The Other Wind (Earthsea Cycle, #6)

by Ursula K. Le Guin

What’s the difference between us and the animals? Speech? All the animals have some way of speaking, saying come and beware and much else; but they can’t tell stories, and they can’t tell lies. While we can . . . “But the dragons speak: they speak the True Speech, the language of the Making, in which there are no lies, in which to tell the story is to make it be! Yet we call the dragons animals . . . “So maybe the difference isn’t language. Maybe it’s this: animals do neither good nor evil. They do as they must do. We may call what they do harmful or useful, but good and evil belong to us, who chose to choose what we do. The dragons are dangerous, yes. They can do harm, yes. But they’re not evil. They’re beneath our morality, if you will, like any animal. Or beyond it. They have nothing to do with it. “We must choose and choose again. The animals need only be and do. We’re yoked, and they’re free. So to be with an animal is to know a little freedom . . .

Why had such a burden been laid on him? How could it be that a village sorcerer who knew nothing of high matters and deep arts was called on to make these journeys from land to land, from mage to monarch, from the living to the dead? He had said something like that to Sparrowhawk. “It’s all beyond me,” he had said. The old man looked at him a while and then, calling him by his true name, said, “The world’s vast and strange, Hara, but no vaster and no stranger than our minds are. Think of that sometimes.”

“Kalessin said: ‘Long ago we chose. We chose freedom. Men chose the yoke. We chose fire and the wind. They chose water and the earth. We chose the west, and they the east.’ “And Kalessin said: ‘But always among us some envy them their wealth, and always among them some envy us our liberty. So it was that evil came into us and will come into us again, until we choose again, and forever, to be free. Soon I am going beyond the west to fly on the other wind. I will lead you there, or wait for you, if you will come.’

Have you spoken with the wizard Seppel here?” “The man from Paln,” Alder said, with a slight unease in his voice. Paln, the greatest island west of Havnor, had the reputation of being an uncanny place. The Pelnish spoke Hardic with a peculiar accent, using many words of their own. Their lords had in ancient times refused fealty to the kings of Enlad and Havnor. Their wizards did not go to Roke for their training. The Pelnish Lore, which called upon the Old Powers of the Earth, was widely believed to be dangerous if not sinister. Long ago the Grey Mage of Paln had brought ruin on his island by summoning the souls of the dead to advise him and his lords, and that tale was part of the education of every sorcerer: “The living should not take counsel of the dead.” There had been more than one duel in wizardry between a man of Roke and a man of Paln; in one such combat two centuries ago a plague had been loosed on the people of Paln and Semel that had left half the towns and farmlands desolate. And fifteen years ago, when the wizard Cob had used the Pelnish Lore to cross between life and death, the Archmage Sparrowhawk had spent all his own power to defeat him and heal the evil he had done.

“They know more than we do about these matters,” Onyx said. “Most of our art of Summoning comes from the Pelnish Lore. Thorion was a master of it . . . The Summoner of Roke now, Brand of Venway, won’t use any part of his craft that draws from that lore. Misused, it has brought only harm. But it may be only our ignorance that’s led us to use it wrongly. It goes back to very ancient times; there may be knowledge in it we’ve lost. Seppel is a wise man and mage.

Perhaps that had been part of the great choice men made in ancient times: to give up the innate knowledge of the Old Speech, which they once shared with the dragons. Had they done so, Alder wondered, in order to have a language of their own, a language suited to mankind, in which they could lie, cheat, swindle, and invent wonders that never had been and would never be?

“Where,” the Summoner said, “where is that land?” “On the other wind,” said Irian. “The west beyond the west.” She looked round at them all, scornful, irate. “Do you think we dragons fly only on the winds of this world? Do you think our freedom, for which we gave up all possessions, is no greater than that of the mindless seagulls? That our realm is a few rocks at the edge of your rich islands? You own the earth, you own the sea. But we are the fire of sunlight, we fly the wind! You wanted land to own. You wanted things to make and keep. And you have that. That was the division, the verw nadan. But you were not content with your share. You wanted not only your cares, but our freedom. You wanted the wind! And by the spells and wizardries of those oath-breakers, you stole half our realm from us, walled it away from life and light, so that you could live there forever. Thieves, traitors!”

Azver the Patterner spoke. As he spoke, he looked into the aisles of the trees across the clearing, as if following the slight movements of the leaves. “The ancients saw that the dragons’ realm was not of the body only. That they could fly . . . outside of time, it may be . . . And envying that freedom, they followed the dragons’ way into the west beyond the west. There they claimed part of that realm as their own. A timeless realm, where the self might be forever. But not in the body, as the dragons were. Only in spirit could men be there . . . So they made a wall which no living body could cross, neither man nor dragon. For they feared the anger of the dragons. And their arts of naming laid a great net of spells upon all the western lands, so that when the people of the islands die, they would come to the west beyond the west and live there in the spirit forever. “But as the wall was built and the spell laid, the wind ceased to blow, within the wall. The sea withdrew. The springs ceased to run. The mountains of sunrise became the mountains of the night. Those that died came to a dark land, a dry land.”

“I think,” Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, “that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn’t do. All that I might have been and couldn’t be. All the choices I didn’t make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven’t been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed.”

I can see now its theme coming together from elements of all the previous books, joining forces and playing out in a way I could never have foreseen when I started A Wizard of Earthsea. Even when I started The Other Wind, all I knew certainly was that the increasing imbalance in the practice of wizardry was caused by a profound error, made long ago; and that not only Cob in The Farthest Shore but Thorion of Roke embodied this misunderstanding of the uses of power, the desire for control, and the nature of death. This was my great theme. To find its resolution I had to play it through. I did so. I knew partly what I wanted it to say; not till it was said did I know fully.

I don’t and won’t attempt to explain what it says. I’ve been asked a thousand times to say what a story “means,” and every time I’ve grown surer that so long as I’ve told the story rightly, finding its meaning, or a meaning, is rightly up to its readers.

I have, believe me, learned never to call any book “the last.” But I want to tell the kind people who write me asking for another Earthsea story that so far as I know, the story I had to tell ends here. With Tenar and Ged, on Gont. It has come round to and past where it began so long ago. In that dark night on Roke and the great sunrise in the other world, it came where it was going all along—and yet it goes on past that, being not a closed circle but a spiral, like the orbit of our Earth. Lives end, lives go on, a story ends, others go on. I know the reign of King Lebannen and Queen Seserakh will be long remembered both in the Archipelago and the Kargad Lands. I think Roke will change, and maybe magic itself will change. I’m not sure if the dragons will ever return out of the west beyond the west, yet I know Tehanu will. I know where Ged goes next. But the storyteller doesn’t tell all she knows. When the story is over she falls silent. Then, after a while, perhaps she says, “But listen now! I have another tale to tell! Once upon a time, on the western shore of the world, lived people who could work strange spells . . .”