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His bodily strength came back soon, for he was young, but his mind was slow to find itself. He had lost something, lost it forever, lost it as he found it.
“Whatever I am, whatever I can do, it’s not enough,” he said. “It’s never enough,” Mead said. “And what can anyone do alone?”
“Can I know the secret?” he asked after a while. “You already know it. You gave it to Flag. She gave it to you. Trust.”
I think there’s an evil in us, in humankind. Trust denies it. Leaps across it. Leaps the chasm. But it’s there. And everything we do finally serves evil, because that’s what we are. Greed and cruelty. I look at the world, at the forests and the mountain here, the sky, and it’s all right, as it should be. But we aren’t. People aren’t. We’re wrong. We do wrong. No animal does wrong. How could they? But we can, and we do. And we never stop.”
His words went into their listening silence, and rested there for days, and came back to him changed.
And those who won’t join them stand each alone.”
Nobody can be free alone.
A good fire burned in the hearth. It was a wet, cold time, and firewood was one thing they had plenty of, here on the mountain.
They were very poor people. They gave him what they had. So Anieb had done.
but he had clear in his mind the idea of something very much greater, the wholeness of knowledge. And that made him a mage.
“What do you want to learn?” asked the taller woman in her mild voice. Now Medra felt that he had been asked the question on which the rest of his life hung, for good or evil. Again he stood silent a while. He started to speak, and didn’t speak, and finally spoke. “I could not save one, not one, not the one who saved me,” he said. “Nothing I know could have set her free. I know nothing. If you know how to be free, I beg you, teach me!”
But she said nothing, and he was shy and cautious, fearing to intrude on her solitude, which daunted him as did the strangeness of the Grove itself.
“If I told you my name,” he said, “my true name—” “I’d tell you mine,” she said. “If that . . . if that’s how we should begin.” They began, however, with the peaches.
Nobody on Roke starved or went unhoused, though nobody had much more than they needed.
“She gave me freedom,” he said. “And I still feel that all I do is done through her and for her. No, not for her. We can do nothing for the dead. But for . . .” “For us,” said Ember. “For us who live, in hiding, neither killed nor killing. The dead are dead. The great and mighty go their way unchecked. All the hope left in the world is in the people of no account.”
“Must we hide forever?” “Spoken like a man,” said Veil with her gentle, wounded smile.
“It’s dangerous,” Crow said, “it’s pointless,” but he made no further objection. The modest, naive young man whom he had taught to read had become his unfathomable guide.
Her look of accusation slowly changed. She put her face in her hands. “We have to let them go,” he said. She said, “I know.”
For there had been times when he felt that, as he had summoned her living, so dead she might summon him. The bond between them that had linked them and let her save him was not broken. Many times she had come into his dreams, standing silent as she stood when he first saw her in the reeking tower at Samory.
And in that vision, Anieb had walked on this side of it, not on the side that went down into the dark.
Early did not punish Hound for his failure, but he remembered it. He was not used to failures and did not like them.
Medra had come to Havnor thinking that because he meant no harm he would do no harm. He had done irreparable harm.
When he moved, he whimpered; but he sat up. I have to live, he thought. I have to remember how to live. How to make light. I have to remember. I have to remember the shadows of the leaves.
How far does the forest go? As far as the mind goes.
He saw darkness, heard silence. Slow and halting, he entered the passage.
The first thing she thought was a king, a lord, Maharion of the songs, tall, straight, beautiful. The next thing she thought was a beggar, a lost man, in dirty clothes, hugging himself with shivering arms.
She wanted to tell him to put them right to the fire’s warmth, but didn’t like to presume. Whatever he was, he wasn’t a beggar by choice.
It was a fine face, but there was something wrong, something amiss. He looks ruined, she thought, a ruined man.
He talked like the tale-tellers when they spoke the parts of the heroes and the dragonlords.
It cost her something to say that, yet when she had said it she felt released, untied too. What was she keeping Bren’s shoes for, anyhow?
She’d given away his clothes, but kept the shoes, she didn’t know what for. For this fellow, it would seem.
it was a name he had made up to call himself. It did not fit him. Nothing about him fit together, made a whole. Yet she felt no distrust of him. She was easy with him. He meant no harm to her.
She thought there was kindness in him, the way he spoke of the animals.
He was like an animal himself, a silent, damaged creature that needed protection ...
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HE WOKE, AS HE ALWAYS did, in his room in the Great House. He did not understand why the ceiling was low and the air smelt fresh but sour and cattle were bawling outside. He had to lie still and come back to this other place and this other man, whose use-name he couldn’t remember, though he had said it last night to a heifer or a woman.
he had met women and found them easy to be with, like the animals; they went about their business not paying much attention to him unless he frightened them. He tried not to do that. He had no wish or reason to frighten them. They were not men.
He often doesn’t know what he’s doing, do you see.” “Yes,” Irioth said. “I understand. You are a kind woman.” She was talking about him, about his not knowing what he was doing. She was forgiving him. “A kind sister,” he said. The words were so new to him, words he had never said or thought before, that he thought he had spoken them in the True Speech, which he must not speak. But she only shrugged, with a frowning smile.
“Oh, yes,” Irioth said. “It was my fault.” But she forgave;
There was no fault, only the great innocence.
He had come over the dead mountain on black roads, but here the streams ran slow among the pastures.
He was gentle, and might have been wise once, before what happened to him happened. And he wasn’t so mad as all that. Mad in patches, mad at moments. Nothing in him was whole, not even his madness.
“You’re crazy,” she said, very angry. It was a sweet anger. Why could not more anger be sweet?
He said her name. She gave him sleep.
“How can you cure when you’re sick?” she said. “How else?” he said.
“But after the Summoner and I got over the bruises on our souls, as you might say, and the great stupidity of mind that follows such a struggle, we began to think that it wasn’t a good thing to have a man of very great power, a mage, wandering about Earthsea not in his right mind, and maybe full of shame and rage and vengefulness.
“Will you take my name from me?” “Why should I do that?” “It means only hurt. Hate, pride, greed.” “I’ll take those names from you, Irioth, but not your own.”
“You went wrong. You’ve come back. But you’re tired, Irioth, and the way’s hard when you go alone. Come home with me.”
They know my name. But they never say it.”
People who have a secret name that holds their power the way a diamond holds light may well like their public name to be ordinary, common, like other people’s names.
Your tongue speaks it, the name. Your breath makes it. You give it to that child, the breath, the name. You can’t think of it. You let it come to you. It must come through you and the water to her it belongs to. That’s the power, the way it works. It’s all like that. It’s not a thing you do. You have to know how to let it do. That’s all the mastery.”
