Tehanu (Earthsea Cycle, #4)

by Ursula K. Le Guin

it was about being two things, two beings, at once, and in the same form, and he said that this is beyond the power of wizards.

how children have child-names, and everybody has a use-name, and maybe a nickname too. Different people may call you differently.

because your own self is in your true name. It is your strength, your power; but to another it is risk and burden, only to be given in utmost need and trust.

There had never been a woman mage. Though some few had called themselves wizard or sorceress, their power had been untrained, strength without art or knowledge, half frivolous, half dangerous.

There was something in her, some seed or glimmer, too small to look at or think about, new.

A good deal of her obscurity and cant, Tenar had begun to realize, was mere ineptness with words and ideas.

“Dearie,” she said, “a man, you mean, a wizardly man? What’s a man of power to do with us?”

Wanting a man got me into awful troubles more than once. But wanting to get married, never! No, no. None of that for me.”

A man’s in his skin, see, like a nut in its shell.” She held up her long, bent, wet fingers as if holding a walnut. “It’s hard and strong, that shell, and it’s all full of him.

Full of grand man-meat,

man-self. And that’s all. That’s all there is. It’s all him and n...

Who knows where a woman begins and ends?

In the sunlight. I am trying to find out where I can live, Moss.

everywhere Ged had lived, it was without women; so he did the “women’s work” and thought nothing about it. It would be a pity, she thought, if he did think about it, if he started fearing that his dignity hung by a dishcloth.

One had married a northern lord, they said, who buried her alive under a stone; another had meddled with the unborn child in her womb, trying to make it a creature of power, and indeed it had spoken words as it was born, but it had no bones.

As a woman she had chosen and had the powers of a woman, in their time, and the time was past; her wiving and mothering was done. There was nothing in her, no power, for anybody to recognize.

with the plain honesty that forever disarmed her,

Was a hero being born?

Tenar nodded her foreign head pleasantly.

she understood his shame, his agony of humiliation. Perhaps only a man could feel so. A woman got used to shame.

I do my art for pay but I take my pleasure for love, that’s what I say.

“A man gives out, dearie. A woman takes in.”

I say the word of the Making and it dies in my mouth, it is meaningless. A stone. I am a woman, an old woman, weak, stupid. All I do is wrong. All I touch turns to ashes, shadow, stone. I am the creature of darkness, swollen with darkness. Only fire can cleanse me. Only fire can eat me, eat me away like—

you say you fled from one enemy and found another; but I came seeking a friend, and found another.”

And she wondered why it was she could not tell him. His deafness silenced her. She could not even tell him he was deaf.

They held each other so fiercely, so dearly, that they stopped knowing anything but each other.

It happened to you. Because of your—emptiness.”

They lay in shadow, but it seemed as if the ceiling were a mere veil between them and endless, silver, tranquil depths of light.

If women had power, what would men be but women who can’t bear children? And what would women be but men who can?”

“If power were trust,” she said. “I like that word. If it weren’t all these arrangements—one above the other—kings and masters and mages and owners—It all seems so unnecessary. Real power, real freedom, would lie in trust, not force.”

and a day went on forever and yet no time passed before the evening came, and morning again. . . .

but all the swallows’ talk with one another was about beginning.

Nobody had made a fuss when I reversed the racist tradition of white heroes and black villains; but now I was messing around with gender. And sex.

I didn’t want it to be. By the time I wrote this book I needed to look at heroics from outside and underneath, from the point of view of the people who are not included.

Women, kids, the poor, the old, the powerless. Unheroes, ordinary people—my people. I didn’t want to change Earthsea, but I needed to see what Earthsea looked like to us.

“What cannot be mended must be transcended.” Maybe the change coming into Earthsea has something to do with no longer identifying freedom with power, with separating being free from being in control. There is a kind of refusal to serve power that isn’t a revolt or a rebellion, but a revolution in the sense of reversing meanings, of changing how things are understood.

“Who’ll ask the dark its name?” “I will,” Tenar says. “I lived long enough in the dark.”