Tehanu (Earthsea Cycle, #4)

by Ursula K. Le Guin

Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk’s flight on the empty sky. —The Creation of Éa

There was nothing she could do, but there was always the next thing to be done.

AUNTY MOSS ARRIVED IN THE midmorning. One of her skills as a witch-handywoman was basketmaking, using the rushes of Overfell Marsh, and Tenar had asked her to teach her the art. As a child in Atuan, Tenar had learned how to learn. As a stranger in Gont, she had found that people liked to teach. She had learned to be taught and so to be accepted, her foreignness forgiven.

A good deal of her obscurity and cant, Tenar had begun to realize, was mere ineptness with words and ideas. Nobody had ever taught her to think consecutively. Nobody had ever listened to what she said. All that was expected, all that was wanted of her was muddle, mystery, mumbling. She was a witchwoman. She had nothing to do with clear meaning.

“What’s wrong with men?” Tenar inquired cautiously. As cautiously, lowering her voice, Moss replied, “I don’t know, my dearie. I’ve thought on it. Often I’ve thought on it. The best I can say it is like this. 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 nothing else, inside.”

“Well, well,” the older woman said; and after a while, “Dearie, there’s misery enough without going looking for it.”

“He said they say there’s a king in Havnor now,” the sheep-buyer went on, with a sidelong glance. “That might be a good thing,” said Tenar. Townsend nodded. “Might keep the foreign riffraff out.” Tenar nodded her foreign head pleasantly.

“Well, what if they do come? What will they want of you?” “To be what I was.” The desolation of his voice chilled her. She was silent, trying to remember what it was like to have been powerful, to be the Eaten One, the One Priestess of the Tombs of Atuan, and then to lose that, throw it away, become only Tenar, only herself. She thought about how it was to have been a woman in the prime of life, with children and a man, and then to lose all that, becoming old and a widow, powerless. But even so she did not feel she understood his shame, his agony of humiliation. Perhaps only a man could feel so. A woman got used to shame.

He thought he had learned pain, but he would learn it again and again, all his life, and forget none of it.

Like most people, Tiff believed that you are what happens to you. The rich and strong must have virtue; one to whom evil has been done must be bad, and may rightly be punished.

“How she’s changing!” she said. “I can’t keep up with her. I’m old to be bringing up a child. And she . . . She obeys me, but only because she wants to.” “It’s the only justification for obedience,” Ged observed.

Both manhood and magery are built on one rock: power belongs to men. If women had power, what would men be but women who can’t bear children? And what would women be but men who can?” “Hah!” went Tenar; and presently, with some cunning, she said, “Haven’t there been queens? Weren’t they women of power?” “A queen’s only a she-king,” said Ged. She snorted. “I mean, men give her power. They let her use their power. But it isn’t hers, is it? It isn’t because she’s a woman that she’s powerful, but despite it.” She nodded. She stretched, sitting back from the spinning wheel. “What is a woman’s power, then?” she asked “I don’t think we know.” “When has a woman power because she’s a woman? With her children, I suppose. For a while . . .” “In her house, maybe.” She looked around the kitchen. “But the doors are shut,” she said, “the doors are locked.” “Because you’re valuable.” “Oh, yes. We’re precious. So long as we’re powerless . . . I remember when I first learned that! Kossil threatened me—me, the One Priestess of the Tombs. And I realized that I was helpless. I had the honor; but she had the power, from the God-king, the man. Oh, it made me angry! And frightened me . . . Lark and I talked about this once. She said, ‘Why are men afraid of women?’” “If your strength is only the other’s weakness, you live in fear,” Ged said.

He turned to her, and she said to him, “I have loved you since I first saw you.”

IN BOTH THE TOMBS OF ATUAN and Tehanu, books in which women are central to the story, there’s a kind of anger which I don’t think is in A Wizard or The Farthest Shore. It’s the anger of the underdog, fury against social injustice, the vengeful rage women have too often been made to feel. I’d finally learned to acknowledge such anger in myself and to try to express it without injustice.