Tehanu (Earthsea Cycle, #4)

by Ursula K. Le Guin

“So this is the story she sang to him, to Ogion. “When Segoy raised the islands of the world from the sea in the beginning of time, the dragons were the first born of the land and the wind blowing over the land. So the Song of the Creation tells. But her song told also that then, in the beginning, dragon and human were all one. They were all one people, one race, winged, and speaking the True Language. “They were beautiful, and strong, and wise, and free. “But in time nothing can be without becoming. So among the dragon-people some became more and more in love with flight and wildness, and would have less and less to do with the works of making, or with study and learning, or with houses and cities. They wanted only to fly farther and farther, hunting and eating their kill, ignorant and uncaring, seeking more freedom and more. “Others of the dragon-people came to care little for flight, but gathered up treasure, wealth, things made, things learned. They built houses, strongholds to keep their treasures in, so they could pass all they gained to their children, ever seeking more increase and more. And they came to fear the wild ones, who might come flying and destroy all their dear hoard, burn it up in a blast of flame out of mere carelessness and ferocity. “The wild ones feared nothing. They learned nothing. Because they were ignorant and fearless, they could not save themselves when the flightless ones trapped them as animals and killed them. But other wild ones would come...

“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.” Tenar pondered awhile and finally asked, “But if he’s a wizard—” “Then it’s all his power, inside. His power’s himself, see. That’s how it is with him. And that’s all. When his power goes, he’s gone. Empty.” She cracked the unseen walnut and tossed the shells away. “Nothing.” “And a woman, then?” “Oh, well, dearie, a woman’s a different thing entirely. Who knows where a woman begins and ends? Listen, mistress, I have roots, I have roots deeper than this island. Deeper than the sea, older than the raising of the lands. I go back into the dark.” Moss’s eyes shone with a weird brightness in their red rims and her voice sang like an instrument. “I go back into the dark! Before the moon I was. No one knows, no one knows, no one can say what I am, what a woman is, a woman of power, a woman’s power, deeper than the roots of trees, deeper than the roots of islands, older than the Making, older than the moon. Who dares ask questions of the dark? Who’ll ask the dark its name?”

“Like the child?” It was like a knife so sharp she did not feel it come into her body. “I don’t know,” he said in the same soft, dry voice, “why you took her, knowing that she cannot be healed. Knowing what her life must be. I suppose it’s a part of this time we have lived—a dark time, an age of ruin, an ending time. You took her, I suppose, as I went to meet my enemy, because it was all you could do. And so we must live on into the new age with the spoils of our victory over evil. You with your burned child, and I with nothing at all.” Despair speaks evenly, in a quiet voice.

The haze had risen and not many stars were visible. One of those she had seen from indoors was the white summer star that they called, in Atuan, in her own language, Tehanu. She did not know the other one. She did not know what they called Tehanu here, in Hardic, or what its true name was, what the dragons called it. She knew only what her mother would have called it, Tehanu, Tehanu. Tenar, Tenar . . .

The day before he died. You say, and Moss says, that power knows power. I don’t know what he saw in her, but he said, ‘Teach her!’ And he said . . .” Ged waited. “He said, ‘They will fear her.’ And he said, ‘Teach her all! Not Roke.’ I don’t know what he meant. How can I know? If I had stayed here with him I might know, I might be able to teach her. But I thought, Ged will come, he’ll know. He’ll know what to teach her, what she needs to know, my wronged one.” “I do not know,” he said, speaking very low. “I saw— In the child I see only—the wrong done. The evil.”

“I don’t know,” Tenar said. “It seems to me we make up most of the differences, and then complain about ’em. I don’t see why the Art Magic, why power, should be different for a man witch and a woman witch. Unless the power itself is different. Or the art.” “A man gives out, dearie. A woman takes in.” Tenar sat silent but unsatisfied. “Ours is only a little power, seems like, next to theirs,” Moss said. “But it goes down deep. It’s all roots. It’s like an old blackberry thicket. And a wizard’s power’s like a fir tree, maybe, great and tall and grand, but it’ll blow right down in a storm. Nothing kills a blackberry bramble.” She gave her hen-chuckle, pleased with her comparison. “Well, then!” she said briskly. “So as I said, it’s maybe just as well he’s on his way and out o’ the way, lest people in the town begin to talk.”

“The other side? No,” she said, and nothing would do then but he must get the fan down; only she had to climb up and do it, carefully untacking it, since he could not see well enough and could not climb up on the chair. He directed her anxiously. She laid it in his hands, and he peered with his dim eyes at it, half closed it to make sure the ribs played freely, then closed it all the way, turned it over, and handed it to her. “Open it slow,” he said. She did so. Dragons moved as the folds of the fan moved. Painted faint and fine on the yellowed silk, dragons of pale red, blue, green moved and grouped, as the figures on the other side were grouped, among clouds and mountain peaks. “Hold it up to the light,” said old Fan. She did so, and saw the two sides, the two paintings, made one by the light flowing through the silk, so that the clouds and peaks were the towers of the city, and the men and women were winged, and the dragons looked with human eyes. “You see?” “I see,” she murmured. “I can’t, now, but it’s in my mind’s eye. I don’t show many that.” “It is very wonderful.” “I meant to show it to the old mage,” Fan said, “but with one thing and another I never did.” Tenar turned the fan once more before the light, then remounted it as it had been, the dragons hidden in darkness, the men and women walking in the light of day.

In a larger cabin that ran across the stern of the ship, with a long window looking out over the twilit bay, he asked her to sit at the oaken table. He took a tray from the sailor boy that brought it, poured out red wine in goblets of heavy glass, offered her fruit and cakes. She tasted the wine. “It’s very good, but not the Dragon Year,” she said. He looked at her in unguarded surprise, like any boy. “From Enlad, not the Andrades,” he said meekly. “It’s very fine,” she assured him, drinking again. She took a cake. It was shortbread, very rich, not sweet. The green and amber grapes were sweet and tart. The vivid tastes of the food and wine were like the ropes that moored the ship, they moored her to the world, to her mind again.

“Now I needn’t hope the fair weather will hold, but can count on it,” she said to him. “I’m only cargo on a day like this,” said the mage. “Besides, with a sailor like Master Serrathen handling the ship, who needs a weatherworker?” We are so polite, she thought, all Ladies and Lords and Masters, all bows and compliments. She glanced at the young king. He was looking at her, smiling but reserved. She felt as she had felt in Havnor as a girl: a barbarian, uncouth among their smoothnesses. But because she was not a girl now, she was not awed, but only wondered at how men ordered their world into this dance of masks, and how easily a woman might learn to dance it.

It’s so easy, she thought with rage, it’s so easy for Handy to take the sunlight from her, take the ship and the King and her childhood from her, and it’s so hard to give them back! A year I’ve spent trying to give them back to her, and with one touch he takes them and throws them away. And what good does it do him—what’s his prize, his power? Is power that—an emptiness?

“So at last we looked to the one who knows the names: the Master Namer. And he was watching the Patterner, who hadn’t said a word, but sat there among his trees like a stump. It’s in the Grove we meet, you know, among those trees whose roots are deeper than the islands. It was late in the evening by then. Sometimes there’s a light among those trees, but not that night. It was dark, no starlight, a cloudy sky above the leaves. And the Patterner stood up and spoke then—but in his own language, not in the Old Speech, nor in Hardic, but in Kargish. Few of us knew it or even knew what tongue it was, and we didn’t know what to think. But the Namer told us what the Patterner had said. He said: A woman on Gont.”

She could clean and serve and spin, cook a little, sew a little, look after poultry, fetch the cows, and do excellent work in the dairy. A proper farm-lassie, old Tiff called her, fawning a bit. Tenar had also seen him make the sign to avert evil, surreptitiously, when Therru passed him. 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.

The fire danced in her eyes. The flames swam, flared up, sank away, brightened again against the sooty stone, against the dark sky, against the pale sky, the gulfs of evening, the depths of air and light beyond the world. Flames of yellow, orange, orange-red, red tongues of flame, flame-tongues, the words she could not speak. Tenar. “We call the star Tehanu,” she said. “Tenar, my dear. Come on. Come with me.” They were not at the fire. They were in the dark—in the dark hall. The dark passage. They had been there before, leading each other, following each other, in the darkness underneath the earth. “This is the way,” she said.

“Well,” she said, “which bed shall I sleep in, Ged? The child’s, or yours?” He drew breath. He spoke low. “Mine, if you will.” “I will.” The silence held him. She could see the effort he made to break from it. “If you’ll be patient with me,” he said. “I have been patient with you for twenty-five years,” she said. She looked at him and began to laugh. “Come—come on, my dear—better late than never! I’m only an old woman. . . . Nothing is wasted, nothing is ever wasted. You taught me that.” She stood up, and he stood; she put out her hands, and he took them. They embraced, and their embrace became close. They held each other so fiercely, so dearly, that they stopped knowing anything but each other. It did not matter which bed they meant to sleep in. They lay that night on the hearthstones, and there she taught Ged the mystery that the wisest man could not teach him.

“Now you’re a man indeed,” she said. “Stuck another man full of holes, first, and lain with a woman, second. That’s the proper order, I suppose.” “Hush,” he murmured, turning to her, laying his head on her shoulder. “Don’t.” “I will, Ged. Poor man! There’s no mercy in me, only justice. I wasn’t trained to mercy. Love is the only grace I have. Oh, Ged, don’t fear me! You were a man when I first saw you! It’s not a weapon or a woman can make a man, or magery either, or any power, anything but himself.”

“But what I want to know is this. Is there something besides what you call power—that comes before it, maybe? Or something that power is just one way of using? Like this. Ogion said of you once that before you’d had any learning or training as a wizard at all, you were a mage. Mage-born, he said. So I imagined that, to have power, one must first have room for the power. An emptiness to fill. And the greater the emptiness the more power can fill it. But if the power never was got, or was taken away, or was given away—still that would be there.” “That emptiness,” he said. “Emptiness is one word for it. Maybe not the right word.” “Potentiality?” he said, and shook his head. “What is able to be . . . to become.” “I think you were there on that road, just there just then, because of that—because that is what happens to you. You didn’t make it happen. You didn’t cause it. It wasn’t because of your ‘power.’ It happened to you. Because of your—emptiness.”

After a while he said, “This isn’t far from what I was taught as a boy on Roke: that true magery lies in doing only what you must do. But this would go further. Not to do, but to be done to. . . .” “I don’t think that’s quite it. It’s more like what true doing rises from. Didn’t you come and save my life—didn’t you run a fork into Hake? That was ‘doing,’ all right, doing what you must do. . . .” He pondered again, and finally asked her, “Is this a wisdom taught you when you were Priestess of the Tombs?” “No.” She stretched a little, gazing into the darkness. “Arha was taught that to be powerful she must sacrifice. Sacrifice herself and others. A bargain: give, and so get. And I cannot say that that’s untrue. But my soul can’t live in that narrow place—this for that, tooth for tooth, death for life. . . . There is a freedom beyond that. Beyond payment, retribution, redemption—beyond all the bargains and the balances, there is freedom.” “The doorway between them,” he said softly.

The old moon had risen. Its white brilliance on the fallen snow was reflected into the room, for cold as it was Tenar would not have the shutters closed. All the air above them was luminous. They lay in shadow, but it seemed as if the ceiling were a mere veil between them and endless, silver, tranquil depths of light.

“Ah!” said Tenar. “That story! Did Ogion never tell you about the Woman of Kemay?” “No,” he said, “tell me.” She told him the tale as she spun, and the purr and hush of the wheel went along with the words of the story. At the end of it she said, “When the Master Windkey told me how he’d come looking for ‘a woman on Gont,’ I thought of her. But she’d be dead by now, no doubt. And how would a fisherwoman who was a dragon be an archmage, anyhow!” “Well, the Patterner didn’t say that a woman on Gont was to be archmage,” said Ged. He was mending a badly torn pair of breeches, sitting up in the window ledge to get what light the dark day afforded. It was a half-month after Sunreturn and the coldest time yet. “What did he say, then?” “‘A woman on Gont.’ So you told me.” “But they were asking who was to be the next archmage.” “And got no answer to that question.” “Infinite are the arguments of mages,” said Tenar rather drily.

“I learned to quibble a bit, on Roke,” he admitted. “But this isn’t a quibble, I think. ‘A woman on Gont’ can’t become archmage. No woman can be archmage. She’d unmake what she became in becoming it. The Mages of Roke are men—their power is the power of men, their knowledge is the knowledge of men. 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. “Yes; but women seem to fear their own strength, to be afraid of themselves.” “Are they ever taught to trust themselves?” Ged asked, and as he spoke Therru came in on her work again. His eyes and Tenar’s met. “No,” she said. “Trust is not what we’re taught.” She watched the child stack the wood in the box. “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.” “As children trust their parents,” he said. They were both silent.

Only in dying, life . . . I thought about that when I was up with the goats on the mountain, and a day went on forever and yet no time passed before the evening came, and morning again. . . . I learned goat wisdom. So I thought, What is this grief of mine for? What man am I mourning? Ged the Archmage? Why is Hawk the goatherd sick with grief and shame for him? What have I done that I should be ashamed?” “Nothing,” Tenar said. “Nothing, ever!” “Oh, yes,” said Ged. “All the greatness of men is founded on shame, made out of it. So Hawk the goatherd wept for Ged the Archmage. And looked after the goats, also, as well as a boy his age could be expected to do.”

“Who is Therru, Ged?” He did not answer until she thought he was not going to answer, and then he said, “So made—what freedom is there for her?” “We are our freedom, then?” “I think so.” “You seemed, in your power, as free as man can be. But at what cost? What made you free? And I . . . I was made, molded like clay, by the will of the women serving the Old Powers, or serving the men who made all services and ways and places, I no longer know which. Then I went free, with you, for a moment, and with Ogion. But it was not my freedom. Only it gave me choice; and I chose. I chose to mold myself like clay to the use of a farm and a farmer and our children. I made myself a vessel. I know its shape. But not the clay. Life danced me. I know the dances. But I don’t know who the dancer is.” “And she,” Ged said after a long silence, “if she should ever dance—” “They will fear her,” Tenar whispered.

“Are you here for a stay, then?” “I might be.” So Flint had answered her questions for twenty years, denying her right to ask them by never answering yes or no, maintaining a freedom based on her ignorance; a poor, narrow sort of freedom, she thought.

The three of them ate their bread and cheese. They watched darkness rise up the mountain from the sea. They made their bed of cloaks and slept, Therru next to Tenar next to Ged. In the deep night Tenar woke. An owl was calling nearby, a sweet repeated note like a bell, and far off up the mountain its mate replied like the ghost of a bell. Tenar thought, I’ll watch the stars set in the sea, but she fell asleep again at once in peace of heart. She woke in the grey morning to see Ged sitting up beside her, his cloak pulled round his shoulders, looking out through the gap westward. His dark face was quite still, full of silence, as she had seen it once long ago on the beach of Atuan. His eyes were not downcast, as then; he looked into the illimitable west. Looking with him she saw the day coming, the glory of rose and gold reflected clear across the sky. He turned to her, and she said to him, “I have loved you since I first saw you.”

THE WIND BLEW FROM THE sea. A tiny thistle growing in a cleft in the rock near her hand nodded and nodded in the wind from the sea. Ged was beside her. They were crouched side by side, the sea behind them and the dragon before them. It looked at them sidelong from one long, yellow eye. Ged spoke in a hoarse, shaking voice, in the dragon’s language. Tenar understood the words, which were only, “Our thanks, Eldest.” Looking at Tenar, Kalessin spoke, in the huge voice like a broom of metal dragged across a gong: “Aro Tehanu?” “The child,” Tenar said—“Therru!” She got to her feet to run, to seek her child. She saw her coming along the ledge of rock between the mountain and the sea, toward the dragon. “Don’t run, Therru!” she cried, but the child had seen her and was running, running straight to her. They clung to each other. The dragon turned its enormous, rust-dark head to watch them with both eyes. The nostril pits, big as kettles, were bright with fire, and wisps of smoke curled from them. The heat of the dragon’s body beat through the cold sea wind. “Tehanu,” the dragon said. The child turned to look at it. “Kalessin,” she said.

BETWEEN THE LAST CHAPTER OF The Tombs of Atuan and the first chapter of Tehanu, twenty-five years or so pass, time enough for the girl Tenar to become a widow with grown children. Between the last chapter of The Farthest Shore and the fourth chapter of Tehanu, a day or two passes, time enough for the dragon Kalessin to carry Ged from Roke to Gont. Between finishing The Farthest Shore and beginning Tehanu, eighteen years of my life passed, time enough for me to learn how to write this book. I never thought of Earthsea as a trilogy, but for a long time I saw it as a three-legged chair. I knew Tenar’s story needed to be told, and that she and Ged had to be brought together. So right after finishing the third book, I began the fourth one. But—though I knew Tenar had not stayed with Ogion but had gone off and married a farmer and lived an ordinary, unmagical life—I didn’t know why. The story got stuck. I couldn’t go on. It took years of living my own ordinary life, and a great deal of learning how to think about such things, mostly from other women, before I could understand why Tenar did what she did and who she was at the end of it. Then at last I could write Tehanu.

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. The ones who can’t do magic. The ones who don’t have shining staffs or swords. 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.

Some readers who identified with Ged as a male power figure thought I’d betrayed and degraded him in some sort of feminist spasm of revenge. So far as I know, I had no spasms and didn’t betray Ged. Quite the opposite, I think. In Tehanu he can become, finally, fully a man. He is no longer the servant of his power.

Therru is the key to the book. It wasn’t till I saw her that I could begin to write it. But what I saw took me aback. Therru isn’t ordinary at all. Her life has been ruined at the start. She is not just powerless, but crippled, deformed, and terrorized. She cannot be healed. The cruel wrong done her came with the breakdown of the society of Earthsea, which the new king may be able to repair; but for Therru, what reparation? “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. Anyone who has been able to break from the grip of a controlling, crippling belief or bigotry or enforced ignorance knows the sense of coming out into the light and air, of release, being set free to fly, to transcend.

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. So Ged the Archmage could be grandly serene as he paralyzed pirates with a wave of his staff, but Ged the goatherd in blind fury uses a pitchfork on his enemy. And so Aspen, the wizard of Re Albi, is detestable in a way even Cob is not, because Aspen flaunts all the behaviors that cause such anger—fear and loathing of women, the arrogance of the powerful, and the sick human lust to dominate that leads to endless cruelty.

It’s not surprising that Tehanu was labeled “feminist.” But the word is used so variously that it’s worse than useless. If you see feminism as vindictive prejudice against men, the label lets you dismiss the book unread; if you see feminism as a belief in superior properties unique to women and expect the book to confirm that belief, you’ll find it equivocal. The conversation between Tenar and the witch Moss in the fifth chapter is a case in point. Is it “feminist”? Moss is pretty contemptuous of men in general, having been treated by them with contempt all her life. That’s all right, and I find her discussion of men’s power and women’s power harsh, incomplete, but interesting. Then she goes off into an incantatory praise of mysterious female knowledge: “Who knows where a woman begins or ends? . . . I have roots, I have roots deeper than this island. . . . I go back into the dark!” And she ends with a rhetorical question—“Who’ll ask the dark its name?” “I ...

Tenar is three people. As young Arha she lived a cruel, rigid, mindless life of ritual obedience in a community of women worshiping the Dark Powers, the Nameless Ones. She broke free from this prison and came away with Ged, who could give her back her true name and show her the power of knowing the names of things. Then she took a second, more obscure step to freedom, by refusing to stay with the kind teacher, Ogion, whose wisdom was not quite what she needed. She’d had enough of the celibate, sexless life in Atuan. Thinking the best way to learn where a woman begins and ends was to live a woman’s life as fully as she knew how, and take all the chances a woman takes, she went off to get married, to live as Goha, the farmer’s wife, to bear children and bring them up. Now, older, and having made herself responsible for a damaged and vulnerable child, she knows she is ready, not for vague, innate mystical insights, but for the wisdom she needs and has earned. Beyond the obscure worship of dark earth-powers, and beyond the common sen...

But Ged, too, is in desperate need of a new wisdom. He has lost so much: his fame and high standing, the gift that shaped his life since he was a boy, the use of all he learned on Roke. How is he to live as an ordinary man? Now all his magic’s gone, used up, given away, can he even respect himself? Was he (as Moss slyly asked) ever anything but his power—is there anything left of him when it’s gone but an empty shell? Tenar may know the answer to that question, but for Ged to be able to answer it himself, as he must, he has to find out what he gave up to become a man of power. Which might be defined as everything but that power. Or which might be seen as a different kind of learning. T...