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“But in time nothing can be without becoming.
There was nothing she could do, but there was always the next thing to be done.
And I had my man, I bore my children, I lived well. In the broad daylight. And in the broad daylight, they did that—to the child. In the meadows by the river. The river that rises from the spring where Ogion named my daughter. In the sunlight. I am trying to find out where I can live, Moss. Do you know what I mean? What I’m trying to say?”
she went on, pondering the indifference of a man toward the exigencies that ruled a woman: that someone must be not far from a sleeping child, that one’s freedom meant another’s unfreedom, unless some ever-changing, moving balance were reached, like the balance of a body moving forward, as she did now, on two legs, first one then the other, in the practice of that remarkable art, walking. . . . Then the deepening colors of the sky and the soft insistence of the wind replaced her thoughts.
What wrong could she be? Wronged, wronged beyond all repair, but not wrong.
Townsend nodded. “Might keep the foreign riffraff out.” Tenar nodded her foreign head pleasantly.
If they come prying they can leave curious.”
But I should be teaching her, Tenar thought, distressed. “Teach her all,” Ogion said, and what am I teaching her? Cooking and spinning? Then another part of her mind said in Goha’s voice, “And are those not true arts, needful and noble? Is wisdom all words?”
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.
his own precious shame. That was his child, his nurseling. That was all he cared about. He had never cared or thought about her, only about power—her power, his power, how he could use it, how he could make more power of it. Putting the broken Ring together, making the Rune, putting a king on the throne. And when his power was gone, still it was all he could think about: that it was gone, lost, leaving him only himself, his shame, his emptiness.
She obeys me, but only because she wants to.” “It’s the only justification for obedience,” Ged observed.
If women had power, what would men be but women who can’t bear children? And what would women be but men who can?”
“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.
