Ursula Le Guin: The Rule of Names

Mr Underhill came out from under his hill, smiling and breathing hard. Each breath shot out of his nostrils as a double puff of steam, snow-white in the morning sunshine. Mr Underhill looked up at the bright December sky and smiled wider than ever, showing snow-white teeth. Then he went down to the village.

‘Morning, Mr Underhill,’ said the villagers as he passed them in the narrow street between houses with conical, overhanging roofs like the fat red caps of toadstools. ‘Morning, morning!’ he replied to each. (It was of course bad luck to wish anyone a good morning; a simple statement of the time of day was quite enough, in a place so permeated with Influences as Sattins Island, where a careless adjec­tive might change the weather for a week.) All of them spoke to him, some with affection, some with affectionate disdain. He was all the little island had in the way of a wizard, and so deserved respect—but how could you respect a little fat man of fifty who waddled along with his toes turned in, breathing steam and smiling? He was no great shakes as a workman either. His fireworks were fairly elaborate but his elixirs were weak. Warts he charmed off frequently reappeared after three days; tomatoes he enchanted grew no bigger than canta­loupes; and those rare times when a strange ship stopped at Sattins harbour, Mr Underhill always stayed under his hill—for fear, he explained, of the evil eye. He was, in other words, a wizard the way wall-eyed Gan was a carpenter: by default. The villagers made do with badly hung doors and inefficient spells, for this generation, and relieved their annoyance by treating Mr Underhill quite familiarly, as a mere fellow-villager. They even asked him to dinner. Once he asked some of them to dinner, and served a splendid repast, with silver, crystal, damask, roast goose, sparkling Andrades ’639, and plum pudding with hard sauce; but he was so nervous all through the meal that it took the joy out of it, and besides, everybody was hungry again half an hour afterwards. He did not like anyone to visit his cave, not even the anteroom, beyond which in fact nobody had ever got. When he saw people approaching the hill he always came trotting to meet them. ‘Let’s sit out here under the pine trees!’ he would say, smiling and waving towards the fir-grove, or if it was raining, ‘Let’s go and have a drink at the inn, eh?’ though everybody knew he drank nothing stronger than well-water.

Some of the village children, teased by that locked cave, poked and pried and made raids while Mr Underhill was away; but the small door that led into the inner chamber was spell-shut, and it seemed for once to be an effective spell. Once a couple of boys, thinking the wizard was over on the West Shore curing Mrs Ruuna’s sick donkey, brought a crowbar and a hatchet up there, but at the first whack of the hatchet on the door there came a roar of wrath from inside, and a cloud of purple steam. Mr Underhill had got home early. The boys fled. He did not come out, and the boys came to no harm, though they said you couldn’t believe what a huge hooting howling hissing horrible bellow that little fat man could make unless you’d heard it.

His business in town this day was three dozen fresh eggs and a pound of liver; also a stop at Seacaptain Fogeno’s cottage to renew the seeing-charm on the old man’s eyes (quite useless when applied to a case of detached retina, but Mr Underhill kept trying), and finally a chat with old Goody Guld the concertina-maker’s widow. Mr Underhill’s friends were mostly old people. He was timid with the strong young men of the village, and the girls were shy of him. ‘He makes me nervous, he smiles so much,’ they all said, pouting, twisting silky ringlets round a finger. ‘Nervous’ was a newfangled word, and their mothers all replied grimly, ‘Nervous my foot, silliness is the word for it. Mr Underhill is a very respectable wizard!’

After leaving Goody Guld, Mr Underhill passed by the school, which was being held this day out on the common. Since no one on Sattins Island was literate, there were no books to learn to read from and no desks to carve initials on and no blackboards to erase, and in fact no schoolhouse. On rainy days the children met in the loft of the Communal Barn, and got hay in their pants; on sunny days the schoolteacher, Palani, took them anywhere she felt like. Today, sur­rounded by thirty interested children under twelve and forty uninter­ested sheep under five, she was teaching an important item on the curriculum: the Rules of Names. Mr Underhill, smiling shyly, paused to listen and watch. Palani, a plump, pretty girl of twenty, made a charming picture there in the wintry sunlight, sheep and children around her, a leafless oak above her, and behind her the dunes and sea and clear, pale sky. She spoke earnestly, her face flushed pink by wind and words. ‘Now you know the Rules of Names already, children. There are two, and they’re the same on every island in the world. What’s one of them?’

‘It ain’t polite to ask anybody what his name is,’ shouted a fat, quick boy, interrupted by a little girl shrieking, ‘You can’t never tell your own name to nobody my ma says!’

‘Yes, Suba. Yes, Popi dear, don’t screech. That’s right. You never ask anybody his name. You never tell your own. Now think about that a minute and then tell me why we call our wizard Mr Underhill.’ She smiled across the curly heads and the woolly backs at Mr Underhill, who beamed, and nervously clutched his sack of eggs.

‘Cause he lives under a hill!’ said half the children.

‘But is it his truename?’

‘No!’ said the fat boy, echoed by little Popi shrieking, ‘No!’

‘How do you know it’s not?’

‘Cause he came here all alone and so there wasn’t anybody knew his truename so they could not tell us, and he couldn’t—’

‘Very good, Suba. Popi, don’t shout. That’s right. Even a wizard can’t tell his truename. When you children are through school and go through the Passage, you’ll leave your child-names behind and keep only your truenames, which you must never ask for and never give away. Why is that the rule?’

The children were silent. The sheep bleated gently. Mr Underhill answered the question: ‘Because the name is the thing,’ he said in his shy, soft, husky voice, ‘and the truename is the true thing. To speak the name is to control the thing. Am I right, Schoolmistress?’

She smiled and curtseyed, evidently a little embarrassed by his participation. And he trotted off towards his hill, clutching the eggs to his bosom. Somehow the minute spent watching Palani and the children had made him very hungry. He locked his inner door behind him with a hasty incantation, but there must have been a leak or two in the spell, for soon the bare anteroom of the cave was rich with the smell of frying eggs and sizzling liver.

The wind that day was light and fresh out of the west, and on it at noon a little boat came skimming the bright waves into Sattins har­bour. Even as it rounded the point a sharp-eyed boy spotted it, and knowing, like every child on the island, every sail and spar of the forty boats of the fishing fleet, he ran down the street calling out, ‘A foreign boat, a foreign boat!’ Very seldom was the lonely isle visited by a boat from some equally lonely isle of the East Reach, or an adventurous trader from the Archipelago. By the time the boat was at the pier half the village was there to greet it, and fishermen were following it homewards, and cowherds and clamdiggers and herb-hunters were puffing up and down all the rocky hills, heading towards the harbour.

But Mr UnderhilFs door stayed shut.

There was only one man aboard the boat. Old Seacaptain Fogeno, when they told him that, drew down a bristle of white brows over his unseeing eyes. ‘There’s only one kind of man,’ he said, ‘that sails the Outer Reach alone. A wizard, or a warlock, or a Mage .. .’