Ursula Le Guin - Tehanu The Last Book of Earthsea

“From Havnor, smith’s boy said. He was down in Port bargaining for ingots. Come up yesterevening late. The great ship’s from Havnor Great Port, he said.”

He was probably talking to keep her mind off the price of goats, and the slyness of his look was probably simply the way his eyes were made. But Havnor Great Port traded little with Gont, a poor and remote island notable only for wizards, pirates, and goats; and something in the words, “the great ship,” troubled or alarmed her, she did not know why.

“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. “But there’s those down in Port won’t be pleased, maybe.” He meant the pirate sea-captains of Gont, whose control of the northeastern seas had been increasing of late years to the point where many of the old trade-schedules with the central islands of the Archipelago had been disrupted or abandoned; this impoverished everyone on Gont except the pirates, but that did not prevent the pirates from being heroes in the eyes of most Gontishmen. For all she knew, Tenar’s son was a sailor on a pirate ship. And safer, maybe, as such than on a steady merchantman. Better shark than herring, as they said.

“There’s some who’re never pleased no matter what,” Tenar said, automatically following the rules of conversation, but impatient enough with them that she added, rising, “I’ll show you the goats. You can have a look. I don’t know if we’ll sell all or any.” And she took the man to the

broom-pasture gate and left him. She did not like him. It wasn’t his fault that he had brought her bad news once and maybe twice, but his eyes slid, and she did not like his company. She wouldn’t sell him Ogion’s goats. Not even Sippy.

After he had left, bargainless, she found herself uneasy. She had said to him, “I don’t know if we’ll sell,” and that had been foolish, to say we instead of 1, when he hadn’t asked to speak to Sparrowhawk, hadn’t even alluded to him, as a man bargaining with a woman was more than likely to do, especially when she was refusing his offer.

She did not know what they made of Sparrowhawk, of his presence and nonpresence, in the village. Ogion, aloof and silent and in some ways feared, had been their own mage and their fellow-villager. Sparrowhawk they might be proud of as a name, the archmage who had lived awhile in Re Albi and done wonderful things, fooling a dragon in the Ninety Isles, bringing the Ring of Erreth-Akbe back from somewhere or other; but they did not know him. Nor did he know them. He had not gone into the village since he came, only to the forest, the wilderness. She had not thought about itbefore, but he avoided the village as surely as Therru did.

They must have talked about him. It was a village, and people talked. But gossip about the doings of wizards and mages would not go far. The matter was too uncanny, the lives of men of power were too strange, too different from their own. “Let be,” she had heard villagers in the Middle Valley say when somebody got to speculating too freely about a visiting weatherworker or their own wizard, Beech-’ ‘Let be. He goes his way, not ours.

As for herself, that she should have stayed on to nurse and serve such a man of power would not seem a questionable matter to them; again itwas a case of “Let be.” She had not been very much in the village herself; they were neither friendly nor unfriendly to her. She had lived there once in Weaver Fan’s cottage, she was the old mage’s ward, he had sent Townsend down round the mountain for her; all that was very well. But then she had come with the child, terrible to look at, who’d walk about in daylight with itby choice? And what kind of woman would be a wizard’s pupil, a wizard’s nurse? Witchery there, sure enough, and foreign too. But all the same, she was wife to a rich farmer way down there in the Middle Valley; though he was dead and she a widow. Well, who could understand the ways of the witchfolk? Let be, better let be....

She met the Archmage of Earthsea as he came past the garden fence. She said, “They say there’s a ship in from the City of Havnor. “

He stopped. He made a movement, quickly controlled, but ithad been the beginning of a turn to run, to break and run like a mouse from a hawk.

“Ged!” she said. “What is it?”

“I can’t, “ he said. “I can’t face them.”

“Who?”

“Men from him. From the king.”

His face had gone greyish, as when he was first here, and he looked around for a place to hide.

His terror was so urgent and undefended that she thought only how to spare him. “You needn’t see them. If anybody comes I’ll send them away. Come back to the house now. You haven’t eaten all day.”

“There was a man there,” he said.

“Townsend, pricing goats. I sent him away. Come on!” He came with her, and when they were in the house she shut the door.

“They couldn’t harm you, surely, Ged. Why would they want to?”

He sat down at the table and shook his head dully. “No, no.

“Do they know you’re here?”

“I don’t know.”

“What is it you’re afraid of?” she asked, not impatiently, but with some rational authority.

He put his hands across his face, rubbing his temples and forehead, looking down. “I was--” he said. “I’m not- It was all he could say.

She stopped him, saying, “All right, it’s all right.” She dared not touch him lest she worsen his humiliation by any semblance of pity. She was angry at him, and for him. “It’s none of their business,’ ‘ she said, “where you are, or who you are, or what you choose to do or not to do! If they come prying they can leave curious.” That was Lark’s saying. She had a pang of longing for the company of an ordinary, sensible woman. “Anyhow, the ship may have nothing at all to do with you. They may be chasing pirates home. It ll be a good thing, too, when the king gets around to doing that.. . . I found some wine in the back of the cupboard, a couple of bottles, I wonder how long Ogion had itsquirreled away there. I think we’d both do well with a glass of wine. And some bread and cheese. The little one’s had her dinner and gone off with Heather to catch frogs. There may be frogs’ legs for supper. But bread and cheese for now. And wine. I wonder where it’s from, who brought itto Ogion, how old itis?” So she talked along, woman’s babble, saving him from having to make any answer or misread any silence, until he had got over the crisis of shame, and eaten a little, and drunk a glass of the old, soft, red wine.

“It’s best I go, Tenar,” he said. “Till I learn to be what I am now.

“Go where?’ ‘

“Up on the mountain.”

“Wandering-like Ogion?’ ‘ She looked at him. She remembered walking with him on the roads of Atuan, deriding him: “Do wizards often beg?” And he had answered, “Yes, but they try to give something in exchange. “ ‘

She asked cautiously, “Could you get on for a while as a weatherworker, or a finder?” She filled his glass full.

He shook his head. He drank wine, and looked away. “No,” he said. “None of that. Nothing of that.”

She did not believe him. She wanted to rebel, to deny, to say to him, How can itbe, how can you say that-as if you’d forgotten all you know, all you learned from Ogion, and at Roke, and in your traveling! You can’t have forgotten the words, the names, the acts of your art. You learned, you earned your power!-She kept herself from saying that, but she murmured, “I don’t understand. How can it all . . . ‘ ‘