Ursula Le Guin - Tehanu The Last Book of Earthsea

"I don’t know. Sometimes I feel as if I’d been alive for a thousand years; sometimes I feel my life’s been like a flying swallow seen through the chink of a wall. I have died and been reborn, both in the dry land and here under the sun, more than once. And the Making tells us that we have all returned and return forever to the source, and that the source is ceaseless. 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. . . "

After a while Tenar smiled. She said, a little shyly, “Moss said you were about fifteen."

“That would be about right. Ogion named me in the autumn; and the next summer I was off to Roke. . . . Who was that boy? An emptiness . . . A freedom.”

“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. Then the child came back in, and the conversation turned to the bread dough raising in the box by the stove. They talked so, quietly and long, passing from one thing to another and round and back, for half the brief day, often, spinning and sewing their lives together with words, the years and the deeds and the thoughts they had not shared. Then again they would be silent, working and thinking and dreaming, and the silent child was with them.

So the winter passed, till lambing season was on them, and the work got very heavy for a while as the days lengthened and grew bright. Then the swallows came from the isles under the sun, from the South Reach, where the star Gobardon shines in the constellation of Ending; but all the swallows’ talk with one another was about beginning.

Like the swallows, the ships began to fly among the islands with the return of spring, In the villages there was talk, secondhand from Valmouth, of the king’s ships harrying the harriers, driving well-established pirates to ruin, confiscating their ships and fortunes. Lord Heno himself sent out his three finest, fastest ships, captained by the sorcererseawolf Tally, who was feared by every merchantman from Solea to the Andrades; his fleet was to ambush the king’s ships off Oranea and destroy them. But it was one of the king’s ships that came into Valmouth Bay with Tally in chains aboard, and under orders to escort Lord Heno to Gont Port to be tried for piracy and murder. Heno barricaded himself in his stone manor house in the hills behind Valmouth, but neglected to light a fire, it being warm spring weather; so five or six of the king’s young soldiers dropped in on him by way of the chimney, and the whole troop walked him chained through the streets of Valmouth and carried him off to justice.

When he heard this, Ged said with love and pride, “All that a king can do, he will do well.”

Handy and Shag had been taken promptly off on the north road to Gont Port, and when his wounds healed enough Hake was carried there by ship, to be tried for murder at the king’s courts of law. The news of their sentence to the galleys caused much satisfaction and self-congratulation in Middle Valley, to which Tenar, and Therru beside her, listened in silence.

There came other ships bearing other men sent by the king, not all of them popular among the townsfolk and villagers of rude Gont: royal sheriffs, sent to report on the system of bailiffs and officers of the peace and to hear complaints and grievances from the common people; tax reporters and tax collectors; noble visitors to the little lords of Gont, inquiring politely as to their fealty to the Crown in Havnor; and wizardly men, who went here and there, seem-ing to do little and say less.

“I think they’re hunting for a new archmage after all,” said Tenar.

“Or looking for abuses of the art,” Ged said-’ "sorcery gone wrong."

Tenar was going to say, “Then they should look in the manor house of Re Albi!” but her tongue stumbled on the words. What was I going to say? she thought. Did I ever tell Ged about- I’m getting forgetful. What was it I was going to tell Ged? Oh, that we’d better mend the lower pasture gate before the cows get out.

There was always something, a dozen things, in the front of her mind, business of the farm. “Never one thing, for you,” Ogion had said. Even with Ged to help her, all her thoughts and days went into the business of the farm. He shared the housework with her as Flint had not; but Flint had been a farmer, and Ged was not. He learned fast, but there was a lot to learn. They worked. There was little time for talk, now. At the day’s end there was supper together, and bed together, and sleep, and wake at dawn and back to work, and so round and so round, like the wheel of a water mill, rising full and emptying, the days like the bright water falling.

“Hello, mother,” said the thin fellow at the farmyard gate. She thought it was Lark’s eldest and said, “What brings you by, lad?” Then she looked back at him across the clucking chickens and the parading geese.

“Spark!” she cried, and scattered the poultry, running to him.

“Well, well,” he said. “Don’t carry on."

He let her embrace him and stroke his face. He came in and sat down in the kitchen, at the table.

“Have you eaten? Did you see Apple?”

“I could eat.”

She rummaged in the well-stocked larder. “What ship are you on? Still the Gull?”

“No.” A pause. “My ship’s broke up."

She turned in horror-”Wrecked?”

“No.” He smiled without humor. “Crew’s broke up. King’s men took her over.”

“But-it wasn’t a pirate ship-”

“No.”

“Then why-?”

“Said the captain was running some goods they wanted,” he said, unwillingly. He was as thin as ever, but looked older, tanned dark, lank-haired, with a long, narrow face like Flint’s but still narrower, harder.

“Where’s dad?” he said.

Tenar stood still.

“You didn’t stop by your sister’s.”

“No,” he said, indifferent.

“Flint died three years ago,” she said. “Of a stroke. In the fields-on the path up from the lambing pens. Clear-brook found him. It was three years ago.

There was a silence. He did not know what to say, or had nothing to say.

She put food before him. He began to eat so hungrily that she set out more at once.

“When did you eat last?”

He shrugged, and ate.