Ursula LeGuin - The Other Wind

"But as the wall was built and the spell laid, the wind ceased to blow, within the wall. The sea withdrew. The springs ceased to run. The mountains of sunrise became the mountains of the night. Those that died came to a dark land, a dry land."

"I have walked in that land," Lebannen said, low and unwillingly. "I do not fear death, but I fear it."

There was a silence among them.

"Cob, and Thorion," the Summoner said in his rough, reluctant voice, "they tried to break down that wall. To bring the dead back into life."

"Not into life, master," Seppel said. "Still, like the Rune Makers, they sought the bodiless, immortal self."

"Yet their spells disturbed that place," the Summoner said, brooding. "So the dragons began to remember the ancient wrong, And so the souls of the dead come reaching now across the wall, yearning back to life."

Alder stood up. He said, "It is not life they yearn for. It is death. To be one with the earth again. To rejoin it."

They all looked at him, but he hardly knew it; his awareness was half with them, half in the dry land. The grass beneath his feet was green and sunlit, was dead and dim. The leaves of the trees trembled above him and the low stone wall lay only a little distance from him, down the dark hill. Of them all he saw only Tehanu; he could not see her clearly, but he knew her, standing between him and the wall. He spoke to her. "They built it, but they cannot unbuild it," he said. "Will you help me, Tehanu?"

"I will, Hara," she said.

A shadow rushed between them, a great dark bulky strength, hiding her, seizing him, holding him; he struggled, gasped for breath, could not draw breath, saw red fire in the darkness, and saw nothing more.

They met in the starlight at the edge of the glade, the king of the western lands and the Master of Roke, the two powers of Earthsea.

"Will he live?" the Summoner asked, and Lebannen answered, "The healer says he is in no danger now."

"I did wrong," said the Summoner. "I am sorry for it."

"Why did you summon him back?" the king asked, not reproving but wanting an answer.

After a long time the Summoner said, grimly, "Because I had the power to do it."

They paced along in silence down an open path among the great trees. It was very dark to either hand, but the starlight shone grey where they walked.

"I was wrong. But it is not right to want to die," the Summoner said. The burr of the East Reach was in his voice. He spoke low, almost pleadingly. "For the very old, the very ill, it may be. But life is given us. Surely it's wrong not to hold and treasure that great gift!"

"Death also is given us," said the king.

Alder lay on a pallet on the grass. He should lie out under the stars, the Patterner had said, and the old Master Herbal had agreed to that. He lay asleep, and Tehanu sat still beside him.

Tenar sat in the doorway of the low stone house and watched her. The great stars of late summer shone above the clearing: highest of them the star called Tehanu, the Swan's Heart, the linchpin of the sky.

Seserakh came quietly out of the house and sat down on the threshold beside her. She had taken off the circlet that held her veil, leaving her mass of tawny hair unbound.

"Oh my friend," she murmured, "what will happen to us? The dead are coming here. Do you feel them? Like the tide rising. Across that wall. I think nobody can stop them. All the dead people, from the graves of all the islands of the west, all the centuries."

Tenar felt the beating, the calling, in her head and in her blood. She knew now, they all knew, what Alder had known. But she held to what she trusted, even if trust had become mere hope. She said, "They are only the dead, Seserakh. We built a false wall. It must be unbuilt. But there is a true one."

Tehanu got up and came softly over to them. She sat on the doorstep below them.

"He's all right, he's sleeping," she whispered.

"Were you there with him?" Tenar asked.

Tehanu nodded. "We were at the wall."

"What did the Summoner do?"

"Summoned him—brought him back by force."

"Into life."

"Into life."

"I don't know which I should fear more," Tenar said, "death or life. I wish I could be done with fear."

Seserakh's face, the wave of her warm hair, bent down to Tenar's shoulder for a moment in a light caress. "You are brave, brave," she murmured. "But oh! I fear the sea! and I fear death!"

Tehanu sat quietly. In the faint soft light that hung among the trees, Tenar could see how her daughter's slender hand lay crossed over her burnt and twisted hand.

"I think," Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, "that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn't do. All that I might have been and couldn't be. All the choices I didn't make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven't been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed."

She looked up at the stars and sighed. "Not for a long time yet," she whispered. Then she looked round at Tenar.

Seserakh stroked Tenar's hair gently, rose, and went silently into the house.

"Before long, I think, mother."

"I know."

"I don't want to leave you."

"You have to leave me."

"I know."

They sat on in the glimmering darkness of the Grove, silent.

"Look," Tehanu murmured. A shooting star crossed the sky, a quick, slow-fading trail of light.

Five wizards sat in starlight. "Look," one said, his hand following the trail of the shooting star.

"The soul of a dragon dying," said Azver the Patterner "So they say in Karego-At."

"Do dragons die?" asked Onyx, musing. "Not as we do I think."

"They don't live as we do. They move between the worlds. So says Orm Irian. From the world's wind to the other wind."

"As we sought to do," said Seppel. "And failed."

Gamble looked at him curiously. "Have you on Paln always known this tale, this lore we have learned today—of the parting of dragon and mankind, and the making of the dry land?"

"Not as we heard it today. I was taught that the verw nadan was the first great triumph of the art magic. And that the goal of wizardry was to triumph over time and live forever, Hence the evils the Pelnish Lore has done."

"At least you kept the Mother knowledge we despised," Onyx said. "As your people did, Azver."

"Well, you had the sense to build your Great House here," the Patterner said, smiling. "But we built it wrong," Onyx said. "All we build, we build wrong."

"So we must knock it down," said Seppel.

"No," said Gamble. "We're not dragons. We do live in houses. We have to have some walls, at least."

"So long as the wind can blow through the windows," said Azver.

"And who will come in the doors?" asked the Doorkeeper in his mild voice.

There was a pause. A cricket trilled industriously somewhere across the glade, fell silent, trilled again.

"Dragons?" said Azver.

The Doorkeeper shook his head. "I think maybe the division that was begun, and then betrayed, will be completed at last," he said. "The dragons will go free, and leave us here to the choice we made."

"The knowledge of good and evil," said Onyx.

"The joy of making, shaping," said Seppel. "Our mastery."

"And our greed, our weakness, our fear," said Azver.

The cricket was answered by another, closer to the stream. The two trills pulsed, crossed, in and out of rhythm.

"What I fear," said Gamble, "so much that I fear to say it—is this: that when the dragons go, our mastery will go with them. Our art. Our magic."

The silence of the others showed that they feared what he did. But the Doorkeeper spoke at last, gently, but with some certainty. "No, I think not. They are the Making, yes. But we learned the Making. We made it ours. It can't be taken from us. To lose it we must forget it, throw it away."