Ursula LeGuin: The Other Wind

"It's a terrible thing to hear one's true name called by strangers," Alder said, "and it's a terrible thing to be called by the dead."

He tried to turn and climb back up the hill, away from the wall; but his legs had the awful weakness of dream and would not carry him. He fell to his knees to keep himself from being drawn down to the wall, and called out for help, though there was no one to help him; and so he woke in terror.

Since then, every night that he slept deeply, he found himself standing on the hill in the dry grey grass above the wall, and the dead would crowd thick and shadowy below it, pleading and crying to him, calling his name.

"I wake," he said, "and I'm in my own room. I'm not there, on that hillside. But I know they are. And I have to sleep. I try to wake often, and to sleep in daylight when I can, but I have to sleep at last. And then I am there, and they are there. And I can't go up the hill. If I move it's always downhill, towards the wall. Sometimes I can turn my back to them, but then I think I hear Lily among them, crying to me. And I turn to look for her. And they reach out to me."

He looked down at his hands gripping each other.

"What am I to do?" he said.

Sparrowhawk said nothing.

After a long time Alder said, "The harper I told you of was a good friend to me. After a while he saw there was something amiss, and when I told him that I couldn't sleep for fear of my dreams of the dead, he urged me arid helped me to take ship's passage to Ea, to speak to a grey wizard there." He meant a man trained in the School on Roke. "As soon as that wizard heard what my dreams were he said I must go to Roke."

"What is his name?"

"Beryl. He serves the Prince of Ea, who is Lord of the Isle of Taon."

The old man nodded.

"He had no help to give me, he said, but his word was as good as gold to the ship's

master. So I went on the water again. That was a long journey, coasting clear round Havnor and down the Inmost Sea. I thought maybe being on the water, far from Taon, always farther, I might leave the dream behind me. The wizard on Ea called that place in my dream the dry land, and I thought maybe I'd be going away from it, going on the sea. But every night I was there on the hillside. And more than once in the night, as time went on. Twice, or three times, or every time my eyes close, I'm on the hill, and the wall below me, and the voices calling me. So I'm like a man crazy with the pain of a wound who can find peace only in sleep, but the sleep is my torment, with the pain and anguish of the wretched dead all crowding at the wall, and my fear of them."

The sailors soon began to shun him, he said, at night because he cried out and woke them with his miserable wakenings, and in daylight because they thought there was a curse on him or a gebbeth in him.

"And no relief for you on Roke?"

"In the Grove," Alder said, and his face changed entirely when he said the word. Sparrowhawk's face had the same look for a moment.

"The Master Patterner took me there, under those trees, and I could sleep. Even at night I could sleep. In daylight, if the sun's on me—it was like that in the afternoon, yesterday, here—if the warmth of the sun's on me and the red of the sun shines through my eyelids, I don't fear to dream. But in the Grove there was no fear at all, and I could love the night again."

"Tell me how it was when you came to Roke."

Though hampered by weariness, anguish, and awe, Alder had the silver tongue of his island; and what he left out for fear of going on too long or telling the Archmage what he already knew, his listener could well imagine, remembering when he himself first came to the Isle of the Wise as a boy of fifteen.

When Alder left the ship at the docks at Thwil Town, one of the sailors had drawn the rune of the Closed Door on the top of the gangplank to prevent his ever coming back aboard. Alder noticed it, but he thought the sailor had good cause. He felt himself ill-omened; he felt he bore darkness in him. That made him shyer than he would have been in any case in a strange town. And Thwil was a very strange town.

"The streets lead you awry," Sparrowhawk said.

"They do that, my lord!—I'm sorry, my tongue will obey my heart, and not you—"

"Never mind. I was used to it once. I can be Lord Goatherd again, if it eases your speech. Go on."

Misdirected by those he asked, or misunderstanding the directions, Alder wandered about the hilly little labyrinth of Thwil Town with the School always in sight and never able to get to it, until, having reached despair, he came to a plain door in a bare wall on a dull square. After staring at it a while he recognised the wall was the one he had been trying to get to. He knocked, and a man with a quiet face and quiet eyes opened the door.

Alder was ready to say that he had been sent by the wizard Beryl of Ea with a message for the Master Summoner, but he didn't have a chance to speak. The Doorkeeper gazed at him a moment and said mildly, "You cannot bring them into this house, friend."

Alder did not ask who it was he could not bring with him. He knew. He had slept scarcely at all the past nights, snatching fragments of sleep and waking in terror, dozing off in the daylight, seeing the dry grass sloping down through the sunlit deck of the ship, the wall of stones across the waves of the sea. And waking, the dream was in him, with him, around him, veiled, and he could hear, always, faintly, through all the noises of wind and sea, the voices that cried his name. He did not know if he was awake now or asleep. He was crazy with pain and fear and weariness.

"Keep them out," he said, "and let me in, for pity's sake let me in!"

"Wait here," the man said, as gently as before. "There's a bench," pointing. And he closed the door.

Alder went and sat down on the stone bench. He remembered that, and he remembered some boys of fifteen or so looking curiously at him as they went by and entered that door, but what happened for some while after he could recall only in fragments.

The Doorkeeper came back with a young man with the staff and cloak of a Roke wizard. Then Alder was in a room, which he understood was in a lodging house. There the Master Summoner came and tried to talk with him. But Alder by then was not able to talk. Between sleep and waking, between the sunlit room and the dim grey hill, between the Summoner's voice speaking to him and the voices calling him across the wall, he could not think and he could not move, in the living world. But in the dim world where the voices called, he thought it would be easy to walk on down those few steps to the wall and let the reaching hands take him and hold him. If he was one of them they would let him be, he thought.

Then, as he remembered, the sunlit room was altogether gone, and he was on the grey hill. But with him stood the Summoner of Roke: a big, broad, dark-skinned man, with a great staff of yew wood that shimmered in the dim place.

The voices had ceased calling. The people, the crowding figures at the wall, were gone. He could hear a distant rustle and a kind of sobbing as they went down into the darkness, went away.

The Summoner stepped to the wall and put his hands on it.

The stones had been loosened here and there. A few had fallen and lay on the dry grass. Alder felt that he should pick them up and replace them, mend the wall, but he did not.

The Summoner turned to him and asked, "Who brought you here?"

"My wife, Mevre."

"Summon her here."

Alder stood dumb. At last he opened his mouth, but it was not his wife's true name that he spoke but her use-name, the name he had called her in life. He said it aloud,

"Lily." The sound of it was not like a white flower, but like a pebble dropping on dust.

No sound. Stars shone small and steady in the black sky. Alder had never looked up at the sky in this place before. He did not recognise the stars.