Ursula K. Le Guin - Earthsea 2 - The Tombs Of Atuan

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TheTombs of Atuan

Ursula K. Leguin

1970

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Prologue

------

"Come home, Tenar! Come home!"

In the deep valley, in the twilight, the apple trees were on the eve of

blossoming; here and there among the shadowed boughs one flower had opened

early, rose and white, like a faint star. Down the orchard aisles, in the thick,

new, wet grass, the little girl ran for the joy of running; hearing the call she

did not come at once, but made a long circle before she turned her face towards

home. The mother waiting in the doorway of the hut, with the firelight behind

her, watched the tiny figure running and bobbing like a bit of thistledown blown

over the darkening grass beneath the trees.

By the corner of the hut, scraping clean an earthclotted hoe, the father

said, "Why do you let your heart hang on the child? They're coming to take her

away next month. For good. Might as well bury her and be done with it. What's

the good of clinging to one you're bound to lose? She's no good to us. If they'd

pay for her when they took her, that would be something, but they won't. They'll

take her and that's an end of it."

The mother said nothing, watching the child who had stopped to look up

through the trees. Over the high hills, above the orchards, the evening star

shone piercing clear.

"She isn't ours, she never was since they came here and said she must be

the Priestess at the Tombs. Why can't you see that?" The man's voice was harsh

with complaint and bitterness. "You have four others. They'll stay here, and

this one won't. So, don't set your heart on her. Let her go!"

"When the time comes," the woman said, "I will let her go." She bent to

meet the child who came running on little, bare, white feet across the muddy

ground, and gathered her up in her arms. As she turned to enter the hut she bent

her head to kiss the child's hair, which was black; but her own hair, in the

flicker of firelight from the hearth, was fair.

The man stood outside, his own feet bare and cold on the ground, the clear

sky of spring darkening above him. His face in the dusk was full of grief, a

dull, heavy, angry grief that he would never find the words to say. At last he

shrugged, and followed his wife into the firelit room that rang with children's

voices.

------

The Eaten One

------

One high horn shrilled and ceased. The silence that followed was shaken

only by the sound of many footsteps keeping time with a drum struck softly at a

slow heartpace. Through cracks in the roof of the Hall of the Throne, gaps

between columns where a whole section of masonry and tile had collapsed,

unsteady sunlight shone aslant. It was an hour after sunrise. The air was still

and cold. Dead leaves of weeds that had forced up between marble pavement-tiles

were outlined with frost, and crackled, catching on the long black robes of the

priestesses.

They came, four by four, down the vast hall between double rows of

columns. The drum beat dully. No voice spoke, no eye watched. Torches carried by

black-clad girls burned reddish in the shafts of sunlight, brighter in the dusk

between. Outside, on the steps of the Hall of the Throne, the men stood, guards,

trumpeters, drummers; within the great doors only women had come, dark-robed and

hooded, walking slowly four by four towards the empty throne.

Two came, tall women looming in their black, one of them thin and rigid,

the other heavy, swaying with the planting of her feet. Between these two walked

a child of about six. She wore a straight white shift. Her head and arms and

legs were bare, and she was barefoot. She looked extremely small. At the foot of

the steps leading up to the throne, where the others now waited in dark rows,

the two tall women halted. They pushed the child forward a little.

The throne on its high platform seemed to be curtained on each side with

great webs of blackness dropping from the gloom of the roof; whether these were

curtains, or only denser shadows, the eye could not make certain. The throne

itself was black, with a dull glimmer of precious stones or gold on the arms and

back, and it was huge. A man sitting in it would have been dwarfed; it was not

of human dimensions. It was empty. Nothing sat in it but shadows.

Alone, the child climbed up four of the seven steps of red-veined marble.

They were so broad and high that she had to get both feet onto one step before

attempting the next. On the middle step, directly in front of the throne, stood

a large, rough block of wood, hollowed out on top. The child knelt on both knees

and fitted her head into the hollow, turning it a little sideways. She knelt

there without moving.

A figure in a belted gown of white wool stepped suddenly out of the

shadows at the right of the throne and strode down the steps to the child. His

face was masked with white. He held a sword of polished steel five feet long.

Without word or hesitation he swung the sword, held in both hands, up over the

little girl's neck. The drum stopped beating.

As the blade swung to its highest point and poised, a figure in black

darted out from the left side of the throne, leapt down the stairs, and stayed

the sacrificer's arms with slenderer arms. The sharp edge of the sword glittered

in mid-air. So they balanced for a moment, the white figure and the black, both

faceless, dancer-like above the motionless child whose white neck was bared by

the parting of her black hair.

In silence each leapt aside and up the stairs again, vanishing in the

darkness behind the enormous throne. A priestess came forward and poured out a

bowl of some liquid on the steps beside the kneeling child. The stain looked

black in the dimness of the hall.

The child got up and descended the four stairs laboriously. When she stood

at the bottom, the two tall priestesses put on her a black robe and hood and

mantle, and turned her around again to face the steps, the dark stain, the

throne.

"O let the Nameless Ones behold the girl given to them, who is verily the

one born ever nameless. Let them accept her life and the years of her life until

her death, which is also theirs. Let them find her acceptable. Let her be

eaten!"

Other voices, shrill and harsh as trumpets, replied: "She is eaten! She is

eaten!"

The little girl stood looking from under her black cowl up at the throne.

The jewels inset in the huge clawed arms and the back were glazed with dust, and

on the carven back were cobwebs and whitish stains of owl droppings. The three

highest steps directly before the throne, above the step on which she had knelt,

had never been climbed by mortal feet. They were so thick with dust that they

looked like one slant of gray soil, the planes of the red-veined marble wholly

hidden by the unstirred, untrodden siftings of how many years, how many

centuries.

"She is eaten! She is eaten!"

Now the drum, abrupt, began to sound again, beating a quicker pace.

Silent and shuffling, the procession formed and moved away from the

throne, eastward towards the bright, distant square of the doorway. On either

side, the thick double columns, like the calves of immense pale legs, went up to

the dusk under the ceiling. Among the priestesses, and now all in black like

them, the child walked, her small bare feet treading solemnly over the frozen

weeds, the icy stones. When sunlight slanting through the ruined roof flashed

across her way, she did not look up.

Guards held the great doors wide. The black procession came out into the

thin, cold light and wind of early morning. The sun dazzled, swimming above the

eastern vastness. Westward, the mountains caught its yellow light, as did the

facade of the Hall of the Throne. The other buildings, lower on the hill, still

lay in purplish shadow, except for the Temple of the God-Brothers across the way

on a little knoll: its roof, newly gilt, flashed the day back in glory. The

black line of priestesses, four by four, wound down the Hill of the Tombs, and

as they went they began softly to chant. The tune was on three notes only, and

the word that was repeated over and over was a word so old it had lost its

meaning, like a signpost still standing when the road is gone. Over and over

they chanted the empty word. All that day of the Remaking of the Priestess was

filled with the low chanting of women's voices, a dry unceasing drone.

The little girl was taken from room to room, from temple to temple. In one

place salt was placed upon her tongue; in another she knelt facing west while

her hair was cut short and washed with oil and scented vinegar; in another she

lay face down on a slab of black marble behind an altar while shrill voices sang

a lament for the dead. Neither she nor any of the priestesses ate food or drank

water all that day. As the evening star set, the little girl was put to bed,

naked between sheepskin rugs, in a room she had never slept in before. It was in

a house that had been locked for years, unlocked only that day. The room was

higher than it was long, and had no windows. There was a dead smell in it, still

and stale. The silent women left her there in the dark.

She held still, lying just as they had put her. Her eyes were wide open.

She lay so for a long time.

She saw light shake on the high wall. Someone came quietly along the

corridor, shielding a rushlight so it showed no more light than a firefly. A

husky whisper: "Ho, are you there, Tenar?"

The child did not reply.

A head poked in the doorway, a strange head, hairless as a peeled potato,

and of the same yellowish color. The eyes were like potato-eyes, brown and tiny.

The nose was dwarfed by great, fiat slabs of cheek, and the mouth was a lipless

slit. The child stared unmoving at this face. Her eyes were large, dark, and

fixed.

"Ho, Tenar, my little honeycomb, there you are!" The voice was husky, high

as a woman's voice but not a woman's voice. "I shouldn't be here, I belong

outside the door, on the porch, that's where I go. But I had to see how my

little Tenar is, after all the long day of it, eh, how's my poor little

honeycomb?"

He moved towards her, noiseless and burly, and put out his hand as if to

smooth back her hair.

"I am not Tenar any more," the child said, staring up at him. His hand

stopped; he did not touch her.

"No," he said, after a moment, whispering. "I know. I know. Now you're the

little Eaten One. But I..."

She said nothing.

"It was a hard day for a little one," the man said, shuffling, the tiny

light flickering in his big yellow hand.

"You should not be in this House, Manan."

"No. No. I know. I shouldn't be in this House. Well, good night, little

one... Good night."

The child said nothing. Manan slowly turned around and went away. The

glimmer died from the high cell walls. The little girl, who had no name any more

but Arha, the Eaten One, lay on her back looking steadily at the dark.

------

The Wall Around the Place

------

As she grew older she lost all remembrance of her mother, without knowing

she had lost it. She belonged here, at the Place of the Tombs; she had always

belonged here. Only sometimes in the long evenings of July as she watched the

western mountains, dry and lion-colored in the afterglow of sunset, she would

think of a fire that had burned on a hearth, long ago, with the same clear

yellow light. And with this came a memory of being held, which was strange, for

here she was seldom even touched; and the memory of a pleasant smell, the

fragrance of hair freshly washed and rinsed in sage-scented water, fair long

hair, the color of sunset and firelight. That was all she had left.

She knew more than she remembered, of course, for she had been told the

whole story. When she was seven or eight years old, and first beginning to

wonder who indeed this person called "Arha" was, she had gone to her guardian,

the Warden Manan, and said, "Tell me how I was chosen, Manan."

"Oh, you know all that, little one."

And indeed she did; the tall, dry-voiced priestess Thar had told her till

she knew the words by heart, and she recited them: "Yes, I know. At the death of

the One Priestess of the Tombs of Atuan, the ceremonies of burial and

purification are completed within one month by the moon's calendar. After this

certain of the Priestesses and Wardens of the Place of the Tombs go forth across

the desert, among the towns and villages of Atuan, seeking and asking. They seek

the girl-child who was born on the night of the Priestess' death. When they find

such a child, they wait and they watch. The child must be sound of body and of

mind, and as it grows it must not suffer from rickets nor the smallpox nor any

deformity, nor become blind. If it reaches the age of five years unblemished,

then it is known that the body of the child is indeed the new body of the

Priestess who died. And the child is made known to the Godking in Awabath, and

brought here to her Temple and instructed for a year. And at the year's end she

is taken to the Hall of the Throne and her name is given back to those who are

her Masters, the Nameless Ones: for she is the nameless one, the Priestess Ever

Reborn."

This was all word for word as Thar had told her, and she had never dared

ask for a word more. The thin priestess was not cruel, but she was very cold and

lived by an iron law, and Arha was in awe of her. But she was not in awe of

Manan, far from it, and she would command him, "Now tell me how I was chosen!"

And he would tell her again.

"We left here, going north and west, in the third day of the moon's

waxing; for Arha-that-was had died in the third day of the last moon. And first

we went to Tenacbah, which is a great city, though those who've seen both say

it's no more to Awabath than a flea to a cow. But it's big enough for me, there

must be ten hundred houses in Tenacbahl And we went on to Gar. But nobody in

those cities had a baby girl born to them on the third day of the moon a month

before; there were some had boys, but boys won't do... So we went into the hill

country north of Gar, to the towns and villages. That's my own land. I was born

in the hills there, where the rivers run, and the land is green. Not in this

desert." Manan's husky voice would get a strange sound when he said that, and

his small eyes would be quite hidden in their folds; he would pause a little,

and at last go on. "And so we found and spoke to all those who were parents of

babies born in the last months. And some would lie to us. `Oh yes, surely our

baby girl was born on the moon's third day!' For poor folk, you know, are often

glad to get rid of girl-babies. And there were others who were so poor, living

in lonely huts in the valleys of the hills, that they kept no count of days and

scarce knew how to tell the turn of time, so they could not say for certain how

old their baby was. But we could always come at the truth, by asking long

enough. But it was slow work. At last we found a girlchild, in a village of ten

houses, in the orchard-vales westward of Entat. Eight months old she was, so

long had we been looking. But she had been born on the night that the Priestess

of the Tombs had died, and within the very hour of her death. And she was a fine

baby, sitting up on her mother's knee and looking with bright eyes at all of us,

crowding into the one room of the house like bats into a cave! The father was a

poor man. He tended the apple trees of the rich man's orchard, and had nothing

of his own but five children and a goat. Not even the house was his. So there we

all crowded in, and you could tell by the way the priestesses looked at the baby

and spoke among themselves that they thought they had found the Reborn One at

last. And the mother could tell this too. She held the baby and never said a

word. Well, so, the next day we came back. And look here! The little bright-eyed

baby lying in a cot of rushes weeping and screaming, and all over its body weals

and red rashes of fever, and the mother wailing louder than the baby, `Oh! Oh!

My babe hath the Witch-Fingers on her!' That's how she said it; the smallpox she

meant. In my village, too, they called it the Witch-Fingers. But Kossil, she who

is now the High Priestess of the Godking, she went to the cot and picked up the

baby. The others had all drawn back, and I with them; I don't value my life very

high, but who enters a house where smallpox is? But she had no fear, not that

one. She picked up the baby and said, `It has no fever.' And she spat on her

finger and rubbed at the red marks, and they came off. They were only berry

juice. The poor silly mother had thought to fool us and keep her child!" Manan

laughed heartily at this; his yellow face hardly changed, but his sides heaved.

"So, her husband beat her, for he was afraid of the wrath of the priestesses.

And soon we came back to the desert, but each year one of the people of the

Place would return to the village among the apple orchards, and see how the

child got on. So five years passed, and then Thar and Kossil made the journey,

with the Temple guards, and soldiers of the red helmet sent by the Godking to

escort them safely. They brought the child back here, for it was indeed the

Priestess of the Tombs reborn, and here it belonged. And who was the child, eh,

little one?"

"Me," said Arha, looking off into the distance as if to see something she

could not see, something gone out of sight.

Once she asked, "What did the... the mother do, when they came to take the

child away?"

But Manan didn't know; he had not gone with the priestesses on that final

journey.

And she could not remember. What was the good in remembering? It was gone,

all gone. She had come where she must come. In all the world she knew only one

place: the Place of the Tombs of Atuan.

In her first year there she had slept in the big dormitory with the other

novices, girls between four and fourteen. Even then Manan had been set apart

among the Ten Wardens as her particular guardian, and her cot had been in a

little alcove, partly separated from the long, low-beamed main room of the

dormitory in the Big House where the girls giggled and whispered before they

slept, and yawned and plaited one another's hair in the gray light of morning.

When her name was taken from her and she became Arha, she slept alone in the

Small House, in the bed and in the room that would be her bed and her room for

the rest of her life. That house was hers, the House of the One Priestess, and

no one might enter it without her permission. When she was quite little still,

she enjoyed hearing people knock submissively on her door, and saying, "You may

come in," and it annoyed her that the two High Priestesses, Kossil and Thar,

took their permission for granted and entered her house without knocking.

The days went by, the years went by, all alike. The girls of the Place of

the Tombs spent their time at classes and disciplines. They did not play any

games. There was no time for games. They learned the sacred songs and the sacred

dances, the histories of the Kargad Lands, and the mysteries of whichever of the

gods they were dedicated to: the Godking who ruled in Awabath, or the Twin

Brothers, Atwah and Wuluah. Of them all, only Arha learned the rites of the

Nameless Ones, and these were taught her by one person, Thar, the High Priestess

of the Twin Gods. This took her away from the others for an hour or more daily,

but most of her day, like theirs, was spent simply working. They learned how to

spin and weave the wool of their flocks, and how to plant and harvest and

prepare the food they always ate: lentils, buckwheat ground to a coarse meal for

porridge or a fine flour for unleavened bread, onions, cabbages, goat-cheese,

apples, and honey.

The best thing that could happen was to be allowed to go fishing in the

murky green river that flowed through the desert a half mile northeast of the

Place; to take along an apple or a cold buckwheat bannock for lunch and sit all

day in the dry sunlight among the reeds, watching the slow green water run and

the cloudshadows change slowly on the mountains. But if you squealed with

excitement when the line tensed and you swung in a flat, glittering fish to flop

on the riverbank and drown in air, then Mebbeth would hiss like an adder, "Be

still, you screeching fool!" Mebbeth, who served in the Godking's temple, was a

dark woman, still young, but hard and sharp as obsidian. Fishing was her

passion. You had to keep on her good side, and never make a sound, or she would

not take you out to fish again; and then you'd never get to the river except to

fetch water in summer when the wells ran low. That was a dreary business, to

trudge through the searing white heat a half mile down to the river, fill the

two buckets on their carrying pole, and then set off as fast as possible uphill

to the Place. The first hundred yards were easy, but then the buckets began to

grow heavier, and the pole burned your shoulders like a bar of hot iron, and the

light glared on the dry road, and every step was harder and slower. At last you

got to the cool shade of the back courtyard of the Big House by the vegetable

patch, and dumped the buckets into the great cistern with a splash. And then you

had to turn around to do it all over again, and again, and again.

Within the precincts of the Place -that was all the name it had or needed,

for it was the most ancient and sacred of all places in the Four Lands of the

Kargish Empire- a couple of hundred people lived, and there were many buildings:

three temples, the Big House and the Small House, the quarters of the eunuch

wardens, and close outside the wall the guards' barracks and many slaves' huts,

the storehouses and sheep pens and goat pens and farm buildings. It looked like

a little town, seen from a distance, from up on the dry hills westward where

nothing grew but sage, wire-grass in straggling clumps, small weeds and desert

herbs. Even from away off on the eastern plains, looking up one might see the

gold roof of the Temple of the Twin Gods wink and glitter beneath the mountains,

like a speck of mica in a shelf of rock.

That temple itself was a cube of stone, plastered white, windowless, with

a low porch and door. Showier, and centuries newer, was the Temple of the God-

king a little below it, with a high portico and a row of thick white columns

with painted capitals - each one a solid log of cedar, brought on shipboard from

Hur-atHur where there are forests, and dragged by the straining of twenty slaves

across the barren plains to the Place. Only after a traveler approaching from

the east had seen the gold roof and the bright columns would he see, higher up

on the Hill of the Place, above them all, tawny and ruinous as the desert

itself, the oldest of the temples of his race: the huge, low Hall of the Throne,

with patched walls and flattish, crumbling dome.

Behind the Hall and encircling the whole crest of the hill ran a massive

wall of rock, laid without mortar and half fallen down in many places. Inside

the loop of the wall several black stones eighteen or twenty feet high stuck up

like huge fingers out of the earth. Once the eye saw them it kept returning to

them. They stood there full of meaning, and yet there was no saying what they

meant. There were nine of them. One stood straight, the others leaned more or

less, two had fallen. They were crusted with gray and orange lichen as if

splotched with paint, all but one, which was naked and black, with a dull gloss

to it. It was smooth to the touch, but on the others, under the crust of lichen,

vague carvings could be seen, or felt with the fingers - shapes, signs. These

nine stones were the Tombs of Atuan. They had stood there, it was said, since

the time of the first men, since Earthsea was created. They had been planted in

the darkness when the lands were raised up from the ocean's depths. They were

older by far than the God-kings of Kargad, older than the Twin Gods, older than

light. They were the tombs of those who ruled before the world of men came to

be, the ones not named, and she who served them had no name.

She did not go among them often, and no one else ever set foot on that

ground where they stood, on the hilltop within the rock wall behind the Hall of

the Throne. Twice a year, at the full moon nearest the equinox of spring and of

autumn, there was a sacrifice before the Throne and she came out from the low

back door of the Hall carrying a great brass basin full of smoking goat's blood;

this she must pour out, half at the foot of the standing black stone, half over

one of the fallen stones which lay embedded in the rocky dirt, stained by the

blood-offering of centuries.

Sometimes Arha went by herself in the early morning and wandered among the

Stones trying to make out the dim humps and scratches of the carvings, brought

out more clearly by the low angle of the light; or she would sit there and look

up at the mountains westward, and down at the roofs and walls of the Place all

laid out below, and watch the first stirrings of activity around the Big House

and the guards' barracks, and the flocks of sheep and goats going off to their

sparse pastures by the river. There was never anything to do among the Stones.

She went only because it was permitted her to go there, because there she was

alone. It was a dreary place. Even in the heat of noon in the desert summer

there was a coldness about it. Sometimes the wind whistled a little between the

two stones that stood closest together, leaning together as if telling secrets.

But no secret was told.

From the Tomb Wall another, lower rock wall ran, making a long irregular

semicircle about the Hill of the Place and then trailing off northward towards

the river. It did not so much protect the Place, as cut it in two: on one side

the temples and houses of the priestesses and wardens, on the other the quarters

of the guards and of the slaves who farmed and herded and foraged for the Place.

None of these ever crossed the wall, except that on certain very holy festivals

the guards, and their drummers and players of the horn, would attend the

procession of the priestesses; but they did not enter the portals of the

temples. No other men set foot upon the inner ground of the Place. There had

once been pilgrimages, kings and chieftains coming from the Four Lands to

worship there; the first God-king, a century and a half ago, had come to enact

the rites of his own temple. Yet even he could not enter among the Tombstones,

even he had had to eat and sleep outside the wall around the Place.

One could climb that wall easily enough, fitting toes into crevices. The

Eaten One and a girl called Penthe were sitting up on the wall one afternoon in

late spring.

They were both twelve years old. They were supposed to be in the weaving

room of the Big House, a huge stone attic; they were supposed to be at the great

looms always warped with dull black wool, weaving black cloth for robes. They

had slipped outside for a drink at the well in the courtyard, and then Arha had

said, "Come on!" and had led the other girl down the hill, around out of sight

of the Big House, to the wall. Now they sat on top of it, ten feet up, their

bare legs dangling down on the outside, looking over the flat plains that went

on and on to the east and north.

"I'd like to see the sea," said Penthe.

"What for?" said Arha, chewing a bitter stem of milkweed she had picked

from the wall. The barren land was just past its flowering. All the small desert

blossoms, yellow and rose and white, low-growing and quick-flowering, were going

to seed, scattering tiny plumes and parasols of ash white on the wind, dropping

their hooked, ingenious burrs. The ground under the apple trees of the orchard

was a drift of bruised white and pink. The branches were green, the only green

trees within miles of the Place. Everything else, from horizon to horizon, was a

dull, tawny, desert color, except that the mountains had a silvery bluish tinge

from the first buds of the flowering sage.

"Oh, I don't know what for. I'd just like to see something different. It's

always the same here. Nothing happens."

"All that happens everywhere, begins here," said Arha.

"Oh, I know... But I'd like to see some of it happening!"

Penthe smiled. She was a soft, comfortable-looking girl. She scratched the

soles of her bare feet on the sunwarmed rocks, and after a while went on, "You

know, I used to live by the sea when I was little. Our village was right behind

the dunes, and we used to go down and play on the beach sometimes. Once I

remember we saw a fleet of ships going by, way out at sea. The ships looked like

dragons with red wings. Some of them had real necks, with dragon heads. They

came sailing by Atuan, but they weren't Kargish ships. They came from the west,

from the Inner Lands, the headman said. Everybody came down to watch them. I

think they were afraid they might land. They just went by, nobody knew where

they were going. Maybe to make war in Karego-At. But think of it, they really

came from the sorcerers' islands, where all the people are the color of dirt and

they can all cast a spell on you easy as winking."

"Not on me," Arha said fiercely. "I wouldn't have looked at them. They're

vile accursed sorcerers. How dare they sail so close to the Holy Land?"

"Oh, well, I suppose the God-king will conquer them some day and make them

all slaves. But I wish I could see the sea again. There used to be little

octopuses in the tide pools, and if you shouted `Boo!' at them they turned all

white. -There comes that old Manan, looking for you."

Arha's guard and servant was coming slowly along the inner side of the

wall. He would stoop to pull a wild onion, of which he held a large, limp bunch,

then straighten up and look about him with his small, dull, brown eyes. He had

grown fatter with the years, and his hairless yellow skin glistened in the sun.

"Slide down part way on the men's side," Arha hissed, and both girls

wriggled lithe as lizards down the far side of the wall until they could cling

there just below the top, invisible from the inner side. They heard Manan's slow

footsteps coming by.

"Hoo! Hoo! Potato face!" crooned Arha, a whispering jeer faint as the wind

among the grasses.

The heavy tread halted. "Ho there," said the uncertain voice. "Little one?

Arha?"

Silence.

Manan went forward.

"Hoo-oo! Potato face!"

"Hoo, potato belly!" Penthe whispered in imitation, and then moaned,

trying to suppress giggles.

"Somebody there?"

Silence.

"Oh well, well, well," the eunuch sighed, and his slow feet went on. When

he was gone over the shoulder of the slope, the girls scrambled back up onto the

top of the wall. Penthe was pink with sweat and giggles, but Arha looked savage.

"The stupid old bellwether, following me around everywhere!"

"He has to," Penthe said reasonably. "It's his job, looking after you."

"Those I serve look after me. I please them; I need please nobody else.

These old women and half-men, these people should leave me alone. I am the One

Priestess!"

Penthe stared at the other girl. "Oh," she said feebly, "oh, I know you

are, Arha-"

"Then they should let me be. And not order me about all the time!"

Penthe said nothing for a while, but sighed, and sat swinging her plump

legs and gazing at the vast, pale lands below, that rose so slowly to a high,

vague, immense horizon.

"You'll get to give the orders pretty soon, you know," she said at last,

quietly. "In two more years we won't be children any more. We'll be fourteen.

I'll go into the Godking's temple, and things will be about the same for me. But

you'll really be the High Priestess then. Even Kossil and Thar will have to obey

you."

The Eaten One said nothing. Her face was set, her eyes under black brows

caught the light of the sky in a pale glitter.

"We ought to go back," Penthe said.

"No."

"But the weaving mistress might tell Thar. And soon it'll be time for the

Nine Chants."

"I'm staying here. You stay, too."

"They won't punish you, but they will punish me," Penthe said in her mild

way. Arha did not reply. Penthe sighed, and stayed. The sun was sinking into

haze high above the plains. Far away on the long, gradual slant of the land,

sheep bells clanked faintly and lambs bleated. The spring wind blew in dry,

faint gusts, sweetsmelling.

The Nine Chants were nearly over when the two girls returned. Mebbeth had

seen them sitting on the `Men's Wall' and had reported this to her superior,

Kossil, High Priestess of the Godking.

Kossil was heavy-footed, heavy-faced. Without expression in face or voice

she spoke to the two girls, telling them to follow her. She led them through the

stone hallways of the Big House, out the front door, up the knoll to the Temple

of Atwah and Wuluah. There she spoke with the High Priestess of that temple,

Thar, tall and dry and thin as the legbone of a deer.

Kossil said to Penthe, "Take off your gown."

She whipped the girl with a bundle of reed canes, which cut the skin a

little. Penthe bore this patiently, with silent tears. She was sent back to the

weaving room without supper, and the next day also she would go without food.

"If you are found climbing over the Men's Wall again," Kossil said, "there will

be very much worse things than this happen to you. Do you understand, Penthe?"

Kossil's voice was soft, but not kindly. Penthe said, "Yes," and slipped away,

cowering and flinching as her heavy clothing rubbed the cuts on her back.

Arha had stood beside Thar to watch the whipping. Now she watched Kossil

clean the canes of the whip.

Thar said to her, "It is not fitting that you be seen climbing and running

with other girls. You are Arha."

She stood sullen and did not reply.

"It is better that you do only what is needful for you to do. You are

Arha."

For a moment the girl raised her eyes to Thar's face, then to Kossil's,

and there was a depth of hate or rage in her look that was terrible to see. But

the thin priestess showed no concern; rather she confirmed, leaning forward a

little, almost whispering, "You are Arha. There is nothing left. It was all

eaten."

"It was all eaten," the girl repeated, as she had repeated daily, all the

days of her life since she was six.

Thar bowed her head slightly; so did Kossil, as she put away the whip. The

girl did not bow, but turned submissively and left.

After the supper of potatoes and spring onions, eaten in silence in the

narrow, dark refectory, after the chanting of the evening hymns, and the placing

of the sacred words upon the doors, and the brief Ritual of the Unspoken, the

work of the day was done. Now the girls might go up to the dormitory and play

games with dice and sticks, so long as the single rushlight burned, and whisper

in the dark from bed to bed. Arha set off across the courts and slopes of the

Place as she did every night, to the Small House where she slept alone.

The night wind was sweet. The stars of spring shone thick, like drifts of

daisies in spring meadows, like the glittering of light on the April sea. But

the girl had no memory of meadows or the sea. She did not look up.

"Ho there, little one!"

"Manan," she said indifferently.

The big shadow shuffled up beside her, starlight glinting on his hairless

pate.

"Were you punished?"

"I can't be punished."

"No... That's so..."

"They can't punish me. They don't dare."

He stood with his big hands hanging, dim and bulky. She smelled wild

onion, and the sweaty, sagey smell of his old black robes, which were torn at

the hem, and too short for him.

"They can't touch me. I am Arha," she said in a shrill, fierce voice, and

burst into tears.

The big, waiting hands came up and drew her to him, held her gently,

smoothed her braided hair. "There, there. Little honeycomb, little girl..." She

heard the husky murmur in the deep hollow of his chest, and clung to him. Her

tears stopped soon, but she held onto Manan as if she could not stand up.

"Poor little one," he whispered, and picking the child up carried her to

the doorway of the house where she slept alone. He set her down.

"All right now, little one?"

She nodded, turned from him, and entered the dark house.

------

The Prisoners

------

Kossil's steps sounded along the hallway of the Small House, even and

deliberate. The tall, heavy figure filled the doorway of the room, shrank as the

priestess bowed down touching one knee to the floor, swelled as she straightened

to her full height.

"Mistress."

"What is it, Kossil?"

"I have been permitted to look after certain matters pertaining to the

Domain of the Nameless Ones, until now. If you so desire, it is now time for you

to learn, and see, and take charge of these matters, which you have not yet

remembered in this life."

The girl had been sitting in her windowless room, supposedly meditating,

actually doing nothing and thinking almost nothing. It took some time for the

fixed, dull, haughty expression of her face to change. Yet it did change, though

she tried to conceal it. She said, with a certain slyness, "The Labyrinth?"

"We will not enter the Labyrinth. But it will be necessary to cross the

Undertomb."

There was a tone in Kossil's voice that might have been fear, or might

have been a pretense of fear, intended to frighten Arha. The girl stood up

without haste and said indifferently, "Very well." But in her heart, as she

followed the heavy figure of the Godking's priestess, she exulted: At last! At

last! I shall see my own domain at last!

She was fifteen. It was over a year since she had made her crossing into

womanhood and at the same time had come into her full powers as the One

Priestess of the Tombs of Atuan, highest of all high priestesses of the Kargad

Lands, one whom not even the Godking himself might command. They all bowed the

knee to her now, even grim Thar and Kossil. All spoke to her with elaborate

deference. But nothing had changed. Nothing happened. Once the ceremonies of her

consecration were over, the days went on as they had always gone. There was wool

to be spun, black cloth to be woven, meal to be ground, rites to be performed;

the Nine Chants must be sung nightly, the doorways blessed, the Stones fed with

goat's blood twice a year, the dances of the dark of the moon danced before the

Empty Throne. And so the whole year had passed, just as the years before it had

passed, and were all the years of her life to pass so?

Her boredom rose so strong in her sometimes that it felt like terror: it

took her by the throat. Not long ago she had been driven to speak of it. She had

to talk, she thought, or she would go mad. It was Manan she talked to. Pride

kept her from confiding in the other girls, and caution kept her from confession

to the older women, but Manan was nothing, a faithful old bellwether; it didn't

matter what she said to him. To her surprise he had had an answer for her.

"Long ago," he said, "you know, little one, before our four lands joined

together into an empire, before there was a Godking over us all, there were a

lot of lesser kings, princes, chiefs. They were always quarreling with each

other. And they'd come here to settle their quarrels. That was how it was,

they'd come from our land Atuan, and from Karego-At, and Atnini, and even from

Hur-at-Hur, all the chiefs and princes with their servants and their armies. And

they'd ask you what to do. And you'd go before the Empty Throne, and give them

the counsel of the Nameless Ones. Well, that was long ago. After a while the

Priest-Kings came to rule all of Karego-At, and soon they were ruling Atuan; and

now for four or five lifetimes of men the Godkings have ruled all the four lands

together, and made them an empire. And so things are changed. The Godking can

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TheTombsofAtuanUrsulaK.Leguin1970------Prologue------"Comehome,Tenar!Comehome!"Inthedeepvalley,inthetwilight,theappletreeswereontheeveofblossoming;hereandthereamongtheshadowedboughsoneflowerhadopenedearly,roseandwhite,likeafaintstar.Downtheorchardaisles,inthethick,new,wetgrass,thelittlegirlranforthe...

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Ursula K. Le Guin - Earthsea 2 - The Tombs Of Atuan

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