Ursula K. LeGuin - Earthsea 6 - Tales From Earthsea

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TALES FROM

EARTHSEA

Ursula K. Le Guin

reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including

photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in

writing from the publisher.

Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be mailed to the following

address:

Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc., 6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.

www.harcourt.com "Darkrose and Diamond" first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science

Fiction.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Le Guin, Ursula K., 1929-

Tales from Earthsea/Ursula K. Le Guin.-1st ed. p. cm. Contents: The finder-Darkrose and

Diamond-The bones of the earth-

On the high marsh-Dragonfly-A description of Earthsea.

Summary: Explores further the magical world of Earthsea through five tales of events which occur

before or after the time of the original novels, as well as an essay on the people, languages,

history and magic of the place.

ISBN 0-15-100561-3 I. Fantasy fiction, American, [I. Fantasy. 2. Short stories.] I. Title.

PZ7.L52I5 Tal 2001 [Fic]-dc21 2001016554

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Foreword

The Finder

Darkrose and Diamond

The Bones of the Earth

On the High Marsh Dragonfly

A Description of Earthsea

Foreword

AT THE END OF THE fourth book of Earthsea, Tehanu, the story had arrived at what I felt to be now.

And, just as in the now of the so-called real world, I didn't know what would happen next. I could

guess, foretell, fear, hope, but I didn't know.

Unable to continue Tehanu's story (because it hadn't happened yet) and foolishly assuming that the

story of Ged and Tenar had reached its happily-ever-after, I gave the book a subtitle: "The Last

Book of Earthsea."

O foolish writer. Now moves. Even in storytime, dreamtime, once-upon-a time, now isn't then.

Seven or eight years after Tehanu was published, I was asked to write a story set in Earthsea. A

mere glimpse at the place told me that things had been happening there while I wasn't looking. It

was high time to go back and find out what was going on now.

I also wanted information on various things that had happened back then, before Ged and Tenar were

born. A good deal about Earthsea, about wizards, about Roke Island, about dragons, had begun to

puzzle me. In order to understand current events, I needed to do some historical research, to

spend some time in the Archives of the Archipelago.

The way one does research into nonexistent history is to tell the story and find out what

happened. I believe this isn't very different from what historians of the so-called real world do.

Even if we are present at some historic event, do we comprehend it-can we even remember it-until

we can tell it as a story? And for events in times or places outside our own experience, we have

nothing to go on but the stories other people tell us. Past events exist, after all, only in

memory, which is a form of imagination. The event is real now, but once it's then, its continuing

reality is entirely up to us, dependent on our energy and honesty. If we let it drop from memory,

only imagination can restore the least glimmer of it. If we lie about the past, forcing it to tell

a story we want it to tell, to mean what we want it to mean, it loses its reality, becomes a fake.

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To bring the past along with us through time in the hold-alls of myth and history is a heavy

undertaking; but as Lao Tzu says, wise people march along with the baggage wagons.

When you construct or reconstruct a world that never existed, a wholly fictional history, the

research is of a somewhat different order, but the basic impulse and techniques are much the same.

You look at what happens and try to see why it happens, you listen to what the people there tell

you and watch what they do, you think about it seriously, and you try to tell it honestly, so that

the story will have weight and make sense.

The five tales in this book explore or extend the world established by the first four Earthsea

novels. Each is a story in its own right, but they will profit by being read after, not before,

the novels.

"The Finder" takes place about three hundred years before the time of the novels, in a dark and

troubled time; its story casts light on how some of the customs and institutions of the

Archipelago came to be. "The Bones of the Earth" is about the wizards who taught the wizard who

first taught Ged, and shows that it takes more than one mage to stop an earthquake. "Darkrose and

Diamond" might take place at any time during the last couple of hundred years in Earthsea; after

all, a love story can happen at any time, anywhere. "On the High Marsh" is a story from the brief

but eventful six years that Ged was Archmage of Earthsea. And the last story, "Dragonfly," which

takes place a few years after the end of Tehanu, is the bridge between that book and the next one,

The Other Wind (to be published soon). A dragon bridge.

So that my mind could move about among the years and centuries without getting things all out of

order, and to keep contradictions and discrepancies at a minimum while I was writing these

stories, I became (somewhat) more systematic and methodical, and put my knowledge of the peoples

and their history together into "A Description of Earthsea." Its function is like that of the

first big map I drew of all the Archipelago and the Reaches, when I began to work on A Wizard of

Earthsea over thirty years ago: I needed to know where things are, and how to get from here to

there-in time as well as in space.

Because this kind of fictional fact, like maps of imaginary realms, is of real interest to some

readers, I include the description after the stories. I also redrew the geographical maps for this

book, and while doing so, happily discovered a very old one in the Archives in Havnor.

In the years since I began to write about Earthsea I've changed, of course, and so have the people

who read the books. All times are changing times, but ours is one of massive, rapid moral and

mental transformation. Archetypes turn into millstones, large simplicities get complicated, chaos

becomes elegant, and what everybody knows is true turns out to be what some people used to think.

It's unsettling. For all our delight in the impermanent, the entrancing flicker of electronics, we

also long for the unalterable.

We cherish the old stories for their changelessness. Arthur dreams eternally in Avalon. Bilbo can

go "there and back again," and "there" is always the beloved familiar Shire. Don Quixote sets out

forever to kill a windmill... So people turn to the realms of fantasy for stability, ancient

truths, immutable simplicities.

And the mills of capitalism provide them. Supply meets demand. Fantasy becomes a commodity, an

industry.

Commodified fantasy takes no risks: it invents nothing, but imitates and trivializes. It proceeds

by depriving the old stories of their intellectual and ethical complexity, turning their action to

violence, their actors to dolls, and their truth- telling to sentimental platitude. Heroes

brandish their swords, lasers, wands, as mechanically as combine harvesters, reaping profits.

Profoundly disturbing moral choices are sanitized, made cute, made safe. The passionately

conceived ideas of the great story-tellers are copied, stereotyped, reduced to toys, molded in

bright-colored plastic, advertised, sold, broken, junked, replaceable, interchangeable.

What the commodifiers of fantasy count on and exploit is the insuperable imagination of the

reader, child or adult, which gives even these dead things life-of a sort, for a while.

Imagination like all living things lives now, and it lives with, from, on true change. Like all we

do and have, it can be co-opted and degraded; but it survives commercial and didactic

exploitation. The land outlasts the empires. The conquerors may leave desert where there was

forest and meadow, but the rain will fall, the rivers will run to the sea. The unstable, mutable,

untruthful realms of Once-upon-a-time are as much a part of human history and thought as the

nations in our kaleidoscopic atlases, and some are more enduring.

We have inhabited both the actual and the imaginary realms for a long time. But we don't live in

either place the way our parents or ancestors did. Enchantment alters with age, and with the age.

We know a dozen different Arthurs now, all of them true. The Shire changed irrevocably even in

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Bilbos lifetime. Don Quixote went riding out to Argentina and met Jorge Luis Borges there. Plus

c'est la meme chose, plus fa change.

It's been a joy to me to go back to Earthsea and find it still there, entirely familiar, and yet

changed and still changing. What I thought was going to happen isn't what's happening, people

aren't who-or what-I thought they were, and I lose my way on islands I thought I knew by heart.

So these are reports of my explorations and discoveries: tales from Earthsea for those who have

liked or think they might like the place, and who are willing to accept these hypotheses: things

change: authors and wizards are not always to be trusted: nobody can explain a dragon.

The Finder

I. In the Dark Time

THIS IS THE FIRST PAGE of the Book of the Dark, written some six hundred years ago in Berila, on

Enlad:

"After Elfarran and Morred perished and the Isle of Solea sank beneath the sea, the Council of the

Wise governed for the child Serriadh until he took the throne. His reign was bright but brief. The

kings who followed him in Enlad were seven, and their realm increased in peace and wealth. Then

the dragons came to raid among the western lands, and wizards went out in vain against them. King

Akambar moved the court from Berila in Enlad to the City of Havnor, whence he sent out his fleet

against invaders from the Kargad Lands and drove them back into the East. But still they sent

raiding ships even as far as the Inmost Sea. Of the fourteen Kings of Havnor the last was

Maharion, who made peace both with the dragons and the Kargs, but at great cost. And after the

Ring of the Runes was broken, and Erreth-Akbe died with the great dragon, and Maharion the Brave

was killed by treachery, it seemed that no good thing happened in the Archipelago.

"Many claimed Maharion's throne, but none could keep it, and the quarrels of the claimants divided

all loyalties. No commonwealth was left and no justice, only the will of the wealthy. Men of noble

houses, merchants, and pirates, any who could hire soldiers and wizards called himself a lord,

claiming lands and cities as his property. The warlords made those they conquered slaves, and

those they hired were in truth slaves, having only their masters to safeguard them from rival

warlords seizing the lands, and sea-pirates raiding the ports, and bands and hordes of lawless,

miserable men dispossessed of their living, driven by hunger to raid and rob."

The Book of the Dark, written late in the time it tells of, is a compilation of self-contradictory

histories, partial biographies, and garbled legends. But it's the best of the records that

survived the dark years. Wanting praise, not history, the warlords burnt the books in which the

poor and powerless might learn what power is.

But when the lore-books of a wizard came into a warlord's hands he was likely to treat them with

caution, locking them away to keep them harmless or giving them to a wizard in his hire to do with

as he wished. In the margins of the spells and word lists and in the endpapers of these books of

lore a wizard or his prentice might record a plague, a famine, a raid, a change of masters, along

with the spells worked in such events and their success or unsuccess. Such random records reveal a

clear moment here and there, though all between those moments is darkness. They are like glimpses

of a lighted ship far out at sea, in darkness, in the rain.

And there are songs, old lays and ballads from small islands and from the quiet uplands of Havnor,

that tell the story of those years.

Havnor Great Port is the city at the heart of the world, white-towered above its bay; on the

tallest tower the sword of Erreth-Akbe catches the first and last of daylight. Through that city

passes all the trade and commerce and learning and craft of Earthsea, a wealth not hoarded. There

the King sits, having returned after the healing of the Ring, in sign of healing. And in that

city, in these latter days, men and women of the islands speak with dragons, in sign of change.

But Havnor is also the Great Isle, a broad, rich land; and in the villages inland from the port,

the farmlands of the slopes of Mount Onn, nothing ever changes much. There a song worth singing is

likely to be sung again. There old men at the tavern talk of Morred as if they had known him when

they too were young and heroes. There girls walking out to fetch the cows home tell stories of the

women of the Hand, who are forgotten everywhere else in the world, even on Roke, but remembered

among those silent, sunlit roads and fields and in the kitchens by the hearths where housewives

work and talk.

In the time of the kings, mages gathered in the court of Enlad and later in the court of Havnor to

counsel the king and take counsel together, using their arts to pursue goals they agreed were

good. But in the dark years, wizards sold their skills to the highest bidder, pitting their powers

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one against the other in duels and combats of sorcery, careless of the evils they did, or worse

than careless. Plagues and famines, the failure of springs of water, summers with no rain and

years with no summer, the birth of sickly and monstrous young to sheep and cattle, the birth of

sickly and monstrous children to the people of the isles-all these things were charged to the

practices of wizards and witches, and all too often rightly so.

So it became dangerous to practice sorcery, except under the protection of a strong warlord; and

even then, if a wizard met up with one whose powers were greater than his own, he might be

destroyed. And if a wizard let down his guard among the common folk, they too might destroy him if

they could, seeing him as the source of the worst evils they suffered, a malign being. In those

years, in the minds of most people, all magic was black.

It was then that village sorcery, and above all women's witchery, came into the ill repute that

has clung to it since. Witches paid dearly for practicing the arts they thought of as their own.

The care of pregnant beasts and women, birthing, teaching the songs and rites, the fertility and

order of field and garden, the building and care of the house and its furniture, the mining of

ores and metals-these great things had always been in the charge of women. A rich lore of spells

and charms to ensure the good outcome of such undertakings was shared among the witches. But when

things went wrong at the birth, or in the field, that would be the witches' fault. And things went

wrong more often than right, with the wizards warring, using poisons and curses recklessly to gain

immediate advantage without thought for what followed after. They brought drought and storm,

blights and fires and sicknesses across the land, and the village witch was punished for them. She

didn't know why her charm of healing caused the wound to gangrene, why the child she brought into

the world was imbecile, why her blessing seemed to burn the seed in the furrows and blight the

apple on the tree. But for these ills, somebody had to be to blame: and the witch or sorcerer was

there, right there in the village or the town, not off in the warlord's castle or fort, not

protected by armed men and spells of defense. Sorcerers and witches were drowned in the poisoned

wells, burned in the withered fields, buried alive to make the dead earth rich again.

So the practice of their lore and the teaching of it had become perilous. Those who undertook it

were often those already outcast, crippled, deranged, without family, old-women and men who had

little to lose. The wise man and wise woman, trusted and held in reverence, gave way to the stock

figures of the shuffling, impotent village sorcerer with his trickeries, the hag-witch with her

potions used in aid of lust, jealousy, and malice. And a child's gift for magic became a thing to

dread and hide.

This is a tale of those times. Some of it is taken from the Book of the Dark, and some comes from

Havnor, from the upland farms of Onn and the woodlands of Faliern. A story may be pieced together

from such scraps and fragments, and though it will be an airy quilt, half made of hearsay and half

of guesswork, yet it may be true enough. It's a tale of the Founding of Roke, and if the Masters

of Roke say it didn't happen so, let them tell us how it happened otherwise. For a cloud hangs

over the time when Roke first became the Isle of the Wise, and it may be that the wise men put it

there.

II. Otter

There was an otter in our brook

That every mortal semblance took,

Could any spell of magic make,

And speak the tongues of man and drake.

So runs the water away, away,

So runs the water away.

OTTER WAS THE SON of a boatwright who worked in the shipyards of Havnor Great Port. His mother

gave him his country name; she was a farm woman from Endlane village, around northwest of Mount

Onn. She had come to the city seeking work, as many came. Decent folk in a decent trade in

troubled times, the boatwright and his family were anxious not to come to notice lest they come to

grief. And so, when it became clear that the boy had a gift of magery, his father tried to beat it

out of him.

"You might as well beat a cloud for raining," said Otter's mother.

"Take care you don't beat evil into him," said his aunt.

"Take care he doesn't turn your belt on you with a spell!" said his uncle.

But the boy played no tricks against his father. He took his beatings in silence and learned to

hide his gift.

It didn't seem to him to amount to much. It was such an easy matter to him to make a silvery light

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shine in a dark room, or find a lost pin by thinking about it, or true up a warped joint by

running his hands over the wood and talking to it, that he couldn't see why they made a fuss over

such things. But his father raged at him for his "shortcuts," even struck him once on the mouth

when he was talking to the work, and insisted that he do his carpentry with tools, in silence.

His mother tried to explain. "It's as if you'd found some great jewel," she said, "and what's one

of us to do with a diamond but hide it? Anybody rich enough to buy it from you is strong enough to

kill you for it. Keep it hid. And keep away from great people and their crafty men!"

"Crafty men" is what they called wizards in those days.

One of the gifts of power is to know power. Wizard knows wizard, unless the concealment is very

skillful. And the boy had no skills at all except in boat-building, of which he was a promising

scholar by the age of twelve. About that time the midwife who had helped his mother at his birth

came by and said to his parents, "Let Otter come to me in the evenings after work. He should learn

the songs and be prepared for his naming day."

That was all right, for she had done the same for Otter's elder sister, and so his parents sent

him to her in the evenings. But she taught Otter more than the song of the Creation. She knew his

gift. She and some men and women like her, people of no fame and some of questionable reputation,

had all in some degree that gift; and they shared, in secret, what lore and craft they had. "A

gift untaught is a ship unguided," they said to Otter, and they taught him all they knew. It

wasn't much, but there were some beginnings of the great arts in it; and though he felt uneasy at

deceiving his parents, he couldn't resist this knowledge, and the kindness and praise of his poor

teachers. "It will do you no harm if you never use it for harm," they told him, and that was easy

for him to promise them.

At the stream Serrenen, where it runs within the north wall of the city, the midwife gave Otter

his true name, by which he is remembered in islands far from Havnor.

Among these people was an old man whom they called, among themselves, the Changer. He showed Otter

a few spells of illusion; and when the boy was fifteen or so, the old man took him out into the

fields by Serrenen to show him the one spell of true change he knew. "First let's see you turn

that bush into the seeming of a tree," he said, and promptly Otter did so. Illusion came so easy

to the boy that the old man took alarm. Otter had to beg and wheedle him for any further teaching

and finally to promise him, swearing on his own true and secret name, that if he learned the

Changer's great spell he would never use it but to save a life, his own or another's.

Then the old man taught it to him. But it wasn't much use, Otter thought, since he had to hide it.

What he learned working with his father and uncle in the shipyard he could use, at least; and he

was becoming a good craftsman, even his father would admit that.

Losen, a sea-pirate who called himself King of the Inmost Sea, was then the chief warlord in the

city and all the east and south of Havnor. Exacting tribute from that rich domain, he spent it to

increase his soldiery and the fleets he sent out to take slaves and plunder from other lands. As

Otters uncle said, he kept the shipwrights busy. They were grateful to have work in a time when

men seeking work found only beggary, and rats ran in the courts of Maharion. They did an honest

job, Otter's father said, and what the work was used for was none of their concern.

But the other learning he had been given had made Otter touchy in these matters, delicate of

conscience. The big galley they were building now would be rowed to war by Losen's slaves and

would bring back slaves as cargo. It galled him to think of the good ship in that vicious usage.

"Why can't we build fishing boats, the way we used to?" he asked, and his father said, "Because

the fishermen can't pay us."

"Can't pay us as well as Losen does. But we could live," Otter argued.

"You think I can turn the King's order down? You want to see me sent to row with the slaves in the

galley we're building? Use your head, boy!"

So Otter worked along with them with a clear head and an angry heart. They were in a trap. What's

the use of a gift of power, he thought, if not to get out of a trap?

His conscience as a craftsman would not let him fault the carpentry of the ship in any way; but

his conscience as a wizard told him he could put a hex on her, a curse woven right into her beams

and hull. Surely that was using the secret art to a good end? For harm, yes, but only to harm the

harmful. He did not talk to his teachers about it. If he was doing wrong, it was none of their

fault and they would know nothing about it. He thought about it for a long time, working out how

to do it, making the spell very carefully. It was the reversal of a finding charm: a losing charm,

he called it to himself. The ship would float, and handle well, and steer, but she would never

steer quite true.

It was the best he could do in protest against the misuse of good work and a good ship. He was

pleased with himself. When the ship was launched (and all seemed well with her, for her fault

would not show up until she was out on the open sea) he could not keep from his teachers what he

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