A Wizard of Earthsea: Chapters 8–10

There was a great wish in him to stay here on Gont, and forgoing all wizardry and venture, forgetting all power and horror, to live in peace like any man on the known, dear ground of his home land.

In its pursuit of Ged and in its struggle with him on the moors it had drawn power from him, sucking it into itself: and it may be that his summoning of it, aloud in the light of day, had given to it or forced upon it some form and semblance.

He spoke to wind and sail and turned the tiller and pursued, though again it was a blind pursuit: the fog thickened fast, boiling and tattering where it met with the spellwind, closing down all round the boat, a featureless pallor that deadened light and sight.

It did not break, and buoyant as a dry log it rode the water.

Then doggedly he turned to the left, so the wind would be at his back at least, and shuffled down the high dune, seeking some hollow among the ice-rimed, bowing sea-grass where he could have a little shelter.

Their water came from a little brackish well beside the hut; their food was fish and shellfish, fresh or dried, and rockweed.

The tattered hides in the hut, and a little store of bone needles and fishhooks, and the sinew for fishlines and firedrill, came not from goats as Ged had thought at first, but from spotted seal; and indeed this was the kind of place where the seal will go to raise their pups in summer.

It was a little child’s dress of silk brocade stiff with seed-pearls, stained with salt, yellow with years.

He guessed now that these two might be children of some royal house of the Kargad Empire; a tyrant or usurper who feared to shed kingly blood had sent them to be cast away, to live or die, on an uncharted islet far from Karego-At.

Each was blind to the other’s being, Ged as baffled by impalpable shadows as the shadow was baffled by daylight and by solid things.

And thinking of that day he saw all at once, with a qualm at his heart, how the shadow had tricked him with his own trick, bringing that mist about him on the sea as if bringing it out of his own past, blinding him to danger and fooling him to his death.

The hollows of the waves all were full of darkness while the crests shone yet with a clear ruddy reflection of the west.

Ged sang aloud the Winter Carol, and such cantos of the Deed of the Young King as he remembered, for those songs are sung at the Festival of Sunreturn.

This boat he sailed was in truth no boat but a thing more than half charm and sorcery, and the rest of it mere planks and driftwood which, if he let slack the shaping-spells and the binding-spell upon them, would soon enough lapse and scatter and go drifting off as a little flotsam on the waves.

Ged's spells were cogent and potent, but when the matter on which such spells works is small, the power that keeps them working must be renewed from moment to moment: so he slept not that night.

He peered ahead into the dark cleft, and left and right up the great, cavern-pocked, boulder-tumbled slopes where trees crouched with their roots half in air.

Ged spent three days in that village of the West Hand, recovering himself, and making ready a boat built not of spells and sea-wrack but of sound wood well pegged and caulked, with a stout mast and sail of her own, that he might sail easily and sleep when he needed.

But Ged paid him for it in sorcerers’ kind, healing his eyes of the cataracts that were in the way of blinding him.

The people in the little port looked at him askance, and soon their sorcerer came hurrying.

He looked hard at Ged, and then he bowed, and said in a voice that was both pompous and wheedling, “Lord Wizard! forgive my temerity, and honor us by accepting of us anything you may need for your voyage..."

He looked hard at Ged, and then he bowed, and said in a voice that was both pompous and wheedling, “Lord Wizard! forgive my temerity, and honor us by accepting of us anything you may need for your voyage..."

...I think it prudent, however, that you continue on your way from here as soon as it meets your convenience to do so.

“Lord Wizard,” the girl greeted him, and decorously she bobbed her head and hid her eyes with her hands to show respect, as women did in the East Reach; her eyes when not hidden were clear, shy, and curious.

So entreated Ged could not deny his friend, but he said, “I should not have stayed this day here. I knew it, but I stayed.”

Every land has its own powers, and the farther one goes from the Inner Lands, the less one can guess about those powers and their governance.

They talked together late that night, and though always they came back to the bitter matter of what lay before Ged, yet their pleasure in being together overrode all; for the love between them was strong and steadfast, unshaken by time or chance.

He seemed not much more than a boy, for there was no gift or scourge of mage-power in him, and he had never been anywhere but Iffish, Tok, and Holp, and his life was easy and untroubled.

She kept busy those two days making dry wheatcakes for the voyagers to carry, and wrapping up dried fish and meat and other such provender to stock their boat, until Ged told her to stop, for he did not plan to sail clear to Selidor without a halt.

“Wizards, then, are not cooks,” said Murre, who was sitting across the kitchen hearth from Ged, carving a box-lid of fine wood; he was a woodworker by trade, though not a very zealous one.

“The moon wanes to her dark,” Vetch murmured, awake in the dawn, when for a while the cold wind dropped.

The young men came ashore there for fresh water and a respite from the sea, and at first were well received, with wonder and commotion.

They passed between Kornay and Gosk in foul weather, seeing neither isle in the fog and rain, and knowing they had passed them only on the next day when they saw ahead of them an isle of pinnacled cliffs above which sea-gulls wheeled in huge flocks whose mewing clamor could be heard from far over the sea.

The men, lean fellows ill-clothed against the cold, gathered in a solemn circle about Vetch and Ged, and each one held a stone hand-axe or a knife of shell.

Ged did not smile; there was no mirth left in him.

When day came the world's wind slackened somewhat, and the sun shone fitfully; but the great swells ran so high that Lookfar must tilt and climb up them as if they were hills, and hang at the hillcrest and plunge suddenly, and climb up the next again, and the next, and the next, unending.

All sounds of water, wind, wood, sail, were gone, lost in a huge profound silence that might have been unbroken forever.

It was Jasper: Jasper’s insolent handsome young face, and silver-clasped grey cloak, and stiff stride.

In that light all form of man sloughed off the thing that came towards Ged.

But as he ran the sand sank under his feet, and he struggled in it as in quicksand, as through a heavy flow of water: until with a roar of noise and a glory of daylight, and the bitter cold of winter, and the bitter taste of salt, the world was restored to him and he floundered in the sudden, true, and living sea.

He did not know if this was Ged in the boat with him, and his hand had been for hours ready to the anchor, to stave in the boat’s planking and sink her there in midsea, rather than carry back to the harbors of Earthsea the evil thing that he feared might have taken Ged's look and form.