Tehanu: Chapters 4–5

Austere he had been, living as plain as a poor farmer, but when his eyes were clear and his strength in him, he would never have used a broken plate or let a pan go unmended.

She was still unresponsive, without anger, without joy; but since they had been here her awful vigilance, her immobility, had almost imperceptibly relaxed.

A wife, a farmer’s wife, a mother, a householder, undertaking the power that a woman was born to, the authority allotted her by the arrangements of mankind.

With her, Therru behaved as with everyone—blank, unanswering, docile in the way an inanimate thing, a stone, is docile.

But the old woman had kept at her, offering her little sweets and treasures, bribing, coaxing, wheedling.

And then the witch shut the child in her oven and baked it brown and ate it, or dropped it into her well, where it hopped and croaked dismally forever, or put it to sleep for a hundred years inside a great stone, till the King’s Son should come, the Mage Prince, to shatter the stone with a word, wake the maiden with a kiss, and slay the wicked witch.

Though some few had called themselves wizard or sorceress, their power had been untrained, strength without art or knowledge, half frivolous, half dangerous.

Most were midwives and healers with a few love potions, fertility charms, and potency spells on the side, and a good deal of quiet cynicism about them.

A few, having wisdom though no learning, used their gift purely for good, though they could not tell, as any prentice wizard could, the reason for what they did, and prate of the Balance and the Way of Power to justify their action or abstention.

A few, having wisdom though no learning, used their gift purely for good, though they could not tell, as any prentice wizard could, the reason for what they did, and prate of the Balance and the Way of Power to justify their action or abstention.

A goat appeared on the roof of the milking shed and arranged itself in profile to them, its head nobly poised; apparently it considered itself to be a mountain goat.

As you went on north the drop grew ever steeper, till it began to fall sheer; and on the path the rock of the great ledge showed through the soil, till a mile or so north of the village the Overfell had narrowed to a shelf of reddish sandstone hanging above the sea that undercut its base two thousand feet below.

Was it a wild goose, or an albatross, the great, rare voyager of the open sea, come among the islands?

Then she got to her feet, retreating a little from the cliff’s edge, and stood motionless, her heart going hard and her breath caught in her throat, watching the sinuous, iron-dark body borne by long, webbed wings as red as fire, the outreaching claws, the coils of smoke fading behind it in the air.

The thorny tail, writhing, rattled, and the wings, scarlet where the sun shone through them, stormed and rustled as they folded down to the mailed flanks.

It gazed straight at her from yellow eyes under armored carapaces wide-set above the narrow nose and flaring, fuming nostrils.

Tenar saw for the first time, then, the man astride its back.

Resolute, she dragged him ten or fifteen feet inland, off the bare rock shelf onto a bit of dirt, where dry bunchgrass gave some illusion of shelter.

She and Tenar rolled Ged onto it and were dragging this conveyance laboriously homeward when Heather came trotting along, followed by Therru and Sippy.

Wrath at the witch’s obstinate suspicion rang in her voice.

Born early and very small, he had nearly died of the croup at two months, and for two years after that it had been like rearing a fledgling sparrow, you never knew if he would be alive in the morning.

And growing, he became a wiry boy, endlessly active, driven; no use on the farm; no patience with animals, plants, people; using words for his needs only, never for pleasure and the give and take of love and knowledge.

Moss’s reply was circuitous, beginning with the usual gnomics and obscurities.

Maybe, maybe not, was the gist of Moss’s dark reply.

A good deal of her obscurity and cant, Tenar had begun to realize, was mere ineptness with words and ideas.

A good deal of her obscurity and cant, Tenar had begun to realize, was mere ineptness with words and ideas.

All that was expected, all that was wanted of her was muddle, mystery, mumbling.

The old woman was rocking, chanting, lost in her incantation; but Tenar sat upright, and split a reed down the center with her thumbnail.

She would be a formidable enemy, Tenar thought, and was a difficult friend.

And we couldn’t go outside the walls. Only in a group, all women and girls, with eunuchs guarding us, keeping the men out of sight.

Horror, the macabre, and a gleam of vengeance had won out over both anger and reason.

And after appraising him again, “He’ll be too far gone already, I think. They get weak, see, and can’t even drink, though it’s all they need. I’ve known a great strong man to die like that. All in a few days, shriveled to a shadow, like.”

She had to force his fingers open gently to wash and salve the sores.

As she tried to think of it, a horror, a sense of transgression, came on her very strongly, and then died away, meaningless.

He was all wrong, she said. Tenar respected the witch’s sagacity enough that this troubled her, but she could not find any such suspicion in herself, only the pleasure of his being there and of his slow return to life.

He sat on the threshold, looking out into the day, and Tenar, coming around the house from the bean patch, looked at him.

Whatever the truth of such tales, the Lords of Re Albi had always held aloof.

Since Ogion was buried, with Aunty Moss’s talisman in his hand, under the beech tree by the mountain path, Tenar had not seen Aspen.

The light came down from windows away up in the tower. Shafts of sunlight crossing like swords.

His face was strained, wistful, as if he named a joy he could not grasp.