Tehanu: Chapters 6–8

When she ran out of the songs she had learned as a farmer’s wife in Middle Valley, she sang interminable Kargish chants she had learned as a child priestess at the Tombs of Atuan, lulling Therru with the drone and sweet whine of offerings to the Nameless Powers and the Empty Throne that was now filled with the dust and ruin of earthquake.

“Yes. Go on,” he said, and she went on, pondering the indifference of a man toward the exigencies that ruled a woman: that someone must be not far from a sleeping child, that one’s freedom meant another’s unfreedom, unless some ever-changing, moving balance were reached, like the balance of a body moving forward, as she did now, on two legs, first one then the other, in the practice of that remarkable art, walking.

“Yes. Go on,” he said, and she went on, pondering the indifference of a man toward the exigencies that ruled a woman: that someone must be not far from a sleeping child, that one’s freedom meant another’s unfreedom, unless some ever-changing, moving balance were reached, like the balance of a body moving forward, as she did now, on two legs, first one then the other, in the practice of that remarkable art, walking.

It was dark in the house, and seemed stuffy. She was oppressed.

Though Lark had said ten times over that nothing could be done, yet she had hoped that Tenar could heal the burns; and for all her saying that even Ogion could not have done it, Tenar had hoped that Ged could heal Therru—could lay his hand on the scar and it would be whole and well, the blind eye bright, the clawed hand soft, the ruined life intact.

His back was turned, and he did not know anyone was watching him, for he was watching a bird, a young kestrel; and she in turn was watching some small prey she had glimpsed in the grass.

She hung beating her wings, wanting to flush the vole or mouse, to panic it into a rush to its nest.

The kestrel veered, crying her high, harsh, keening cry, and shot up and off toward the forests.

Rather he had to give away the excess of food and raiment and tools and livestock and all necessities and ornaments that were offered or simply left on his doorstep.

“What shall I do with them?” he would demand, perplexed, standing with his arms full of indignant, squawking chickens, or yards of tapestry, or pots of pickled beets.

Just yesterday the witch had said, “Dearie, my ringneck hen’s brood’s hatched out, and I’ll bring you two-three chickies when they begin to scratch. The mage wouldn’t keep ’em, too noisy and silly, he said, but what’s a house without chickies at the door?”

No eagerness, of course, was to be evinced on either side.

“Might keep the foreign riffraff out.”

He meant the pirate sea-captains of Gont, whose control of the northeastern seas had been increasing of late years to the point where many of the old trade-schedules with the central islands of the Archipelago had been disrupted or abandoned; this impoverished everyone on Gont except the pirates, but that did not prevent the pirates from being heroes in the eyes of most Gontishmen.

She had said to him, “I don’t know if we’ll sell,” and that had been foolish, to say we instead of I, when he hadn’t asked to speak to Sparrowhawk, hadn’t even alluded to him, as a man bargaining with a woman was more than likely to do, especially when she was refusing his offer.

“Let be,” she had heard villagers in the Middle Valley say when somebody got to speculating too freely about a visiting weatherworker or their own wizard, Beech—“Let be. He goes his way, not ours.”

She dared not touch him lest she worsen his humiliation by any semblance of pity.

She remembered walking with him on the roads of Atuan, deriding him: “Do wizards often beg?”

I used to think, I could be dressed up as a warrior, with a lance and a sword and a plume and all, but it wouldn’t fit, would it?

The fear of them she had felt at first—caught from Sparrowhawk’s panic, perhaps, or mere foolish fluster at seeing strangers—was subsiding.

The fourth nodded and sipped again, reverent.

“I cannot say,” she said, but it was a poor equivocation, repeated, and she could see that the men thought so.

The oldest of the men, and the tallest, said, “The King’s will is ours.”
The first speaker said more conciliatingly, “We are only messengers. What is between the King and the Archmage of the Isles is between them. We seek only to bring the message, and the reply.”

It was also truth, and these matters were more subtle even than the guises and shape-changes of wizards...

It was also truth, and these matters were more subtle even than the guises and shape-changes of wizards...

“I never,” she said, in a tone of deep, replete satisfaction, and went to see where the goats had got to.

She moved in the tight, sidling way she had mostly abandoned since they had been here, not looking up, the ruined half of her face bent down toward the shoulder.

“Well, he’s off,” she said, conspiratorial, jubilant.

Never was anything to look at, but there was a way I could look at them...not witching, you know, dearie, you know what I mean...there’s a way to look, and he’d come round, sure as a crow will caw, in a day or two or three he’d come around my place—‘I need a cure for my dog’s mange,’ 'I need a tea for my sick granny,’—but I knew what it was they needed, and if I liked ’em well enough maybe they got it.

“Not a bit of it,” the witch said, complacent.

“But it goes down deep. It’s all roots. It’s like an old blackberry thicket. And a wizard’s power’s like a fir tree, maybe, great and tall and grand, but it’ll blow right down in a storm. Nothing kills a blackberry bramble.”

It’s time you found out, maybe, she thought to him. Time you learned that you didn’t learn everything on Roke! As she harangued him thus in her mind, another image came into it: she saw near Ged one of the men who had stood waiting for her and Therru on that road.

Though almost a recluse, like many weavers, Fan had been kind in his shy way to the Kargish girl, and vigilant.

The delicately painted men and women in their gorgeous robes of rose and jade and azure, the towers and bridges and banners of Havnor Great Port, were all familiar to Tenar as soon as she saw the fan again.

Tenar’s first thought was of Ged, and her mind, still moving with the quickness of fear, caught that, saw who “he” was to her, and gave it a wry grin in passing, but passed on, hunting.

“I am hollow,” she said to Therru, and set them out a substantial meal of bread and cheese, cold beans in oil and herbs, a sliced onion, and dry sausage.

She was not in the hiding vein.

“There’s—there’s beings about,” the witch said, not portentously but uneasily.

Moss was still bewildered, still frightened by her own conjurations and visions, by Tenar’s fierceness, by the presence of abominable evil.

She shook her head, desolate.