Tales from Earthsea: "On the High Marsh"

Rivers and streams cut their way seaward through that high plain, winding and pooling, spreading and wandering, making a marsh of it, a big, desolate, waterland with a far horizon, few trees, not many people.

A haze was coming up from the south, blotting out the sky. Only above the huge, dim bulk of the mountain did stars burn clearly. Wind whistled in the reeds, soft, dismal.

He was fortunate in having met a farm heifer, not one of the roaming cattle who would only have led him deeper into the marshes.

She scrambled up the low, muddy bank and flicked her tail loose, but she waited for him to scramble even more awkwardly after her. Then she plodded gently on.

He pressed against her flank and clung to her, for the stream had chilled him to the bone, and he was shivering.

He drank from it eagerly yet warily, as if long unaccustomed to hot soup.

His bare feet were a sad sight, bruised, swollen, sodden.

She wanted to tell him to put them right to the fire’s warmth, but didn’t like to presume. Whatever he was, he wasn’t a beggar by choice.

“Not many come here to the High Marsh,” she said. “Peddlers and such. But not in winter.”

It was a fine face, but there was something wrong, something amiss.

His dark eyes were large, deep, opaque like a horse’s eyes, unreadable.

Ice on the trough this morning.

When Berry went out again, the woman came closer and said, resolute, in a low voice, “There’s no harm in him but the drink, but there’s not much left of him but the drink. It’s eaten up most of his mind, and most of what we have. So, do you see, put up your money where he won’t see it, if you don’t mind, sir. He won’t come looking for it. But if he saw it, he’d take it. He often doesn’t know what he’s doing, do you see.”

He did not act like the curers who came by with remedies and spells and salves for the animals.

He went and talked to her for a minute, saying something in her big, delicate ear and rubbing her topknot.

“He does that,” the cowboy said to Gift. “Talks at ’em.” He was amused, disdainful.

Gift thought it was like seeing a prince ride off, like something out of a tale, the mounted figures that walked through bright mist across the vague dun of the winter fields, and faded into the light, and were gone.

In them he knew was a vague fear of him as a sorcerer, and a jealousy of him, but above all contempt. He was old, other, not one of them. Fear and jealousy he knew and shrank from, and contempt he remembered.

The sickness was very familiar to him now. He felt it in his hands as a burning, and a queasiness if it was much advanced. Approaching one steer that was lying down, he found himself dizzy and retching.

They stood, big, indifferent; sometimes one looked at him for a long time.

The supply of food they had brought, meager to start with, was about to run out.

Horses were all lords. They agreed to collude.

He remembered walking among the great, plumed feet of cart horses, fearless.

She was still indignant, speaking more bluntly even than usual.

“Tell him ivory it has to be. Out there ten days starving in the cold to cure his beasts! San’s got nothing but copper, but Alder can pay you in ivory. I’m sorry if I’m meddling in your business. Sir.”

“Now then! That’s fair and square!” he said, expansive. “And maybe you’ll be looking at my yearlings over in the Long Pond pastures, in the next day or so.”

He walked down the straggling street of Purewells to San’s house, which was about midway, opposite the tavern.

Ayeth’s stare grew more insolent as he watched Irioth stammer.

Seems there’s no harm in a curer. Heal the foot rot, clear a caked udder. That’s all fine. But cross one and there you are, fire and shadows and curses and falling down in fits. Uncanny. Always was uncanny, that one.

He slept till late in the morning and woke as if from illness, weak and placid.

“Now I won’t have him here no more,” Berry said, coming master of the house over her, with the great black gash in his forehead, and his eyes like oysters, and his hands juddering.

When she did so, Alder’s wife Tawny and several other people agreed with her that a squabble between sorcerers over work was nothing new and nothing to take on about.

“Besides,” Tawny said, “my man’s never averse to paying copper where he thought he might have to pay ivory.”

“I’m Gift,” she said, a bit flustered, but liking the fellow.

And they lose their tempers, and they did some black spells, maybe. I guess Otak did. But he did no harm to the man at all, but fell down in a swoon himself.

And they say every beast he touched is standing yet, and hale. Ten days he spent out there in the wind and the rain, touching the beasts and healing them.

Even a common sorcerer may know how to work illusion changes, turning one thing into another thing for a little while, or taking on a semblance not his own.

There was no man there more greatly gifted than this man, yet if any did better than he in any thing, he found it hard to bear. It frightened him, it galled him.

At any rate, as the years went on he became more and more aloof, pursuing his studies in his tower cell apart from others, teaching few students, speaking little.

“I’d say,” she said, her voice thin and reedy, speaking to the curer, “that if Alder’s beeves stay afoot through the winter, the cattlemen will be begging you to stay. Though they may not love you."