The Farthest Shore: Chapters 7–9

I have duties at home and am shirking them.

Behind, in the east, day came wan and dull. There were no clouds, but a faint, sickly overcast.

After four days of interminable tacking into a fitful headwind, Arren asked him if he would not speak a little following wind into the sail, and when he shook his head, said, “Why not?”

Always they sailed, slowly in the calms and fitful breezes, to the west, where Sparrowhawk pretended that Sopli guided them.

In his pride, his overweening pride as Archmage, he feared lest they might gain it; he envied them, and feared them, and would have no man greater than himself.

Sparrowhawk leapt out to push the boat clear up on the last impetus of the waves.

With a mighty strain he dragged the boat back into the water on the outward wash of the wave, and floundered in over the gunwale as she hung between sea and shore.

Sparrowhawk asked him for the spear, and when Arren laid it on his knees he put his right hand over the blade, long and narrow like a willow leaf, of crudely hammered bronze; he made as if to speak, but after a minute he shook his head.

He watched dawn come over the quiet sea, where low, great swells ran colored like pale amethyst, and it was all like a dream, pallid, with no grip or vigor of reality.

The raft was so great and buoyant that it did not dip even slightly to their weight.

He was lying on his back, stretched out flat, gazing up at a rough green roof dappled with tiny dots of light.

One of the men came up to Arren warily, stopping some feet from him.

The rafts had masts, though the mast of the one they were on was not stepped. On these, sails could be run up, small compared to the breadth of the raft.

The sails were of a brown material, not canvas or linen, but a fibrous stuff that looked not woven but beaten together, as felt is made.

When there was only three feet of water between, the man beside Arren got up and nonchalantly hopped across.

He wore nothing but a loincloth, but dignity clothed him amply.

He would have liked very much to know how the raft-man knew it, but remained impassive.

The chief watched him with black, opaque eyes.

Arren let himself gingerly into the water. Its cool was pleasant on his sun-baked skin.

He spoke smilingly, as though he had shared in that timeless ease of life in the summer light; but his face was gaunt, and in his eyes lay an unlighted darkness.

The mage’s gaze on him was somber, unfathomable.

The raft-folk danced, using no drum or flute or any music but the rhythm of bare feet on the great, rocking rafts, and the thin voices of their chanters ringing plaintive in the vastness of their dwelling place the sea.

Now and again one flashed like a fish leaping, a youth vaulting from one raft to the next: long leaps and high, and they vied with one another, trying to circle all the ring of rafts and dance on each, and so come round before the break of day.

Between the carven whales that made its doorway sat a chanter whose high voice had not flagged all night long. Tireless he sang, tapping his hands on the wooden deck to keep the time.

“What does he sing of?” Arren asked the mage, for he could not follow the words, which were all held long, with trills and strange catches on the notes.

Then his face became fierce and exulting, and he shouted out aloud, “Nam hietha arw Ged arkvaissaf!”—which in the Speech of the Making is, If thou seekest Ged here find him.

Poising it on his small, sinewy arm, he ran forward to gain the impetus to hurl it up and strike the dragon’s narrow, light-mailed belly that hung above the raft.

Arren waking from stupor saw him, and plunging forward caught his arm and came down in a heap with him and the harpoon.

The mage answered briefly, and again the dragon spoke, poising above him on slight-shifting wings: even, thought Arren, like a dragonfly poised on the air.

His face had a light in it that might have been joy or stark anger, but he spoke quietly.

So the boat had followed the raft-town in its long, slow drift into the south, rocking along empty behind; but the Children of the Open Sea had filled its empty cask with hoarded rainwater and made up its stock of provisions, wishing thus to honor their guests, for many of them believed Sparrowhawk to be one of the Great Ones, who had taken on the form of a man instead of the form of a whale.

Under no wind of earth could that small boat have sailed so fast, unless in storm, and then it might have foundered in the storm-waves.

But one day in practice he had caught his master off guard and nearly disarmed him, and he had never forgotten the incredulous, incongruous happiness that had suddenly gleamed in the master’s cold face, the hope, the joy—an equal, at last an equal!

From that moment on, the fencing-master had trained him mercilessly, and whenever they fenced, that same relentless smile would be on the old man’s face, brightening as Arren pressed him harder.

Arren sat with his arm on the gunwale and his head on his arm, watching those curves and whorls of silver radiance.

In a room in the south tower, a magician's workroom cluttered with retorts and alembics and great-bellied, crook-necked bottles, thick-walled furnaces and tiny heating-lamps, tongs, bellows, stands, pliers, pipes, a thousand boxes and vials and stoppered jugs marked with Hardic or more secret runes, and all such paraphernalia of alchemy, glass-blowing, metal-refining, and the arts of healing...

...in that room among the much- encumbered tables and benches stood the Master Changer and the Master Summoner of Roke.

This was the Stone of Shelieth. It had long been kept by the princes of Way, sometimes as a mere bauble of their treasury, sometimes as a charm for sleep, sometimes for a more baneful purpose: for those who looked too long and without understanding into that endless depth of crystal might go mad.

It had long been kept by the princes of Way, sometimes as a mere bauble of their treasury, sometimes as a charm for sleep, sometimes for a more baneful purpose: for those who looked too long and without understanding into that endless depth of crystal might go mad.

Then stretching wide his arms in the great gesture that begins the spells of his art, he raised his head and spoke the syllables of invocation.