The Other Wind: Chapter 2

The ship’s master, after getting his purser to read it for him, became quite deferential and apologised for the cramped quarters and the length of the voyage.

From guard to guard, from official to official, from the broad outer steps of the palace to high anterooms, staircases with gilded banisters, inner offices with tapestried walls, across floors of tile and marble and oak, under ceilings coffered, beamed, vaulted, painted, he went repeating his talisman: “I come from Sparrowhawk who was the Archmage with a letter for the king.”

A retinue, a crowd of suspicious, semi-civil, patronising, temporising, obstructive guards and ushers and officials kept gathering and thickening around him and followed and impeded his slow way into the palace.

The eyes watching him were alert, urbane, as implacably keen as Sparrowhawk’s, but withholding even more of the mind within.

His face was as impassive as before.

There was nothing offensive in his gaze, but he was more open in that scrutiny than most men would have been.

Though he had been in awe of Sparrowhawk, the ex-Archmage looked and dressed and lived like an old villager or farmer, a man of Alder’s own kind and standing, and that simplicity had defeated all superficial timidity.

But however kind and courteous the king might be, he looked like the king, he behaved like the king, he was the king, and to Alder the distance was insuperable.

A discreet knock at the door.

The king had all too many people to talk to before he could sit down on his bed. Chief among them were the emissaries of the High King of the Kargs.

He had looked forward to the visit of these ambassadors as the culmination of years of patient overture, invitation, and negotiation.

The God-King in Awabath rejected his offers of treaties and trade and sent his envoys back unheard, declaring that gods do not parley with vile mortals, least of all with accursed sorcerers.

But the God-King’s proclamations of universal divine empire were not followed by the threatened fleets of a myriad ships bearing plumed warriors to overrun the godless West.

The pirates had become contrabanders, seeking to trade whatever unlicensed goods they could smuggle out of Karego-At for Archipelagan iron and steel and bronze, for the Kargad Lands were poor in mines and metal.
It was from these illicit traders that news first came of the rise of the High King.

As soon as he got word of that, Lebannen sent ambassadors to greet his brother king and assure him of the friendly disposition of the Archipelago.

Five years of difficult and tiresome diplomacy had ensued.

It had been made in ancient days in the West, but long ago, King Thoreg of Hupun had accepted it as a gift from the hero Erreth-Akbe, a sign of amity between the Kargad and Hardic lands.

Was it true she was tall and thin, short and muscular, white as milk, pockmarked, one-eyed, yellow-haired, black-haired, forty-five years old, ten years old, a drooling cretin, a brilliant beauty?

He knelt down suddenly, catching her hand and putting it over his eyes in sign of contrition. “Tenar, I’m sorry. This disturbs me beyond all reason. I can’t see what to do.”

“I never knew anybody from Hur-at-Hur. On Atuan, we called them barbarians.”
He was chastised.

The look of fury came into his face again.
Tenar forestalled him.

You must see what an imposition this is, using this girl to make Thol appear my equal, using the Ring—the Ring you brought us—as a trap!

You must see what an imposition this is, using this girl to make Thol appear my equal, using the Ring—the Ring you brought us—as a trap! I cannot even seem to condone it.

I’m willing to temporise, to delay, in order to keep the peace.

All the time he was talking amenities to the emissaries and displaying the gifts he was sending to Thol, Lebannen puzzled over this easy acceptance of his evasiveness.

Lebannen felt the anger rising in his heart again. He saw the ambassador’s face change a little, taking on a wary, placating look.

Finding Kargs at the court when she came there at the beginning of summer, she had expected them to shun her or at least to eye her askance: the renegade priestess who with the thieving Hawk Mage had stolen the Ring of Erreth-Akbe from the treasury of the Tombs of Atuan and traitorously fled with it to Havnor.

And Thol of Hur-at-Hur had restored the worship of the Twin Gods and the Nameless Ones, whose greatest temple Tenar had despoiled.

Thol’s ambassador had begged the honor of an audience with her and had greeted her with elaborately pious respect, some of which she thought was real.

But it gave her a keen, rueful pleasure to hear her native tongue and to find she could still speak it.

Though her power as the One Priestess had been mostly ceremonial, nominal, she had taken real control of her fate when she broke with the grim ways of her upbringing and won freedom for her prisoner and herself.

She did not mind the formalities of court life or the knowledge that under the civility simmered a stew of ambitions, rivalries, passions, complicities, collusions.

A flame no bigger than a pearl burned on the wick of a tiny alabaster lamp.

Unanswerable questions clamored in her mind: because she was no longer a Karg, because she had betrayed the sacred place, must she go to that dry land when she died?

The wizard Onyx spoke, not imperiously but with finality.

“Many heads make light thinking,” said Tosla, sardonic.

When I was in the West Reach with the Archmage, seeking Cob the necromancer, we passed Jessage, which lies even farther out than Simly, and we saw burned fields there.

Alder felt as if he were a wraith she saw through.

That each bore her true name openly, as the king did, was so rare a matter, so defiant of rule and custom, of safety and propriety, that though people might know the name they were reluctant to say it and preferred to speak around it.

When Tosla’s coarseness chafed him he blamed his own thin skin.