Then there was some movement, something lighter, coming up the hill, coming slowly nearer. Alder shook with fear and yearning, and whispered, “Oh my dear love.”
But the figure as it came closer was too small to be Lily. He saw it was a child of twelve or so, girl or boy he could not tell. It paid no heed to him or the Summoner and never looked across the wall, but settled down just under it. When Alder came closer and looked down he saw the child was prying and pulling at the stones, trying to loosen one, then another.
The Summoner was whispering in the Old Speech. The child glanced up once indifferently and went on tugging at the stones with its thin fingers that seemed to have no strength in them.
This was so horrible to Alder that his head spun; he tried to turn away, and beyond that he could remember nothing till he woke in the sunny room, lying in bed, weak and sick and cold.
People looked after him: the aloof, smiling woman who kept the lodging house, and a brown-skinned, stocky old man who came with the Doorkeeper. Alder took him for a physician- sorcerer. Only after he had seen him with his staff of olive wood did he understand that he was the Herbal, the master of healing of the School on Roke.
His presence brought solace, and he was able to give Alder sleep. He brewed up a tea and had Alder drink it, and lighted some herb that burned slowly with a smell like the dark earth under pine woods, and sitting nearby began a long, soft chant. “But I must not sleep,” Alder protested, feeling sleep coming into him like a great dark tide. The healer laid his warm hand on Alder’s hand. Then peace came into Alder, and he slipped into sleep without fear. So long as the healer’s hand was on his, or on his shoulder, it kept him from the dark hillside and the wall of stones.
He woke to eat a little, and soon the Master Herbal was there again with the tepid, insipid tea and the earth-smelling smoke and the dull untuneful chant and the touch of his hand; and Alder could have rest.
The healer had all his duties at the School, so could be there only some hours of the night. Alder got enough rest in three nights that he could eat and walk about the town a little in the day and think and talk coherently. On the fourth morning the three masters, the Herbal, the Doorkeeper, and the Summoner, came to his room.
Alder bowed to the Summoner with dread, almost distrust, in his heart. The Herbal was also a great mage, but his art was not altogether different from Alder’s own craft, so they had a kind of understanding; and there was the great kindness of his hand. The Summoner, though, dealt not with bodily things but with the spirit, with the minds and wills of men, with ghosts, with meanings. His art was arcane, dangerous, full of risk and threat. And he had stood beside Alder there, not in the body, on the boundary, at the wall. With him the darkness and the fear returned.
None of the three mages said anything at first. If they had one thing in common, it was a great capacity for silence.
So Alder spoke, trying to say what was in his heart, for nothing less would do.
“If I did some wrong that brought me to that place, or brought my wife to me there, or the other souls, if I can mend or undo what I did, I will. But I don’t know what it is I did.”
“Or what you are,” the Summoner said.
Alder was mute.
“Not many of us know who or what we are,” said the Doorkeeper. “A glimpse is all we get.”
“Tell us how you first went to the wall of stones,” the Summoner said.
And Alder told them.
The mages listened in silence and said nothing for a while after he was done. Then the Summoner asked, “Have you thought what it means to cross that wall?”
“I know I could not come back.”
“Only mages can cross the wall living, and only at utmost need. The Herbal may go with a sufferer all the way to that wall, but if the sick man crosses it, he does not follow.”
The Summoner was so tall and broad-bodied and dark that, looking at him, Alder thought of a bear.
“My art of Summoning empowers us to call the dead back across the wall for a brief time, a moment, if there is need to do so. I myself question if any need could justify so great a breach in the law and balance of the world. I have never made that spell. Nor have I crossed the wall. The Archmage did, and the King with him, to heal the wound in the world the wizard called Cob made.”
“And when the Archmage did not return, Thorion, who was our Summoner then, went down into the dry land to seek him,” the Herbal said. “He came back, but changed.”
“There is no need to speak of that,” the big man said.
“Maybe there is,” said the Herbal. “Maybe Alder needs to know it. Thorion trusted his strength too far, I think. He stayed there too long. He thought he could summon himself back into life, but what came back was only his skill, his power, his ambition—the will to live that gives no life. Yet we trusted him, because we had loved him. So he devoured us. Until Irian destroyed him.”
Far from Roke, on the Isle of Gont, Alder’s listener interrupted him—“What name was that?” Sparrowhawk asked.
“Irian, he said.”
“Do you know that name?”
“No, my lord.”
“Nor I.” After a pause Sparrowhawk went on softly, as if unwillingly. “But I saw Thorion, there. In the dry land, where he had risked going to seek me. It grieved me to see him there. I said to him he might go back across the wall.” His face went dark and grim. “That was ill spoken. All is spoken ill between the living and the dead. But I had loved him too.”
They sat in silence. Sparrowhawk got up abruptly to stretch his arms and rub his thighs. They both moved about a bit. Alder got a drink of water from the well. Sparrowhawk fetched out a garden spade and the new handle to fit to it, and set to work smoothing the oaken shaft and tapering the end that would go in the socket.
He said, “Go on, Alder,” and Alder went on with his story.
The two masters had been silent for a while after the Herbal spoke about Thorion. Alder got up the courage to ask them about a matter that had been much on his mind: how those who died came to the wall, and how the mages came there.
The Summoner answered promptly: “It is a spirit journey.”
The old healer was more hesitant. “It’s not in the body that we cross the wall, since the body of one who dies stays here. And if a mage goes there in vision, his sleeping body is still here, alive. And so we call that voyager . . . we call what makes that journey from the body, the soul, the spirit.”
“But my wife took my hand,” Alder said. He could not say again to them that she had kissed his mouth. “I felt her touch.”
“So it seemed to you,” the Summoner said.
“If they touched bodily, if a link was made,” the Herbal said to the Summoner, “might that not be why the other dead can come to him, call to him, even touch him?”
“That is why he must resist them,” said the Summoner, with a glance at Alder. His eyes were small, fiery.
Alder felt it as an accusation, and not a fair one. He said, “I try to resist them, my lord. I have tried. But there are so many of them— and she’s with them—and they’re suffering, crying out to me.”
“They cannot suffer,” the Summoner said. “Death ends all suffering.”
“Maybe the shadow of pain is pain,” said the Herbal. “There are mountains in that land, and they are called Pain.”
The Doorkeeper had scarcely spoken until now. He said in his quiet, easy voice, “Alder is a mender, not a breaker. I don’t think he can break that link.”
“If he made it he can break it,” the Summoner said.
“Did he make it?”
“I have no such art, my lord,” Alder said, so frightened by what they were saying that he spoke angrily.
“Then I must go down among them,” said the Summoner.
“No, my friend,” said the Doorkeeper, and the old Herbal said, “You last of us all.”
“But this is my art.”
“And ours.”
“Who then?”
The Doorkeeper said, “It seems Alder is our guide. Having come to us for help, maybe he can help us. Let us all go with him in his vision—to the wall, though not across it.”
So that night, when late and fearfully Alder let sleep overcome him, and found himself on the grey hill, the others were with him: the Herbal, a warm presence in the chill; the Doorkeeper, elusive and silvery as starlight; and the massive Summoner, the bear, a dark strength.
This time they were standing not where the hill ran down into the dark, but on the near slope, looking up to the top. The wall in this place ran along the crest of the hill and was low, little more than knee height. Above it the sky with its few small stars was perfectly black.
Nothing moved.
It would be hard to walk uphill to the wall, Alder thought. Always before it had been below him.
But if he could go to it maybe Lily would be there, as she had been the first time. Maybe he could take her hand, and the mages would bring her back with him. Or he could step over the wall where it was so low and come to her.
He began to walk up the hill. It was easy, it was no trouble, he was almost there.
“Hara!”
The Summoner’s deep voice called him back like a noose round his neck, a jerked leash. He stumbled, staggered forward one step more, almost at the wall, dropped to his knees and reached out to the stones. He was crying, “Save me!” but to whom? To the mages, or to the shadows beyond the wall?
Then hands were on his shoulders, living hands, strong and warm, and he was in his room, with the healer’s hands indeed on his shoulders, and the werelight burning white around them. And there were four men in the room with him, not three.
The old Herbal sat down on the bed with him and soothed him a while, for he was shaking, shuddering, sobbing. “I can’t do it,” he kept saying, but still he did not know if he was talking to the mages or to the dead.
When the fear and pain began to lessen, he felt tired beyond bearing, and looked almost without interest at the man who had come into the room. His eyes were the color of ice, his hair and skin were white. A far Northerner, from Enwas or Bereswek, Alder thought him.
This man said to the mages, “What are you doing, my friends?”
“Taking risks, Azver,” said the old Herbal.
“Trouble at the border, Patterner,” said the Summoner.
Alder could feel the respect they had for this man, their relief that he was there, as they told him briefly what the trouble was.
“If he’ll come with me, will you let him go?” the Patterner asked when they were done, and turning to Alder, “You need not fear your dreams in the Immanent Grove. And so we need not fear your dreams.”
They all assented. The Patterner nodded and vanished. He was not there.
He had not been there; he had been a sending, a presentment. It was the first time Alder had seen the great powers of these masters made manifest, and it would have unnerved him if he had not been past amazement and fear.
He followed the Doorkeeper out into the night, through the streets, past the walls of the School, across fields under a high round hill, and along a stream singing its water music softly in the darkness of its banks. Ahead of them was a high wood, the trees crowned with grey starlight.
The Master Patterner came along the path to meet them, looking just as he had in the room. He and the Doorkeeper spoke for a minute, and then Alder followed the Patterner into the Grove.
“The trees are dark,” Alder said to Sparrowhawk, “but it isn’t dark under them. There is a light—a lightness there.”
His listener nodded, smiling a little.
“As soon as I came there, I knew I could sleep. I felt as if I’d been asleep all along, in an evil dream, and now, here, I was truly awake: so I could truly sleep. There was a place he took me to, in among the roots of a huge tree, all soft with the fallen leaves of the tree, and he told me I could lie there. And I did, and I slept. I cannot tell you the sweetness of it.”
***
T
HE MIDDAY SUN HAD GROWN
strong; they went indoors, and the host set out bread and cheese and a bit of dried meat. Alder looked round him as they ate. The house had only the one long room with its little western alcove, but it was large and darkly airy, strongly built, with wide boards and beams, a gleaming floor, a deep stone fireplace. “This is a noble house,” Alder said.
“An old one. They call it the Old Mage’s house. Not for me, nor for my master Aihal who lived here, but for his master Heleth, who with him stilled the great earthquake. It’s a good house.”
Alder slept a while again under the trees with the sun shining on him through the moving leaves. His host rested too, but not long; when Alder woke, there was a good-sized basket of the small golden plums under the tree, and Sparrowhawk was up in the goat pasture mending a fence. Alder went to help him, but the job was done. The goats, however, were long gone.
“Neither of ’em’s in milk,” Sparrowhawk grumbled as they returned to the house. “They’ve got nothing to do but find new ways through the fence. I keep them for exasperation . . . The first spell I ever learned was to call goats from wandering. My aunt taught me. It’s no more use to me now than if I sang them a love song. I’d better go see if they’ve got into the widower’s vegetables. You don’t have the kind of sorcery to charm a goat to come, do you?”
The two brown nannies were indeed invading a cabbage patch on the outskirts of the village. Alder repeated the spell Sparrowhawk told him:
Noth hierth malk man,
hiolk han merth han!
The goats gazed at him with alert disdain and moved away a little. Shouting and a stick got them out of the cabbages onto the path, and there Sparrowhawk produced some plums from his pocket. Promising, offering, and cajoling, he slowly led the truants back into their pasture.
“They’re odd creatures,” he said, latching the gate. “You never know where you are with a goat.”
Alder thought that he never knew where he was with his host, but did not say it.
When they were sitting in the shade again, Sparrowhawk said, “The Patterner isn’t a Northerner, he’s a Karg. Like my wife. He was a warrior of Karego-At. The only man I know of who ever came from those lands to Roke. The Kargs have no wizards. They distrust all sorcery. But they’ve kept more knowledge of the Old Powers of the Earth than we have. This man, Azver, when he was young, he heard some tale of the Immanent Grove, and it came to him that the center of all the earth’s powers must be there. So he left his gods and his native tongue behind him and made his way to Roke. He stood on our doorstep and said, ‘Teach me to live in that forest!’ And we taught him, till he began to teach us . . . So he became our Master Patterner. He’s not a gentle man, but he is to be trusted.”