“It is.”
“But I—what should I do in Havnor?” And, with sudden hope, “Would you go with me?”
Sparrowhawk shook his head once. “I stay here.”
“The Lord Patterner . . .”
“Sent you to me. And I send you to those who should hear your tale and find out what it means . . . I tell you, Alder, I think in his heart the Patterner believes I am what I was. He believes I’m merely hiding here in the forests of Gont and will come forth when the need is greatest.” The old man looked down at his sweaty, patched clothes and dusty shoes, and laughed. “In all my glory,” he said.
“Beh,” said the brown goat behind him.
“But all the same, Alder, he was right to send you here, since she’d have been here, if she hadn’t gone to Havnor.”
“The Lady Tenar?”
“
Hama Gondun.
So the Patterner himself called her,” Sparrowhawk said, looking across the fence at Alder, his eyes unfathomable. “A woman on Gont. The Woman of Gont. Tehanu.”
W
HEN
A
LDER CAME DOWN TO
the docks,
Farflyer
was still there, taking on a cargo of timbers; but he knew he had worn out his welcome on that ship. He went to a small shabby coaster tied up next to her, the
Pretty Rose.
Sparrowhawk had given him a letter of passage signed by the king and sealed with the Rune of Peace. “He sent it for me to use if I changed my mind,” the old man had said with a snort. “It’ll serve you.” 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.
Pretty Rose
was going to Havnor, sure enough, but she was a coaster, trading small goods from port to port, and it might take her a month to work clear round the southeast coast of the Great Island to the King’s City.
That was all right with him, Alder said. For if he dreaded the voyage, he feared its ending more.
New moon to half moon, the sea voyage was a time of peace for him. The grey kitten was a hardy traveler, busy mousing the ship all day but faithfully curling up under his chin or within hand’s reach at night; and to his unceasing wonder, that little scrap of warm life kept him from the wall of stones and the voices calling him across it. Not wholly. Not so that he ever entirely forgot them. They were there, just through the veil of sleep in darkness, just through the brightness of the day. Sleeping out on deck those warm nights, he opened his eyes often to see that the stars moved, swinging to the rocking of the moored ship, following their courses through heaven to the west. He was still a haunted man. But for a half month of summer along the coasts of Kameber and Barnisk and the Great Island he could turn his back on his ghosts.
For days the kitten hunted a young rat nearly as big as it was. Seeing it proudly and laboriously hauling the carcass across the deck, one of the sailors called it Tug. Alder accepted the name for it.
They sailed down the Ebavnor Straits and in through the portals of Havnor Bay. Across the sunlit water little by little the white towers of the city at the center of the world resolved out of the haze of distance. Alder stood at the prow as they came in and looking up saw on the pinnacle of the highest tower a flash of silver light, the Sword of Erreth-Akbe.
Now he wished he could stay aboard and sail on and not go ashore into the great city among great people with a letter for the king. He knew he was no fit messenger. Why had such a burden been laid on him? How could it be that a village sorcerer who knew nothing of high matters and deep arts was called on to make these journeys from land to land, from mage to monarch, from the living to the dead?
He had said something like that to Sparrowhawk. “It’s all beyond me,” he had said. The old man looked at him a while and then, calling him by his true name, said, “The world’s vast and strange, Hara, but no vaster and no stranger than our minds are. Think of that sometimes.”
Behind the city the sky darkened with a thunderstorm inland. The towers burned white against purple-black, and gulls soared like drifting sparks of fire above them.
Pretty Rose
was moored, the gangplank run out. This time the sailors wished him well as he shouldered his pack. He picked up the covered poultry basket in which Tug crouched patiently, and went ashore.
The streets were many and crowded, but the way to the palace was plain, and he had no idea what to do except go there and say that he carried a letter for the king from the Archmage Sparrowhawk.
And that he did, many times.
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.” He would not give his letter up. 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.
Suddenly they were all gone. A door had opened. It closed behind him.
He stood alone in a quiet room. A wide window looked out over the roofs northwestward. The thundercloud had cleared and the broad grey summit of Mount Onn hovered above far hills.
Another door opened. A man came in, dressed in black, about Alder’s age, quick moving, with a fine, strong face as smooth as bronze. He came straight to Alder: “Master Alder, I am Lebannen.”
He put out his right hand to touch Alder’s hand, palm against palm, as the custom was in Éa and the Enlades. Alder responded automatically to the familiar gesture. Then he thought he ought to kneel, or bow at least, but the moment to do so seemed to have passed. He stood dumb.
“You came from my Lord Sparrowhawk? How is he? Is he well?”
“Yes, lord. He sends you—” Alder hurriedly groped inside his jacket for the letter, which he had intended to offer to the king kneeling, when they finally showed him to the throne room where the king would be sitting on his throne—“this letter, my lord.”
The eyes watching him were alert, urbane, as implacably keen as Sparrowhawk’s, but withholding even more of the mind within. As the king took the letter Alder offered him, his courtesy was perfect. “The bearer of any word from him has my heart’s thanks and welcome. Will you forgive me?”
Alder finally managed a bow. The king walked over to the window to read the letter.
He read it twice at least, then refolded it. His face was as impassive as before. He went to the door and spoke to someone outside it, then turned back to Alder. “Please,” he said, “sit down with me. They’ll bring us something to eat. You’ve been all afternoon in the palace, I know. If the gate captain had had the wits to send me word, I could have spared you hours of climbing the walls and swimming the moats they set around me . . . Did you stay with my Lord Sparrowhawk? In his house on the cliff’s edge?”
“Yes.”
“I envy you. I’ve never been there. I haven’t seen him since we parted on Roke, half my lifetime ago. He wouldn’t let me come to him on Gont. He wouldn’t come to my crowning.” Lebannen smiled as if nothing he said was of any moment. “He gave me my kingdom,” he said.
Sitting down, he nodded to Alder to take the chair facing him across a little table. Alder looked at the tabletop, inlaid with curling patterns of ivory and silver, leaves and blossoms of the rowan tree twined about slender swords.
“Did you have a good voyage?” the king asked, and made other small talk while they were served plates of cold meat and smoked trout and lettuces and cheese. He set Alder a welcome example by eating with a good appetite; and he poured them wine, the palest topaz, in goblets of crystal. He raised his glass. “To my lord and dear friend,” he said.
Alder murmured, “To him,” and drank.
The king spoke about Taon, which he had visited a few years before—Alder remembered the excitement of the island when the king was in Meoni. And he spoke of some musicians from Taon who were in the city now, harpers and singers come to make music for the court; it might be Alder knew some of them; and indeed the names he said were familiar. He was very skilled at putting his guest at ease, and food and wine were a considerable help too.
When they were done eating, the king poured them another half glass of wine and said, “The letter concerns you, mostly. Did you know that?” His tone had not changed much from the small talk, and Alder was fuddled for a moment.
“No,” he said.
“Do you have an idea what it deals with?”
“What I dream, maybe,” Alder said, speaking low, looking down.
The king studied him for a moment. There was nothing offensive in his gaze, but he was more open in that scrutiny than most men would have been. Then he took up the letter and held it out to Alder.
“My lord, I read very little.”
Lebannen was not surprised—some sorcerers could read, some could not—but he clearly and sharply regretted putting his guest at a disadvantage. The gold-bronze skin of his face went dusky red. He said, “I’m sorry, Alder. May I read you what he says?”
“Please, my lord,” Alder said. The king’s embarrassment made him, for a moment, feel the king’s equal, and he spoke for the first time naturally and with warmth.
Lebannen scanned the salutation and some lines of the letter and then read aloud:
“‘Alder of Taon who bears this to you is one called in dream and not by his own will to that land you and I crossed once together. He will tell you of suffering where suffering is past and change where no thing changes. We closed the door Cob opened. Now the wall itself maybe is to fall. He has been to Roke. Only Azver heard him. My Lord the King will hear and will act as wisdom instructs and need requires. Alder bears my lifelong honor and obedience to my Lord the King. Also my lifelong honor and regard to my lady Tenar. Also to my beloved daughter Tehanu a spoken message from me.’ And he signs it with the rune of the Talon.” Lebannen looked up from the letter into Alder’s eyes and held his gaze. “Tell me what it is you dream,” he said.
So once more Alder told his story.
He told it briefly and not very well. 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. He hurried through as best he could and stopped with relief.
Lebannen asked a few questions. Lily and then Gannet had each touched Alder once: never since? And Gannet’s touch had burned?
Alder held out his hand. The marks were almost invisible under a month’s tan.
“I think the people at the wall would touch me if I came close to them,” he said.
“But you keep away from them?”
“I have done so.”
“And they are not people you knew in life?”
“Sometimes I think I know one or another.”
“But never your wife?”
“There are so many of them, my lord. Sometimes I think she’s there. But I can’t see her.”
To talk about it brought it near, too near. He felt the fear welling up in him again. He thought the walls of the room might melt away and the evening sky and the floating mountain-crown vanish like a curtain brushed aside, to leave him standing where he was always standing, on a dark hill by a wall of stones.
“Alder.”
He looked up, shaken, his head swimming. The room seemed bright, the king’s face hard and vivid.
“You’ll stay here in the palace?”
It was an invitation, but Alder could only nod, accepting it as an order.
“Good. I’ll arrange for you to give the message you bear to Mistress Tehanu tomorrow. And I know the White Lady will wish to talk with you.”
He bowed. Lebannen turned away.
“My lord—”
Lebannen turned.
“May I have my cat with me?”
Not a flicker of a smile, no mockery. “Of course.”
“My lord, I am sorry to my heart to bring news that troubles you!”
“Any word from the man who sent you is a grace to me and to its bearer. And I’d rather get bad news from an honest man than lies from a flatterer,” Lebannen said, and Alder, hearing the true accent of his home islands in the words, was a little cheered.
The king went out, and at once a man looked in the door Alder had entered by. “I will take you to your chamber, if you will follow me, sir,” he said. He was dignified, elderly, and well dressed, and Alder followed him without any idea whether he was a nobleman or a servant, and therefore not daring to ask him about Tug. In the room before the room where he had met the king, the officials and guards and ushers had absolutely insisted that he leave his poultry basket with them. It had been eyed with suspicion and inspected with disapproval by ten or fifteen officials already. He had explained ten or fifteen times that he had the cat with him because he had nowhere in the city to leave it. The anteroom where he had been compelled to set it down was far behind him, he had not seen it there as they went through, he would never find it now, it was half a palace away, corridors, hallways, passages, doors . . .
His guide bowed and left him in a small, beautiful room, tapestried, carpeted, a chair with an embroidered seat, a window that looked out to the harbor, a table on which stood a bowl of summer fruit and a pitcher of water. And the poultry basket.
He opened it. Tug emerged in a leisurely manner indicating his familiarity with palaces. He stretched, sniffed Alder’s fingers in greeting, and went about the room examining things. He discovered a curtained alcove with a bed in it and jumped up on the bed. A discreet knock at the door. A young man entered carrying a large, flat, heavy wooden box with no lid. He bowed to Alder, murmuring, “Sand, sir.” He placed the box in the far corner of the alcove. He bowed again and left.
“Well,” Alder said, sitting down on the bed. He was not in the habit of talking to the kitten. Their relationship was one of silent, trustful touch. But he had to talk to somebody. “I met the king today,” he said.