Tehanu (Earthsea Cycle) Page 10

  She looked up to see the little cottage next to Fan’s house, where she had lived when she lived here. Between it and her a man was passing. It was the man she had been remembering, imagining, the man with a leather cap. He was going past the cottage, past the weaver’s house; he had not seen her. She watched him walk on up the village street without stopping. He was going either to the turning of the hill road or to the mansion house.

  Without pausing to think why, Tenar followed him at a distance until she saw which turn he took. He went on up the hill to the domain of the Lord of Re Albi, not down the road that Ged had gone.

  She turned back then, and made her visit to old Fan.

  Though almost a recluse, like many weavers, Fan had been kind in his shy way to the Kargish girl, and vigilant. How many people, she thought, had protected her respectability! Now nearly blind, Fan had an apprentice who did most of the weaving. He was glad to have a visitor. He sat as if in state in an old carved chair under the object from which his use-name came: a very large painted fan, the treasure of his family—the gift, so the story went, of a generous sea-pirate to his grandfather for some speedy sailmaking in time of need. It was displayed open on the wall. The delicately painted men and women in their gorgeous robes of rose and jade and azure, the towers and bridges and banners of Havnor Great Port, were all familiar to Tenar as soon as she saw the fan again. Visitors to Re Albi were often brought to see it. It was the finest thing, all agreed, in the village.

  She admired it, knowing it would please the old man, and because it was indeed very beautiful, and he said, “You’ve not seen much to equal that, in all your travels, eh?”

  “No, no. Nothing like it in Middle Valley at all,” said she.

  “When you was here, in my cottage, did I ever show you the other side of it?”

  “The other side? No,” she said, and nothing would do then but he must get the fan down; only she had to climb up and do it, carefully untacking it, since he could not see well enough and could not climb up on the chair. He directed her anxiously. She laid it in his hands, and he peered with his dim eyes at it, half closed it to make sure the ribs played freely, then closed it all the way, turned it over, and handed it to her.

  “Open it slow,” he said.

  She did so. Dragons moved as the folds of the fan moved. Painted faint and fine on the yellowed silk, dragons of pale red, blue, green moved and grouped, as the figures on the other side were grouped, among clouds and mountain peaks.

  “Hold it up to the light,” said old Fan.

  She did so, and saw the two sides, the two paintings, made one by the light flowing through the silk, so that the clouds and peaks were the towers of the city, and the men and women were winged, and the dragons looked with human eyes.

  “You see?”

  “I see,” she murmured.

  “I can’t, now, but it’s in my mind’s eye. I don’t show many that.”

  “It is very wonderful.”

  “I meant to show it to the old mage,” Fan said, “but with one thing and another I never did.”

  Tenar turned the fan once more before the light, then remounted it as it had been, the dragons hidden in darkness, the men and women walking in the light of day.

  Fan took her out next to see his pigs, a fine pair, fattening nicely towards autumn sausages. They discussed Heather’s shortcomings as a swill-carrier. Tenar told him that she fancied a scrap of cloth for a child’s dress, and he was delighted, pulling out a full width of fine linen sheeting for her, while the young woman who was his apprentice, and who seemed to have taken up his unsociability as well as his craft, clacked away at the broad loom, steady and scowling.

  Walking home, Tenar thought of Therru sitting at that loom. It would be a decent living. The bulk of the work was dull, always the same over, but weaving was an honorable trade and in some hands a noble art. And people expected weavers to be a bit shy, often to be unmarried, shut away at their work as they were; yet they were respected. And working indoors at a loom, Therru would not have to show her face. But the claw hand? Could that hand throw the shuttle, warp the loom?

  And was she to hide all her life?

  But what was she to do? “Knowing what her life must be...”

  Tenar set herself to think of something else. Of the dress she would make. Larks daughters dresses were coarse homespun, plain as mud. She could dye half this width, yellow maybe, or with red madder from the marsh; and then a full apron or overdress of white, with a ruffle to it. Was the child to be hidden at a loom in the dark and never have a ruffle to her skirt? And that would still leave enough for a shift, and a second apron if she cut out carefully.

  “Therru!” she called as she approached the house. Heather and Therru had been in the broom-pasture when she left. She called again, wanting to show Therru the material and tell her about the dress. Heather came gawking around from the spring-house, hauling Sippy on a rope.

  “Where’s Therru?”

  “With you,” Heather replied so serenely that Tenar looked around for the child before she understood that Heather had no idea where she was and had simply stated what she wished to be true.

  “Where did you leave her?”

  Heather had no idea. She had never let Tenar down before; she had seemed to understand that Therru had to be kept more or less in sight, like a goat. But maybe it was Therru all along who had understood that, and had kept herself in sight? So Tenar thought, as having no comprehensible guidance from Heather, she began to look and call for the child, receiving no response.

  She kept away from the cliff’s edge as long as she could. Their first day there, she had explained to Therru that she must never go alone down the steep fields below the house or along the sheer edge north of it, because one-eyed vision cannot judge distance or depth with certainty. The child had obeyed. She always obeyed. But children forget. But she would not forget. But she might get close to the edge without knowing it. But surely she had gone to Moss’s house. That was it—having been there alone, last night, she would go again. That was it, of course.

  She was not there. Moss had not seen her.

  “I’ll find her, I’ll find her, dearie,” she assured Tenar; but instead of going up the forest path to look for her as Tenar had hoped she would, Moss began to knot up her hair in preparation for casting a spell of finding.

  Tenar ran back to Ogion’s house, calling again and again. And this time she looked down the steep fields below the house, hoping to see the little figure crouched playing among the boulders. But all she saw was the sea, wrinkled and dark, at the end of those falling fields, and she grew dizzy and sick-hearted.

  She went to Ogion’s grave and a short way past it up the forest path, calling. As she came back through the meadow, the kestrel was hunting in the same spot where Ged had watched it hunt. This time it stooped, and struck, and rose with some little creature in its talons. It flew fast to the forest. She’s feeding her young, Tenar thought. All kinds of thoughts went through her mind very vivid and precise, as she passed the laundry laid out on the grass, dry now, she must take it up before evening. She must search around the house, the springhouse, the milking shed, more carefully. This was her fault. She had caused it to happen by thinking of making Therru into a weaver, shutting her away in the dark to work, to be respectable. When Ogion had said “Teach her, teach her all, Tenar!” When she knew that a wrong that cannot be repaired must be transcended. When she knew that the child had been given her and she had failed in her charge, failed her trust, lost her, lost the one great gift.

  She went into the house, having searched every corner of the other buildings, and looked again in the alcove and round the other bed. She poured herself water, for her mouth was dry as sand.

  Behind the door the three sticks of wood, Ogion’s staff and the walking sticks, moved in the shadows, and one of them said, “Here.”

  The child was crouched in that dark corner, drawn into her own body so that she seemed no bigger than a little dog, head b
ent down to the shoulder, arms and legs pulled tight in, the one eye shut.

  “Little bird, little sparrow, little flame, what is wrong? What happened? What have they done to you now?”

  Tenar held the small body, closed and stiff as stone, rocking it in her arms. “How could you frighten me so? How could you hide from me? Oh, I was so angry!”

  She wept, and her tears fell on the child’s face.

  “Oh Therru, Therru, Therru, don’t hide away from me!”

  A shudder went through the knotted limbs, and slowly they loosened. Therru moved, and all at once clung to Tenar, pushing her face into the hollow between Tenar’s breast and shoulder, clinging tighter, till she was clutching desperately. She did not weep. She never wept; her tears had been burned out of her, maybe; she had none. But she made a long, moaning, sobbing sound.

  Tenar held her, rocking her, rocking her. Very, very slowly the desperate grip relaxed. The head lay pillowed on Tenar’s breast.

  “Tell me,” the woman murmured, and the child answered in her faint, hoarse whisper, “He came here.”

  Tenar’s first thought was of Ged, and her mind, still moving with the quickness of fear, caught that, saw who “he” was to her, and gave it a wry grin in passing, but passed on, hunting, “Who came here?”

  No answer but a kind of internal shuddering.

  “A man,” Tenar said quietly, “a man in a leather cap.

  Therru nodded once.

  “We saw him on the road, coming here.”

  No response.

  “The four men—the ones I was angry at, do you remember? He was one of them.”

  But she recalled how Therru had held her head down, hiding the burned side, not looking up, as she had always done among strangers.

  “Do you know him, Therru?”

  “Yes.”

  “From—from when you lived in the camp by the river? One nod.

  Tenar’s arms tightened around her.

  “He came here?” she said, and all the fear she had felt turned as she spoke into anger, a rage that burned in her the length of her body like a rod of fire. She gave a kind of laugh—“Hah!”—and remembered in that moment Kalessin, how Kalessin had laughed.

  But it was not so simple for a human and a woman. The fire must be contained. And the child must be comforted.

  “Did he see you?”

  “I hid.”

  Presently Tenar said, stroking Therru’s hair, “He will never touch you, Therru. Understand me and believe me: he will never touch you again. He’ll never see you again unless I’m with you, and then he must deal with me. Do you understand, my dear, my precious, my beautiful? You need not fear him. You must not fear him. He wants you to fear him. He feeds on your fear. We will starve him, Therru. We’ll starve him till he eats himself. Till he chokes gnawing on the bones of his own hands.... Ah, ah, ah, don’t listen to me now, I’m only angry, only angry.... Am I red? Am I red like a Gontishwoman, now? Like a dragon, am I red?” She tried to joke; and Therru, lifting her head, looked up into her face from her own crumpled, tremulous, fire-eaten face and said, “Yes. You are a red dragon.”

  The idea of the man’s coming to the house, being in the house, coming around to look at his handiwork, maybe thinking of improving on it, that idea whenever it recurred to Tenar came less as a thought than as a queasy fit, a need to vomit. But the nausea burned itself out against the anger.

  They got up and washed, and Tenar decided that what she felt most of all just now was hunger. “I am hollow,” she said to Therru, and set them out a substantial meal of bread and cheese, cold beans in oil and herbs, a sliced onion, and dry sausage. Therru ate a good deal, and Tenar ate a great deal.

  As they cleared up, she said, “For the present, Therru, I won’t leave you at all, and you won’t leave me. Right? And we should both go now to Aunty Moss’s house. She was making a spell to find you, and she needn’t bother to go on with it, but she might not know that.”

  Therru stopped moving. She glanced once at the open doorway, and shrank away from it.

  “We need to bring in the laundry, too. On our way back. And when we’re back, I’ll show you the cloth I got today. For a dress. For a new dress, for you. A red dress.”

  The child stood, drawing in to herself.

  “If we hide, Therru, we feed him. We will eat. And we will starve him. Come with me.”

  The difficulty, the barrier of that doorway to the outside was tremendous to Therru. She shrank from it, she hid her face, she trembled, stumbled, it was cruel to force her to cross it, cruel to drive her out of hiding, but Tenar was without pity. “Come!” she said, and the child came.

  They walked hand-in-hand across the fields to Moss’s house. Once or twice Therru managed to look up.

  Moss was not surprised to see them, but she had a queer, wary look about her. She told Therru to run inside her house to see the ringneck hen’s new chicks and choose which two might be hers; and Therru disappeared at once into that refuge.

  “She was in the house all along,” Tenar said. “Hiding.”

  “Well she might,” said Moss.

  “Why?” Tenar asked harshly. She was not in the hiding vein.

  “There’s—there’s beings about,” the witch said, not portentously but uneasily.

  “There’s scoundrels about!” said Tenar, and Moss looked at her and drew back a little.

  “Eh, now,” she said. “Eh, dearie. You have a fire around you, a shining of fire all about your head. I cast the spell to find the child, but it didn’t go right. It went its own way somehow, and I don’t know yet if it’s ended. I’m bewildered. I saw great beings. I sought the little girl but I saw them, flying in the mountains, flying in the clouds. And now you have that about you, like your hair was afire. What’s amiss, what’s wrong?”

  “A man in a leather cap,” Tenar said. “A youngish man. Well enough looking. The shoulder seam of his vest’s torn. Have you seen him round?”

  Moss nodded. “They took him on for the haying at the mansion house.”

  “I told you that she”—Tenar glanced at the house—“was with a woman and two men? He’s one of them.”

  “You mean, one of them that—”

  “Yes.”

  Moss stood like a wood carving of an old woman, rigid, a block. “I don’t know,” she said at last. “I thought I knew enough. But I don’t. What—What would—Would he come to—to see her?”

  “If he’s the father, maybe he’s come to claim her.”

  “Claim her?”

  “She’s his property.”

  Tenar spoke evenly. She looked up at the heights of Gont Mountain as she spoke.

  “But I think its not the father. I think this is the other one. The one that came and told my friend in the village that the child had ‘hurt herself.’”

  Moss was still bewildered, still frightened by her own conjurations and visions, by Tenar’s fierceness, by the presence of abominable evil. She shook her head, desolate. “I don’t know,” she said. “I thought I knew enough. How could he come back?”

  “To eat,” Tenar said. “To eat. I won’t be leaving her alone again. But tomorrow, Moss, I might ask you to keep her here an hour or so, early in the day. Would you do that, while I go up to the manor house?”

  “Aye, dearie. Of course. I could put a hiding spell on her, if you like. But... But they’re up there, the great men from the King’s City....”

  “Why, then, they can see how life is among the common folk,” said Tenar, and Moss drew back again as if from a rush of sparks blown her way from a fire in the wind.

  THEY WERE MAKING HAY IN THE lord’s long meadow, strung out across the slope in the bright shadows of morning. Three of the mowers were women, and of the two men one was a boy, as Tenar could make out from some distance, and the other was stooped and grizzled. She came up along the mown rows and asked one of the women about the man with the leather cap.

  “Him from down by Valmouth, ah,” said the mower. “Don’t know where
he’s got to.” The others came along the row, glad of a break. None of them knew where the man from Middle Valley was or why he wasn’t mowing with them. “That kind don’t stay,” the grizzled man said. “Shiftless. You know him, miss’s?”

  “Not by choice,” said Tenar. “He came lurking about my place—frightened the child. I don’t know what he’s called, even.”

  “Calls himself Handy,” the boy volunteered. The others looked at her or looked away and said nothing. They were beginning to piece out who she must be, the Kargish woman in the old mage’s house. They were tenants of the Lord of Re Albi, suspicious of the villagers, leery of anything to do with Ogion. They whetted their scythes, turned away, strung out again, fell to work. Tenar walked down from the hillside field, past a row of walnut trees, to the road.

  On it a man stood waiting. Her heart leapt. She strode on to meet him.

  It was Aspen, the wizard of the mansion house. He stood gracefully leaning on his tall pine staff in the shade of a roadside tree. As she came out onto the road he said, “Are you looking for work?”

  “No.”

  “My lord needs field hands. This hot weather’s on the turn, the hay must be got in.”

  To Goha, Flint’s widow, what he said was appropriate, and Goha answered him politely, “No doubt your skill can turn the rain from the fields till the hay’s in.” But he knew she was the woman to whom Ogion dying had spoken his true name, and, given that knowledge, what he said was so insulting and deliberately false as to serve as a clear warning. She had been about to ask him if he knew where the man Handy was. Instead, she said, “I came to say to the overseer here that a man he took on for the haymaking left my village as a thief and worse, not one he’d choose to have about the place. But it seems the man’s moved on.”

  She gazed calmly at Aspen until he answered, with an effort, “I know nothing about these people.”