Bettering

He lay like the dead but was not dead. Where had he been? What had he come through? That night, in firelight, Tenar took the stained, worn, sweat-stiffened clothes off him. She washed him and let him lie naked between the linen sheet and the blanket of soft, heavy goat’s-wool. Though a short, slight-built man, he had been compact, vigorous; now he was thin as if worn down to the bone, worn away, fragile. Even the scars that ridged his shoulder and the left side of his face from temple to jaw seemed lessened, silvery. And his hair was grey.

I’m sick of mourning, Tenar thought. Sick of mourning, sick of grief. I will not grieve for him Didn’t he come to me riding the dragon? Once I meant to kill him, she thought. Now I’ll make him

live, if I can. She looked at him then with a challenge in her eye, and no pity.

“Which of us saved the other from the Labyrinth, Ged?”

Unhearing, unmoving, he slept. She was very tired. She bathed in the water she had heated to wash him with, and crept into bed beside the little, warm, silky silence that was Therru asleep. She slept, and her sleep opened out into a vast windy space hazy with rose and gold. She flew. Her voice called, “Kalessin!” A voice answered, calling from the gulfs of light.

When she woke, the birds were chirping in the fields and on the roof. Sitting up she saw the light of morning through the gnarled glass of the low window looking west. There was something in her, some seed or glimmer, too small to look at or think about, new. Therru was still asleep. Tenar sat by her looking out the small window at cloud and sunlight, thinking of her daughter Apple, trying to remember Apple as a baby. Only the faintest glimpse, vanishing as she turned to it-the small, fat body shaking with a laugh, the wispy, flying hair..., And the second baby, Spark he got called as a joke, because he’d been struck off Flint. She did not know his true name. He had been as sickly a child as Apple had been a sound one. Born early and very small, he had nearly died of the croup at two months, and for two years after that it had been like rearing a fledgling sparrow, you never knew if he would be alive in the morning. But he held on, the little spark wouldn’t go out. And growing, he became a wiry boy, endlessly active, driven; no use on the farm; no patience with animals, plants, people; using words for his needs only, never for pleasure and the give and take of love and knowledge.

Ogion had come by on his wanderings when Apple was thirteen and Spark eleven. Ogion had named Apple then, in the springs of the Kaheda at the valley’s head; beautiful she had walked in the green water, the woman-child, and he had given her her true name, Hayohe. He had stayed on at Oak Farm a day or two, and had asked the boy if he wanted to go wandering a little with him in the forests. Spark merely shook his head. “What would you do if you could?” the mage had asked him, and the boy said what he had never been able to say to father or mother: “Go to sea.

after Beech gave him his true name, three years later, he shipped as a sailor aboard a merchantman trading from Valmouth to Orane’a and North Havnor. From time to time he would come to the farm, but not often and never for long, though at his father’s death it would be his property. He was white-skinned like Tenar, but grew tall like Flint, with a narrow face. He had not told his parents his true name. There might never be anyone he told it to. Tenar had not seen him for three years now. He might or might not know of his father’s death. He might be dead himself, drowned, but she thought not. He would carry that spark his life over the waters, through the storms.

That was what it was like in her now, a spark; like the bodily certainty of a conception; a change, a new thing. What it was she would not ask. You did not ask. You did not ask a true name. It was given you, or not.

She got up and dressed. Early as it was, it was warm, and she built no fire. She sat in the doorway to drink a cup of milk and watch the shadow of Gont Mountain draw inward from the sea. There was as little wind as there could be on this air-swept shelf of rock, and the breeze had a midsummer feel, soft and rich, smelling of the meadows. There was a sweetness in the air, a change.

“All changed!” the old man had whispered, dying, joyful. Laying his hand on hers, giving her the gift, his name, giving it away.

“Aihal!” she whispered. For answer a couple of goats bleated, out behind the milking shed, waiting for Heather to come. “Be-eh,” one said, and the other, deeper, metallic, “Bla-ah! Bla-ah!” Trust a goat, Flint used to say, to spoil anything. Flint, a shepherd, had disliked goats. But Sparrowhawk had been a goatherd, here across the mountain, as a boy.

She went inside. She found Therru standing gazing at the sleeping man. She put her arm around the child, and though Therm usually shrank from or was passive to touch or caress, this time she accepted it and perhaps even leaned a little to Tenar.

Ged lay in the same exhausted, overwhelmed sleep. His face was turned to expose the four white scars that marked it.

“Was he burned?” Therru whispered.

Tenar did not answer at once. She did not know what those scars were. She had asked him long ago, in the Painted Room of the Labyrinth of Atuan, jeering: “A dragon?” And he had answered seriously, “Not a dragon. One of the kinship of the Nameless Ones; but I learned his name.... And that was all she knew. But she knew what “burned” meant to the child.

“Yes,” she said.

Therru continued to gaze at him. She had cocked her head to bring her one seeing eye to bear, which made her look like a little bird, a sparrow or a finch.

“Come along, finchling, birdlet, sleep’s what he needs, you need a peach. Is there a peach ripe this morning?”

Therru trotted out to see, and Tenar followed her.

Eating her peach, the child studied the place where she had planted the peach pit yesterday. She was evidently disappointed that no tree had grown there, but she said nothing.

“Water it,” said Tenar.

Aunty Moss arrived in the midmorning. One of her skills as a witch-handywoman was basket making, using the rushes of Overfell Marsh, and Tenar had asked her to teach her the art. As a child in Atuan, Tenar had learned how to learn. As a stranger in Gont, she had found that people

liked to teach. She had learned to be taught and so to be accepted, her foreignness forgiven.

Ogion had taught her his knowledge, and then Flint had taught her his. It was her habit of life, to learn. There seemed always to be a great deal to be learned, more than she would have believed when she was a prentice-priestess or the pupil of a mage.

The rushes had been soaking, and this morning they were to split them, an exacting but not a complicated business, leaving plenty of attention to spare.

“Aunty,” said Tenar as they sat on the doorstep with the bowl of soaking rushes between them and a mat before them to lay the split ones on, “how do you tell if a man’s a wizard or not?”

Moss’s reply was circuitous, beginning with the usual gnomics and obscurities. “Deep knows deep,” she said, deeply, and “What’s born will speak,” and she told a story about the ant that picked up a tiny end of hair from the floor of a palace and ran off to the ants’ nest with it, and in the night the nest glowed underground like a star, for the hair was from the head of the great mage Brost, But only the wise could see the glowing anthill. To common eyes it was all dark.

“One needs training, then,” said Tenar.

Maybe, maybe not, was the gist of Moss’s dark reply. “Some are born with that gift,” she said. “Even when they don’t know it, it will be there. Like the hair of the mage in the hole in the ground, it will shine.”

“Yes,” said Tenar. “I’ve seen that.” She split and resplit a reed cleanly and laid the splints on the mat. “How do you know, then, when a man is not a wizard?”

“It’s not there,” Moss said, “it’s not there, dearie. The power. See now. If I’ve got eyes in my head I can see that you have eyes, can’t I? And if you’re blind I’ll see that. And if you’ve only got one eye, like the little one, or if you’ve got three, I’ll see ‘em, won’t I? But if I don’t have an eye to see with, I won’t know if you do till you tell me. But I do. I see, I know. The third eye!” She touched her forehead and gave a loud, dry chuckle, like a hen triumphant over an egg. She was pleased with having found the words to say what she wanted to say. A good deal of her obscurity and cant, Tenar had begun to realize, was mere ineptness with words and ideas. Nobody had ever taught her to think consecutively. Nobody had ever listened to what she said. All that was expected, all that was wanted of her was muddle, mystery, mumbling. She was a witchwoman. She had nothing to do with clear meaning.

“I understand,” Tenar said. “Then-maybe this is a question you don’t want to answer-then when you look at a person with your third eye, with your power, you see their power-or don’t see it?”

“It’s more a knowing,” Moss said. “Seeing is just a way of saying it. ‘Tisn’t like I see you, I see this rush, I see the mountain there. It’s a knowing. I know what’s in you and not in that poor hollow-headed Heather, I know what’s in the dear child and not in him in yonder. I know-” She could not get any farther with it. She mumbled and spat. “Any witch worth a hairpin knows another witch!” she said finally, plainly, impatiently.

“You recognize each other.”

Moss nodded. “Aye, that’s it. That’s the word. Recognize.”

“And a wizard would recognize your power, would know you for a sorceress-”

But Moss was grinning at her, a black cave of a grin in a cobweb of wrinkles. “Dearie,” she said, “a man, you mean, a wizardly man? What’s a man of power to do with us?”

“But Ogion-”

“Lord Ogion was kind,” Moss said, without irony.

They split rushes for a while in silence.

“Don’t cut your thumb on ‘em, dearie,” Moss said.

“Ogion taught me. As if I weren’t a girl. As if I’d been his prentice, like Sparrowhawk. He taught me the Language of the Making, Moss. What I asked him, he told me.”

“There wasn’t no other like him.”

“It was I who wouldn’t be taught. I left him. What did I I want with his books? What good were they to me? I

wanted to live, I wanted a man, I wanted my children, I wanted my life.”

She split reeds neatly, quickly, with her nail.

“And I got it,” she said.

“Take with the right hand, throw away with the left,” the witch said. “Well, dearie mistress, who’s to say? Who’s to say? Wanting a man got me into awful troubles more than once. But wanting to get married, never! No, no. None of that for me.

“Why not?” Tenar demanded.

Taken aback, Moss said simply, “Why, what man’d marry a witch?” And then, with a sidelong chewing motion of her jaw, like a sheep shifting its cud, “And what witch’d marry a man?”

They split rushes.

“What’s wrong with men?” Tenar inquired cautiously.

As cautiously, lowering her voice, Moss replied, “I don’t know, my dearie. I’ve thought on it. Often I’ve thought on it. The best I can say it is like this. A man’s in his skin, see, like a nut in its shell.” She held up her long, bent, wet fingers as if holding a walnut. “It’s hard and strong, that shell, and it’s all full of him. Full of grand man-meat, manself. And that’s all. That’s all there is. It’s all him and nothing else, inside.”

Tenar pondered awhile and finally asked, “But if he’s a wizard-”

“Then it’s all his power, inside. His power’s himself, see. That’s how it is with him. And that’s all. When his power goes, he’s gone. Empty.” She cracked the unseen walnut and tossed the shells away. “Nothing.”

“And a woman, then?”

“Oh, well, dearie, a woman’s a different thing entirely. Who knows where a woman begins and ends? Listen, mistress, I have roots, I have roots deeper than this island. Deeper than the sea, older than the raising of the lands. I go back into the dark.” Moss’s eyes shone with a weird brightness in their red rims and her voice sang like an instrument. “I go back into the dark! Before the moon I was. No one knows, no one knows, no one can say what I am, what a woman is, a woman of power, a woman’s power, deeper than the roots of trees, deeper than the roots of islands, older than the Making, older than the moon. Who dares ask questions of the dark? Who’ll ask the dark its name?”

The old woman was rocking, chanting, lost in her incantation; but Tenar sat upright, and split a reed down the center with her thumbnail.

“I will,” she said. She split another reed.

“I lived long enough in the dark,” she said.

She looked in from time to time to see that Sparrowhawk was still sleeping. She did so now. When she sat down again with Moss, wanting not to return to what they had been

saying, for the older woman looked dour and sullen, she said, “This morning when I woke up I felt, oh, as if a new wind were blowing. A change. Maybe just the weather. Did you feel that?”

But Moss would not say yes or no. “Many a wind blows here on the Overfell, some good, some ill. Some bears clouds and some fair weather, and some brings news to those who can hear it, but those who won’t listen can’t hear. Who am I to know, an old woman without mage~learning, without book~learning? All my learning’s in the earth, in the dark earth. Under their feet, the proud ones. Under their feet, the proud lords and mages. Why should they look down, the learned ones? What does an old witch-woman know?”

She would be a formidable enemy, Tenar thought, and was a difficult friend.

“Aunty,” she said, taking up a reed, “I grew up among women. Only women, In the Kargish lands, far east, in Atuan, I was taken from my family as a little child to be brought up a priestess in a place in the desert. I don’t know what name it has, all we called it in our language was just that, the place. The only place I knew. There were a few soldiers guarding it, but they couldn’t come inside the walls. And we couldn’t go outside the walls. Only in a group, all women and girls, with eunuchs guarding us, keeping the men out of sight.”

“What’s those you said?”

“Eunuchs?” Tenar had used the Kargish word without thinking. “Gelded men,” she said.

The witch stared, and said, “Tsekh!” and made the sign to avert evil. She sucked her lips. She had been startled out of her resentment.

“One of them was the nearest to a mother I had there.. . , But do you see, Aunty, I never saw a man till I was a woman grown. Only girls and women. And yet I didn’t know what women are, because women were all I did know. Like men who live among men, sailors, and soldiers, and mages on Roke-do they know what men are? How can they, if they never speak to a woman?”

“Do they take ‘em and do ‘em like rams and he-goats,” said Moss, “like that, with a gelding knife?”

Horror, the macabre, and a gleam of vengeance had won out over both anger and reason. Moss didn’t want to pursue any topic but that of eunuchs.

Tenar could not tell her much. She realized that she had never thought about the matter. When she was a girl in Atuan, there had been gelded men; and one of them had loved her tenderly, and she him; and she had killed him to escape from him. Then she had come to the Archipelago, where there were no eunuchs, and had forgotten them, sunk them in darkness with Manan’s body.

“I suppose,” she said, trying to satisfy Moss’s craving for details, “that they took young boys, and-” But she stopped. Her hands stopped working.

“Like Therru,” she said after a long pause. “What’s a child for? What’s it there for? To be used. To be raped, to be gelded— Listen, Moss. When I lived in the dark places, that was what they did there. And when I came here, I thought I’d come out into the light, I learned the true words. And I had my man, I bore my children, I lived well. In the broad daylight, And in the broad daylight, they did that-to the child. In the meadows by the river. The river that rises from the spring where Ogion named my daughter. In the sunlight. I am trying to find out where I can live, Moss. Do you know what I mean? What I’m trying to say?”

“Well, well,” the older woman said; and after a while,

“Dearie, there’s misery enough without going looking for it.” And seeing Tenar’s hands shake as she tried to split a stubborn reed, she said, again, “Don’t cut your thumb on ‘em, dearie. “

It was not till the next day that Ged roused at all. Moss, who was very skillful though appallingly unclean as a nurse, had succeeded in spooning some meat-broth into him. “Starving,” she said, “and dried up with thirst. Wherever he was, they didn’t do much eating and drinking.” And after appraising him again, “He’ll be too far gone already, I think. They get weak, see, and can’t even drink, though it’s all they need. I’ve known a great strong man to die like that. All in a few days, shriveled to a shadow, like.”

But through relentless patience she got a few spoonfuls of her brew of meat and herbs into him. “Now we’ll see,” she said. “Too late, I guess. He’s slipping away.” She spoke without regret, perhaps with relish. The man was nothing to her; a death was an event. Maybe she could bury this mage. They had not let her bury the old one.

Tenar was salving his hands, the next day, when he woke. He must have ridden long on Kalessin’s back, for his fierce grip on the iron scales had scoured the skin off his palms, and the inner side of the fingers was cut and recut. Sleeping, he kept his hands clenched as if they would not let go the absent dragon. She had to force his fingers open gently to wash and salve the sores. As she did that, he cried out and started, reaching out, as if he felt himself falling. His eyes opened. She spoke quietly. He looked at her.

“Tenar,” he said without smiling, in pure recognition beyond emotion. And it gave her pure pleasure, like a sweet flavor or a flower, that there was still one man living who knew her name, and that it was this man.

She leaned forward and kissed his cheek. “Lie still,” she said. “Let me finish this. “ He obeyed, drifting back into sleep soon, this time with his hands open and relaxed.

Later, falling asleep beside Therru in the night, she thought, But I never kissed him before, And the thought shook her. At first she disbelieved it. Surely, in all the years— Not in the Tombs, but after, traveling together in the mountains— In Lookfar, when they sailed together to Havnor— When he brought her here to Gont-?

No. Nor had Ogion ever kissed her, or she him. He had called her daughter, and had loved her, but had not touched her; and she, brought up as a solitary, untouched priestess, a holy thing, had not sought touch, or had not known she sought it. She would lean her forehead or her cheek for a moment on Ogion’s open hand, and he might stroke her hair, once, very lightly.