Tenar watched it till it was no larger than a wild goose or a gull. The air was cold. When the dragon had been there it had been hot, furnace-hot, with the dragon’s inward fire. Tenar shivered. She sat down on the rock beside Ged and began to cry. She hid her face in her arms and wept aloud. “What can I do?” she cried. “What can I do now?”
Presently she wiped hen eyes and nose on hen sleeve, put back her hair with both hands, and turned to the man who lay beside her. He lay so still, so easy on the bare rock, as if he might lie there forever.
Tenar sighed. There was nothing she could do, but there was always the next thing to be done.
She could not carry him. She would have to get help. That meant leaving him alone. It seemed to her that he was too near the cliff’s edge. If he tried to get up he might fall, weak and dizzy as he would be. How could she move him? He did not rouse at all when she spoke and touched him. She took him under the shoulders and tried to pull him, and to her surprise succeeded; dead weight as he was, the weight was not much. Resolute, she dragged him ten on fifteen feet inland, off the bane rock shelf onto a bit of dirt, where dry bunchgrass gave some illusion of shelter. There she had to leave him. She could not run, for her legs shook and her breath still came in sobs. She walked as fast as she could to Ogion’s house, calling out as she approached it to Heather, Moss, and Thenru.
The child appeared around the milking shed and stood, as her way was, obedient to Tenar’s call but not coming forward to greet or be greeted .
“Therru, run into town and ask anyone to come-anybody strong- There’s a man hurt on the cliff.”
Therru stood there. She had never gone alone into the village. She was frozen between obedience and fear. Tenan saw that and said, “Is Aunty Moss here? Is Heather? The
three of us can carry him. Only, quick, quick, Therru!” She felt that if she let Ged lie unprotected there he would surely die. He would be gone when she came back-dead, fallen, taken by dragons. Anything could happen. She must hurry before it happened. Flint had died of a stroke in his fields and she had not been with him. He had died alone. The shepherd had found him lying by the gate. Ogion had died and she could not keep him from dying, she could not give him breath. Ged had come home to die and it was the end of everything, there was nothing left, nothing to be done, but she must do it. “Quick, Therru! Bring anyone!”
She started shakily towards the village herself, but saw old Moss hurrying across the pasture, stumping along with her thick hawthorn stick. “Did you call me, dearie?”
Moss’s presence was an immediate relief. She began to get her breath and be able to think. Moss wasted no time in questions, but hearing there was a man hurt who must be moved, got the heavy canvas mattress-cover that Tenar had been airing, and lugged it out to the end of the Over-fell. She and Tenan rolled Ged onto it and were dragging this conveyance laboriously homeward when Heathen came trotting along, followed by Therru and Sippy. Heathen was young and strong, and with hen help they could lift the canvas like a litter and canny the man to the house.
Tenar and Therru slept in the alcove in the west wall of the long single room. There was only Ogion’s bed at the fan end, covered now with a heavy linen sheet. There they laid the man. Tenar put Ogion’s blanket over him, while Moss muttered charms around the bed, and Heather and Therru stood and stared .
“Let him be now,” said Tenar, leading them all to the front pant of the house.
“Who is he?” Heather asked.
“What was he doing on the Overfell?” Moss asked.
“You know him, Moss. He was Ogion’s-Aihal’s prentice, once.
The witch shook her head. “That was the lad from Ten Alders, dearie,” she said. “The one that’s Anchmage in Roke, now.”
Tenan nodded.
“No, dearie,” said Moss. “This looks like him. But isn’t him. This man’s no mage. Not even a sorcerer.”
Heathen looked from one to the other, entertained. She did not understand most things people said, but she liked to hear them say them.
“But I know him, Moss. It’s Sparrowhawk.” Saying the name, Ged’s use-name, released a tenderness in her, so that for the first time she thought and felt that this was he indeed, and that all the years since she had first seen him were their bond. She saw a light like a star in darkness, underground, long ago, and his face in the light. “I know him, Moss.” She smiled, and then smiled more broadly. “He’s the first man I ever saw,” she said.
Moss mumbled and shifted. She did not like to contradict “Mistress Goha,” but she was perfectly unconvinced. “There’s tricks, disguises, transformations, changes,” she said. “Better be careful, dearie. How did he get where you found him, away out there? Did any see him come through the village?”
“None of you-saw-?”
They stared at her. She tried to say “the dragon” and could not. Her lips and tongue would not form the word. But a word formed itself with them, making itself with her mouth and breath. “Kalessin,” she said.
Therru was staring at her. A wave of warmth, heat, seemed to flow from the child, as if she were in fever. She said nothing, but moved her lips as if repeating the name, and that fever heat burned around her.
“Tricks!” Moss said. “Now that our mage is gone there’ll be all kinds of tnicksters coming round.”
“I came from Atuan to Havnon, from Havnor to Gont, with Sparnowhawk, in an open boat,” Tenar said drily.
“You saw him when he brought me here, Moss. He wasn’t archmage then. But he was the same, the same man. Are there other scars like those?”
Confronted, the olden woman became still, collecting herself. She glanced at Therru. “No,” she said. “But-”
“Do you think I wouldn’t know him?”
Moss twisted her mouth, frowned, rubbed one thumb with the other, looking at hen hands. “There’s evil things in the world, mistress,” she said. “A thing that takes a man’s form and body, but his soul’s gone-eaten- “The gebbeth?”
Moss cringed at the word spoken openly. She nodded.
“They do say, once the mage Sparrowhawk came here, long ago, before you came with him. And a thing of dankness came with him-following him. Maybe it still does. Maybe-”
“The dragon who brought him here,” Tenar said, “called him by his true name. And I know that name. Wrath at the witch’s obstinate suspicion rang in hen voice.
Moss stood mute. Her silence was better argument than her words.
“Maybe the shadow on him is his death,” Tenan said. “Maybe he’s dying. I don’t know. If Ogion-”
At the thought of Ogion she was in tears again, thinking how Ged had come too late. She swallowed the tears and went to the woodbox for kindling for the fire. She gave Therru the kettle to fill, touching hen face as she spoke to her. The seamed and slabby scars were hot to touch, but the child was not feverish. Tenar knelt to make the fire. Somebody in this fine household-a witch, a widow, a cripple, and a half-wit-had to do what must be done, and not frighten the child with weeping. But the dragon was gone, and was there nothing to come any more but death?
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.