Tehanu The Last Book of Earthsea - Le Guin Ursula Kroeber - Страница 4

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But no word of any deed of the Archmage, or any heir to the Throne in Havnor, had come; and things went badly on.

So it was with fear and a grim anger that Goha saw the four men on the road before her step two to each side, so that she and the child would have to pass between them.

As they went walking steadily forward, Therru kept very close beside her, holding her head bent down, but she did not take her hand.

One of the men, a big-chested fellow with coarse black hairs on his upper lip drooping over his mouth, began to speak, grinning a little. “Hey, there,” he said, but Goha spoke at the same time and louder. “Out of my way!” she said, raising her alder stick as if it were a wizard’s staff-” I have business with Ogion!” She strode between the men and straight on, Therru trotting beside her. The men, mistaking effrontery for witchery, stood still. Ogion’s name perhaps still held power. Or perhaps there was a power in Goha, or in the child. For when the two had gone by, one of the men said, “Did you see that?” and spat and made the sign to avert evil.

“Witch and her monster brat,” another said. “Let em go!”

Another, a man in a leather cap and jerkin, stood staring for a moment while the others slouched on their way. His face looked sick and stricken, yet he seemed to be turning to follow the woman and child, when the hairy-lipped man called to him, “Come on, Handy!” and he obeyed.

Out of sight around the turn of the road, Goha had picked up Therm and hurried on with her until she had to set her down and stand gasping. The child asked no questions and made no delays. As soon as Goha could go on again, the child walked as fast as she could beside her, holding her hand.

“You’re red,” she said. “Like fire.”

She spoke seldom, and not clearly, her voice being very hoarse; but Goha could understand her.

“I’m angry,” Goha said with a kind of laugh. “When I’m angry I turn red. Like you people, you red people, you barbarians of the western lands. . . . Look, there’s a town

there ahead, that’ll be Oak Springs. It’s the only village on this road. We’ll stop there and rest a little. Maybe we can get some milk. And then, if we can go on, if you think you can walk on up to the Falcon’s Nest, we’ll be there by nightfall, I hope.”

The child nodded. She opened her bag of raisins and walnuts and ate a few. They trudged on.

The sun had long set when they came through the village and to Ogion’s house on the cliff-top. The first stars glimmered above a dark mass of clouds in the west over the high horizon of the sea. The sea wind blew, bowing short grasses. A goat bleated in the pastures behind the low, small house. The one window shone dim yellow.

Goha stood her stick and Therm’s against the wall by the door, and held the child’s hand, and knocked once.

There was no answer.

She pushed the door open. The fire on the hearth was out, cinders and grey ashes, but an oil lamp on the table made a tiny seed of light, and from his mattress on the floor in the far corner of the room Ogion said, “Come in, Tenar.”

She bedded down the child on the cot in the western alcove. She built up the fire. She went and sat down beside Ogion’s pallet, cross-legged on the floor.

“No one looking after you!”

“I sent ‘em off,” he whispered.

His face was as dark and hard as ever, but his hair was thin and white, and the dim lamp made no spark of light in his eyes.

“You could have died alone,” she said, fierce. “Help me do that,” the old man said. “Not yet,” she pleaded, stooping, laying her forehead on his hand.

“Not tonight,” he agreed. “Tomorrow.”

He lifted his hand to stroke her hair once, having that much strength.

She sat up again. The fire had caught. Its light played on the walls and low ceiling and sent shadows to thicken in the corners of the long room.

“If Ged would come,” the old man murmured.

“Have you sent to him?”

“Lost,” Ogion said. “He’s lost. A cloud. A mist over the lands. He went into the west. Carrying the branch of the rowan tree. Into the dark mist. I’ve lost my hawk.”

“No, no, no,” she whispered. “He’ll come back.”

They were silent. The fire’s warmth began to penetrate them both, letting Ogion relax and drift in and out of sleep, letting Tenar find rest pleasant after the long day afoot. She rubbed her feet and her aching shoulders. She had carried Therru part of the last long climb, for the child had begun to gasp with weariness as she tried to keep up.

Tenar got up, heated water, and washed the dust of the road from her. She heated milk, and ate bread she found in Ogion’s larder, and came back to sit by him. While he slept, she sat thinking, watching his face and the firelight and the shadows.

She thought how a girl had sat silent, thinking, in the night, a long time ago and far away, a girl in a windowless room, brought up to know herself only as the one who had been eaten, priestess and servant of the powers of the darkness of the earth. And there had been a woman who would sit up in the peaceful silence of a farmhouse when husband and children slept, to think, to be alone an hour. And there was the widow who had carried a burned child here, who sat by the side of the dying, who waited for a man to return. Like all women, any woman, doing what women do. But it was not by the names of the servant or the wife or the widow that Ogion had called her. Nor had Ged, in the darkness of the Tombs. Nor-longer ago, farther away than all-had her mother, the mother she remembered only as the warmth and lion-color of firelight, the mother who had given her her name.

“I am Tenar,” she whispered. The fire, catching a dry branch of pine, leaped up in a .bright yellow tongue of flame.

Ogion’s breathing became troubled and he struggled for air. She helped him as she could till he found some ease.

They both slept for a while, she drowsing by his dazed and drifting silence, broken by strange words. Once in the deep night he said aloud, as if meeting a friend in the road, “Are you here, then? Have you seen him?” And again, when Tenar roused herself to build up the fire, he began to speak, but this time it seemed he spoke to someone in his memory of years long gone, for he said clearly as a child might, “I tried to help her, but the roof of the house fell down. It fell on them. It was the earthquake.” Tenar listened. She too had seen earthquake. “I tried to help!” said the boy in the old man’s voice, in pain. Then the gasping struggle to breathe began again.

At first light Tenar was wakened by a sound she thought at first was the sea. It was a great rushing of wings. A flock of birds was flying over, low, so many that their wings stormed and the window was darkened by their quick shadows. It seemed they circled the house once and then were gone. They made no call or cry, and she did not know what birds they were.

People came that morning from the village of Re Albi, which Ogion’s house stood apart from to the north. A goatgirl came, and a woman for the milk of Ogion’s goats, and others to ask what they might do for him. Moss, the village witch, fingered the alder stick and the hazel switch by the door and peered in hopefully, but not even she ventured to come in, and Ogion growled from his pallet, “Send ‘em away! Send ‘em all away!”

He seemed stronger and more comfortable. When little Therru woke, he spoke to her in the dry, kind, quiet way Tenar remembered. The child went out to play in the sun, and he said to Tenar, “What is the name you call her?”

He knew the True Language of the Making, but he had never learned any Kargish at all.

“Therru means burning, the flaming of fire,” she said.

“Ah, ah,” he said, and his eyes gleamed, and he frowned. He seemed to grope for words for a moment. “That one,” he said, “That one-they will fear her.”

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