Ursula K. LeGuin

THE BONES OF THE EARTH

It was raining again, and the wizard of Re Albi was sorely tempted to make a weather spell, just a little, small spell, to send the rain on round the mountain. His bones ached. They ached for the sun to come out and shine through his flesh and dry them out. Of course he could say a pain spell, but all that would do was hide the ache for a while. There was no cure for what ailed him. Old bones need the sun. The wizard stood still in the doorway of his house, between the dark room and the rainstreaked open air, preventing himself from making a spell, and angry at himself for preventing himself and for having to be prevented.

He never swore—men of power do not swear, it is not safe—but he cleared his throat with a coughing growl, like a bear. A moment later a thunderclap rolled off the hidden upper slopes of Gont Mountain, echoing round from north to south, dying away in the cloud-filled forests.

A good sign, thunder, Dulse thought. It would stop raining soon. He pulled up his hood and went out into the rain to feed the chickens.

He checked the henhouse, finding three eggs. Red Bucca was setting. Her eggs were about due to hatch. The mites were bothering her, and she looked scruffy and jaded. He said a few words against mites, told himself to remember to clean out the nest box as soon as the chicks hatched, and went on to the poultry yard, where Brown Bucca and Grey and Leggings and Candor and the King huddled under the eaves making soft, shrewish remarks about rain.

“It'll stop by midday,” the wizard told the chickens. He fed them and squelched back to the house with three warm eggs. When he was a child he had liked to walk in mud. He remembered enjoying the cool of it rising between his toes. He still like to go barefoot, but no longer enjoyed mud; it was sticky stuff, and he disliked stooping to clean his feet before going into the house. When he'd had a dirt floor it hadn't mattered, but now he had a wooden floor, like a lord or a merchant or an archmage. To keep the cold and damp out of his bones. Not his own notion. Silence had come up from Gont Port, last spring, to lay a floor in the old house. They had had one of their arguments about it. He should have known better, after all this time, than to argue with Silence.

“I've walked on dirt for seventy-five years,” Dulse had said. “A few more won't kill me!"

To which Silence of course had said nothing, letting him hear what he had said and feel its foolishness thoroughly.

“Dirt's easier to keep clean,” he said, knowing the struggle already lost. It was true that all you had to do with a good hard-packed clay floor was sweep it and now and then sprinkle it to keep the dust down. But it sounded silly all the same.

“Who's to lay this floor?” he said, now merely querulous.

Silence nodded, meaning himself.

The boy was in fact a workman of the first order, carpenter, cabinetmaker, stonelayer, roofer; he had proved that when he lived up here as Dulse's student, and his life with the rich folk of Gont Port had not softened his hands. He brought the boards from Sixth's mill in Re Albi, driving Gammer's ox-team; he laid the floor and polished it the next day, while the old wizard was up at Bog Lake gathering simples. When Dulse came home there it was, shining like a dark lake itself. “Have to wash my feet every time I come in,” he grumbled. He walked in gingerly. The wood was so smooth it seemed soft to the bare sole. “Satin,” he said. “You didn't do all that in one day without a spell or two. A village hut with a palace floor. Well, it'll be a sight, come winter, to see the fire shine in that! Or do I have to get me a carpet now? A fleecefell, on a golden warp?"

Silence smiled. He was pleased with himself.

He had turned up on Dulse's doorstep a few years ago. Well, no, twenty years ago it must be, or twenty-five. A while ago now. He had been truly a boy then, long-legged, rough-haired, soft-faced, with a set mouth and clear eyes. “What do you want?” the wizard had asked, knowing what he wanted, what they all wanted, and keeping his eyes from those clear eyes. He was a good teacher, the best on Gont, he knew that. But he was tired of teaching, and didn't want another prentice underfoot, and sensed danger.

“To learn,” the boy whispered.

“Go to Roke,” the wizard said. The boy wore shoes and a good leather vest. He could afford or earn ship's passage to the School.

“I've been there."

At that Dulse looked him over again. No cloak, no staff.

“Failed? Sent away? Ran away?"

The boy shook his head at each question. He shut his eyes; his mouth was already shut. He stood there, intensely gathered, suffering: drew breath: looked straight into the wizard's eyes.

“My mastery is here, on Gont,” he said, still speaking hardly above a whisper. “My master is Enhemon”.

At that the wizard whose true name was Enhemon stood as still as he did, looking back at him, till the boy's gaze dropped.

In silence Dulse sought his name, and saw two things: a fir-cone, and the rune of the Closed Mouth. Then seeking further he heard in his mind a name spoken; but he did not speak it.

“I'm tired of teaching and talking,” he said. “I need silence. Is that enough for you?"

The boy nodded once.

“Then to me you are Silence,” the wizard said. “You can sleep in the nook under the west window. There's an old pallet in the woodhouse. Air it. Don't bring mice in with it.” And he stalked off towards the Overfell, angry with the boy for coming and with himself for giving in; but it was not anger that made his heart pound. Striding along—he could stride, then—with the seawind pushing at him always from the left and the early sunlight on the sea out past the vast shadow of the mountain, he thought of the Mages of Roke, the masters of the art magic, the professors of mystery and power. “He was too much for ‘em, was he? And he'll be too much for me,” he thought, and smiled. He was a peaceful man, but he did not mind a bit of danger.

He stopped and felt the dirt under his feet. He was barefoot, as usual. When he was a student on Roke, he had worn shoes. But he had come back home to Gont, to Re Albi, with his wizard's staff, and kicked his shoes off. He stood still and felt the dust and rock of the cliff-top path under his feet, and the cliffs under that, and the roots of the island in the dark under that. In the dark under the waters all islands touched and were one. So his teacher Ard had said, and so his teachers on Roke had said. But this was his island, his rock, dust, dirt. His wizardry grew out of it. “My mastery is here,” the boy had said, but it went deeper than mastery. That, perhaps, was something Dulse could teach him: what went deeper than mastery. What he had learned here, on Gont, before he ever went to Roke.

And the boy must have a staff. Why had Nemmerle let him leave Roke without one, empty-handed as a prentice or a witch? Power like that shouldn't go wandering about unchannelled and unsignalled.

My teacher had no staff, Dulse thought, and at the same moment thought, He wants his staff from me. Gontish oak, from the hands of a Gontish wizard. Well, if he earns it I'll make him one. If he can keep his mouth closed. And I'll leave him my lore-books. If he can clean out a henhouse, and understand the Glosses of Danemer, and keep his mouth closed.

The new student cleaned out the henhouse and hoed the bean-patch, learned the meaning of the Glosses of Danemer and the Arcana of the Enlades, and kept his mouth closed. He listened. He heard what Dulse said; sometimes he heard what Dulse thought. He did what Dulse wanted and what Dulse did not know he wanted. His gift was far beyond Dulse's guidance, yet he had been right to come to Re Albi, and they both knew it.

Dulse thought sometimes in those years about sons and fathers. He had quarreled with his own father, a sorcerer-prospector, over his choice of a teacher; his father had shouted that a student of Ard's was no son of his, had nursed his rage and died unforgiving. Dulse had seen young men weep for joy at the birth of a first son. He had seen poor men pay witches a year's earnings for the promise of a healthy boy, and a rich man touch his gold-bedizened baby's face and whisper, adoring, “My immortality!” He had seen men beat their sons, bully and humiliate them, spite and thwart them, hating the death they saw in them. He had seen the answering hatred in the son's eyes, the threat, the pitiless contempt. And seeing it, Dulse knew why he had never sought reconciliation with his father. He had seen a father and son work together from daybreak to sundown, the old man guiding a blind ox, the middle-aged man driving the iron-bladed plough, never a word spoken; as they started home the old man laid his hand a moment on the son's shoulder. In that touch, Dulse had seen what was lacking in his life. He remembered it when he looked across the hearth, winter evenings, at the dark face bent above a lorebook or a shirt that needed mending. The eyes cast down, the mouth closed, the spirit listening.

“Once in his lifetime, if he's lucky, a wizard finds somebody he can talk to.” Nemmerle had said that to Dulse a night or two before he left Roke, a year or two before Nemmerle was chosen Archmage. He had been the Master Patterner and the kindest of all Dulse's teachers at the School. “I think, if you stayed, Enhemon, we could talk."

Dulse had been unable to answer at all for a while. Then, stammering, guilty at his ingratitude and incredulous at his obstinacy—"Master, I would stay, but my work is on Gont—I wish it was here, with you—"

“It's a rare gift, to know where you need to be, before you've been to all the places you don't need to be. Well, send me a student now and then. Roke needs Gontish wizardry. I think we're leaving things out, here, things worth knowing...."

Dulse had sent students on to the School, three or four of them, nice lads with a gift for this or that; but the one Nemmerle waited for had come and gone of his own will, and what they had thought of him on Roke Dulse did not know. Silence did not say. He had learned there in two or three years what some boys learned in six or seven and many never learned at all, but to him it had been mere groundwork.

“Why didn't you come to me first?” Dulse had demanded. “And then Roke, to put a polish on it?"

“I didn't want to waste your time."

“Did Nemmerle know you were coming to work with me?"

Silence shook his head.

“If you'd deigned to tell him your intentions, he might have sent a message to me."

Silence looked stricken. “Was he your friend?"

Dulse paused. “He was my master. Would have been my friend, perhaps, if I'd stayed on Roke. Have wizards friends? No more than they have wives, or sons, some would say.... Once he said to me that in our trade it's a lucky man who finds someone to talk to. Keep that in mind. If you're lucky, one day you'll have to open your mouth."

Silence bowed his rough, thoughtful head.

“If it hasn't rusted shut,” Dulse added.

“If you ask me to, I'll talk,” the young man said, so earnest, so willing to deny his whole nature at Dulse's request that the wizard had to laugh.

“I asked you not to,” he said, “and it's not my need I spoke of. I talk enough for two. Never mind. You'll know what to say when the time comes. That's the art, eh? What to say, and when to say it. And the rest is silence."

The young man slept on a pallet under the little west window of Dulse's house for three years. He learned wizardry, fed the chickens, milked the cow. He suggested, once, that Dulse keep goats. He had not said anything for a week or so, a cold, wet week of autumn. He said, “You might keep some goats."

Dulse had the big lorebook open on the table. He had been trying to reweave one of the Acastan Spells, much broken and made powerless by the Emanations of Fundaur centuries ago. He had just begun to get a sense of the missing word that might fill one of the gaps, he almost had it, and—"You might keep some goats,” Silence said.

Dulse considered himself a wordy, impatient man with a short temper. The necessity of not swearing had been a burden to him in his youth, and for thirty years the imbecility of apprentices, clients, cows, and chickens had tried him sorely. Apprentices and clients were afraid of his tongue, though cows and chickens paid no attention to his outbursts. He had never been angry at Silence before. There was a very long pause.

“What for?"

Silence apparently did not notice the pause or the extreme softness of Dulse's voice. “Milk, cheese, roast kid, company,” he said.

“Have you ever kept goats?” Dulse asked, in the same soft, polite voice.

Silence shook his head.

He was in fact a town boy, born in Gont Port. He had said nothing about himself, but Dulse had asked around a bit. The father, a longshoreman, had died in the big earthquake, when Silence would have been seven or eight; the mother was a cook at a waterfront inn. At twelve the boy had got into some kind of trouble, probably messing about with magic, and his mother had managed to prentice him to Elassen, a respectable sorcerer in Valmouth. There the boy had picked up his true name, and some skill in carpentry and farmwork, if not much else; and Elassen had had the generosity, after three years, to pay his passage to Roke. That was all Dulse knew about him.

“I dislike goat cheese,” Dulse said.

Silence nodded, acceptant as always.

From time to time in the years since then, Dulse remembered how he hadn't lost his temper when Silence asked about keeping goats; and each time the memory gave him a quiet satisfaction, like that of finishing the last bite of a perfectly ripe pear.

After spending the next several days trying to recapture the missing word, he had set Silence to studying the Acastan Spells. Together they had finally worked it out, a long toil. “Like ploughing with a blind ox,” Dulse said. Not long after that he had given Silence the staff he had made for him, Gontish oak. And the Lord of Gont Port had tried once again to get Dulse to come down to do what needed doing in Gont Port, and Dulse had sent Silence down instead, and there he had stayed.

And Dulse was standing on his own doorstep, three eggs in his hand and the rain running cold down his back. How long had he been standing here? Why was he standing here? He had been thinking about mud, about the floor, about Silence. Had he been out walking on the path above the Overfell? No, that was years ago, years ago, in the sunlight. It was raining. He had fed the chickens, and come back to the house with three eggs, they were still warm in his hand, silky brown lukewarm eggs, and the sound of thunder was still in his mind, the vibration of thunder was in his bones, in his feet. Thunder?

No. There had been a thunderclap, a while ago. This was not thunder. He had had this queer feeling and had not recognised it, back then, before the earthquake that had sunk a halfmile of the coast at Essary and swamped the wharfs at Gont Port.

He stepped down from the doorstep onto the dirt so that he could feel the ground with the nerves of his soles, but the mud slimed and fouled any messages the dirt had for him. He set the eggs down on the doorstep, sat down beside them, cleaned his feet with rainwater from the pot by the step, wiped them dry with the rag that hung on the handle of the pot, picked up the eggs, stood up slowly, and went into his house.

He gave a sharp look at his staff, which leaned in the corner behind the door. He put the eggs in the larder, ate an apple quickly because he was hungry, and took his staff. It was yew, bound at the foot with copper, worn to silk at the grip. Nemmerle had given it to him. “Stand!” he said to it in its language, and let go of it. It stood as if he had driven it into a socket. “To the root,” he said impatiently, in the language of the Making. “To the root!"

He watched the staff that stood on the shining floor. In a little while he saw it quiver very slightly, a shiver, a tremble.

“Ah, ah, ah,” said the old wizard.

“What should I do?” he said aloud after a while.

The staff swayed, was still, shivered again.

“Enough of that, my dear,” Dulse said, laying his hand on it. “Come now. No wonder I kept thinking about Silence. I should send for him ... send to him ... No. What did Ard say? Find the center, find the center. That's the question to ask. That's what to do...” As he muttered on to himself, routing out his heavy cloak, setting water to boil on the small fire he had lighted earlier, he wondered if he had always talked to himself, if he had talked all the time when Silence lived with him. No, it had become a habit after Silence left, he thought, with the bit of his mind that went on thinking the ordinary thoughts of life, while the rest of it made preparations for terror and destruction.

He hardboiled the three new eggs and one already in the larder and put them into a pouch along with four apples and a bladder of resinated wine, in case he had to stay out all night. He shrugged arthritically into his heavy cloak, took up his staff, told the fire to go out, and left.

He no longer kept a cow. He stood looking into the poultry yard, considering. The fox had been visiting the orchard lately. But the birds would have to forage if he stayed away. They must take their chances, like everyone else. He opened their gate a little. Though the rain was no more than a misty drizzle now, they stayed hunched up under the henhouse eaves, disconsolate. The King had not crowed once this morning.

“Have you anything to tell me?” Dulse asked them.

Brown Bucca, his favorite, shook herself and said her name a few times. The others said nothing.

“Well, take care. I saw the fox on the full-moon night,” Dulse said, and went on his way.

As he walked he thought; he thought hard; he recalled. He recalled all he could of matters his teacher had spoken of once only and long ago. Strange matters, so strange he had never known if they were true wizardry or mere witchery, as they said on Roke; matters he certainly had never heard about on Roke, nor did he ever speak about them there, maybe fearing the Masters would despise him for taking such things seriously, maybe knowing they would not understand them, because they were Gontish matters, truths of Gont. Yet Ard's lorebooks, that had come down from the Great Mage Ennas of Gont, said nothing of them. They were all word of mouth. They were home matters.

“Go to the Dark Pond at the top of Semere's cow pasture,” his teacher had told him. “You can read the Mountain there. You need to find the center. See where to go in."

“Go in?” the boy Dulse had whispered.

“What could you do from outside?"

Dulse was silent for a long time, and then said, “How?"

“Thus.” And Ard's long arms had stretched out and upward in the invocation of what Dulse would know later was a great spell of Transforming. Ard spoke the words of the spell awry, as teachers of wizardry must do lest the spell operate. Dulse knew the trick of hearing them aright and remembering them. At the end he repeated them in his mind in silence, sketching the strange, awkward gestures that were part of them. All at once his hand stopped.

“But you can't undo this!” he said aloud.

Ard nodded. “It is irrevocable”.

He knew no transformation that was irrevocable, no spell that could not be unsaid, except the Word of Unbinding, which is spoken only once.

“But why—?"

“At need,” Ard said.

He knew better than to ask for explanation. The need to speak such a spell could not come often; the chance of his ever having to use it was very slight. He let the terrible spell sink down in his mind and be hidden and layered over with a thousand useful or beautiful or enlightening mageries and charms, all the lore and rules of Roke, all the wisdom of the books Ard had bequeathed him. Crude, monstrous, useless, it lay in the dark of his mind for sixty years, like the cornerstone of an earlier, forgotten house down in the cellar of a mansion full of lights and treasures and children.

The rain had ceased, though mist still hid the peak and shreds of cloud drifted through the high forests. Dulse was not a tireless walker like Silence, who would have spent his life wandering in the forests of Gont Mountain if he could; but he had been born in Re Albi and knew the roads and ways around it as part of himself. He took the shortcut at Rissi's well and came out before midday on Semere's high pasture, a level step on the mountainside. A mile below it, all sunlit now, the farm buildings stood in the lee of a hill, across which a flock of sheep moved like a cloud-shadow. Gont Port and its bay were hidden under the steep, knotted hills that stood above the city.

Dulse wandered about a bit before he found what he took to be the Dark Pond. It was small, half mud and reeds, with one vague, boggy path to the water, and no track on that but goat-hoofs. The water was dark, though it lay out under the bright sky and far above the peat soils. Dulse followed the goat-tracks, growling when his foot slipped in the mud and he wrenched his ankle to keep from falling. At the brink of the water he stood still. He stooped to rub his ankle. He listened.

It was absolutely silent.

No wind. No birdcall. No distant lowing or bleating or call of voice. As if all the island had gone still. Not a fly buzzed.

He looked at the dark water. It reflected nothing.

Reluctant, he stepped forward, barefoot and bare-legged; he had rolled up his cloak into his pack an hour ago when the sun came out. Reeds brushed his legs. The mud was soft and sucking under his feet, full of tangling reed-roots. He made no noise as he moved slowly out into the pool, and the circles of ripples from his movement were slight and small. It was shallow for a long way. Then his cautious foot felt no bottom, and he paused.

The water shivered. He felt it first on his thighs, a lapping like the tickling touch of fur; then he saw it, the trembling of the surface all over the pond. Not the round ripples he made, which had already died away, but a ruffling, a roughening, a shudder, again, and again.

“Where?” he whispered, and then said the word aloud in the language all things understand that have no other language.

There was the silence. Then a fish leapt from the black, shaking water, a white-grey fish the length of his hand, and as it leapt it cried out in a small, clear voice, in that same language, “Iaved!"

The old wizard stood there. He recollected all he knew of the names of Gont, and after a while he saw where Iaved was. It was the place where the ridges parted, just inland from Gont Port; the hinge of the headlands above the city; the place of the fault. An earthquake centered there could shake the city down, bring avalanche and tidal wave, close the cliffs of the bay together like hands clapping. Dulse shivered, shuddered all over like the water of the pool.

He turned and made for the shore, hasty, careless where he set his feet and not caring if he broke the silence by splashing and breathing hard. He slogged back up the path through the reeds till he reached dry ground and coarse grass, and heard the buzz of midges and crickets. He sat down then on the ground, rather hard, for his legs were shaking.

“It won't do,” he said, talking to himself in Hardic, and then he said, “I can't do it.” Then he said, “I can't do it by myself."

He was so distraught that when he made up his mind to call Silence he could not think of the opening of the spell, which he had known for sixty years; then when he thought he had it, he began to speak a Summoning instead, and the spell had begun to work before he realised what he was doing and stopped and undid it word by word.

He pulled up some grass and rubbed at the slimy mud on his feet and legs. It was not dry yet, and only smeared about on his skin. “I hate mud,” he whispered. Then he snapped his jaws and stopped trying to clean his legs. “Dirt, dirt,” he said, gently patting the ground he sat on. Then, very slow, very careful, he began to speak the spell of calling.

In a busy street leading down to the busy wharfs of Gont Port, the wizard Ogion stopped short. The ship's captain beside him walked on several steps and turned to see Ogion talking to the air.

“But I will come, master!” he said. And then after a pause, “How soon?” And after a longer pause, he told the air something in a language the ship's captain did not understand, and made a gesture that darkened the air about him for an instant.

“Captain,” he said, “I'm sorry, I must wait to spell your sails. An earthquake is near. I must warn the city. Do you tell them down there, every ship that can sail make for the open sea. Clear out, past the Armed Cliffs! Good luck to you.” And he turned and ran back up the street, a tall, strong man with rough greying hair, running now like a stag.

Gont Port lies at the inner end of a long narrow bay between steep shores. Its entrance from the sea is between two great headlands, the Gates of the Port, the Armed Cliffs, not a hundred feet apart. They are safe from sea-pirates in Gont Port. But their safety is their danger; the long bay follows a fault in the earth, and jaws that have opened may shut.

When he had done what he could to warn the city, and seen all the gate-guards and port-guards doing what they could to keep the few roads out from becoming choked and murderous with panicky people, Ogion shut himself into a room in the signal tower of the Port, locked the door, for everybody wanted him at once, and sent a sending to the Dark Pond in Semere's cow pasture up on the Mountain.

His old master was sitting in the grass near the pond, eating an apple. Bits of eggshell flecked the ground near his legs, which were caked with drying mud. When he looked up and saw Ogion's sending he smiled a wide, sweet smile. But he looked old. He had never looked so old. Ogion had not seen him for over a year, having been busy; he was always busy in Gont Port, doing the business of the lords and people, never a chance to walk in the forests on the mountainside or to come sit with Enhemon in the little house at Re Albi and listen and be still. Enhemon was an old man, near eighty now; and he was frightened. He smiled with joy to see Ogion, but he was frightened.

“I think what we have to do,” he said without preamble, “is try to hold the fault from slipping much, you at the Gates and me at the inner end, in the Mountain. Working together, you know. We might be able to. I can feel it building up, can you?"

Ogion shook his head. He let his sending sit down in the grass near Enhemon, though it did not bend the stems of the grass where it stepped or sat. “I've done nothing but set the city in a panic,” he said. “And send the ships out of the bay. What is it you feel? How do you feel it?”

They were technical questions, mage to mage. Enhemon hesitated before answering.

“I learned from Ard,” he said, and paused again. He had never told Ogion anything about his first teacher, a sorcerer of no fame, even in Gont, and perhaps of ill fame. There was some mystery or shame connected with Ard. Though he was talkative, for a wizard, Enhemon was silent as a stone about some things. Ogion, who respected silence, had never asked him about his teacher.

“It's not Roke magic,” the old man said. His voice was dry, a little forced. “Not to do with the Old Powers, either. Nothing of that sort. Nothing sticky.” That had always been his word for evil doings, spells for gain, curses, black magic: “sticky stuff.” After a while, searching for words, he went on: “Dirt. Rocks. It's a dirty magic. Must be very old. Very old. As old as Gont.”

“Will it control the rocks, the earth?"

“I should think so.” Enhemon was burying the core of his apple and the larger bits of eggshell under loose dirt, patting it over them neatly. “Of course I know the words, but I'll have to learn what to do as I go. That's the trouble with the big spells, isn't it? You learn what you're doing while you do it. No chance to practice. Ah—there! You feel that?"

Ogion shook his head.

“Straining,” Enhemon said, his eyes inlooking, his hand still absently, gently patting the dirt, as one might pat a scared cow. “Quite soon now, I think. Can you hold the Gates open, my dear?"

“Tell me what you'll be doing—”

But Enhemon was shaking his head: “No,” he said, “no time. Not your kind of thing.” He was more and more distracted by whatever it was he sensed in the earth or air, and through him Ogion felt that gathering, intolerable tension. But after a while he relaxed a little and even smiled. “Very old stuff,” he said. “I wish now I'd thought about it more. Passed it on to you. But it seemed a bit crude. Heavyhanded ... She didn't say where she'd learned it. Here, of course ... There are different kinds of knowledge, after all."

“She?"

“Ard. My teacher.” Enhemon looked up, his face unreadable, its expression possibly sly. “You didn't know that? No, I suppose I never mentioned it. But it doesn't make much difference, after all. Since we none of us have any sex, us wizards, do we? What matters is whose house we live in. It seems we may have left out a good deal worth knowing. This kind of thing—There! There again—"

His sudden tension and immobility, the strained face and inward look, were like those of a woman in labor when her womb contracts. That was Ogion's thought, even as he said, “What did you mean, ‘in the Mountain'?"

The spasm passed; Enhemon answered, “Inside the Mountain. There at Iaved.” He pointed to the knotted hills below them. “Go in, try to keep things from sliding around, eh? I'll find out when I'm doing it, no doubt. I think you should be getting back to yourself. Things are tightening up.” He stopped again, looking as if he were in intense pain, hunched and clenched. He struggled to stand up. Unthinking, Ogion held out his hand to help him.

“No use,” said the old wizard, grinning, “you're only wind and sunlight. Now I'm going to be dirt and stone. You'd best go on. Farewell, Aihal. Keep the—keep the mouth open, for once, eh?"

Ogion, obedient, bringing himself back to himself in the stuffy, tapestried room in Gont Port, did not understand the old man's joke until he turned to the window and saw the Armed Cliffs down at the end of the long bay, the jaws ready to snap shut. “I will,” he said, and set to it.

“What I have to do, you see,” the old wizard said, still talking to Silence because it was a comfort to talk to him even if he was no longer there, “is get into the mountain, right inside; but not the way a sorcerer-prospector does; not just slipping about between things and looking and tasting. Deeper. All the way in. Not the veins, but the bones. So,” and standing there alone in the high pasture, in the noon light, Enhemon opened his arms wide in the gesture of invocation that opens all the greater spells; and he spoke.

Nothing happened as he said the words Ard had taught him, his old witch-teacher with her bitter mouth and her long, lean arms, the words spoken awry then, spoken truly now. Nothing happened, and he had time to regret the sunlight and the seawind, and to doubt the spell, and to doubt himself, before the earth rose up around him, dry, warm, and dark.

In there he knew he should hurry, that the bones of the earth ached to move, and that he must become them to guide them, but he could not hurry. There was on him the bewilderment of any transformation. He had in his day been fox, and bull, and dragonfly, and knew what it was to change being. But this was different, this slow enlargement. I am vastening, he thought. He reached out towards Iaved, towards the ache, the suffering. As he came closer to it he felt a great strength flow into him from the west, as if Silence had taken him by the hand after all. Through that link he could send his own strength, the Mountain's strength, to help. I didn't tell him I wasn't coming back, he thought, his last words in Hardic, his last grief, for he was in the bones of the mountain now. He knew the arteries of fire, and the beat of the great heart. He knew what to do. It was in no tongue of man that he said, “Be quiet, be easy. There now, there. Hold fast. So, there. We can be easy.” And he was easy, he was still, he held fast, rock in rock and earth in earth in the fiery dark of the mountain.

It was their mage Ogion whom the people saw stand alone on the roof of the signal tower on the wharf, when the streets ran up and down in waves, the cobbles bursting out of them, and walls of clay brick puffed into dust, and the Armed Cliffs leaned together, groaning. It was Ogion they saw, his hands held out before him, straining, parting: and the cliffs parted with them, and stood straight, unmoved. The city shuddered and stood still. It was Ogion who stopped the earthquake. They saw it, they said it.

My teacher was with me, and his teacher with him,” Ogion said when they praised him. “I could hold the Gate open because he held the Mountain still.” They praised his modesty and did not listen to him. Listening is a rare gift, and men will have their heroes.

When the city was in order again, and the ships had all come back, and the walls were being rebuilt, Ogion escaped from praise and went up into the hills above Gont Port. He found the queer little valley called Trimmer's Dell, the true name of which in the language of the Making was Iaved, as Ogion's true name was Aihal. He walked about there all one day, as if seeking something. In the evening he lay down on the ground and talked to it. “You should have told me, I could have said goodbye,” he said. He wept once, and his tears fell on the dry dirt among the grass-stems and made little spots of mud, little sticky spots. He slept there, on the ground. At sunrise he got up and walked by the high road over to Re Albi. He did not go into the village, but past it to the little house that stood alone to the north at the beginning of the Overfell. The door of the house stood open.

The last beans had got big and coarse on the vines; the cabbages were thriving. Three hens came clucking and pecking around the dusty dooryard, a red, a brown, a white; a grey hen was setting her clutch in the henhouse. There were no chicks, and no sign of the cock, the King, Enhemon had called him. The king is dead, Ogion thought. Maybe a chick is hatching even now to take his place. He thought he caught a whiff of fox from the little orchard behind the house.

He swept out the dust and leaves that had blown in the open door across the polished wood floor, and set Enhemon's mattress and blanket in the sun to air. “I'll stay here a while,” he thought. “It's a good place.” After a while he thought, “I might keep some goats.”

© 2001 by Ursula K. Le Guin

First published in TALES OF EARTHSEA, Harcourt, 2001