Tehanu The Last Book of Earthsea - Le Guin Ursula Kroeber - Страница 28
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“Surely he’ll come to you. Only give him time. He was so badly hurt-everything taken from him- But when he spoke of you, when he said your name, oh, then I saw him for a moment as he was-as he will be again- All pride!’”
“Pride?”’ Lebannen repeated, as if startled.
“Yes. Of course, pride. Who should be proud, if not he?”
“I always thought of him as- He was so patient,” Lebannen said, and then laughed at the inadequacy of his description.
“Now he has no patience,” she said, “and is hard on himself beyond all reason. There’s nothing we can do for him, I think, except let him go his own way and find himself at the end of his tether, as they say on Gont All at once she was at the end of her own tether, so weary she felt ill. “I think I must rest now,”” she said.
He rose at once. “Lady Tenar, you say you fled from one enemy and found another; but I came seeking a friend, and found another.’ “ She smiled at his wit and kindness. What a nice boy he is, she thought.
The ship was all astir when she woke: creaking and groaning of timbers, thud of running feet overhead, rattle of canvas, sailors’ shouts. Therru was hard to waken and woke dull, perhaps feverish, though she was always so warm that Tenar found it hard to judge her fevers. Remorseful for having dragged the fragile child fifteen miles on foot and for all that had happened yesterday, Tenar tried to cheer her by telling her that they were in a ship, and that there was a real king on the ship, and that the little room they were in was the king’s own room; that the ship was taking them home, to the farm, and Aunty Lark would be waiting for them at home, and maybe Sparrowhawk would be there too. Not even that roused Therru’s interest. She was blank, inert, mute.
On her small, thin arm Tenar saw a mark-four fingers, red, like a brand, as from a bruising grip. But Handy had not gripped her, he had only touched her. Tenar had told her, had promised her that he would never touch her again. The promise had been broken. Her word meant nothing. What word meant anything, against deaf violence?
She bent down and kissed the marks on Therru’s arm.
“I wish I’d had time to finish your red dress,” she said. “The king would probably like to see it. But then, I suppose people don’t wear their best clothes on a ship, even kings.”
Therru sat on the bunk, her head bent down, and did not answer. Tenar brushed her hair. It was growing out thick at last, a silky black curtain over the burned parts of the scalp. “Are you hungry, birdlet? You didn’t have any supper last night. Maybe the king will give us breakfast. He gave me cakes and grapes last night.”
No response.
When Tenar said it was time to leave the room, she obeyed. Up on deck she stood with her head bent to her shoulder. She did not look up at the white sails full of the morning wind, nor at the sparkling water, nor back at Gont Mountain rearing its bulk and majesty of forest, cliff, and peak into the sky. She did not look up when Lebannen spoke to her.
“Therru,” Tenar said softly, kneeling by her, “when a king speaks to you, you answer.
She was silent.
The expression of Lebannen's face as he looked at her was unreadable. A mask perhaps, a civil mask for revulsion, shock. But his dark eyes were steady. He touched the child’s arm very lightly, saying, “It must be strange for you, to wake up in the middle of the sea."
She would eat only a little fruit. When Tenar asked her if she wanted to go back to the cabin, she nodded. Reluctant, Tenar left her curled up in the bunk and went back up on deck.
The ship was passing between the Armed Cliffs, towering grim walls that seemed to lean above the sails. Bowmen on guard in little forts like mud-swallows’ nests high on the cliffs looked down at them on deck, and the sailors yelled cheerfully up at them. “Way for the king!”’ they shouted, and the reply came down not much louder than the calling of swallows from the heights, “The king!"
Lebannen stood at the high prow with the ship’s master and an elderly, lean, narrow-eyed man in the grey cloak of a mage of Roke Island. Ged had worn such a cloak, a clean, fine one, on the day he and she brought the Ring of ErrethAkbe to the Tower of the Sword; an old one, stained and dirty and travelworn, had been all his blanket on the cold stone of the Tombs of Atuan, and on the dirt of the desert mountains when they had crossed those mountains together. She was thinking of that as the foam flew by the ship’s sides and the high cliffs fell away behind.
When the ship was out past the last reefs and had begun to swing eastward, the three men came to her. Lebannen said, “My lady, this is the Master Windkey of Roke Island.”
The mage bowed, looking at her with praise in his keen eyes, and curiosity also; a man who liked to know which way the wind blew, she thought.
“Now I needn”t hope the fair weather will hold, but can count on it,’” she said to him.
“I’m only cargo on a day like this,’” said the mage. "Besides, with a sailor like Master Serrathen handling the ship, who needs a weatherworker?”
We are so polite, she thought, all Ladies and Lords and Masters, all bows and compliments. She glanced at the young king. He was looking at her, smiling but reserved.
She felt as she had felt in Havnor as a girl: a barbarian, uncouth among their smoothnesses. But because she was not a girl now, she was not awed, but only wondered at how men ordered their world into this dance of masks, and how easily a woman might learn to dance it.
It would take them only the day, they told her, to sail to Valmouth. They would make port there by late afternoon, with this fair wind in the sails.
Still very weary from the long distress and strain of the day before, she was content to sit in the seat the bald sailor contrived for her out of a straw mattress and a piece of sailcloth, and watch the waves and the gulls, and see the outline of Gont Mountain, blue and dreamy in the noon light, changing as they skirted its steep shores only a mile or two out from land. She brought Therru up to be in the sunshine, and the child lay beside her, watching and dozing.
A sailor, a very dark man, toothless, came on bare feet with soles like hooves and hideously gnarled toes, and put something down on the canvas near Therru. “For the little girl,”’ he said hoarsely, and went off at once, though not far off. He looked around hopefully now and then from his work to see if she liked his gift and then pretended he had not looked around. Therru would not touch the little cloth-wrapped packet. Tenar had to open it. It was an exquisite carving of a dolphin, in bone or ivory, the length of her thumb.
“It can live in your grass bag,” Tenar said, “with the others, the bone people.”
At that Therru came to life enough to fetch out her grass bag and put the dolphin in it. But Tenar had to go thank the humble giver. Therru would not look at him or speak. After a while she asked to go back to the cabin, and Tenar left her there with the bone person, the bone animal, and the dolphin for company.
It’s so easy, she thought with rage, it’s so easy for Handy
to take the sunlight from her, take the ship and the king and her childhood from her, and it’s so hard to give them back! A year I’ve spent trying to give them back to her, and with one touch he takes them and throws them away. And what good does it do him-what’s his prize, his power? Is power that-an emptiness?
She joined the king and the mage at the ship’s railing. The sun was well to the west now, and the ship drove through a glory of light that made her think of her dream of flying with the dragons.
“Lady Tenar,” the king said, “I give you no message for our friend. It seems to me that to do so is to lay a burden on you, and also to encroach upon his freedom; and I don’t want to do either. I am to be crowned within the month. If it were he that held the crown, my reign would begin as my heart desires. But whether he’s there or not, he brought me to my kingdom. He made me king. I will not forget it.”
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