The Tombs of Atuan

They both woke. The fire was dead. The stars she had watched were now far over the mountains and new ones had risen in the east. It was the cold that woke them, the dry cold of the desert night, the wind like a knife of ice. A veil of cloud was coming over the sky from the southwest.

The gathered firewood was almost gone. “Let's walk,” Ged said, “it's not long till dawn.” His teeth chattered so that she could hardly understand him. They set out, climbing the long slow slope westward. The bushes and rocks showed black in starlight, and it was as easy to walk as in the day. After a cold first while, the walking warmed them; they stopped crouching and shivering, and began to go easier. So by sunrise they were on the first rise of the western mountains, which had walled in Tenar's life till then.

They stopped in a grove of trees whose golden, quivering leaves still clung to the boughs. He told her they were aspens; she knew no trees but juniper, and the sickly poplars by the riversprings, and the forty apple trees of the orchard of the Place. A small bird among the aspens said “dee, dee,” in a small voice. Under the trees ran a stream, narrow but powerful, shouting, muscular over its rocks and falls, too hasty to freeze. Tenar was almost afraid of it. She was used to the desert where things are silent and move slowly: sluggish rivers, shadows of clouds, vultures circling.

They divided a piece of bread and a last crumbling bit of cheese for breakfast, rested a little, and went on.

By evening they were up high. It was overcast and windy, freezing weather. They camped in the valley of another stream, where there was plenty of wood, and this time built up a sturdy fire of logs by which they could keep fairly warm.

Tenar was happy. She had found a squirrel's cache of nuts, exposed by the falling of a hollow tree: a couple of pounds of fine walnuts and a smooth-shelled kind that Ged, not knowing the Kargish name, called ubir. She cracked them one by one between a flat stone and a hammerstone, and handed every second nutmeat to the man.

“I wish we could stay here,” she said, looking down at the windy, twilit valley between the hills. “I like this place.”

“This is a good place,” he agreed.

“People would never come here.”

“Not often… I was born in the mountains,” he said, “on the Mountain of Gont. We shall pass it, sailing to Havnor, if we take the northern way. It's beautiful to see it in winter, rising all white out of the sea, like a greater wave. My village was by just such a stream as this one. Where were you born, Tenar?”

“In the north of Atuan, in Entat, I think. I can't remember it.”

“They took you so young?”

“I was five. I remember a fire on a hearth, and… nothing else.”

He rubbed his jaw, which though it had acquired a sparse beard, was at least clean; despite the cold, both of them had washed in the mountain streams. He rubbed his jaw and looked thoughtful and severe. She watched him, and never could she have said what was in her heart as she watched him, in the firelight, in the mountain dusk.

“What are you going to do in Havnor?” he said, asking the question of the fire, not of her. “You are -more than I had realized– truly reborn.”

She nodded, smiling a little. She felt newborn.

“You should learn the language, at least.”

“Your language?”

“Yes.”

“I'd like to”

“Well, then. This is kabat,” and he tossed a little stone into the lap of her black robe.

“Kabat. Is that in the dragon-tongue?”

“No, no. You don't want to work spells, you want to talk with other men and women!”

“But what is a pebble in the dragon's tongue?”

“Tolk,” he said. “But I am not making you my apprentice sorcerer. I'm teaching you the language people speak in the Archipelago, the Inner Lands. I had to learn your language before I came here.”

“You speak it oddly.”

“No doubt. Now, arkemmi kabat,” and he held out his hands for her to give him the pebble.

“Must I go to Havnor?” she said.

“Where else would you go, Tenar?”

She hesitated.

“Havnor is a beautiful city,” he said. “And you bring it the ring, the sign of peace, the lost treasure. They'll welcome you in Havnor as a princess. They'll do you honor for the great gift you bring them, and bid you welcome, and make you welcome. They are a noble and generous people in that city. They'll call you the White Lady because of your fair skin, and they'll love you the more because you are so young. And because you are beautiful. You'll have a hundred dresses like the one I showed you by illusion, but real ones. You'll meet with praise, and gratitude, and love. You who have known nothing but solitude and envy and the dark.”

“There was Manan,” she said, defensive, her mouth trembling just a little. “He loved me and was kind to me, always. He protected me as well as he knew how, and I killed him for it; he fell into the black pit. I don't want to go to Havnor. I don't want to go there. I want to stay here.”

“Here– in Atuan?”

“In the mountains. Where we are now.”