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Seserakh came quietly out of the house and sat down on the threshold beside her. She had taken off the circlet that
held her veil, leaving her mass of tawny hair unbound.
"Oh my friend," she murmured, "what will happen to us? The dead are coming here. Do you feel them? Like the tide
rising. Across that wall. I think nobody can stop them. All the dead people, from the graves of all the islands of the
west, all the centuries…"
Tenar felt the beating, the calling, in her head and in her blood. She knew now, they all knew, what Alder had known.
But she held to what she trusted, even if trust had become mere hope. She said, "They are only the dead, Seserakh.
We built a false wall. It must be unbuilt. But there is a true one."
Tehanu got up and came softly over to them. She sat on the doorstep below them.
"He's all right, he's sleeping," she whispered.
"Were you there with him?" Tenar asked.
Tehanu nodded. "We were at the wall."
"What did the Summoner do?"
"Summoned him—brought him back by force."
"Into life."
"Into life."
"I don't know which I should fear more," Tenar said, "death or life. I wish I could be done with fear."
Seserakh's face, the wave of her warm hair, bent down to Tenar's shoulder for a moment in a light caress. "You are
brave, brave," she murmured. "But oh! I fear the sea! and I fear death!"
Tehanu sat quietly. In the faint soft light that hung among the trees, Tenar could see how her daughter's slender hand
lay crossed over her burnt and twisted hand.
"I think," Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, "that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. I
can give back to the world all that I didn't do. All that I might have been and couldn't be. All the choices I didn't make.
All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven't been lived yet.
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That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed."
She looked up at the stars and sighed. "Not for a long time yet," she whispered. Then she looked round at Tenar.
Seserakh stroked Tenar's hair gently, rose, and went silently into the house.
"Before long, I think, mother…"
"I know."
"I don't want to leave you."
"You have to leave me."
"I know."
They sat on in the glimmering darkness of the Grove, silent.
"Look," Tehanu murmured. A shooting star crossed the sky, a quick, slow-fading trail of light.
Five wizards sat in starlight. "Look," one said, his hand following the trail of the shooting star.
"The soul of a dragon dying," said Azver the Patterner "So they say in Karego-At."
"Do dragons die?" asked Onyx, musing. "Not as we do I think."
"They don't live as we do. They move between the worlds. So says Orm Irian. From the world's wind to the other
wind."
"As we sought to do," said Seppel. "And failed."
Gamble looked at him curiously. "Have you on Paln always known this tale, this lore we have learned
today—of the parting of dragon and mankind, and the making of the dry land?"
"Not as we heard it today. I was taught that the verw nadan was the first great triumph of the art magic. And that the
goal of wizardry was to triumph over time and live forever… Hence the evils the Pelnish Lore has done."
"At least you kept the Mother knowledge we despised," Onyx said. "As your people did, Azver."
"Well, you had the sense to build your Great House here," the Patterner said, smiling.
"But we built it wrong," Onyx said. "All we build, we build wrong."
"So we must knock it down," said Seppel.
"No," said Gamble. "We're not dragons. We do live in houses. We have to have some walls, at least."
"So long as the wind can blow through the windows," said Azver.
"And who will come in the doors?" asked the Doorkeeper in his mild voice.
There was a pause. A cricket trilled industriously somewhere across the glade, fell silent, trilled again.
"Dragons?" said Azver.
The Doorkeeper shook his head. "I think maybe the division that was begun, and then betrayed, will be completed at
last," he said. "The dragons will go free, and leave us here to the choice we made."
"The knowledge of good and evil," said Onyx.
"The joy of making, shaping," said Seppel. "Our mastery."
"And our greed, our weakness, our fear," said Azver.
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The cricket was answered by another, closer to the stream. The two trills pulsed, crossed, in and out of rhythm.
"What I fear," said Gamble, "so much that I fear to say it—is this: that when the dragons go, our mastery will
go with them. Our art. Our magic."
The silence of the others showed that they feared what he did. But the Doorkeeper spoke at last, gently, but with
some certainty. "No, I think not. They are the Making, yes. But we learned the Making. We made it ours. It can't be
taken from us. To lose it we must forget it, throw it away."
"As my people did," said Azver.
"Yet your people remembered what the earth is, what life everlasting is," said Seppel. "While we forgot."
There was another long silence among them.
"I could reach my hand out to the wall," Gamble said in a very low voice, and Seppel said, "They are near, they are
very near."
"How are we to know what we should do?" Onyx said.
Azver spoke into the silence that followed the question.
"Once when my lord the Archmage was here with me in the Grove, he said to me he had spent his life learning how to
choose to do what he had no choice but to do."
"I wish he were here now," said Onyx.
"He's done with doing," the Doorkeeper murmured smiling.
"But we're not. We sit here talking on the edge of the precipice—we all know it." Onyx looked round at their
starlit faces. "What do the dead want of us?"
"What do the dragons want of us?" said Gamble. "These women who are dragons, dragons who are
women—why are they here? Can we trust them?"
"Have we a choice?" said the Doorkeeper.
"I think not," said the Patterner. An edge of hardness, a sword's edge, had come into his voice. "We can only follow."
"Follow the dragons?" Gamble asked.
Azver shook his head. "Alder."
"But he's no guide, Patterner!" said Gamble. "A village mender?"
Onyx said, "Alder has wisdom, but in his hands, not in his head. He follows his heart. Certainly he doesn't seek to lead
us." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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