The Farthest Shore

The Madman

The madman, the Dyer of Lorbanery, sat huddled up against the mast, his arms wrapped around his knees and his head hunched down. His mass of wiry hair looked black in the moonlight. Sparrowhawk had rolled himself up in a blanket and gone to sleep in the stern of the boat. Neither of them stirred. Arren sat up in the prow; he had sworn to himself to watch all night. If the mage chose to assume that their lunatic passenger would not assault him or Arren in the night, that was all very well for him; Arren, however, would make his own assumptions and undertake his own responsibilities.

But the night was very long and very calm. The moonlight poured down, changeless. Huddled by the mast, Sopli snored, long, soft snores. Softly the boat moved onward; softly Arren slid into sleep. He started awake once and saw the moon scarcely higher; he abandoned his selfrighteous guardianship, made himself comfortable, and went to sleep.

He dreamt again, as he seemed always to do on this voyage, and at first the dreams were fragmentary but strangely sweet and reassuring. In place of Lookfar's mast a tree grew, with great, arching arms of foliage; swans guided the boat, swooping on strong wings before it; far ahead, over the beryl green sea, shone a city of white towers. Then he was in one of those towers, climbing the steps which spiralled upward, running up them lightly and eagerly. These scenes changed and recurred and led into others, which passed without trace; but suddenly he was in the dreaded, dull twilight on the moors, and the horror grew in him until he could not breathe.

But he went forward, because he must go forward. After a long time he realized that to go forward here was to go in a circle and come round on one's own tracks again. Yet he must get out, get away. It grew more and more urgent. He began to run. As he ran, the circles narrowed in and the ground began to slant. He was running in the darkening gloom, faster and faster, around the sinking inner lip of a pit, an enormous whirlpool sucking down to darkness: and as he knew this, his foot slipped and he fell.

“What's the matter, Arren?”

Sparrowhawk spoke to him from the stern. Grey dawn held the sky and sea still.

“Nothing.”

“The nightmare?”

“Nothing.”

Arren was cold, and his right arm ached from having been cramped under him. He shut his eyes against the growing light and thought, “He hints of this and hints of that, but he will never tell me clearly where we're going, or why, or why I should go there. And now he drags this madman with us. Which is maddest, the lunatic or I, for coming with him? The two of them may understand each other; it's the wizards who are mad now, Sopli said. I could have been at home by now, at home in the Hall in Berila, in my room with the carven walls and the red rugs on the floor and a fire in the hearth, waking up to go out a-hawking with my father. Why did I come with him? Why did he bring me? Because it's my way to go, he says, but that's wizard's talk, making things seem great by great words. But the meaning of the words is always somewhere else. If I have any way to go, it's to my home, not wandering senselessly across the Reaches. I have duties at home and am shirking them. If he really thinks there is some enemy of wizardry at work, why did he come alone, with me? He might have brought another mage to help him– a hundred of them. He could have brought an army of warriors, a fleet of ships. Is this how a great peril is met, by sending out an old man and a boy in a boat? This is mere folly. He is mad himself; it is as he said, he seeks death. He seeks death, and wants to take me with him. But I am not mad and not old; I will not die; I will not go with him.”

He sat up on his elbow, looking forward. The moon that had risen before them as they left Sosara Bay was again before them, sinking. Behind, in the east, day came wan and dull. There were no clouds, but a faint, sickly overcast. Later in the day the sun grew hot, but it shone veiled, without splendor.

All day long they coasted Lorbanery, low and green to their right hand. A light wind blew off the land and filled their sail. Toward evening they passed a long last cape; the breeze died down. Sparrowhawk spoke the magewind into the sail, and like a falcon loosed from the wrist, Lookfar started and fled forward eagerly, putting the Isle of Silk behind.

Sopli the Dyer had cowered in the same place all day, evidently afraid of the boat and afraid of the sea, seasick and wretched. He spoke now, hoarsely. “Are we going west?”

The sunset was right in his face; but Sparrowhawk, patient with his stupidest questions, nodded.

“To Obehol?”

“Obehol lies west of Lorbanery.”

“A long way west. Maybe the place is there.”

“What is it like, the place?”

“How do I know? How could I see it? It's not on Lorbanery! I hunted for it for years, four years, five years, in the dark, at night, shutting my eyes, always with him calling Come, come, but I couldn't come. I'm no lord of wizards who can tell the ways in the dark. But there's a place to come to in the light, under the sun too. That's what Mildi and my mother wouldn't understand. They kept looking in the dark. Then old Mildi died, and my mother lost her mind. She forgot the spells we use in the dyeing, and it affected her mind. She wanted to die, but I told her to wait. Wait till I find the place. There must be a place. If the dead can come back to life in the world, there must be a place in the world where it happens.”

“Are the dead coming back to life?”

“I thought you knew such things,” Sopli said after a pause, looking askance at Sparrowhawk.

“I seek to know them.”

Sopli said nothing. The mage suddenly looked at him, a direct, compelling gaze, though his tone was gentle: “Are you looking for a way to live forever, Sopli?”

Sopli returned his gaze for a moment; then he hid his shaggy, brownish-red head in his arms, locking his hands across his ankles, and rocked himself a little back and forth. It seemed that when he was frightened he took this position; and when he was in it, he would not speak or take any notice of what was said. Arren turned away from him in despair and disgust. How could they go on, with Sopli, for days or weeks, in an eighteen-foot boat? It was like sharing a body with a diseased soul…

Sparrowhawk came up beside Arren in the prow and knelt with one knee on the thwart, looking into the sallow evening. He said, “The man has a gentle spirit.”

Arren did not answer this. He asked coldly, “What is Obehol? I never heard the name.”

“I know its name and place on the charts; no more… Look there: the companions of Gobardon!”

The great topaz-colored star was higher in the south now, and beneath it, just clearing the dim sea, shone a white star to the left and a bluish-white one to the right, forming a triangle.

“Have they names?”

“The Master Namer did not know. Maybe the men of Obehol and Wellogy have names for them. I do not know. We go now into strange seas, Arren, under the Sign of Ending.”

The boy did not answer, looking with a kind of loathing at the bright, nameless stars above the endless water.

As they sailed westward day after day, the warmth of the southern spring lay on the waters, and the sky was clear. Yet it seemed to Arren that there was a dullness in the light, as if it fell aslant through glass. The sea was lukewarm when he swam, bringing little refreshment. Their salt food had no savor. There was no freshness or brightness in anything, unless it were at night, when the stars burned with a greater radiance than he had ever seen in them. He would lie and watch them till he slept. Sleeping, he would dream: always the dream of the moors or the pit or a valley hemmed round by cliffs or a long road going downward under a low sky; always the dim light, and the horror in him, and the hopeless effort to escape.

He never spoke of this to Sparrowhawk. He did not speak of anything important to him, nothing but the small daily incidents of their sailing; and Sparrowhawk, who had always had to be drawn out, was now habitually silent.

Arren saw now what a fool he had been to entrust himself body and soul to this restless and secretive man, who let impulse move him and made no effort to control his life, nor even to save it. For now the fey mood was on him; and that, Arren thought, was because he dared not face his own failure– the failure of wizardry as a great power among men.

It was clear now that to those who knew the secrets, there were not many secrets to that art magic from which Sparrowhawk and all the generations of sorcerers and wizards, had made much fame and power. There was not much more to it than the use of wind and weather, the knowledge of healing herbs, and a skillful show of such illusions as mists and lights and shape-changes, which could awe the ignorant, but which were mere tricks. Reality was not changed. There was nothing in magery that gave a man true power over men; nor was it any use against death. The mages lived no longer than ordinary men. All their secret words could not put off for one hour the coming of their death.

Even in small matters magery was not worth counting on. Sparrowhawk was always miserly about employing his arts; they went by the world's wind whenever they might, they fished for food, and they spared their water, like any sailors. After four days of interminable tacking into a fitful headwind, Arren asked him if he would not speak a little following wind into the sail, and when he shook his head, said, “Why not?”

“I would not ask a sick man to run a race,” said Sparrowhawk, “nor lay a stone on an overburdened back.” It was not clear whether he spoke of himself or of the world at large. Always his answers were grudging, hard to understand. There, thought Arren, lay the very heart of wizardry: to hint at mighty meanings while saying nothing at all, and to make doing nothing at all seem the very crown of wisdom.

Arren had tried to ignore Sopli, but it was impossible; and in any case he soon found himself in a kind of alliance with the madman. Sopli was not so mad, or not so simply mad, as his wild hair and fragmented talk made him appear. Indeed the maddest thing about him was perhaps his terror of the water. To come into a boat had taken desperate courage, and he never really got the edge worn off his fear; he kept his head down so much so that he would not have to see the water heaving and lapping about him. To stand up in the boat made him giddy; he clung to the mast. The first time Arren decided on a swim and dived off the prow, Sopli shouted out in horror; when Arren came climbing back into the boat, the poor man was green with shock. “I thought you were drowning yourself,” he said, and Arren had to laugh.

That afternoon, when Sparrowhawk sat meditating, unheeding and unhearing, Sopli came hitching cautiously over the thwarts to Arren. He said in a low voice, “You don't want to die, do you?”

“Of course not.”

“He does,” Sopli said, with a little shift of his lower jaw toward Sparrowhawk.

“Why do you say that?”

Arren took a lordly tone, which indeed came naturally to him, and Sopli accepted it as natural, though he was ten or fifteen years older than Arren. He replied with ready civility, though in his usual fragmentary way, “He wants to get to the secret place. But I don't know why. He doesn't want… He doesn't believe in… the promise.”

“What promise?”

Sopli glanced up at him sharply, something of his ruined manhood in his eyes; but Arren's will was stronger. He answered very low, “You know. Life. Eternal life.”

A great chill went through Arren's body. He remembered his dreams: the moor, the pit, the cliffs, the dim light. That was death; that was the horror of death. It was from death he must escape, must find the way. And on the doorsill stood the figure crowned with shadow, holding out a little light no larger than a pearl, the glimmer of immortal life.

Arren met Sopli's eyes for the first time: light brown eyes, very clear; in them he saw that he had understood at last, and that Sopli shared his knowledge.

“He,” the Dyer said, with his twitch of the jaw toward Sparrowhawk “he won't give up his name. Nobody can take his name through. The way is too narrow.”

“Have you seen it?”

“In the dark, in my mind. That's not enough. I want to get there; I want to see it. In the world, with my eyes. What if I– what if I died and couldn't find the way, the place? Most people can't find it; they don't even know it's there. There's only some of us have the power. But it's hard, because you have to give the power up to get there… No more words. No more names. It is too hard to do in the mind. And when you– die, your mind– dies.” He stuck each time on the word. “I want to know I can come back. I want to be there. On the side of life. I want to live, to be safe. I hate– I hate this water…”

The Dyer drew his limbs together as a spider does when falling, and hunched his wiry-red head down between his shoulders, to shut out the sight of the sea.

But Arren did not shun his conversation after that, knowing that Sopli shared not only his vision, but his fear; and that, if worse came to worst, Sopli might aid him against Sparrowhawk.

Always they sailed, slowly in the calms and fitful breezes, to the west, where Sparrowhawk pretended that Sopli guided them. But Sopli did not guide them, he who knew nothing of the sea, had never seen a chart, never been in a boat, dreaded the water with a sick dread. It was the mage who guided them and led them deliberately astray. Arren saw this now and saw the reason of it. The Archmage knew that they and others like them were seeking eternal life, had been promised it or drawn toward it, and might find it. In his pride, his overweening pride as Archmage, he feared lest they might gain it; he envied them, and feared them, and would have no man greater than himself. He meant to sail out onto the Open Sea beyond all lands until they were utterly astray and could never come back to the world, and there they would die of thirst. For he would die himself, to prevent them from eternal life.

Every now and then there would come a moment when Sparrowhawk spoke to Arren of some small matter of managing the boat or swam with him in the warm sea or bade him good night under the great stars, when all these ideas seemed utter nonsense to the boy. He would look at his companion and see him, that hard, harsh, patient face, and he would think, “This is my lord and friend.” And it seemed unbelievable to him that he had doubted. But a little while later he would be doubting again, and he and Sopli would exchange glances, warning each other of their mutual enemy.

Every day the sun shone hot, yet dull. Its light lay like a gloss on the slow-heaving sea. The water was blue, the sky blue without change or shading. The breezes blew and died, and they turned the sail to catch them and slowly crept on toward no end.

One afternoon they had at last a light following wind; and Sparrowhawk pointed upward, near sunset, saying, “Look.” High above the mast a line of seageese wavered like a black rune drawn across the sky. The geese flew westward: and following, Lookfar came on the next day in sight of a great island.

“That's it,” Sopli said. “That land. We must go there.”

“The place you seek is there?”

"Yes. We must land there. This is as far as we can go.

"This land will be Obehol. Beyond it in the South Reach is another island, Wellogy. And in the West Reach are islands lying farther west than Wellogy. Are you certain, Sopli?'

The Dyer of Lorbanery grew angry, so that the wincing look came back into his eyes; but he did not talk madly, Arren thought, as he had when they first spoke with him many days ago on Lorbanery. “Yes. We must land here. We have gone far enough. The place we seek is here. Do you want me to swear that I know it? Shall I swear by my name?”

“You cannot,” Sparrowhawk said, his voice hard, looking up at Sopli who was taller than he; Sopli had stood up, holding on tight to the mast, to look at the land ahead. “Don't try, Sopli.”

The Dyer scowled as if in rage or pain. He looked at the mountains lying blue with distance before the boat, over the heaving, trembling plain of water, and said, “You took me as guide. This is the place. We must land here.”

“We'll land in any case; we must have water,” said Sparrowhawk, and went to the tiller. Sopli sat down in his place by the mast, muttering. Arren heard him say, “I swear by my name. By my name,” many times, and each time he said it, he scowled again as if in pain.

They beat closer to the island on a north wind and coasted it seeking a bay or landing, but the breakers beat thunderous in the hot sunlight on all the northern shore. Inland green mountains stood baking in that light, treeclothed to the peaks.

Rounding a cape, they came at last in sight of a deep crescent bay with white sand beaches. Here the waves came in quietly, their force held off by the cape, and a boat might land. No sign of human life was visible on the beach or in the forests above it; they had not seen a boat, a roof, a wisp of smoke. The light breeze dropped as soon as Lookfar entered the bay. It was still, silent, hot. Arren took the oars, Sparrowhawk steered. The creak of the oars in the locks was the only sound. The green peaks loomed above the bay, closing in around. The sun laid sheets of white-hot light on the water. Arren heard the blood drumming in his ears. Sopli had left the safety of the mast and crouched in the prow, holding onto the gunwales, staring and straining forward to the land. Sparrowhawk's dark, scarred face shone with sweat as if it had been oiled; his glance shifted continually from the low breakers to the foliage-screened bluffs above.

“Now,” he said to Arren and the boat. Arren took three great strokes with the oars, and lightly Lookfar came up on the sand. Sparrowhawk leapt out to push the boat clear up on the last impetus of the waves. As he put his hands out to push, he stumbled and half-fell, catching himself against the stern. With a mighty strain he dragged the boat back into the water on the outward wash of the wave, and floundered in over the gunwale as she hung between sea and shore. “Row!” he gasped out, and crouched on all fours, streaming with water and trying to get his breath. He was holding a spear – a bronze-headed throwing spear two feet long. Where had he gotten it? Another spear appeared as Arren hung bewildered on the oars; it struck a thwart edgewise, splintering the wood, and rebounded end over end. On the low bluffs over the beach, under the trees, figures moved, darting and crouching. There were little whistling, whirring noises in the air. Arren suddenly bent his head between his shoulders, bent his back, and rowed with powerful strokes: two to clear the shallows, three to turn the boat, and away.

Sopli, in the prow of the boat behind Arren's back, began to shout. Arren's arms were seized suddenly so that the oars shot up out of the water. The butt of one struck him in the pit of the stomach, so that for a moment he was blind and breathless. “Turn back! Turn back!” Sopli was shouting. The boat leapt in the water all at once, and rocked. Arren turned as soon as he had got his grip on the oars again, furious. Sopli was not in the boat.

All around them the deep water of the bay heaved and dazzled in the sunlight.

Stupidly, Arren looked behind him again, then at Sparrowhawk crouching in the stern. “There,” Sparrowhawk said, pointing alongside, but there was nothing, only the sea and the dazzle of the sun. A spear from a throwing-stick fell short of the boat by a few yards, entered the water noiselessly, and vanished. Arren rowed ten or twelve hard strokes, then backed water and looked once more at Sparrowhawk.

Sparrowhawk's hands and left arm were bloody; he held a wad of sailcloth to his shoulder. The bronze-headed spear lay in the bottom of the boat. He had not been holding it when Arren first saw it; it had been standing out from the hollow of his shoulder where the point had gone in. He was scanning the water between them and the white beach, where some tiny figures hopped and wavered in the heat-glare. At last he said, “Go on.”

“Sopli-”

“He never came up.”

“Is he drowned?” Arren asked, unbelieving.

Sparrowhawk nodded.

Arren rowed on until the beach was only a white line beneath the forests and the great green peaks. Sparrowhawk sat by the tiller, holding the wad of cloth to his shoulder but paying no heed to it.

“Did a spear hit him?”

“He jumped.”

“But he– he couldn't swim. He was afraid of the water!”

Aye. Mortally afraid. He wanted… He wanted to come to land.

“Why did they attack us? Who are they?”

“They must have thought us enemies. Will you… give me a hand with this a moment?” Arren saw then that the cloth he held pressed against his shoulder was soaked and vivid.

The spear had struck between the shoulder-joint and collarbone, tearing one of the great veins, so that it bled heavily. Under Sparrowhawk's direction, Arren tore strips from a linen shirt and made shift to bandage the wound. Sparrowhawk asked him for the spear, and when Arren laid it on his knees he put his right hand over the blade, long and narrow like a willow leaf, of crudely hammered bronze; he made as if to speak, but after a minute he shook his head. “I have no strength for spells,” he said. “Later. It will be all right. Can you get us out of this bay, Arren?”

Silently the boy returned to the oars. He bent his back to the work, and soon, for there was strength in his smooth, lithe frame, he brought Lookfar out of the crescent bay into open water. The long noon calm of the Reach lay on the sea. The sail hung slack. The sun glared through a veil of haze, and the green peaks seemed to shake and throb in the great heat. Sparrowhawk had stretched out in the bottom of the boat, his head propped against the thwart by the tiller; he lay still, lips and eyelids half-parted. Arren did not like to look at his face, but stared over the boat's stern. Heat-haze wavered above the water, as if veils of cobweb were spun out over the sky. His arms trembled with fatigue, but he rowed on.

“Where are you taking us?” Sparrowhawk asked hoarsely, sitting up a little. Turning, Arren saw the crescent bay curving its green arms about the boat once more, the white line of the beach ahead, and the mountains gathered in the air above. He had turned the boat around without knowing it.

“I can't row any more,” he said, stowing the oars and going to crouch in the prow. He kept thinking Sopli was behind him in the boat, by the mast. They had been many days together, and his death had been too sudden, too reasonless to be understood. Nothing was to be understood.

The boat hung swaying on the water, the sail slack on the spar. The tide, beginning to enter the bay, turned Lookfar slowly broadside to the current and pushed her by little nudges in and in, toward the distant white line of the beach.

“Lookfar,” the mage said caressingly, and a word or two in the Old Speech; and softly the boat rocked and nosed outward and slipped over the blazing sea away from the arms of the bay.

But as slowly and softly, in less than an hour, she ceased to make way, and again the sail hung slack. Arren looked back in the boat and saw his companion lying as before, but his head had dropped back a little, and his eyes were closed.

All this while Arren had felt a heavy, sickly horror, which grew on him and held him from action as if winding his body and mind in fine threads. No courage rose up in him to fight against the fear; only a kind of dull resentment against his lot.

He should not let the boat drift here near the rocky shores of a land whose people attacked strangers; this was clear to his mind, but it did not mean much. What was he to do instead? Row the boat back to Roke? He was lost, utterly lost beyond hope, in the vastness of the Reach. He could never bring the boat back through those weeks of voyage to any friendly land. Only with the mage's guidance could be do it, and Sparrowhawk was hurt and helpless, as suddenly and meaninglessly as Sopli was dead. His face was changed, lax-featured and yellowish; he might be dying. Arren thought that he should go move him under the awning to keep the sunlight off him, and give him water; men who had lost blood needed to drink. But they had been short of water for days; the barrel was almost empty. What did it matter? There was no good in anything, no use. The luck had run out.

Hours went by, the sun beat down, and the greyish heat wrapped Arren round. He sat unmoving.

A breath of cool passed across his forehead. He looked up. It was evening: the sun was down, the west dull red. Lookfar moved slowly under a mild breeze from the east, skirting the steep, wooded shores of Obehol.

Arren went back in the boat and looked after his companion, arranging him a pallet under the awning and giving him water to drink. He did these things hurriedly, keeping his eyes from the bandage, which was in need of changing, for the wound had not wholly ceased to bleed. Sparrowhawk, in the languor of weakness, did not speak; even as he drank eagerly, his eyes closed and he slipped into sleep again, that being the greater thirst. He lay silent; and when in the darkness the breeze died, no magewind replaced it, and again the boat rocked idly on the smooth, heaving water. But now the mountains that loomed to the right were black against a sky gorgeous with stars, and for a long time Arren gazed at them. Their outlines seemed familiar to him, as if he had seen them before, as if he had known them all his life.

When he lay down to sleep he faced southward, and there, well up in the sky above the blank sea, burned the star Gobardon. Beneath it were the two forming a triangle with it, and beneath these, three had risen in a straight line, forming a greater triangle. Then, slipping free of the liquid plains of black and silver, two more followed as the night wore on; they were yellow like Gobardon, though fainter, slanting from right to left from the right base of the triangle. So there were eight of the nine stars that were supposed to make the figure of a man, or the Hardic rune Agnen. To Arren's eyes there was no man in the pattern, unless, as starfigures are, he was strangely distorted; but the rune was plain, with hooked arm and cross-stroke, all but the foot, the last stroke to complete it, the star that had not yet risen.

Watching for it, Arren slept.

When he woke in the dawn, Lookfar had drifted farther from Obehol. A mist hid the shores and all but the peaks of the mountains, and thinned out into a haze above the violet waters of the south, dimming the last stars.

He looked at his companion. Sparrowhawk breathed unevenly, as when pain moves under the surface of sleep not quite breaking it. His face was lined and old in the cold, shadowless light. Arren looking at him saw a man with no power left in him, no wizardry, no strength, not even youth, nothing. He had not saved Sopli, nor turned away the spear from himself. He had brought them into peril and had not saved them. Now Sopli was dead, and he dying, and Arren would die. Through this man's fault; and in vain, for nothing.

So Arren looked at him with the clear eyes of despair and saw nothing.

No memory stirred in him of the fountain under the rowan tree, or of the white magelight on the slave-ship in the fog, or of the weary orchards of the House of the Dyers. Nor did any pride or stubbornness of will wake in him. He watched dawn come over the quiet sea, where low, great swells ran colored like pale amethyst, and it was all like a dream, pallid, with no grip or vigor of reality. And at the depths of the dream and of the sea, there was nothing – a gap, a void. There were no depths.

The boat moved forward irregularly and slowly, following the fitful humor of the wind. Behind, the peaks of Obehol shrank black against the rising sun, from which the wind came, bearing the boat away from land, away from the world, out onto the open sea.