The Tombs of Atuan: Chapters 4–5

She suddenly produced a rush net containing six or eight perfect yellow apples, from somewhere under her voluminous black robe.

I never get enough. I wish I could be a cook instead of a priestess. I’d cook better than that old skinflint Nathabba, and besides, I’d get to lick the pots.

Penthe bit her apple with a cheerful, rueful face.

Arha agreed with Penthe, for secretly she had come to consider the self-styled Divine Emperors of Kargad as upstarts, false gods trying to filch the worship due to the true and everlasting Powers.

Arha agreed with Penthe, for secretly she had come to consider the self-styled Divine Emperors of Kargad as upstarts, false gods trying to filch the worship due to the true and everlasting Powers.

“I am afraid of the dark,” Penthe said in a low voice.
Arha made a little sound of scorn, but she was pleased.

She never left the walls, for in striking out across the great hollow she might soon lose the sense of direction in the darkness, and so, blundering back at last to the wall, not know where she was.

The powers of the dark, the Nameless Ones, would guide her steps here, just as they would lead astray any other mortal who dared enter the Labyrinth of the Tombs.

Now and then new novices or slaves were sent from lesser temples of the Four Lands, or a small group came to bring some offering of gold or rare incense to one of the temples.

All around beyond the walls reached the profound silence of the desert night.

From time to time came the patter of a sparse, hard shower of rain.

Taciturn as she was, she liked now and then to tell a story, and often did so as part of Arha’s instruction.

The wizards used to sail from the west to Karego-At and Atuan to plunder the towns on the coast, loot the farms, even come into the Sacred City Awabath. They came to kill dragons, they said, but they stayed to rob towns and temples.

He escaped from the city and from the Kargish lands, and fled clear across Earthsea to the farthest west; and there a dragon slew him, because his power was gone. And since that day the power and might of the Inner Lands has ever waned.

Now the High Priest was named Intathin, and he was the first of the house of Tarb, that lineage from which, after the fulfillment of the prophecies and the centuries, the Priest-Kings of Karego-At were descended, and from them, the Godkings of all Kargad.

The one half, in Intathin’s hand, was given by him to the Treasury of the Tombs, where it should lie safe forever. The other remained in the sorcerer’s hand, but he gave it before he fled to a petty king, one of the rebels, named Thoreg of Hupun.

“To cause strife, to make Thoreg proud,” Kossil said.

They were an accursed, ensorcelled race.

For hundreds of years the Inner Lands sent thieves and wizards here to try to steal it back, and they would pass by open coffers of gold, seeking that one thing.

Arha brooded awhile and said, “They must have been very brave men, or very stupid, to enter the Tombs. Don’t they know the powers of the Nameless Ones?”

“But what is this magic they work?” Arha asked, enthralled.

That they are dangerous, subtle with trickery, slippery as eels, yes. But they say that if you take his wooden staff away from a sorcerer, he has no power left.

Thar said no more, avoiding argument; but Arha was loath to have the subject dropped.

In the first stages of her illness, before the silence came upon her, she had asked Arha to come to her every few days, and had talked to her, telling her much about the doings of the Godking and his predecessor, and the ways of Awabath—matters which she should as an important priestess know, but which were not often flattering to the Godking and his court.

Any other, man or woman, who ventured there would certainly be struck dead by the wrath of the Nameless Ones.

There was a weariness in that tracing of the vast, meaningless web of ways; the legs got tired and the mind got bored, forever reckoning up the turnings and the passages behind and to come.

It was wonderful, laid out in the solid rock underground like the streets of a great city; but it had been made to weary and confuse the mortal walking in it, and even its priestess must feel it to be nothing, in the end, but a great trap.

In the treasure rooms she would spend a night learning the contents of a single chest, jewel by jewel, the rusted armor, the broken plumes of helms, the buckles and pins and brooches, bronze, silver-gilt, and solid gold.

Owls, undisturbed by her presence, sat on the rafters and opened and shut their yellow eyes.

She liked sometimes to go there and study the strange wall drawings that leapt out of the dark at the gleam of her candle: men with long wings and great eyes, serene and morose.

A dull edge of pallor, just visible, where nothing could be visible, where all must be black.

It was jeweled with crystals and ornamented with pinnacles and filigrees of white limestone where the waters under earth had worked, eons since: immense, with glittering roof and walls, sparkling, delicate, intricate, a palace of diamonds, a house of amethyst and crystal, from which the ancient darkness had been driven out by glory.

It was jeweled with crystals and ornamented with pinnacles and filigrees of white limestone where the waters under earth had worked, eons since: immense, with glittering roof and walls, sparkling, delicate, intricate, a palace of diamonds, a house of amethyst and crystal, from which the ancient darkness had been driven out by glory.

It was a soft gleam, like marshlight, that moved slowly across the cavern, striking a thousand scintillations from the jeweled roof and shifting a thousand fantastic shadows along the carven walls.

He moved as if he sought something, looking behind the lacy cataracts of stone, studying the several corridors that led out of the Undertomb, yet not entering them.

But, as she stood with one hand on either side of the rock archway, she felt a faint, obscure vibration in the rock, and on the chill, stale air was the trace of a scent that did not belong there: the smell of the wild sage that grew on the desert hills, overhead, under the open sky.

She halted, though the wind almost buffeted her off her feet.

All around her the Place, and the desert around it, was black and silent; the wind keened; there were no lights down in the Big House.

The language he spoke was strange to Arha, but stranger to her than the words was the voice, deep and resonant.

The clenched hand on his breast relaxed and slipped aside, and the watcher above saw then what talisman he wore on the chain: a bit of rough metal, crescent-shaped, it seemed.