The Farthest Shore: Chapters 3–4

In the darkness before dawn Arren dressed in clothing that had been given him, seaman’s garb, well-worn but clean, and hurried down through the silent halls of the Great House to the eastern door, carven of horn and dragon’s tooth.

"Take the tiller,” said the Archmage, a lithe, shadowy figure in the prow, “and hold her steady while I get the sail up.”

“Can it be a kind of pestilence, a plague, that drifts from land to land, blighting the crops and the flocks and men’s spirits?”

A pestilence is a motion of the great Balance, of the Equilibrium itself; this is different. There is the stink of evil in it.

We may suffer for it when the balance of things rights itself, but we do not lose hope and forego art and forget the words of the Making.

“A man?” Arren said, tentative.

But when we crave power over life—endless wealth, unassailable safety, immortality—then desire becomes greed. And if knowledge allies itself to that greed, then comes evil.

There is a certain bleakness in finding hope where one expected certainty.

The dragons are avaricious, insatiable, treacherous; without pity, without remorse. But are they evil?

They were walking up a crowded, smelly, gaudy street lined with shops, little more than booths, whose owners stood in the doorways among heaps and festoons of wares, loudly proclaiming the beauty and cheapness of their pots, hosiery, hats, spades, pins, purses, kettles, baskets, firehooks, knives, ropes, bolts, bed-linens, and every other kind of hardware and drygoods.

“Eh?” said the snub-nosed man, bending his grizzled head.

This poverty disgusted Arren less than the rest; in the rich end of the street he had felt choked, suffocated, by the pressure of things to be sold and voices screaming to him to buy, buy. And the peddler’s abjectness had shocked him.

No man in Berila, he thought, would have grovelled to a stranger like that.

Their mouths had a curious blackish look, as if they had been bruised, and around their lips flies swarmed and gathered in clusters like bunches of dried currants.

Stripes of sunlight colored green, orange, lemon, crimson, azure, fell across the cloths and shawls and woven belts displayed, and danced multitudinous in the tiny mirrors that bedecked the high, feathered headdress of the woman who sold the stuff.

She had flipped open with deft hands a bolt of gauzy silk, pink shot with threads of silver.

But tell me why you’ve turned from working magic to selling fripperies.

But then in the end they know they’ve been fooled and fuddled and they get angry and lose their pleasure in such things.

“Well, well, mistress,” said Hawk with obdurate mildness, “I was only asking.”

The excitement of the chase came into Arren suddenly; his senses were all alert, as they were during a stag-hunt in the forests of Enlad; he saw vividly each face they passed, and breathed in the sweet stink of the city: a smell of garbage, incense, carrion, and flowers.

“Are you called Hare?” asked Sparrowhawk, and he spoke in his own voice, which was harsh in quality, but gentle in intonation.

The door they guarded was rotten on its hinges; the house, once a palace, was derelict.

The gloomy, bulging faces of the giants were chipped and lichen-grown. Between these ponderous figures the man called Hare stood slack and fragile, his eyes as dark as the windows of the empty house.

Hare rocked back and forth on his pallet, a cunning, uncanny brightness in his eyes.

“Well, half-answers beat no answers,” he said, “and the same with payment,” and, deft as a conjuror, he flipped a gold piece onto the pallet in front of Hare.

He felt himself petulant and nervous, like a child.

“This is not a town for luck,” Sparrowhawk had said some hours ago, and now after hours of aimless wandering and fruitless conversations with strangers, he looked tired and grim.

Then he got up and declaimed the lines from the Deed of Morred.

Praised are the Fountains of Shelieth, the silver harp of the waters,
But blest in my name forever this stream that stanched my thirst!

He disputed earnestly with Sparrowhawk, urging him to eat hazia.

His face had grown haggard and his mouth slack.

He would have laughed if he had had time; he knew at last what it was like to be the hunted instead of the hunter, the quarry instead of the leader of the chase.

Each wore an iron band around his waist and manacles on his wrists, and both these bonds were linked by a short, heavy chain to the bonds of the next man; the belt of iron was also chained to a bolt in the deck, so that the man could sit or crouch, but could not stand.

He had fought and been knocked down and trussed up and carried somewhere.

The drum faltered and then resumed its beat, but slower.

The mist condensing in Arren’s hair ran down into his eyes; he tried to catch the drops with his tongue and breathed the damp air with open mouth, trying to assuage his thirst.

But in my haste and anger I missed and overpassed Egre’s ship, which had gone east of south to miss the shoals.

A light fever had replaced Arren’s chill, and he did indeed feel well, his body languid but his mind racing lightly from one thing to another.

He had thought that his fault of falling into sleep or trance on guard could scarcely be atoned by his feat of drawing off the robbers from Sparrowhawk: it now appeared that the latter had been a silly act, whereas going into trance at the wrong moment had been wonderfully clever.

I never lost him, but he was lost. He wandered on the outer borders, in the endless barrens of delirium and nightmare.