The Other Wind: Chapter 3

She saw her go aboard at last, leading a horse that had been balking, and saw Lebannen follow her.

She saw the mooring lines cast off, the docile movement of the ship following the oared tug that towed her clear, the sudden fall and flowering of the white sails in the darkness.

She was provided with a charming footman, or footboy, for he was only about fifteen, who looked after her at the street crossings as if she were a doddering crone.

Guards in their fine harness recognised and let her pass, footmen announced her and went off with her footboy to crack nuts and gossip, which seemed to be the principal occupation of footmen, and ladies-in-waiting came to greet her, grateful for any new face and gasping for more news of the king’s expedition against the dragons. Having run the whole gamut she was admitted at last to the apartments of the princess.

The princess shouted, the women scuttled, the chairs were carried out onto the deep balcony.

Dragons in the mountains, brigands in the deserts.

It’s taboo to cross the Dragons’ Way. You mustn’t set foot on it at all.

But the best things to get reborn as are people and dragons, because those are the sacred beings. So you try not to break the taboos, and you try to observe the Precepts, so you have a better chance to be a person again, or anyhow a dragon.

Seserakh’s expression was curious. It was not sullen or cynical. It was hopeless, half humorous, patient, the expression of a woman decades older.

The day had been very hot; the evening was still and sultry.

Lights in the palace shone through the carved window screens and the still, hanging foliage of the willows.

He had a strong voice to use when he wanted it, and it rang out now silencing the tumult.

A hundred warriors, a hundred women
sat in the great hall of Gemal Sea-Born
at the king's table, courtly in talk,
handsome and generous gentry of Havnor,
no warriors braver, no women more beautiful.

The merchants of the Inner Isles, in their first joy at having a king and laws again to protect their trading, had set his revenue high and offered him yet more money for all such undertakings; for the first few years of his reign they had not even complained that taxation was destroying their business and would leave their children destitute.

But the throne room, once the beamed ceiling was rebuilt, the stone walls replastered, the narrow, high-set windows reglazed, he left in its old starkness.

Through the brief false dynasties and the Dark Years of tyrants and usurpers and pirate lords, through all the insults of time and ambition, the throne of the kingdom had stood at the end of the long room: a wooden chair, high-backed, on a plain dais.

Lebannen had it cleaned, the decayed wood repaired and replaced, oiled and burnished back to dark satin, but left it unpainted, ungilt, bare.

All had been chosen by the king, some to represent the great noble and princely houses of the Inner Isles, pledged vassals of the Crown; some to speak for the interests of other islands and parts of the Archipelago; some because the king had found them or hoped to find them useful and trustworthy counselors of state.

There were noblewomen, young and old, from the kingdom’s fiefs and principalities, some in silks of Lorbanery and pearls from the Isles of Sand, and two Islandwomen, stout, plain, and dignified, one from Iffish and one from Korp, to speak for the people of the East Reach.

“Are we to grovel before mindless beasts? Are there no heroes left among us?” demanded the imperious Lady of O-tokne.

At that, Tehanu stood up from her bench at the foot of the dais.

Alder remained bewildered at being included among the king’s intimates and brought into his councils.

He had seen a young dog once on a beach barking and barking at the ocean, rushing and snapping at the ebb wave, running back from the breaker with its wet tail between its legs.

But he had got used to that and it did not disquiet him.

He felt that, like him, she was there not by choice but because she had forgone choice, driven to follow a way she did not understand.

“Now,” the king said, “what room do I make ready for this guest?”
He spoke as if amused, bemused.

But the instant he saw the dragon turn and come wheeling in towards the Tower of the Sword, he ran from the room and down the stairs, startling and outstripping the guards in the halls and at the doors, so that he came out first and alone on the terrace under the white tower.

The dragon had alighted on the pavement and was furling its wings with a loud metallic rattle as the king came out.

Where it came down its talons had scratched grooves in the marble.

They saw the dragon, the huge creature whose scaled belly and thorny tail dragged and stretched half across the breadth of the terrace, and whose red-horned head reared up twice the height of the king—they saw it lower that big head, and tremble so that its wings rattled like cymbals, and not smoke but a mist breathed out of its deep nostrils, clouding its shape, so that it became cloudy like thin fog or worn glass; and then it was gone.

With a certain stateliness, like that of armed warriors saluting or ships meeting at sea, they embraced.

She looked a little nonplussed and made a kind of country curtsey.

“I’ll do you no harm in this guise,” she said, with a broad, white smile.

Looking with open wonder at Tenar, Irian said, “It was you that brought the Rune Ring from the land of the Hoary Men, along with the Archmage?”

For a moment there was a ponderous, reptilian impassivity in her.

She nodded, a heavy, decisive nod.

Come with me to fly on the far side of the world, on the other wind. Or stay and put on the yoke of good and evil. Or dwindle into dumb beasts.

Irian looked at him with cold, impartial eyes, and nodded.

Lebannen considered this and then said, in his most royal, affable, urbane manner, “Then I believe I should come to Roke with you.”

If you see any hindrance to this journey, speak here and now.