The Tombs of Atuan: Chapters 9–12

The man lay inert.

She moved timorously, and her eyes were wide, the pupils still fully dilated from her long journey through the dark.

Some vigor had come back into his face and stance, though the scars on his cheek showed livid grey, and there was dust yet on his clothes and hair.

Because every instant since I set foot in the cavern under the Tombstones, I have striven to keep them still, to keep them unaware.

And where men worship these things and abase themselves before them, there evil breeds; there places are made in the world where darkness gathers, places given over wholly to the Ones whom we call Nameless, the ancient and holy Powers of the Earth before the Light, the powers of the dark, of ruin, of madness.

You are like a lantern swathed and covered, hidden away in a dark place. Yet the light shines; they could not put out the light.

The greatest gift of this age of the world, and it was given by a poor old foolish woman in sealskins to a silly lout who stuffed it into his pocket and said ‘Thanks!’ and sailed off.

They were full of praise; and one of them even gave me money to provision my boat.

She looked up startled, and saw him flushed with life and triumph, smiling.

She sidled back to safety as the stones teetered under her feet.

At the shout the light blazed up white and intolerable, straight in the eunuch’s face.

As she stumbled forward she cried out in her mind, which was as dark, as shaken as the subterranean vault, “Forgive me. O my Masters, O unnamed ones, most ancient ones, forgive me, forgive me!”

The rocks burned white as if afire, and burst asunder.

And she writhed back away from him, into the crumbling, lipless mouth of the Tombs.

They were across the valley, on a level now with the Tombstones, the nine great monoliths that stood or lay above the cavern of diamonds and graves.

Slowly, like two tiny spiders on a great wall, they toiled up the immense slope of the hill, until at the top they stood on dry ground yellowed by the rising sun and streaked with the long, sparse shadows of the sage.

She opened her eyes to a golden light, and smelled the pungency of sage.

He was one whose power was akin to, and as strong as, the Old Powers of the earth; one who talked with dragons, and held off earthquakes with his word.

Tenar got up and began to gather dry sagebrush, picking up fallen twigs, breaking off the tough branches that grew as gnarled and massive, in their scale, as the limbs of oaks.

A couple of stunted junipers, and the westward slope of the ridge they had just descended, had offered shelter enough; they had drunk a little water from the flask, and lain down, and gone to sleep.

“I’m strong,” she said.
“You are. And valiant. But your companion’s tired,” he said with a smile.

She was used to the desert where things are silent and move slowly: sluggish rivers, shadows of clouds, vultures circling.

Even in the dead of winter, when the thickets were bare and the forests full of grey boughs, it was a green land, humble and mild.

Beside her, in Ged’s clothing, and with his gait, and in his shoes, strode another man.

“Hospitality,” he said, “kindness to a stranger, that’s a very large thing. Thanks are enough, of course. But I was sorry for the goats.”

It was built of clay brick, and walled round in the Kargish fashion, with overhanging battlements, watchtowers at the four corners, and a single gate, under which drovers were herding a big flock of sheep.

She knew he was trying to hearten her, but she had left joy up in the mountains, in the twilit valley of the stream.

When he was done, he went back into the cave to the boat, which lay prow forward, kept from the sand by several long driftwood logs.

And now that he had the ring, now that the Tombs were in ruin and their priestess forsworn forever, now he didn’t need her, and went away where she could not follow.

She would serve her Masters still, though they had betrayed her and forsaken her.

“You’ll leave them behind, Tenar. You’re going free now,” he said, getting up with sudden vigor.

"...In you go!”—and leaping in after her, he caught her as she overbalanced, sat her down in the bottom of the boat, braced his legs wide, and standing to the oars sent the boat shooting out on an ebb wave over the rocks, out past the roaring foam-drenched head of the cape, and so to sea.

He shipped the oars when they were well away from shoal water, and stepped the mast.

Supper was dry bread, and dried smoked fish, which tasted vile to Tenar, and water from the boat's cask, which Ged had filled at a stream on Cloud Cape beach the evening before.

But Erreth-Akbe gave the broken half into the hands of the maiden Tiarath, daughter of the wise king, saying: “Let it remain in the light, in the maiden’s dowry, let it remain in this land until it be rejoined.”

It lit the bottom of the sail, and the gunwales, and the planking, and his face, with a silvery glow.

Listen, Tenar. Heed me. You were the vessel of evil. The evil is poured out. It is done. It is buried in its own tomb.

News of their coming had run ahead of them, for Lookfar’s patched red sail was known in those seas; a great crowd had gathered on the snowy quays, and colored pennants cracked above the people in the bright, cold wind.

News of their coming had run ahead of them, for Lookfar’s patched red sail was known in those seas; a great crowd had gathered on the snowy quays, and colored pennants cracked above the people in the bright, cold wind.

A hundred hands reached to catch the rope he flung up to the mooring.