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[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] Hoary? said the Patterner. Frosty. White, she said, looking away, embarrassed. Ah. Presently he said, The Master Summoner is not old. And she got a sidelong look from those narrow, ice-coloured eyes. She said nothing. I think you feared him. She nodded. When she said nothing, and some time had passed, he said, In the shadow of these trees is no harm. Only truth. When he passed me, she said in a low voice, I saw a grave. Ah, said the Patterner. He had made a little heap of bits of eggshell on the ground by his knee. He arranged the white fragments into a curve, then closed it into a circle. Yes, he said, studying his eggshells, then, scratching up the earth a bit, he neatly and delicately buried them. He dusted off his hands. Again his glance flicked to Irian and away. You have been a witch, Irian? No. But you have some knowledge. No. I don t. Rose wouldn t teach me. She said she didn t dare. Because I had power but she didn t know what it was. Your Rose is a wise flower, said the mage, unsmiling. But I know I have -I have something to do, to be. That s why I wanted to come here. To find out. On the Isle of the Wise. She was getting used to his strange face now and was able to read it. She thought that he looked sad. His way of speaking was harsh, quick, dry, peaceable. The men of the Isle are not always wise, eh? he said. Maybe the Doorkeeper. He looked at her now, not glancing but squarely, his eyes catching and holding hers. But there. In the wood. Under the trees. There is the old wisdom. Never old. I can t teach you. I can take you into the Grove. After a minute he stood up. Yes? Yes, she said uncertainly. The house is all right? Yes - Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html Tomorrow, he said, and strode off. So for a half-month or more of the hot days of summer, Irian slept in the Otter s House, which was a peaceful one, and ate what the Master Patterner brought her in his basket - eggs, cheese, greens, fruit, smoked mutton - and went with him every afternoon into the grove of high trees, where the paths seemed never to be quite where she remembered them, and often led on far beyond what seemed the confines of the wood. They walked there in silence, and spoke seldom when they rested. The mage was a quiet man. Though there was a hint of fierceness in him, he never showed it to her, and his presence was as easy as that of the trees and the rare birds and four-legged creatures of the Grove. As he had said, he did not try to teach her. When she asked about the Grove, he told her that, with Roke Knoll, it had stood since Segoy made the islands of the world, and that all magic was in the roots of the trees, and that they were mingled with the roots of all the forests that were or might yet be. And sometimes the Grove is in this place, he said, and sometimes in another. But it is always. She had never seen where he lived. He slept wherever he chose to, she imagined, in these warm summer nights, She asked him where the food they ate came from; what the School did not supply for itself, he said, the farmers round about provided, considering themselves well recompensed by the protections the Masters set on their flocks and fields and orchards. That made sense to her. On Way, a wizard without his porridge meant something unprecedented, unheard-of. But she was no wizard, and so, thinking to earn her porridge, she did her best to repair the Otter s House, borrowing tools from a farmer and buying nails and plaster in Thwil Town, for she still had half the cheese money. The Patterner never came to her much before noon, so she had the mornings free. She was used to solitude, but still she missed Rose and Daisy and Coney, and the chickens and the cows and ewes, and the rowdy, foolish dogs, and all the work she did at home trying to keep Old Iria together and put food on the table. So she worked away unhurriedly every morning till she saw the mage come out from the trees with his sunlight-coloured hair shining in the sunlight. Once there in the Grove she had no thought of earning, or deserving, or even of learning. To be there was enough, was all. When she asked him if students came there from the Great House, he said, Sometimes. Another time he said, My words are nothing. Hear the leaves. That was all he said that could be called teaching. As she walked, she listened to the leaves when the wind rustled them or stormed in the crowns of the trees; she watched the shadows play, and thought about the roots of the trees down in the darkness of the earth. She was utterly content to be there. Yet always, without discontent or urgency, she felt that she was waiting. And that silent expectancy was deepest and clearest when she came out of the shelter of the woods and saw the open sky. Once, when they had gone a long way and the trees, dark evergreens she did not know, stood very high about them, she heard a call - a horn blowing, a cry? - remote, on the very edge of hearing. She stood still, listening towards the west. The mage walked on, turning only when he realized she had stopped. I heard - she said, and could not say what she had heard. He listened. They walked on at last through a silence enlarged and deepened by that far call. She never went into the Grove without him, and it was many days before he left her alone within it. But one hot afternoon when they came to a glade among a stand of oaks, he said, I will come back here, eh? and walked off with his quick, silent step, lost almost at once in the dappled, shifting depths of the Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html forest. She had no wish to explore for herself. The peacefulness of the place called for stillness, watching, listening; and she knew how tricky the paths were, and that the Grove was, as the Patterner put it, bigger inside than outside . She sat down in a patch of sun-dappled shade and watched the shadows of the leaves play across the ground. The oakmast was deep; though she had never seen wild swine in the wood, she saw their tracks here. For a moment she caught the scent of a fox. Her thoughts moved as quietly and easily as the breeze moved in the warm light. Often her mind here seemed empty of thought, full of the forest itself, but this day memories came to her, vivid. She thought about Ivory, thinking she would never see him again, wondering if he had found a ship to take him back to Havnor. He had told her he d never go back to Westpool; the only place for him was the Great Port, the King s City, and for all he cared the island of Way could sink in the sea as deep [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |