The Farthest Shore Read Free Page A

the most ancient, were some of them thin of leaf, with branches that had died.
     They were not immortal. Among the giants grew sapling trees, tall and vigorous with
     bright crowns of foliage, and seedlings, slight leafy wands no taller than a girl.
    The ground beneath the trees was soft, rich with the rotten leaves of all
     the years. Ferns and small woodland plants grew in it, but there was no kind of tree but
     the one, which had no name in the Hardic tongue of Earthsea. Under the branches the air
     smelled earthy and fresh, and had a taste in the mouth like live spring-water.
    In a glade which had been made years before by the falling of an enormous
     tree, Ged met the Master Patterner, who lived within the Grove and seldom or never came
     forth from it. His hair was butter-yellow; he was no Archipelagan. Since the restoral of
     the Ring of Erreth-Akbe, the barbarians of Kargad had ceased their forays and had struck
     some bargains of trade and peace with the Inner Lands. They were not friendly folk, and
     held aloof. But now and then a young warrior or merchant’s son came westward by
     himself, drawn by love of adventure or craving to learn wizardry. Such had been the
     Master Patterner ten years ago, a sword-begirt, red-plumed young savage from Karego-At,
     arriving at Gont on a rainy morning and telling the Doorkeeper in imperious andscanty Hardic, “I come to learn!” And now he stood in
     the green-gold light under the trees, a tall man and fair, with long fair hair and
     strange green eyes, the Master Patterner of Earthsea.
    It may be that he, too, knew Ged’s name, but if so he never spoke
     it. They greeted each other in silence.
    “What are you watching there?” the Archmage asked, and the
     other answered, “A spider.”
    Between two tall grass blades in the clearing a spider had spun a web, a
     circle delicately suspended. The silver threads caught the sunlight. In the center the
     spinner waited, a grey-black thing no larger than the pupil of an eye.
    “She too is a patterner,” Ged said, studying the artful
     web.
    “What is evil?” asked the younger man.
    The round web, with its black center, seemed to watch them both.
    “A web we men weave,” Ged answered.
    In this wood no birds sang. It was silent in the noon light and hot. About
     them stood the trees and shadows.
    “There is word from Narveduen and Enlad: the same.”
    “South and southwest. North and northwest,” said the
     Patterner, never looking from the round web.
    “We shall come here this evening. This is the best place for
     counsel.”
    “I have no counsel.” The Patterner looked now at Ged, and his
     greenish eyes were cold. “I am afraid,” he said. “There is fear. There
     is fear at the roots.”
    “Aye,” said Ged. “We must look to
     the deep springs, I think. We have enjoyed the sunlight too long, basking in that peace
     which the healing of the Ring brought, accomplishing small things, fishing the shallows.
     Tonight we must question the depths.” And so he left the Patterner alone, gazing
     still at the spider in the sunny grass.
    At the edge of the Grove, where the leaves of the great trees reached out
     over ordinary ground, he sat with his back against a mighty root, his staff across his
     knees. He shut his eyes as if resting, and sent a sending of his spirit over the hills
     and fields of Roke, northward, to the sea-assaulted cape where the Isolate Tower
     stands.
    “Kurremkarmerruk,” he said in spirit, and the Master Namer
     looked up from the thick book of names of roots and herbs and leaves and seeds and
     petals that he was reading to his pupils and said, “I am here, my lord.”
    Then he listened, a big, thin old man, white-haired under his dark hood;
     and the students at their writing-tables in the tower room looked up at him and glanced
     at one another.
    “I will come,” Kurremkarmerruk said, and bent his head to his
     book again, saying, “Now the petal of the flower of moly hath a name,