“Well, we could do so. But we don’t much wish to eat our words, as they say. Meat-pie! is only a word, after all… We can make it odorous, and savorous, and even filling, but it remains a word. It fools the stomach and gives no strength to the hungry man.”
“Wizards, then, are not cooks,” said Murre, who was sitting across the kitchen hearth from Ged, carving a box-lid of fine wood; he was a woodworker by trade, though not a very zealous one.
“Nor are cooks wizards, alas,” said Yarrow on her knees to see if the last batch of cakes baking on the hearthbricks was getting brown. “But I still don’t understand, Sparrowhawk. I have seen my brother, and even his prentice, make light in a dark place only by saying one word: and the light shines, it is bright, not a word but a light you can see your way by!”
“Aye,” Ged answered. “Light is a power. A great power, by which we exist, but which exists beyond our needs, in itself. Sunlight and starlight are time, and time is light. In the sunlight, in the days and years, life is. In a dark place life may call upon the light, naming it. But usually when you see a wizard name or call upon some thing, some object to appear, that is not the same, he calls upon no power greater than himself, and what appears is an illusion only. To summon a thing that is not there at all, to call it by speaking its true name, that is a great mastery, not lightly used. Not for mere hunger’s sake. Yarrow, your little dragon has stolen a cake.”
Yarrow had listened so hard, gazing at Ged as he spoke, that she had not seen the harrekki scuttle down from its warm perch on the kettle-hook over the hearth and seize a wheatcake bigger than itself. She took the small scaly creature on her knee and fed it bits and crumbs, while she pondered what Ged had told her.
“So then you would not summon up a real meat-pie lest you disturb what my brother is always talking about- I forget its name-“
“Equilibrium,” Ged replied soberly, for she was very serious.
“Yes. But, when you were shipwrecked, you sailed from the place in a boat woven mostly of spells, and it didn’t leak water. Was it illusion?”
“Well, partly it was illusion, because I am uneasy seeing the sea through great holes in my boat, so I patched them for the looks of the thing. But the strength of the boat was not illusion, nor summoning, but made with another kind of art, a binding-spell. The wood was bound as one whole, one entire thing, a boat. What is a boat but a thing that doesn’t leak water?”
“I’ve bailed some that do,” said Murre.
“Well, mine leaked, too, unless I was constantly seeing to the spell.” He bent down from his corner seat and took a cake from the bricks, and juggled it in his hands. “I too have stolen a cake.”
“You have burned fingers, then. And when you’re starving on the waste water between the far isles you’ll think of that cake and say, Ah! had I not stolen that cake I might eat it now, alas!- I shall eat my brother’s, so he can starve with you
“Thus is Equilibrium maintained,” Ged remarked, while she took and munched a hot, half-toasted cake; and this made her giggle and choke. But presently looking serious again she said, “I wish I could truly understand what you tell me. I am too stupid.”
“Little sister,” Ged said, “it is I that have no skill explaining. If we had more time-“
“We will have more time,” Yarrow said. “When my brother comes back home, you will come with him, for a while at least, won’t you?”
“If I can,” he answered gently.
There was a little pause; and Yarrow asked, watching the harrekki climb back to its perch, “Tell me just this, if it is not a secret: what other great powers are there beside the light?”
“It is no secret. All power is one in source and end, I think. Years and distances, stars and candles, water and wind and wizardry, the craft in a man’s hand and the wisdom in a tree’s root: they all arise together. My name, and yours, and the true name of the sun, or a spring of water, or an unborn child, all are syllables of the great word that is very slowly spoken by the shining of the stars. There is no other power. No other name.”