“But you wouldn’t be willing to use that skill in the King’s service?”
“There is no king in Earthsea,” the young man said, stern and righteous, “In my master’s service, then,” Hound amended, patient.
“No,” Otter said, and hesitated. He felt he owed this man an explanation. “See, it’s not so much won’t as can’t. I thought of making plugs in the planking of that galley, near the keel-you know what I mean by plugs? They’d work out as the timbers work when she gets in a heavy sea.” Hound nodded. “But I couldn’t do it. I’m a shipbuilder. I can’t build a ship to sink. With the men aboard her. My hands wouldn’t do it. So I did what I could. I made her go her own way. Not his way.”
Hound smiled. “They haven’t undone what you did yet, either,” he said. “Old Whiteface was crawling all over her yesterday, growling and muttering. Ordered the helm replaced.” He meant Losen’s chief mage, a pale man from the North named Gelluk, who was much feared in Havnor.
“That won’t do it.”
“Could you undo the spell you put on her?”
A flicker of complacency showed in Otters tired, battered young face. “No,” he said. “I don’t think anybody can.”
“Too bad. You might have used that to bargain with.”
Otter said nothing.
“A nose, now, is a useful thing, a salable thing,” Hound went on. “Not that I’m looking for competition. But a finder can always find work, as they say…You ever been in a mine?”
The guesswork of a wizard is close to knowledge, though he may not know what it is he knows. The first sign of Otter’s gift, when he was two or three years old, was his ability to go straight to anything lost, a dropped nail, a mislaid tool, as soon as he understood the word for it. And as a boy one of his dearest pleasures had been to go alone out into the countryside and wander along the lanes or over the hills, feeling through the soles of his bare feet and throughout his body the veins of water underground, the lodes and knots of ore, the lay and interfolding of the kinds of rock and earth. It was as if he walked in a great building, seeing its passages and rooms, the descents to airy caverns, the glimmer of branched silver in the walls; and as he went on, it was as if his body became the body of earth, and he knew its arteries and organs and muscles as his own. This power had been a delight to him as a boy. He had never sought any use for it. It had been his secret.
He did not answer Hound’s question.
“What’s below us?” Hound pointed to the floor, paved with rough slate flags.
Otter was silent a while. Then he said in a low voice, “Clay, and gravel, and under that the rock that bears garnets. All under this part of the city is that rock. I don’t know the names.”
“You can learn em.”
“I know how to build boats, how to sail boats.”
“You’ll do better away from the ships, all the fighting and raiding. The King’s working the old mines at Samory, round the mountain. There you’d be out of his way. Work for him you must, if you want to stay alive. I’ll see that you’re sent there. If you’ll go.”
After a little silence Otter said, “Thanks.” And he looked up at Hound, one brief, questioning, judging glance.
Hound had taken him, had stood and seen his people beaten senseless, had not stopped the beating. Yet he spoke as a friend. Why? said Otter’s look. Hound answered it.
“Crafty men need to stick together,” he said. “Men who have no art at all, nothing but wealth-they pit us one against the other, for their gain not ours. We sell em our power. Why do we? If we went our own way together, we’d do better, maybe.”
Hound meant well in sending the young man to Samory, but he did not understand the quality of Otter’s will. Nor did Otter himself. He was too used to obeying others to see that in fact he had always followed his own bent, and too young to believe that anything he did could kill him.