She looked in from time to time to see that Sparrowhawk was still sleeping. She did so now. When she sat down again with Moss, wanting not to return to what they had been saying, for the older woman looked dour and sullen, she said, “This morning when I woke up I felt, oh, as if a new wind were blowing. A change. Maybe just the weather. Did you feel that?”
But Moss would not say yes or no. “Many a wind blows here on the Overfell, some good, some ill. Some bears clouds and some fair weather, and some brings news to those who can hear it, but those who won’t listen can’t hear. Who am I to know, an old woman without mage~learning, without book~learning? All my learning’s in the earth, in the dark earth. Under their feet, the proud ones. Under their feet, the proud lords and mages. Why should they look down, the learned ones? What does an old witch-woman know?”
She would be a formidable enemy, Tenar thought, and was a difficult friend.
“Aunty,” she said, taking up a reed, “I grew up among women. Only women, In the Kargish lands, far east, in Atuan, I was taken from my family as a little child to be brought up a priestess in a place in the desert. I don’t know what name it has, all we called it in our language was just that, the place. The only place I knew. There were a few soldiers guarding it, but they couldn’t come inside the walls. And we couldn’t go outside the walls. Only in a group, all women and girls, with eunuchs guarding us, keeping the men out of sight.”
“What’s those you said?”
“Eunuchs?” Tenar had used the Kargish word without thinking. “Gelded men,” she said.
The witch stared, and said, “Tsekh!” and made the sign to avert evil. She sucked her lips. She had been startled out of her resentment.
“One of them was the nearest to a mother I had there.. . , But do you see, Aunty, I never saw a man till I was a woman grown. Only girls and women. And yet I didn’t know what women are, because women were all I did know. Like men who live among men, sailors, and soldiers, and mages on Roke-do they know what men are? How can they, if they never speak to a woman?”
“Do they take ‘em and do ‘em like rams and he-goats,” said Moss, “like that, with a gelding knife?”
Horror, the macabre, and a gleam of vengeance had won out over both anger and reason. Moss didn’t want to pursue any topic but that of eunuchs.
Tenar could not tell her much. She realized that she had never thought about the matter. When she was a girl in Atuan, there had been gelded men; and one of them had loved her tenderly, and she him; and she had killed him to escape from him. Then she had come to the Archipelago, where there were no eunuchs, and had forgotten them, sunk them in darkness with Manan’s body.
“I suppose,” she said, trying to satisfy Moss’s craving for details, “that they took young boys, and-” But she stopped. Her hands stopped working.
“Like Therru,” she said after a long pause. “What’s a child for? What’s it there for? To be used. To be raped, to be gelded- Listen, Moss. When I lived in the dark places, that was what they did there. And when I came here, I thought I’d come out into the light, I learned the true words. And I had my man, I bore my children, I lived well. In the broad daylight, And in the broad daylight, they did that-to the child. In the meadows by the river. The river that rises from the spring where Ogion named my daughter. In the sunlight. I am trying to find out where I can live, Moss. Do you know what I mean? What I’m trying to say?”
“Well, well,” the older woman said; and after a while,
“Dearie, there’s misery enough without going looking for it.” And seeing Tenar’s hands shake as she tried to split a stubborn reed, she said, again, “Don’t cut your thumb on ‘em, dearie. “