Ogion shook his head.
“Straining,” Enhemon said, his eyes inlooking, his hand still absently, gently patting the dirt, as one might pat a scared cow. “Quite soon now, I think. Can you hold the Gates open, my dear?”
“Tell me what you’ll be doing—”
But Enhemon was shaking his head: “No,” he said, “no time. Not your kind of thing.” He was more and more distracted by whatever it was he sensed in the earth or air, and through him Ogion felt that gathering, intolerable tension. But after a while he relaxed a little and even smiled. “Very old stuff,” he said. “I wish now I’d thought about it more. Passed it on to you. But it seemed a bit crude. Heavyhanded … She didn’t say where she’d learned it. Here, of course … There are different kinds of knowledge, after all.”
“She?”
“Ard. My teacher.” Enhemon looked up, his face unreadable, its expression possibly sly. “You didn’t know that? No, I suppose I never mentioned it. But it doesn’t make much difference, after all. Since we none of us have any sex, us wizards, do we? What matters is whose house we live in. It seems we may have left out a good deal worth knowing. This kind of thing—There! There again—”
His sudden tension and immobility, the strained face and inward look, were like those of a woman in labor when her womb contracts. That was Ogion’s thought, even as he said, “What did you mean, ‘in the Mountain’?”
The spasm passed; Enhemon answered, “Inside the Mountain. There at Iaved.” He pointed to the knotted hills below them. “Go in, try to keep things from sliding around, eh? I’ll find out when I’m doing it, no doubt. I think you should be getting back to yourself. Things are tightening up.” He stopped again, looking as if he were in intense pain, hunched and clenched. He struggled to stand up. Unthinking, Ogion held out his hand to help him.
“No use,” said the old wizard, grinning, “you’re only wind and sunlight. Now I’m going to be dirt and stone. You’d best go on. Farewell, Aihal. Keep the—keep the mouth open, for once, eh?”
Ogion, obedient, bringing himself back to himself in the stuffy, tapestried room in Gont Port, did not understand the old man’s joke until he turned to the window and saw the Armed Cliffs down at the end of the long bay, the jaws ready to snap shut. “I will,” he said, and set to it.
* * * *
“What I have to do, you see,” the old wizard said, still talking to Silence because it was a comfort to talk to him even if he was no longer there, “is get into the mountain, right inside; but not the way a sorcerer-prospector does; not just slipping about between things and looking and tasting. Deeper. All the way in. Not the veins, but the bones. So,” and standing there alone in the high pasture, in the noon light, Enhemon opened his arms wide in the gesture of invocation that opens all the greater spells; and he spoke.
Nothing happened as he said the words Ard had taught him, his old witch-teacher with her bitter mouth and her long, lean arms, the words spoken awry then, spoken truly now. Nothing happened, and he had time to regret the sunlight and the seawind, and to doubt the spell, and to doubt himself, before the earth rose up around him, dry, warm, and dark.
In there he knew he should hurry, that the bones of the earth ached to move, and that he must become them to guide them, but he could not hurry. There was on him the bewilderment of any transformation. He had in his day been fox, and bull, and dragonfly, and knew what it was to change being. But this was different, this slow enlargement. I am vastening, he thought. He reached out towards Iaved, towards the ache, the suffering. As he came closer to it he felt a great strength flow into him from the west, as if Silence had taken him by the hand after all. Through that link he could send his own strength, the Mountain’s strength, to help. I didn’t tell him I wasn’t coming back, he thought, his last words in Hardic, his last grief, for he was in the bones of the mountain now. He knew the arteries of fire, and the beat of the great heart. He knew what to do. It was in no tongue of man that he said, “Be quiet, be easy. There now, there. Hold fast. So, there. We can be easy.” And he was easy, he was still, he held fast, rock in rock and earth in earth in the fiery dark of the mountain.