“I would not ask a sick man to run a race,” said Sparrowhawk, “nor lay a stone on an overburdened back.” It was not clear whether he spoke of himself or of the world at large. Always his answers were grudging, hard to understand. There, thought Arren, lay the very heart of wizardry: to hint at mighty meanings while saying nothing at all, and to make doing nothing at all seem the very crown of wisdom.
Arren had tried to ignore Sopli, but it was impossible; and in any case he soon found himself in a kind of alliance with the madman. Sopli was not so mad, or not so simply mad, as his wild hair and fragmented talk made him appear. Indeed the maddest thing about him was perhaps his terror of the water. To come into a boat had taken desperate courage, and he never really got the edge worn off his fear; he kept his head down so much so that he would not have to see the water heaving and lapping about him. To stand up in the boat made him giddy; he clung to the mast. The first time Arren decided on a swim and dived off the prow, Sopli shouted out in horror; when Arren came climbing back into the boat, the poor man was green with shock. “I thought you were drowning yourself,” he said, and Arren had to laugh.
That afternoon, when Sparrowhawk sat meditating, unheeding and unhearing, Sopli came hitching cautiously over the thwarts to Arren. He said in a low voice, “You don’t want to die, do you?”
“Of course not.”
“He does,” Sopli said, with a little shift of his lower jaw toward Sparrowhawk.
“Why do you say that?”
Arren took a lordly tone, which indeed came naturally to him, and Sopli accepted it as natural, though he was ten or fifteen years older than Arren. He replied with ready civility, though in his usual fragmentary way, “He wants to get to the secret place. But I don’t know why. He doesn’t want… He doesn’t believe in… the promise.”
“What promise?”
Sopli glanced up at him sharply, something of his ruined manhood in his eyes; but Arren’s will was stronger. He answered very low, “You know. Life. Eternal life.”
A great chill went through Arren’s body. He remembered his dreams: the moor, the pit, the cliffs, the dim light. That was death; that was the horror of death. It was from death he must escape, must find the way. And on the doorsill stood the figure crowned with shadow, holding out a little light no larger than a pearl, the glimmer of immortal life.
Arren met Sopli’s eyes for the first time: light brown eyes, very clear; in them he saw that he had understood at last, and that Sopli shared his knowledge.
“He,” the Dyer said, with his twitch of the jaw toward Sparrowhawk “he won’t give up his name. Nobody can take his name through. The way is too narrow.”
“Have you seen it?”
“In the dark, in my mind. That’s not enough. I want to get there; I want to see it. In the world, with my eyes. What if I- what if I died and couldn’t find the way, the place? Most people can’t find it; they don’t even know it’s there. There’s only some of us have the power. But it’s hard, because you have to give the power up to get there… No more words. No more names. It is too hard to do in the mind. And when you- die, your mind- dies.” He stuck each time on the word. “I want to know I can come back. I want to be there. On the side of life. I want to live, to be safe. I hate- I hate this water…”
The Dyer drew his limbs together as a spider does when falling, and hunched his wiry-red head down between his shoulders, to shut out the sight of the sea.
But Arren did not shun his conversation after that, knowing that Sopli shared not only his vision, but his fear; and that, if worse came to worst, Sopli might aid him against Sparrowhawk.