“The first lesson on Roke, and the last, Is Do what is needful. And no more!”
“The lessons in between, then, must consist in learning what is needful.”
“They do. One must consider the Balance. But when the Balance itself is broken-then one considers other things. Above all, haste.”
“But how is it that all the wizards of the South -and elsewhere by now- even the chanters of the rafts- all have lost their art, but you keep yours?”
“Because I desire nothing beyond my art,” Sparrowhawk said.
And after some time he added, more cheerfully, “And if I am soon to lose it, I shall make the best of it while it lasts.”
There was indeed a kind of light-heartedness in him now, a pure pleasure in his skill, which Arren, seeing him always so careful, had not guessed. The mind of the magician takes delight in tricks; a mage is a trickster. Sparrowhawk’s disguise in Hort Town, which had so troubled Arren, had been a game to him; a very slight game, too, for one who could transform not just his face and voice at will, but his body and very being, becoming as he chose a fish, a dolphin, a hawk. And once he said, “Look, Arren: I’ll show you Gont,” and had him look at the surface of their watercask, which he had opened, and which was full to the brim. Many simple sorcerers can cause an image to appear on the water-mirror, and so he had done: a great peak, cloud wreathed, rising from a grey sea. Then the image changed, and Arren saw plainly a cliff on that mountain isle. It was as if he were a bird, a gull or a falcon, hanging on the wind offshore and looking across the wind at that cliff that towered from the breakers for two thousand feet. On the high shelf of it was a little house. “That is Re Albi,” said Sparrowhawk, “and there lives my master Ogion, he who stilled the earthquake long ago. He tends his goats, and gathers herbs, and keeps his silence. I wonder if he still walks on the mountain; he is very old now. But I would know, surely I would know, even now, if Ogion died…” There was no certainty in his voice; for a moment the image wavered, as if the cliff itself were falling. It cleared, and his voice cleared: “He used to go up into the forests alone in late summer and in autumn. So he came first to me, when I was a brat in a mountain village, and gave me my name. And my life with it.” The image of the water-mirror now showed as if the watcher were a bird among the forest branches, looking out to steep, sunlit meadows beneath the rock and snow of the peak, looking inward along a steep road going down in a green, gold-shot darkness. “There is no silence like the silence of those forests,” Sparrowhawk said, yearning.
The image faded, and there was nothing but the blinding disk of the noon sun reflected in the water in the cask.
“There,” Sparrowhawk said, looking at Arren with a strange, mocking look, “there, if I could ever go back there, not even you could follow me.”
Land lay ahead, low and blue in the afternoon like a bank of mist. “Is it Selidor?” Arren asked, and his heart beat fast, but the mage answered, “Obb, I think, or Jessage. We’re not half way yet, lad.”
That night they sailed the straits between those two islands. They saw no lights, but there was a reek of smoke in the air, so heavy that their lungs grew raw with breathing it. When day came and they looked back, the eastern isle, Jessage, looked burnt and black as far as they could see inland from the shore, and a haze hung blue and dull above it.
“They have burnt the fields,” Arren said.
“Aye. And the villages. I have smelled that smoke before.”
“Are they savages, here in the West?”
Sparrowhawk shook his head. “Farmers; townsmen.”
Arren stared at the black ruin of the land, the withered trees of orchards against the sky; and his face was hard. “What harm have the trees done them?” he said. “Must they punish the grass for their own faults? Men are savages, who would set a land afire because they have a quarrel with other men.”