Elric of Melniboné part 3: The Black Sword

In his dedication at the beginning of Elric of Melniboné, Michael Moorcock acknowledges thanks to Poul Anderson for his Three Hearts and Three Lions. As we saw in our look at that book, Anderson used the theme of Law vs. Chaos, which Moorcock echoed in his Eternal Champion stories; but it seems to me that there is another thematic link. Anderson also liked to use the theme of a hero compelled to act against his deepest desires because of honor and duty; and Elric has found himself in just such a position.

Betrayed by his cousin, Prince Yyrkoom, Elric has escaped certain death through the aid of the powerful water elementals who once served his father. But Elric’s triumph is short-lived as Yyrkoom escapes, taking his sister, Elric’s lover Cymoril, with him.

In desperation, Elric turns to his family’s ancient lorebooks and summons Aricoh, the Lord of Chaos, one of the Higher Gods his ancestors once served – a feat of sorcery which even Yyrkoom has been unable to perform. (Then again, Yyrkoom doesn’t really come off as bright enough to remember how many consonants are in his own name),

In exchange for Elric’s vow of fealty, Aricoh tells Elric where Yyrkoom may be found and how to reach him. Elric doesn’t like submitting himself to the will of Chaos; Arioch represents his people’s dark past which he has been trying to reform. But what choice does he have?


His choices are going to get even worse.

Yyrkoom has holed up in a grubby little city straddling a river between two backwater little kingdoms. It’s out of the way, and no one pays much attention to it. This latter fact is helped by the Mirror of Memory, a magical artifact Yyrkoom has acquired. It’s a huge mirror which steals the memories of any being, man or beast, who gazes into it. He has had the mirror mounted on tall pillars so that anyone sailing into the city’s harbor has to look at it. In this way Yyrkoom has kept his location a secret and has also been accumulating a navy comprised of seized merchant ships and their amnesiac crews, retrained to serve him; which he intends to sail against the Dragon Isle of Melniboné. And since Elric’s fleets are scattered all over the world searching for him, the city of Imrryr, Melniboné’s capitol, will be defenseless. Insert maniacal laugh.

And why shouldn’t he laugh? Just this morning he has succeeded in raising a demon who showed him how to reach the dimensional plane where lies his greatest prize: Sormbringer and Mournblade, the twin Black Swords of Chaos once wielded by the Lords of Melniboné in millennia past. With those two swords, no one will be able to stop him! Mwah hah ha!

Yes, he’s a bit unhinged by this point. Hanging around demons will do that to a guy. His sister tells him he’s mad, but what does a girl know. She also tells him that Elric will come to rescue her.

Cymoril strikes me as something of a disappointing character. She’s Elric’s love, but we see precious little of her; and most of her time on-stage is spent passively moping and waiting to be rescued. Now granted, this is the Pulp Fantasy genre, but Dejah Thoris had a lot more gumption than this girl.

But she is right about Elric; he is outside the city gates at this moment with an army. Arioch has warned him about the Magic Mirror, and so instead of approaching the city by sea, he sailed his ship across the land. (It’s a magic ship, okay?) Now Elric has summoned Flame Elementals to set fire to the city.

Yyrkoom orders the Mirror to be turned to face the attackers. This will affect his own forces as well, but he doesn’t care; they’re expendable anyway. Elric is prepared for this possibility as well. He has had the helms of his soldiers outfitted with opaque shields to protect them from the Mirror’s effects, and he has brought along a special group of auxiliaries, veteran soldiers who had been disabled in battle. These were mentioned earlier, but Moorcock was coy about the nature of their disability. The astute reader has probably guessed it, though; these men are blind. As soon as Elric sees the Mirror beginning to rotate in their direction, he orders his men to pull down their visors and fall back to let the sightless troops do the fighting.

Yyrkoom has one last trick up his sleeve. He sends a minion up to the Magic Mirror to destroy it. As the Mirror breaks, it releases all the stored up memories, overwhelming everyone in the immediate vicinity. Only Elric’s tremendous strength of will enables him to keep his own sanity. Most of the men of both armies die from the psychic shock, and most of the remainder are driven mad.

Elric’s friend, Dyvin Tvar is among the handful of survivors, and together they proceed to Yyrkoon’s dwelling. They find Cymoril, but she is in a bad state. Yyrkoom has placed an enchantment of eternal sleep upon her. Through strength of will she has stayed awake long enough to warn Elric that her brother has fled through the Shade Gate to the otherworldly plane in which the Swords of Chaos have been secreted. Then she klunks out.

This puts Elirc in a worse position than ever. Only Yyrkoon can release Cymoril from the spell. But how can he follow the traitorous creep? Arioch again insinuates himself into the picture to give Elric more advice. The Lord of Chaos has kept the Shade Gate open so that Elric can also access the other plane; and he tells Elric that he must find the two rune swords of his ancestors before his cousin does. If Yyrkoom acquires the swords, he will truly be invincible and Melniboné will fall before him.

Once again, Elric has no choice. He tells Dyvin Tvar to take Cymoril back home. He will follow Yyrkoon, and return when and if he can.

The world beyond the Shade Gate is a darksome, lifeless place, demolished long ago by a titanic battle between the Lords of Order and the Lords of Chaos. Elric wonders if this place is underground in an enormous cavern -- for he can see no sky, only darkness – or if he has actually gone far into the future after the stars have gone cold. It doesn’t really matter which.

The plane is not uninhabited, though. Elric meets a bowman clad in red calling himself Rackhir. He is one of the Warrior Priests of the distant land of Phum and until fairly recently he served the Lords of Chaos. But when he turned against them, they exiled him to this dreary place. The two men hit it off, (Elric being careful not to mention his current patron), and Elric promises to bring Rackhir back to their own world with him if he gets the chance.

It’s kind of late in the story for Moorcock to be introducing a new sidekick, but that’s essentially what Rackhir becomes; he accompanies Elric in many of the later Elric stories. And I have to say, he makes a better sidekick than Dyvin Tvar. Sorry, Tvar, you’re just too somber and Elric is a gloom twinkie to begin with.

There is a city nearby, inhabited by people who, for some reason or other, have like Rackhir been exiled to this plane, along with various demons who come and go. The two are attacked by several such demons, sent by Yyrkoom. Elric and his new friend defeat them with the aid of an old man named Nuin Who Knew All.
Nuin is another one of those almost throwaway bits of invention that makes Moorcock’s world so rich. Once he had been a foolish sage who wished to know everything. He made a pact with Orland of the Staff, evidently a god of some sort, and gained his wish. And ever since, he’s been trying to forget. He remembers very little of what he once knew, and every time he uses a bit of information it seems to fade from his mind; so he has hopes that someday he will know nothing and be free to leave this plane. But he still knows enough to recognize Elric’s name and to give him directions to find the Two Swords.

Elric and Rackhir make a perilous journey through and underneath a sinister swamp, eventually ending up at the entrance to the Pulsing Cavern, a weird chamber that seems to be composed of living flesh and which can only be entered through a sphincter-like opening; (thank you very much for that imagery, Michael Moorcock). Yyrkoon has preceded Elric here, but the two swords are suspended over his head and he hasn’t yet figured out how to get them down.

It’s because the swords were waiting for Elric to show up. Well, maybe not Elric specifically; just an opponent. The swords are sentient; and they’ve been waiting millennia for a chance to fight. As soon as Elric enters the fleshly chamber, one of the swords appears in his hand, and the other in Yyrkoon’s.

The swords were singing. Their voices were faint but could be heard quite plainly. Elric lifted the huge blade easily and turned it this way and that, admiring its alien beauty. 

‘Stormbringer,’ he said. 

Then he felt afraid. 

It was suddenly as if he had been born again and that this runesword was born with him. It was as if they had never been separate. 

‘Stormbringer.’ 

And the sword moaned sweetly and settled even more smoothly into his grasp. 

‘Stormbringer!’ yelled Elric and he leapt at his cousin.

The battle which follows is fierce, because Elric deeply desires to kill his cousin, and Yyrkoon fights back with no less fervor. But as the fight goes on, Elric realizes that the sword wants to kill his opponent even more. The Black Swords of Chaos feed off the souls of those they slay, and both Strombringer and Mournblade are long overdue for a snack.

Elric realizes that he is not wielding the sword as much as he is following the sword as it guides his arm. This kind of freaks him out, and he tries to wrest control of the situation. He still wants to kill Yyrkoon, but not for the sport of some demonic ironmongery.

But the sword has something to offer him as well. It feeds energy into Elric’s arm, magical strength. All his life Elric has been dependent on drugs to mitigate his feeble health and keep him alive. With Strombringer, he need never be weak again. The only price would be that Elric would have to let it feed.

This is not a price Elric likes; but he needs Stormbringer right now or else it’s brother Mournblade will feed on his own soul and pass the energy on to his enemy. He must accept the runeblade’s bargain.

‘You shall not be my master,’ Elric insists, and the sword seems to acquiesce. Elric disarms his cousin, but refuses to slay him.

Elric said: ‘We are victims, cousin, of a conspiracy – a game played by gods, demons and sentient swords. They wish one of us dead. I suspect they wish you dead more than they wish me dead. And that is the reason why I shall not slay you here.’

Now that the adrenaline has worn off, and the sword lies quiet in his scabbard, Elric can feel some sympathy, even pity for the pathetic wretch his cousin has become. But now both he and Yyrkoon, joined now by Rackhir, who has promised to share Elric’s fate for good or ill, are trapped in the Pulsing Cave.

Elric once more calls upon Aricoch. The Chaos Lord congratulates him on winning the sword, but asks why he spared his cousin’s life.

‘Let us say he must remain alive in order to wake Cymoril,’ Elric replies. Arioch smiles, and Elric realizes that the Chaos Lord was expecting him to forget that little point. Elric goes on to request that his patron take him, Yyrkoon and Rackhir back to Melniboné. Aricoch at first refuses; Rackhir is a traitor as far as the Lords of Chaos are concerned, and has been exiled to this realm as punishment. Elric insists: ‘He comes back with me… Or I do not take the sword with me.’

This is a calculated gamble. Elric guesses that Aricoh wants the runeblade returned to the mortal plane and that this can only be accomplished by a mortal champion; that is why Elric has been manipulated into this situation.

‘You are clever, Elric of Melniboné… And you are a fitting servant of Chaos.” Aricoch decides that punishing the Priest of Phum is not all that important after all. He takes Elric and his companions back to Melniboné.

And what then? Elric has defeated the usurper, regained his throne and rescued his love. Yyrkoon fulfills his agreement and releases his sister from her enchantment. Elric has tamed the Black Sword of Chaos. He should live happily ever after, right?

Yet Elric is still restless. He is not ready to sit back on the Ruby Throne. He still wants to reform his country, and to that end he wants to spend a year travelling to see the other nations and how they govern themselves. After a year, he promises Cymoril, he will return and settle down. Is that his only reason? Perhaps not, but if not he won’t admit it to himself. He asks if she will accompany him and Rackhir on this new adventure, but she refuses. Melniboné is her home.

But who will rule Melniboné in Elric’s absence? He suggests that Cymoril rule as empress until he returns to marry her, but she refuses. Dyvin Tvar has no desire for that kind of power. The most suitable candidate for regent, ironically, is Yyrkoom. Elric believes that his cousin has learned humility, and can be trusted with the position.

It will end badly; this the chronicle assures us. The actions Elric has taken, even those with the best intentions, will lead irrevocably to doom, for himself and for Melniboné. He still owes a debt to the Lord of Chaos; and the sword he has gained isn’t nearly as tame as he thinks it is.


For the time being, however, he is ready to set out on a new adventure.

Elric of Melneboné part 2: The Desperate Bargain

Michael Moorcock intended Elric to be sort of like the Anti-Conan; where most traditional Heroic Fantasy featured Beefy Barbarians slaying Evil Wizards, Elric was a nerdy wizard who got to kick the snot out of the barbarians.

At first, Elric does seem to be something of a wimp. Weak and sickly as a child, and dependent on exotic drugs to maintain his spark of life, the albino with bone-white skin grew into a bookish lad. His years of study have caused him to question the Traditional Values of cruelty and hedonism practiced by his ancestors, the Dragon Lords of Melniboné.

It is for these reasons that his cousin, Prince Yyrkoon, thinks that Elric's a poor ruler and wants to replace him; and it is for these reasons that, as Elric lies exhausted and weak after a sea-battle against barbarian raiders and when no one is looking, Yyrkoon chucks his cousin overboard.

As he sinks beneath the waves, weighted down by his armor and too weak to struggle to the surface, it occurs to Elric that Yyrkoon might have a point; that Melniboné might be better off with back-stabbing thug sitting on the kingdom’s Ruby Throne than with a conscience-ridden scholar; someone who would better embody the ethos which has governed Melniboné for over ten thousand years. For that matter, the troubled, tortured Elric might be better off dead as well. The only ones who would mourn his passing, would be his friend Dyvin Tvar, Keeper of the Dragon Caves, and of course the woman he loves, Yyrkoon’s sister Cymoril.

As the cold darkness engulfs him, another thought comes to him; an old, old spell which his ancestors had once used to invoke Straasha, the Lord of the Water Elementals, flits through his mind. Elric has eschewed sorcery, but magic is an ancient tradition among the Dragon Lords, mostly involving the summoning of spirits, demons and other supernatural creatures; the incantation, like an old nursery rhyme he might have heard as a child, flits through his mind.

The last thing he expects is to get a reply.

Straasha answers thy summons, mortal. Our destinies are bound together. How may I aid thee, and, in aiding thee, aid myself?

Elric thinks he’s dreaming. He protests that he is resigned to his fate and wants nothing more than to die; but Straasha tells him if that were the case then the invocation would not have called him. Some small part of Elric’s consciousness must have desired life with an intensity strong enough to overcome death. Again he asks Elric what boon he would seek.

Still certain he is hallucinating, Elric says that the only aid he would ask for is to be returned to Melniboné so that he can deal with Yyrkoon and save Cymoril form the torments her brother is sure to inflict upon her. But he doesn’t really believe it will happen. He knows he is as good as dead.

You cannot die. Not yet. Straasha assures him, and takes Elric to a place where he can rest. The world is on the verge of a new age, Strassha tells him, and the Lords of the Higher Realms are again taking an interest in the mortal world. He advises Elric that he will be happier if he gives himself up to his destiny, once he understands it; and that he should not hesitate to call upon the other elemental spirits at need, nor upon the beasts. But beware of gods, Elric. Beware the Lords of the Higher Worlds and remember that their aid and their gifts must always be paid for.

Yyrkoon, meanwhile, is having a really good day. He triumphantly announces that, Elric having died in battle, he is the new emperor. His sister, Cymoril, guesses the truth, and commands her escort of palace guards to kill Yyrkoon for his treason. One of her guards tries to obey, but he is cut down by the captain of the guard, who knows upon which side his bread is buttered. “My loyalty is to the Ruby Throne,” the captain tells the new emperor. That’s fine with Yyrkoon.

Yyrkoon continues on to the imperial palace, but when he enters the throne room, he sees someone sitting in his chair.

“You are dead, Elric! I know that you are dead!” But no, Elric is quite alive; and Yyrkoon finds himself surrounded by Dyvin Tvar’s men, who are more than happy to take him into custody.

In the past, Yyrkoon has criticized Elric for being far to clement and for disdaining the Melnibonéan tradition of gratuitous cruelty. With grim pleasure, Elric tells him that has decided to take Yyrkoom's advice; he thinks of something both humiliating and sadistically appropriate for his treasonous cousin.

Cymoril urges Elric to just kill the creep; she’s afraid that given time, her brother will regroup and cook up some counter-intrigue; but Elric is confident that he has pulled Yyrkoom’s fangs. He plans on exiling his cousin to some distant barbarian kingdom.

He never gets the chance. Yyrkoom still has followers loyal to him, and he’s been practicing sorcery of his own. Elric is aware of the prince’s experiments in magic; Yyrkoom has been trying to summon the Lords of Chaos in order to gain the legendary two Black Swords of Chaos. But he has been unsuccessful in that endeavor, and Elric has discounted Yyrkoom’s sorcerous abilities. Yyrkoom creates a groaning mist, a weird miasma that carries ghostly voices which play mind games on its victims and disorients them. Under the cover of the groaning mist, Yyrkoom is able to abduct Cymoril and flee the city with a group of supporters.

Elric attempts to locate Yyrkoom, but the wily prince has covered his tracks too well. Elric sends ships out in all directions, searching all the nearby islands, to no avail. As he waits, brooding in his palace, Elric buries himself in his father’s library, trying to find lore which might help him recover his love. For several months, his ships search, but return home empty; no report has been found of Yyrkoom. Elric decides to take drastic measures.

He has studied the oldest and most obscure books of magic in his father’s library; he has carefully considered every contingency; he has prepared as well as humanly possible; and now he is ready to attempt his only hope. He is going to try what Yyrkoom could never achieve; to summon Arioch, the Lord of Chaos. Did he remember Straasha’s warnings about the Lords of the Higher Worlds? Maybe; but Elric is out of options.

Arioch does appear, first in the form of a small, buzzing fly, and then as a tall, handsome youth.

The youth was taller, now, than Elric. He looked down at the Emperor of Melniboné and he smiled the smile that the fly had smiled. “You alone are fit to serve Arioch. It is long since I was invited to this plane, but now that I am here I shall aid you, Elric. I shall be your patron. I shall protect you and give you strength and the source of strength, though master I be and slave you be.”

This has “Bad Deal” written all over it, and Elric hesitates; but Arioch tells him he cannot help Elric find Yyrkoom and save Cymoril unless Elric first swears to serve him. Elric swears, and finds himself filled with ecstatic fire and a strength he’s never known.

Arioch tells him where his cousin can be found: in a barbarian land to the south where he has conquered two neighboring countries called Oin and Yu. Yyrkoon has also gained possession of the Mirror of Memory, a magical device which drains the memories of any who look in into it. That is how he has managed to obliterate all traces of himself. Arioch also advises Elric on the best way to reach his cousin: with the Ship Which Sails Over Both Land and Sea.

Elric again summons the Lord of the Water Elementals. It’s harder this time, because he does not have the benefit of a near-death experience to concentrate his attention. Straasha is not terribly happy about Elric’s summoning the Lords of Chaos back to this plane, but understands that he was fated to do so. As it happens, the Ship Arioch spoke of belongs to Straasha. Well, it used to belong to him and his brother King Glome of the Earth Elementals, but the two of them quarreled eons ago. Straasha got the Ship, but Glome was never happy about it. With reluctance, Straasha grants Elric use of the Ship.

Elric and his friend Dyvin Tvar prepare an expeditionary force including several war veterans with a “special disability”, which the narration does not at first specify, but which the astute reader can probably guess. They board the magical ship and damned if the blessed thing doesn’t sail over land just as smoothly as if it were sailing over water. But before they get too far, the land begins to quake and rock as if it were an ocean in a storm. The elementals of the earth are taking umbrage. Elric makes for the sea by the shortest route to avoid more trouble.

Sailing south, they reach the city of Dhoz-Kam, capitol of the lands of Oin and Yu, and find that the Mirror is waiting for them. It’s huge and has been set on two enormous pillars at the entrance to the harbor so that no ship can enter without its crew looking upon its baneful surface. No ocean-going ship, that is. Since Elric’s ship can sail over Land as well as Sea, he can circle around and approach the city from the rear.

But hardly do they strike the coast than the earth begins rebelling against the ship again, rocking and buffeting it like waves in a hurricane. Three of Elric’s men are killed by the pitching of the ship. Finally Elric realizes he must speak directly to Glome to try and placate him.

King Glome is not in a conciliatory mood. As far as he’s concerned, the Ship Which Sails Over Both Land And Sea rightfully belongs to him. After much pleading, Glome finally consents to let them pass, requesting only the bodies of the men already slain to be buried in the earth as tribute. But the Ship may nevermore travel over his domains; henceforth it may only travel over the water. Glome allows Elric to pilot the ship to a nearby lake. There it will stay.

Without the ship, Elric will have to attack Yyrkoon’s city on foot. He will need more help.

NEXT: Siege of Dhoz-Kam; the Mirror of Memory; Yyrkoom’s Desperate Flight and the Two Black Swords!

Elric of Melneboné part 1: The Melancholy King

Unlike many of my fannish friends in college, I was never into Elric. Most of my exposure to science fiction in my youth came from my Dad’s collection of paperbacks in the basement, and he had very little Michael Moorcock. As a result, what I knew about Moorcock’s Elric saga was second-hand until I finally read him many years later.

During the 1960s, Michael Moorcock was editor of New Worlds, a controversial British science fiction magazine and one of the vanguards of the “New Wave” in SF, reacting against the traditional, technological focus of the Campbellian school of Hard Science Fiction.


Many of his stories involved what he called the Eternal Champion, a heroic protagonist who fights for Balance between Order and Chaos in many different incarnations in many different times and worlds. Of these champions, the most famous has to be Elric of Melniboné.

To begin with, Elric is doomed.

This is not a spoiler. The text tells us this from the very beginning.

On the island kingdom of Melniboné all the old rituals are still observed, though the nation’s power has waned for five hundred years, and now her way of life is maintained only by her trade with the Young Kingdoms and the fact that the city of Imrryr has become the meeting place of merchants. Are those rituals no longer useful; can the rituals be denied and doom avoided? One who would rule in Emperor Elric’s stead prefers to think not. He says that Elric will bring destruction to Melniboné by his refusal to honour all the rituals (Elric honours many). And now opens the tragedy which will close many years from now and precipitate the destruction of this world.

Melniboné is a very old kingdom. For about ten thousand years it commanded the oceans surrounding . It was an island of sorcery and to a great extent owed its preeminence to the patronage of the Gods of Chaos. The Melnibonéans are renowned for their cruelty and their decadence. They are not quite human, or at least do not acknowledge themselves as such. But the Gods of Chaos withdrew from the world many centuries ago, and the Kingdom of Melniboné has gone into a decline.

The theme of ancient, decedent kingdoms is one that recurs in Moorcocks works. His Dancers at the End of Time stories are set during the last age of the Universe when the stars are slowly going out. It’s tempting to guess that Moorcock is drawing a parallel with the British Empire, which at the time he was writing had long past its peak and was losing its former colonies. Or perhaps the decadent Melnibonéans are the Old School Hard SF writers trying to stay relevant in the face of the New Wave represented by Moorcock’s generation.

Melniboné is still great and still powerful, but it is not as great as it once was, and the far-sighted can tell that the end must come someday; maybe not within this generation, maybe not within this millennium, but eventually.

Elric the frail albino with bone-white skin and slanted eyes, realizes this. It’s one of the reasons why he takes no delight in the revels of his court and why he spends his days in lassitude and melancholy. By all rights, Elric should not even be alive. His father, going against ancient Melnibonéan tradition, actually loved his wife, and when she died giving birth to their only son, a weak and sickly albino, he used all the spells and potions at his disposal to keep the child alive. Dependent on drugs to keep alive, Elric grew up to be a quiet, introspective young man. Reading the books of his father’s massive library exposed him to different philosophies and ideas and gave him something no other Melnibonéan ever had: a conscience.

This conscience is the reason why he does not follow the sadistic and bloodthirsty rituals handed down from the days when the Melnibonéans served the Gods of Chaos – not all of them anyway. His cousin, Prince Yyrkoon thinks this makes him weak and a threat to the nation. Yyrkoon thinks that he would make a better Emperor of Melniboné, and isn’t shy about making that opinion known.

Yyrkoon tries to provoke Elric at a court function into making a scene that he might use to his advantage, but cagey Elric twits him back with a display of verbal fencing and mock courtesy that embarrasses and infuriates the ambitious prince.

Elric’s closest friend, the Lord of the Dragon Caves Dyvim Tvar, thinks that Elric would do well to have Yyrkoon executed, but he doesn’t for several reasons. For one, Elric is in love with Yyrkoon’s sister, Cymoril. (Not that this is a big reason; Cymoril knows her brother is a creep and also urges Elric to kill him). More important is Elric’s conscience. Killing Yyrkoon would be the solution in accordance with the Melnibonéam tradition; but Elric is trying to break with that tradition. That tradition is leading his kingdom to decline and stagnation; he hopes to forge a better way for his people. He’s going against ten thousand years of inertia.

Cymoril and Elric spend a pleasant morning together out riding, away from the court. They deeply love each other, and to her he can express some of his deepest doubts and apprehensions. Perhaps Melniboné would be better off with her brother on the throne. Yyrkoon would certainly take a more aggressive policy towards Melniboné’s enemies and perhaps, for a short time, reclaim some of its past glories.

“You see doom in all things,” she teases him. “Can you not accept the good gifts granted you? They are few enough, my lord.”

This brief idyll is one of the good gifts Elric has. It does not last. Soldiers come to inform him that a group of spies have been captured, and under the traditions of Melniboné, the Emperor is required to be present during their questioning.

Elric finds this particular duty extremely tiresome, but it is one of the cruel traditions he has not abolished. He has a conscience, but it is a pragmatic one; and spies are spies. One of the spies is a woman, and another a child. When the inquisitor, ironically named Doctor Jest, has finished the procedure – the Melnibonéans have had millennia to refine the practice of torture – the mutilated victims hardly look human any more; but he has the information the spies carried. A barbarian fleet is going to attack the capitol city Imrryr soon.

In previous centuries, the Emperor could have swept out with his fleet and crushed the invaders. Even in these latter days, Melniboné commands flights of dragons to rain destruction on their foes from above; but Dyvin Tvar informs Elric that the dragons are resting after their last battle and won’t come out of hibernation for a while. That was Yyrkoon’s fault; Dyvin Tvar hadn’t wanted to use the dragons against a group of pirates, but Prince Macho-pants insisted.

No matter. Elric devised a plan to draw the invaders into a trap in the city’s harbor. Long ago, the Emperors of Melniboné constructed a huge maze within the city’s vast harbor. The Imperial battle barges, artificial floating mountains armoured in gold, will lie in wait for the enemy fleet.

Yyrkoon suggests that it would be safer for the Emperor to remain in his palace, but Elric knows that to do so would be to appear weak. Elric takes personal command of the flagship His trap succeeds, and Melnibonéam fleet crushes the unwary invaders.

At one point, Elirc fights in close combat with the captain of one of the enemy galleys. He asks the captain why they have been so rash as to attack; after all, Melniboné has not sailed against the Young Kingdoms in many years.

“You harm us by your very presence, Whiteface. There is your sorcery. There are your customs. And there is your arrogance. …you creatures are not human. Worse – you are not gods, though you behave as if you were. Your day is over and you must be wiped out, your city destroyed, your sorceries forgotten.”

Elric is not certain that the man is wrong.. The captain goes on to predict that the Chaos Lords whom the Melnibonéans serve will themselves bring about their downfall. In that, Elric is certain he is wrong; the Gods of Chaos lost interest in the affairs of men long ago.. He kills the barbarian captain.

A remnant of the enemy fleet has escaped. Elric is strongly inclined to let them go. He is feeling weak from the battle, and will soon require another dose of the mystic drugs he uses to stay alive. But Yyrkoon insists on hunting down every last ship, and Elric cannot back down without seeming weak – precisely what Yyrkoon wants. So he orders his barge out into the open sea and gives chase.

The pursuit is a long one, and the fugitive ships do not go down without a fight And it is during this last skirmish with the desperate barbarians, that Elric feels his limbs lose their strength and his body fail him. He loses consciousness.

When he regains it, the battle is over, and Yyrkoon is preparing to head back to Imrryr; but first the Prince has one other piece of business to attend to. He’s going to chuck Elric overboard.

“Farewell, Elric. Now a true Melnibonéan shall sit upon the Ruby Throne. And, who knows, might even make Cymoril his queen? It has not been unheard of…”

Tumbling over the edge of the barge, Elric plunges into the dark waters and sinks beneath the waves. This would seem to be his end.

It’s not.

Elric’s not that lucky. Remember? He's doomed.


NEXT:  Friends in Deep Places; The Emperor Yyrkoon Begins His Reign, but who’s that on the Ruby Throne? And the Lord of Chaos Descends!

Three Hearts and Three Lions part 2: Quest for Cortana

Ever since he arrived in this strange magical world, Holger Carlsen, a practical-minded Danish engineer with perhaps a spark of adventure in him, has been mistaken for a legendary knight. The Faerie lord who has been trying to capture or kill him certainly believes he is someone significant; and the sorceress Morgan le Fay, allied with Faerie against the human realms, seems to have a history with him as well. And Holger is having strange stirrings of memory. Can it be that he truly has lived two lives? Who really is the Knight who bears the shield of the Three Hearts and the Three Lions?

Holger has gained two allies in the form of Hugi, an opinionated dwarf with an accent thick enough to make Peter Jackson blanch, and Alainora, a sweet young thing raised in the wild by some of the more benevolent creatures of magic and who has an enchanted garment that permits her to change into a swan. Together the three have been putting distance between themselves and the twilight curtain marking the boundary between the human-held lands of the Christian Empire and the surrounding Middle World, ruled by the forces of Chaos.

So far they have been traveling through wilderness, living off the hospitality of what peasant cottages they encounter and occasional gifts of prey offered by Alainora’s Woodland Friends. Now they have finally come to a town, where dwells a wizard whom Alainora hopes may be able to help Holger’s plight.

Martinus Trismegistus is a licensed practitioner, thank you very much, and in addition to practicing magic, serves as the town dentist, apothecary, scribe and horse doctor. After listening to Holger’s story, he hazards a guess as to the identity the Knight of the Hearts and Lions.

“Quite likely he was one of the Chosen, like [Charlemagne] or Arthur or their greatest paladins. I do not mean a saint, but a warrior whom God gave more than common gifts and then put under a more than common burden. The knights of the Round Table and of Carl’s court are long dead, but another champion may have taken their place. So before Chaos could hope to advance, this man had to be gotten out of the way.”

He goes on to speculate that the Forces of Chaos, perhaps Morgan herself, had attempted to do this by capturing this knight and exiling him to another world, perhaps taking his memories and changing him into a baby to hinder his return. This does fit with Holger’s remembered history. He was a foundling infant and never knew his true parents

But despite Morgan’s best efforts, this champion did return. Martinus doubts that there was any divine intervention involved; the way he describes it almost sounds like an electron returning to its appropriate energy state. “At the moment of greatest need, the champion had to return.”

Holger doesn’t particularly like the idea that he is being controlled by Destiny. But it’s not really Destiny that is his problem. The easiest thing for him to do would be to find a safe, secluded bolt hole and set up a little love nest with Alainora and let the whole war between Order and Chaos be someone else’s problem. But he couldn't in good conscience do that, any more than he could stay safe in America when the Nazis invaded his native Denmark. As Martinus said, along with the greater gifts of the Paladin, he has also been given a greater burden: a Paladin’s sense of honor and of obligation.

Martinus does have a suggestion. Holger has heard mention of a sword named Cortana, which the wizard recognizes. It is an exceptional sword, made of the same steel as Charlemagne’s sword Joyeuse, or King Arthur’s Excalibur. It bears the blessings of a holy saint and in the hands of its rightful owner would be a mighty bulwark for Christendom. This sword – if he could find it -- would undoubtedly protect Holger from his Faerie foes.

Another problem comes up. Holger has heard that a Saracen knight has been seen in the region seeking the Knight of the Three Hearts and Lions; he now discovers that the mysterious Moor is in this very town. At Holger’s urging, Martinus places a spell of disguise on him, and he adopts the nom de guerre “Sir Rupert of Graustark” after a fictional country from Ruritanian novels.

The Saracen is staying at the local inn and introduces himself as Carahue, once king of Mauretania. He seems to be a friendly, agreeable sort. He assures Holger that he too is a Christian.

“Once, true, I fought for the paynim, but the gentle and virtuous knight who overcame me also won me to the True Faith. Though even were I still a follower of Mahound, I would not be so discourteous as not to drink to your most beautiful lady’s health.”

He goes on to say that he seeks a man he once knew long, long ago. The man had vanished into realms unknown. In his searching for the man, Carahue had been cast ashore on the magical isle of Hy Braseal, where time flows strangely, as it does in Avalon or under Elf Hill. By the time Carahune was able to find a means to escape the isle, (and extract himself from the faerie damsel who had taken a liking to him), many centuries had passed. He heard that the man he sought would soon also be drawn back to the mortal world and so has been searching for him.

As wacky as this story sounds, Holger finds it believable. The Faerie he first encountered tried to trick him into spending a night under Elf Hill, so he’s had a bit of experience with variable time rates. This world follows the medieval romances of King Charlemagne and his knights, and by the standards of those, Carahue’s adventures seem pretty typical. But Holger’s not sure he can trust the affable African. He won’t say why he wants to find his missing knight; and as Holger muses, the fact that Carahue speaks well of the knight means little. Under the fantastic code of chivalry, men could sing each other’s praises while carving out each other’s livers.

But a word first about religion. The Empire in which Holger finds himself, which lies under siege by the Middle World, is a Christian one; but the world is definitely not Narnia.

The author, Poul Anderson, is not an apologist out to proselytize with his stories as C.S. Lewis does – I rather get the impression that, like Holger, Anderson is an agnostic with a Lutheran background – but neither is he particularly hostile to religion, as many of his contemporaries from the John W. Campbell school of science fiction were.

The first Anderson novel I ever read was The High Crusade, in which a group of medieval knights encounter an alien invasion’s advance scout ship and seize it to use in fighting the French. The narrator is a pious monk named Brother Parvus. Another writer might have portrayed a religious figure as either a cynical mountebank or a fool, but Anderson doesn’t do that. Although he frequently makes fun of Parvus’s medieval misconceptions about science, he never mocks the monk’s faith or questions his sincerity.

In Three Hearts and Three Lions, Anderson treats aspects of religion as integral parts of how the Laws of Nature work in this world. The Faerie are repelled by holiness, and certain types of ethically-dubious magic are dispelled by it. But Anderson does not set up a dualism where Christianity is Good and all other religions are Evil; his paradigm here is a conflict between Order and Chaos. Christianity happens to be the predominant faith in this region which lines up on the Lawful end of the struggle, but Islam is one too. And although Carahue is a Christian convert, his former religion is not portrayed as something Evil. (And although he may be a convert, old habits die hard; Anderson has a running gag in which Carahue will occasionally say something like “By the hand of the Prophet!” and then quickly correct himself to add “…the Prophet Jesus.”)

For that matter, Carahue observes that the heathen barbarian tribes to the north, where the sword of Cortana is to be found, were not always unlawful. They have since been corrupted by Chaos and now practice cannibalism and human sacrifice, but in Carahue’s day they were merely uncivilized, not evil.

Anderson’s Operation Chaos plays with this a bit more explicitly. The protagonists, a witch and her werewolf husband, harrow Hell in order to recover their stolen child. Heaven cannot directly aid them, other than to supply a little technical advice; so at the climax, Ginny calls upon those Powers in the world who served neither Heaven nor Hell but who in their own way fought against entropy. Much as he loved the ancient gods of the Greeks and the North, I doubt that C.S. Lewis would have been comfortable doing that.

Back to the story. Carahue offers to join “Sir Rupert’” quest to seek the sword Cortana. It may be, after all, that he will find the one he seeks in this quest. Does he suspect Holger’s true identity? If he does, he says nothing. Holger is unsure whether to let Carahue accompany them; but he really has no good reason to forbid it. And the generous Moor has been good enough to cover the groups food and lodging expenses – something Holger had worried about because he has no cash -- so it would be churlish to spurn his aid. For the time being, though, Holger still harbors suspicions about Carahue and hesitates about revealing his true name

In the character of Carahue, Anderson might be seen as anticipating the cliché of the Black Buddy/Sidekick, similar to the role of Azeem in the movie Robin Hood Prince of Thieves; but really, the medieval romances invented the cliché first. Although the Victorian bowdlerizers tended to whitewash them out of King Arthur’s Round Table, there were heroic black knights in the medieval tales. Years after I first discovered Three Hearts and Three Lions, I read Bullfinch’s Mythology and found Carahue the King of Mauretania mentioned, along with Holger, under the name by which he was known at Charlemagne’s court.

Holger’s relationship with Alainora is becoming more complicated. She’s young, affectionate, and has the distracting habit of going about naked except for her enchanted swan-may garment which more resembles a very skimpy poncho than a gown. But she is so sweet that Holger doesn’t feel comfortable reciprocating her affection; especially since his goal is to leave this world and return home to Denmark. He’s been keeping her at arm’s length, and this has been making her unhappy.

But now Carahue has joined the party and he is far from blind to her charms. He is courteous enough to ask Holger if Alainora is his leman, or lover, before he starts flirting with her; but once he's certain that the way is clear, he sets out to focus his not-inconsiderable charm on her. Yes, Holger has no one to blame but himself for his situation, but he’s still not happy about it.

Stewing in jealousy and self-pity, Holger is vulnerable to another Faerie attack. A nixie grabs him and drags him down to her underwater boudoir. Again, Holger uses scientific knowledge, and a bit of luck to escape.

Intelligence from Marius’s spirit familiars has told them that Cortana is hidden in an old shrine that had been overrun and desecrated by human allies of Chaos. The sword’s sanctity is such that the Faeries cannot touch it, but Morgan used human minions to steal it and hide it in the chapel Approaching the shrine, Alainora reports that a huge army of barbarian fighters have gathered around it. Chaos is massing its armies for a huge push against Christendom.

Holger also again meets Morgan le Fay, who offers to restore his memories if he will abandon his quest and come with her. By this time, Holger has come to realize that he is a man of two worlds, and that this world is his original home. The previous time he encountered Morgan, she very nearly succeeded in seducing him. This time, it’s not even close.

The party finds an underground tunnel which can bring them to the shrine without having to fight their way through the army; but it takes them directly into a troll’s lair. The depiction of the fearsome creature which regenerates after every sword-stroke and which can only be destroyed by fire became the basis for the archetypical Troll from Dungeons & Dragons.

Finally they reach the chapel and find the holy sword. As he grasps it, Holger’s memories return. He turns to Alainora. “Whatever comes… whatever happens to me, know that you will return safe, and that you will always bear my love.”

Carahue recognizes and names him. “I sought you, comrade… I sought you, Ogier.”

Holger Danske whom the old French chronicles know as Ogier le Danois mounted into the saddle. And this was the prince of Denmark who in his cradle was given strength and luck and love by such of Faerie as wish men well. He it was who came to serve Carl the Great and rose to be among the finest of his knights, the defender of Christendie and mankind. He it was who smote Carahue of Mauretania in battle, and became his friend, and wandered far with him. He it was whom Morgan le Fay held dear; and when he grew old, she bore him to Avalon and gave him back his youth. There he dwelt until the paynim again menaced France, a hundred years later, and thence he sallied forth to conquer them anew. Then in the hour of his triumph he was carried away from mortal men.

Now in the hour of need he has come again, and wielding the holy sword Cortana, with Carahue at his side, he charges into the armies of Chaos.

And what then?

In an epilogue, the narrator describes meeting Holger some years after the war and how Holger told him the whole story. “And how did you get back?” he asks, when Holger gets to about that point.

“Suddenly I was back,” Holger says. One moment he was riding forth scattering the forces of Chaos before him; the next he was back on the Danish beach in the middle of the firefight between his Resistance group and the Germans. Stark naked and full of adrenaline, he charged the Germans like one of his berserker ancestors, grabbed a machine gun and finished them.

He grimaced at an unpleasant recollection, but said doggedly, “Those two worlds – and many more, for all I know – are in some way the same. The same fight was being waged, here the Nazis and there the Middle World; but in both places, Chaos against Law, something old and wild and blind at war with man and the works of man. In both worlds it was the time of need for Denmark and France. So Ogier came forth in both of them, as he must.”

He had accomplished his task in the world of Charlemagne; but he was still needed in our world. Like the inexorable logic of a physics equation, he was brought back.

But now he knows where he belongs. He has come back to America to haunt old book stores for grimoires and treatises on magic. With luck, he hopes to find a way back

Three Hearts and Three Lions part 1: Into the Faerie Realm

Poul Anderson is perhaps not one of the legendary titans of science fiction, but he has long been a favorite of mine. A writer with a background in physics, he came from the John W. Campbell school of Hard Science Fiction, but he also had a strong interest in the Middle Ages and was one of the founding members of the Society for Creative Anachronism. He is perhaps best-known for his Hoka stories, written with Gordon Dickson, but he wrote a wide range of tales from space opera to time travel to historical fiction to fantasy. He was one of the core contributors to Robert Aspirin’s Thieves’ World anthologies and his essay “On Thud and Blunder” is a must-read for writers of heroic fantasy.

Three Hearts and Three Lions is an earlier work of his which displays both his love of the medieval period and his background in physics, approaching magic from a hard science point of view.

Holger Carlsen must have had some spark of heroism in him, otherwise why would he feel compelled to leave a good engineering job in America to return home to Denmark when the Nazis invaded, and go on to join the Resistance? Holger himself didn't know. It was something he felt he needed to do.
It was on a mission with the Danish Resistance, helping to smuggle an important person out of the country, that his team was surprised by a German ambush on the beach. Struck by a bullet, Holger loses consciousness.

Then things get weird.

He awakens, naked, in a forest, the kind of densely-wooded forest that hasn’t existed in Denmark in centuries. He finds a large war-horse tethered to a tree, along with clothes and armor which fit him perfectly -- all the stranger because Holger is not a small man -- and a shield bearing the device of three hearts alternating with three lions.

At first he wonders if his friends have carried him off to another country; then he wonders if he’s in another time. Finally he comes to the realization that he is in another world.

In this world, the legends of Charlemagne and his knights, like the Song of Roland, are historical. This seems to work both ways; one character Holger meets muses that their legends of Frederick Barbarossa and the Emperor Napoleon’s champions might be similar echoes from our world. This world is locked in a millennia's-old conflict between the forces of Order, represented mostly by Christendom, and of Chaos, represented by the Faerie of the Middle World.

If that theme of Order vs. Chaos sounds familiar, it might be because you've played Dungeons & Dragons. Gary Gygax and Dave Arnesson borrowed a number of elements from Three Hearts and Three Lions, including the Paladin character class, based largely on Holger, the depiction of the Classic D&D Troll, and most importantly, the Alignment System based on Order vs. Chaos.

Holger muses that the situation here is analogous to the one he left in Europe with two diametrically-opposed world-views facing off against each other; (or the one existing at the time Anderson wrote the book, when the Iron Curtain had descended across Europe).

Since the 1960s I think we've gotten used to identifying “Order” with totalitarianism and “Chaos” with freedom, but Anderson has a science background. He associates Chaos with Entropy and the Heat Death of the Universe. The theme of heroes fighting against Chaos and Entropy comes up in more than one of his stories. In addition, Anderson was a Kipling fan, and I suspect was thinking of the line from the poem “Recessional” which speaks of the “lesser breeds without the law” – not primitive, uncivilized tribes, but nations like the Prussians of Kipling's day and the Nazis a generation later, governed by Might rather than by moral codes.

Although in the Carolingian world of Three Hearts, Christendom, as represented by the remnants of Charlemagne’s Empire, stands as the champions of Order, we are told that the Mohammedans are also of Lawful Alignment, and it’s strongly suggested that the wars between Christians and Muslims are greatly to blame for the weakening of Order and a big reason why the Faerie realms of the Middle World have been encroaching in the past millennium.

Holger seems to be an important person in this world, although at first he thinks he’s being mistaken for somebody else. The name Holger seems to be a famous one, and he hears rumors that a Moorish knight has been seen in the area asking after a knight bearing the three hearts and the three lions.

On the questionable advice of a suspiciously-friendly witch, Holger seeks counsel from a Faerie lord, but this proves to be a mistake. The Faeries try first to kill him outright; then to capture him through trickery. The fairy lord summons Morgan le Fay, the powerful sorceress, who seems to have a history with Holger. She tries to seduce him and comes close to succeeding.

Fortunately, Holger is not alone in his quest. He has gained the friendship of Hugi the dwarf; a race allied with neither human nor Faerie, who has an accent even thicker than Peter Jackson’s dwarves; and of Alianora, a human girl raised in the wild by some of the more friendly of the magical creatures, who has the ability to transform herself into a swan. Alianora is an affectionate girl, and Holger finds himself attracted to her, but he doesn't want to take advantage of her, especially since he chiefly wants to get home, and so he keeps her at arm’s length.

Through their various encounters with magical creatures, Holger uses his engineering experience and his scientific background to good advantage. When challenged by a giant to a riddle contest, he manages to stall the brute until dawn when daylight would turn him into stone. Holger is able to identify the smell of ozone in the air and realizes just in time that such a huge mass of carbon transmuted into silicon would result in an unstable isotope, and he quickly leads his friends away before the radiation from the giant’s stone form can harm them.

In another chapter, he comes to a village being troubled by a werewolf. The wolf is trailed to the home of a local lord. Holger uses deduction, process of elimination, and a knowledge of germ theory to identify which member of the knight’s household is the true werewolf, and then arrives at a humane solution to deal with the threat.

Holger is more and more certain that he is someone significant here; and he has nagging echoes of memories about things. Who is the Knight of the Three Hearts and the Three Lions?


NEXT: Advice from a Wizard; the Mysterious Moor; the Quest for Cortana and the Knight’s Identity Revealed!

A Wizard of Earthsea part 3: Facing the Shadow

When he was a youth on the Island of Gont, the wizard Ged was called "Sparrowhawk" for his interest in birds of prey and his ability to summon them. This was his use name, the everyday name people called him, as opposed to his true name, known only to himself and those closest to him. The name has now proven to be prophetic, for, in order to flee the servants of a malevolent sorceror, the Sparrowhawk has transformed himself into a falcon.

He has come to the sorcerer's castle fleeing the shadowy creature of evil he had inadvertently summoned from the realms of death. Possessing one of Ged's traveling companions, the creature almost seized Ged and turned him into a gebbeth, a mere husk of a living man. For a time, Ged found sanctuary in castle of a sinister nobleman and his flirtatious wife, who wished to use him for their own purposes. Now, upon discovering the dark power residing within the castle, Ged has again taken flight -- this time, quite literally.

As we saw in his fight with the Dragons of Pendor, Ged is quite good at these transformations; but they carry an innate risk. A mage who remains too long in a borrowed form may start to forget his true identity. And Ged, driven by anger, fear and a need to escape, is not really concentrating.

Whether by instinct, or by some latent vestige of conscious thought, the falcon comes to perhaps the only man in all of Earthsea capable of recognizing him and recalling him to his human form: Ged's former master, Ogion the Silent, the wizard of Re Albi on the Island of Gont.

"I have come back to you as I left: a fool," Ged says bitterly when he has again recovered. He tells Ogion of his the shadow he unleashed and of its pursuit across the islands of Earthsea.

Although Ged is pretty hard on himself, Ogion points out that he is not as weak and helpless as he thinks, He did, after all, best the Lord of the Terremon Stone on the sorcerer's home turf, and hold off the Stone's guardians; and he held his own against the Dragon of Pendor -- no small feat, even for a wizard. And although the shadow has pursued Ged, it has not managed to overcome him.

Ged doesn't see how he can possibly defeat the shadow when he doesn't know its name. The magic Ged knows is based on the power of names to correspond to reality. If a mage knows the true name of a thing, or of a person, he can bind that thing to his will. Ged isn't sure the shadow even has a name. Le Guin doesn't even capitalize the word "shadow" when she refers to it, emphasizing its anonymity -- a subtle touch that I missed until I stepped back to edit this piece.

Ogion is sure that it does, and reminds him that the shadow spoke Ged's name when the two last met. If the shadow could guess Ged's true name, there must be some way for Ged to learn the shadow's.

Ogion can offer no sanctuary from the shadow, nor does Ged expect it; but the mage does have a suggestion for his former pupil: turn around.

"If you go ahead, if you keep running, wherever you run you will meet danger and evil, for it drives you, it chooses the way you go. You must choose. You must seek what seeks you. You must hunt the hunter."

Ged takes his mentor's advice. It is the dead of winter and there are no ships willing to venture out upon the seas at this time of the year, but Ged is able to buy a decrepit old boat from a local fisherman. The practical shipwright skills he learned from his friend Pechvarry come in handy as he applies both craft and spells to make the boat seaworthy.

He sets off in the direction from which he came when he flew on falcon's wings to Gont. When he gets out to the open sea, Ged calls out to the shadow to summon it. The shadow appears, but instead of attacking, it turns and begins to flee. As Ogion surmised, the shadow is most powerful when Ged tires to avoid it; facing his enemy gives Ged a greater advantage. Now Ged is the hunter.

The shadow moves swiftly, but Ged's boat, impelled by his magically-created winds, moves quickly as well. By the time night falls, Ged is far to the southeast of Gont in unfamiliar waters. A mist comes up upon the waters, and Ged soon finds himself surrounded by a dense fogbank. He sees the shadow dimly through the mist and presses on. He does not see the rocky shoals until it is too late.

The shadow has stolen Ged's own trick and lured him into a deadly fogbank, just as the young Sparrowhawk had done to the Kargad raiders, long ago. Ged's boat is wrecked upon the rocks and Ged finds himself washed ashore on a cold, barren beach.

The spit of land on which he's been cast away barely ranks as an island; it's only about a half a mile across and little more in length. But Ged finds that it is not uninhabited. An elderly couple live alone on the islet, in a little hut made of scavenged driftwood. They fear Ged, and do not understand his speech, but they grudgingly offer him some small hospitality; the little shelter of their hut and what shellfish they can gather to eat.

The woman seems more friendly than the man, and from some of the few possessions the woman shows Ged, he guesses that the two were a brother and sister from a noble family of the Kargad Lands, left on this remote rock as children to die during some political strife.

The woman gives Ged a strange relic, a half of a metal ring. It has no meaning to Ged, and has absolutely no bearing on the rest of this book; but he keeps it, and it later becomes significant in the second book, The Tombs of Atuan.

Ged repairs his boat with bits of driftwood roughly cut into a serviceable shape and lots of magic. The result isn't pretty, and it requires constant attention to his spells to keep the planks together; but the boat will float and not leak. Much.

Ged offers to take the old couple back to civilization, but the sister cannot understand him, and the brother does not want to go. Neither the foreign islands from which Ged comes, nor the Kargad Lands in which the old man was born are home to him. The two will remain on their islet, a forgotten mystery in the middle of the great wide sea.

It is the day of the Winter Solstice when Ged sets out again, the longest night of the year and the day called the Sunreturn by the people of Ged's culture; an appropriate day to resume his quest, seeing as he has turned from fleeing the shadow and that now the shadow flees him. It could have easily attacked him when he lay half-drowned on the beach of the islet, yet it didn't. Ged doesn't know exactly where the creature is now, so he continues on his southeasterly course.

He comes to a island of high cliffs and narrow fjords, and beneath the shadows of those cliffs, his enemy appears to him again, this time in his very boat. Ged does not hesitate; before it has a chance to attack, he grabs it. The shadow dissolves like a mist in his grasp, but despite losing the creature, Ged has won a significant victory. This is the third time he had the creature have come in physical contact, but this time Ged initiated that contact and forced the shadow to flee. More importantly, the act of seizing it forges a link between shadow and man.

There was no need to hunt the thing down, to track it, nor would its flight avail it. Neither could escape. When they had come to the time and place for their last meeting, they would meet. ... He knew now, and the knowledge was hard, that his task had never been to undo what he had done, but to finish what he had begun.

He comes to an inhabited island where he rests for a few days, having slept little or none at all since leaving the islet. He buys a boat to replace the cobbled-together pieces of wreckage he has been using, paying the owner by magically healing the man's cataracts. The grateful man renames the boat Lookfar, and bids Ged paint eyes on it's prow, so that "...my thanks will look out from that blind wood for you and keep you from rock and reef. For I had forgotten how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me." The Lookfar becomes Ged's second home in all his future travels.

He continues from island to island, from village to village, along the chain of eastern islands, until he comes to the town of Ismay on the island of Iffish. He has resolved to spend only a night there and continue on, when he runs into an unexpected friend: his schoolmate, Vetch, whose true name is Estarriol; a fully-accredited mage who has established himself as the island's wizard.

Vetch welcomes Ged warmly and brings him home to meet his sister, Yarrow, and his younger brothers. He mentions a curious thing: just a couple days ago, Vetch saw a man passing through a marketplace who looked exactly like Ged. The curious thing was, that the man seemed to have no shadow. Ged is not surprised. He has heard the rumors of this doppelganger in one of his previous stops. He does not know why the shadow has taken his likeness, but he has no doubt that this is his shadow.

As they relax at Vetch's home, Ged tells of his adventures and his pursuit by, and then of the shadow. Vetch ponders his tale, and then decides, "I'll go with you, Ged." Ged protests that he doesn't want anybody else to suffer from his evil, least of all his friend; but Vetch will have none of it.

"Pride was ever your mind's master, ... "Now think: it is your quest, assuredly, but if the quest fail, should there not be another there who might bear warning to the Archipelago? For the shadow would be a fearful power then. And if you defeat the thing, should there not be another there who will tell of it in the Archipelago, that the Deed may be known and sung? I know I can be of no use to you; yet I think I should go with you."

Ged can hardly argue with that. And the company of his friend is a great comfort to him. They chat about other matters. Vetch tells him that Jasper, Ged's hated rival from school, left the School of Roke the same Summer that he did, without having earned his staff. The last Vetch heard, Jasper was working for a nobleman in another city. A year ago, Ged might have taken great satisfaction in his rival's lack of status; now he says nothing.

Ged spends a pleasant couple of days in Vetch's household, preparing for the next stage in his journey. It is an idyllic, homey place. He gets to know Vetch's younger sister, Yarrow, who is a welcome antidote to the treacherous, scheming women we have seen so far. Yarrow is friendly and pert. She admits that she does not understand magic, but her questions to Ged on the subject shows that she has an intelligent mind and an honest interest in the subject. I get the feeling that Vetch would like to fix his sister up with Ged, and perhaps the author originally had that intention too, but it's not going to happen. Le Guin establishes later on that the wizards of Roke do no marry, period. They devote their lives to their craft. And although this subject does not come up in the Trilogy, the later books show that this enforced celibacy is a failing of the Roke-mages for it limits their understanding of women, and by extension, of a great part of the world.

The two friends set out on the Lookfar, continuing southeast. Ged can sense the shadow ahead of him. Astowell is the easternmost island, called "Lastland" by its inhabitants for there is nothing known beyond it. Here the Hardic language of the Archipelago is spoken with an accent even Vetch finds unfamiliar, and the magic works in peculiar ways. Vetch quotes the proverb, "Rules change in the Reaches"; spells which he learned on Roke don't always work on the distant islands of the East Reach, and some of the spells he uses were never taught at the wizard's school.

But this is the way the shadow has gone, and so this is the way Ged must go. He feels sure that they will eventually come to land. The shadow has always fought him on or near land before, and has avoided him on the water.

After days of travel, steered by the conjured magewind, the Lookfar does come to land, sort of. The sea seems to become solid, as if its waves were dunes of sand. The two wizards beach their boat on the shoreless shoal, and Ged climbs out upon the water. He sees the shadow ahead of him and walks out to meet it.

The shadow takes of other shapes to distract him: first of his rival Jasper; then of his friend the shipwright Pechvarry, but with a face bloated as if he had drowned; then of Skiorh, the galley-oarsman whom the shadow had possessed and devoured. Unfazed, Ged advances closer, and the shadow-creature comes to meet him, now black and bestial.

In that dreadful silence, man and shadow come to stand face to face; and that silence is then broken as Ged and the creature simultaneously speak a single syllable, the shadow's name: "Ged."

He takes hold of the shadow, and this time it reaches out also to him. And as they touch, the two join and become one.

With this, the sea becomes normal again, and Vetch must row out to pull Ged from the water. For a horrible moment he fears that the shadow has overcome his friend and turned him into a gebbeth. Then Ged banishes his fears with a laugh. "Estarriol, ... look, it is done. It is over. ... The wound is healed, I am whole, I am free."

Now when he saw his friend and heard him speak, his doubt vanished. And he began to see the truth, that Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole: a man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life's sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark.

Together the two friends return to Iffish, where Yarrow waits to welcome them.

A brief epilogue tells that Ged goes on to undertake great journeys and perform mighty works, which are recounted in The Deed of Ged, the epic song of his adventures which later generations will someday sing. But this, his first journey, was never recorded in that account. Ged will sail the Dragon's Run and recover the long lost Ring of Erreth-Akbe and eventually become Archmage of Roke and the greatest mage of his generation, just as his master, Ogion, once predicted.

But that, as a different storyteller once said, is another story.

A Wizard of Earthsea part 2: Pursued by the Shadow

Continuing our look at Ursula K. Le Guin's fantasy classic, A Wizard of Earthsea.
Ged, also known as Sparrowhawk, is a young wizard from the Island of Gont who has come to the Roke School of Magic. He has the potential to become a great mage, but foolish pride and envy has spurred him to attempt a dangerous feat of magic: summoning a spirit of the dead. The attempt ripped open the fabric of reality allowing a dark creature of evil, a living shadow, to enter the world of the living. This is what is known in thaumatological terms as a Problem.

Ged survives the attack by the shadow creature, although it is some months before he fully recovers. The student who once surpassed all his peers is now behind them all in his studies and he has lost his confidence. He wants to learn how to undo the evil he has unleashed but even the Archmage himself, who drove off the creature at the cost of his life, was unable to do that.

The new Archmage warns Ged that he will need to gain strength and wisdom to defend himself, for surely the evil shadow will seek to possess him and make him a gebbeth, a puppet doing the creature's evil will.

"You have great power inborn in you, and you used that power wrongly, to work a spell over which you had no control, not knowing how that spell affects the balance of light and dark, life and death, good and evil. And you were moved to do this by pride and by hate. Is it any wonder the result was ruin? You summoned a spirit from the dead, but with it came one of the Powers of unlife. Uncalled it came from a place where there are no names. Evil, it wills to work evil through you. The power you had to call it gives it power over you: you are connected. It is the shadow of your arrogance, the shadow of your ignorance, the shadow you cast. Has a shadow a name?"

This dismays Ged, because the magic he knows is largely based on knowing the names of things. How can he work magic against a thing which has no name?

He gets a visit from his friend, Vetch, now a fully-ranked mage with a staff and everything. Vetch has taken care of Hoek, Ged's pet ferret -- sorry, his pet otak -- during his convalescence. He offers Ged words of encouragement and invites him to come to his home in the East Reach. Vetch also shares with Ged his true name, Estarriol; an act of supreme trust, fur by speaking a person's true name a wizard can conjure him. True names are usually shared only with very close family members and friends, which is why most people know Ged as Sparrowhawk. Ged reciprocates by telling Estarriol his own true name.

Ged finally completes his own training. The Archmage sends him to a distant post where, with luck, the Shadow will have difficulty finding him. Normally, graduates of the Roke School can expect to be placed in noble courts and important cities, but Ged is just as happy to be sent someplace small and out of the way.

Many years ago, the Island of Pendor far to the west had been wiped out by a dragon, who made the isle his habitation. Since then the Dragon of Pendor has been content to remain there, but fishermen from the islets nearest to Pendor have recently seen more dragons, young ones, flying over the adjacent waters. They fear these new dragons will attack their homes and so have petitioned the Archmage of Roke to send them a wizard to protect them.

Ged is happy with his new assignment. The community of islanders is poor and they can offer but humble lodgings, but no worse than his home growing up on Gont. He makes friends with a boatmaker named Pechvarry, and works with him building fishing boats. Pechvarry teaches Ged about the craft of boat-building, and in return Ged places enchantments on his boats to enchance their seaworthiness.

Then one day, Pechvarry's son falls ill, and he calls in Ged to heal the boy. Ged quickly sees that the boy is dying. Since the disaster on Roke unleashing the Shadow, Ged has been cautious about using his magic, but to save the son of his friend, he tries to follow the dying boy's spirit to bring it back into the land of the living.
Ged is breaking protocol with this. One of the essential lessons the Master Healer of Roke drummed into his students was "Heal the wound and cure the illness, but let the dying spirit go." Still, Ged makes the attempt.

The boy, alas, is too far gone; and in following his spirit, Ged finds himself in the Land of the Dead. Making his way back to the living world, Ged sees, waiting for him at the border between life and death, his enemy, the Shadow creature. By crossing over into its home turf, Ged has attracted its attention. Now Ged faces the possibility that he might draw the creature to him and that his very presence will be a threat to his new friends.

The obvious course of action would be to flee; but Ged also has an obligation to defend the fisher-folk from the dragons. Since the dragons have been lying low of late, Ged decides to take the fight to them. He sails a boat to the dragon-ridden isle of Pendor.

The meeting of Ged with the Dragon of Pendor has to be my favorite scene in the book, and Le Guin's dragon ranks up there with Smaug the Terrible as one of the best dragons in fantasy literature.

The first dragons who meet Ged are young, immature ones, and he is able to dispatch them easily. Then three come after him at once, and Ged must transform himself into a dragon to fight them -- a dangerous act which he dares not maintain for long. Changing back to his normal form, he calls out a challenge: "Six I have see, five slain, nine are told of: come out, worms!"

Finally the oldest of the dragons comes out to meet him, and he is a huge critter; one so big that Ged at first mistook it for a part of the ruined Pendor castle. Almost Ged allows himself to gaze into the dragon's hypnotic eyes, which would be a fatal mistake.

"Eight sons I had, little wizard," the dragon says. "Five died, one dies: enough. You will not win my hoard by killing them."

This is significant. Ged has proven himself worthy of the dragon's notice; the dragon will talk to him. In The Tombs of Atuan, Ged explains the matter this way: "The question is always the same with a dragon: will he talk with you or will he eat you? If you can count on his doing the former, and not doing the latter, why then you're a dragonlord." It is with this encounter that Ged enters into the ranks of the dragonlords.

The two fence with words. Dragons speak the Old Tongue which was used to create the world. Mortal men cannot lie in the Old Tongue because the words in it have such a one-to-one correspondence with reality, that you cannot alter their meaning without altering that reality. That is the basis for the Magic of Earthsea. Dragons, however, are a different matter; for them the Old Tongue is part of their very being. They can use it much more subtly than mortal mages can, and Ged must be careful when listening to the dragon's words and when answering.

"What is it that hunts you? Name it to me." 

"If I could name it --" Ged stopped himself. 

Yellow smoke curled above the dragon's long head, from the nostrils that were two round pits of fire. 

"If you could name it you could master it, maybe. little wizard. Maybe I could tell you its name, when I see it close by. And it will come close, if you wait about my isle. It will come wherever you come. If you do not want it to come close you must run, and run, and keep running from it. And yet it will follow you. Would you like to know its name?"

The dragon is playing mind games with Ged, just as Smaug played with Bilbo in The Hobbit. But Ged is here to bargain. He offers the dragon his safety. "Swear that you will never fly eastward of Pendor, and I will swear to leave you unharmed."

"You threaten me!" Ged might have killed the young dragonspawn, but he is hardly a match for a fully-grown dragon. "With what?"

"With your name, Yevaud." This is a calculated risk. Ged has been preparing for this encounter by reading all the dragon lore he can find. He guesses that this dragon might be the same one mentioned in old histories as being driven from the Island of Osskill by a previous wizard.

His guess is correct. The dragon backs down. He offers Ged jewels, but Ged has no wish for them. He offers to tell Ged the name of the thing which pursues them, and this tempts him; but Ged has an obligation to fulfill. At last, Yevaud agrees. He swears that neither he nor his sons will ever come to the Archipelago; an oath that he will be bound to honor.

The fisher-folk rejoice that Ged has ensured their safety from the dragon and would gladly let him stay in their community; but Ged knows that the Shadow will come after him. He needs to leave. And to be truthful, he has difficulty facing his friend Pechvarry, whose son he could not save.

Leaving the fishermen's community, Ged takes passage on a ship back to Roke; but strange winds keep pushing the ship away, even when Ged tries to use magic to blow the ship back on course. He realizes this must be the Roke-wind, a magical protection that keeps evil away from Roke. The creature which pursues Ged is linked to him so closely, that the Roke-wind blows against him as well. He has the ship deposit him on another island.

Friendless and alone, except for his pet otak, he continues on with no firm destination other than a vague idea of heading north and maybe returning to Gont. In one town, a friendly stranger suggests he go to the Court of the Terrenon on the Island of Osskill. Something about the stranger strikes Ged as peculiar, and Osskill has something of a dark reputation. The island is culturally distinct from the central island of the Archipelego and its natives, like all the northerners, it seems, save the Gontsmen, have lighter skin. More importantly, they practice magical traditions on Osskill different than the School of Roke; but as the stranger observes, their reputation may just reflect prejudice on the part of the Roke-mages.

Ged takes passage on a galley ship headed north. The captain does not accept the ivory currency with which the fisher-folk paid him, and Ged has no gold, so he offers to pay his passage as an oarsman.

The voyage is a long and dismal one. Most of the other oarsmen are slaves, leaving a considerable social barrier between the rowers who got whipped and the rowers who got paid. Few of the free men speak the same language as Ged. Once one of the freemen, a tough named Skiorh, tries to pick a fight with Ged. Ged does not rise to the provocation, but he catches something strange in the man's face, as if his features were slurring and changing; but a moment later it was back to normal.

Arriving on Osskill, Ged asks around for directions to the Court of the Terrenon. Surprisingly, Skiorh overhears him and offers to guide him there. Skiorh had never been particularly friendly to him before, and he is not the companion Ged would have chosen; but being alone in a foreign port, he has no other options.

The two men venture forth from the port town into the snowy hills of Osskill. Skiorh says little as the farms become fewer, the roads become rougher and the hills become wilder. Day is failing and the darkening sky threatens snow when Ged asks, not for the first time, "How far?"

"Not far," Skiorh replies, but his voice sounds like something inhuman. Turning Skiorh around to face him, Ged sees only darkness beneath the man's hood. The Shadow has possessed Skiorh; Ged actually saw it happen on the ship but didn't recognize what was taking place. Now Skiorh is a gebbeth.

Before Ged can summon his magic, the gebbeth speaks his name, "Ged!" Locked into his true form by his true name, Ged can work no transformations upon himself, as he did in the fight with the dragons. There is no one around to help him, even if any would help a stranger in this alien land. He tries beating at the gebbeth with his staff, but its body has become amorphous, like smoke, and he cannot harm it. Ged has no choice but to run.

He flees into the snowy darkness, with the gebbeth close behind him. He spots a light up on a hill and seems to hear a voice urging him to come. With his last bit of strength, and with the gebbeth clutching at him from behind, he reaches a faintly shining gate and makes it through the doorway.

He awakens in richly-furnished sleeping chambers. A beautiful lady tells him he is safe from his pursuer and that he has reached the Court of the Terrenon. She seems to know exactly who he is, which puzzles Ged. Although he does not recognize her right away, the lady Serret is the same young witch whom he sought to impress back on Gont, the daughter of the Lord of Re Albi, and who cajoled him into sneaking a look at his master's books of magic. She is now grown up and married to the elderly Lord Benderesk.

Was it coincidence that brought his path here? Ged cannot be certain. He has trouble thinking straight during his stay at the Court of the Terrenon. Maybe it's because of the overpowering guilt and shame he feels over his nearly disastrous encounter with the gebbeth; maybe it's because of Sennet's distracting beauty; maybe it's because of some enchantment of the castle, for it is a very ancient castle, raised by magic and not by human hands.

One evening, Ged asks about the Terrenon Stone, from which the keep gets its name. He imagines it it some splendid jewel. Serret takes him down to the bowels of the keep, to a locked dungeon-like cell. Ged's mystically-attuned senses recognize one of the rough-hewn blocks that make up the floor as containing a powerful magic.

"That is the Terrenon. Do you wonder that we keep so precious a jewel locked away in our deepest hoardroom?" Serret goes on to explain that the stone was made when the world itself was made, long before the islands were raised. If one puts his hand upon it, it will answer questions and reveal secrets. It foretold Ged's coming to the castle. "It might tell you... how you will defeat your enemy."

Ged refuses. He fears the power that dwells within the stone, and this time he is not afraid to admit it.

"My lady, that spirit is seals in a stone, and the stone is locked by binding-spell and blinding spell and charm of lock and ward and triple fortress-walls in a barren land, not because it is precious, but because it can work great evil."

He is afraid at first that he might have offended the lady; but when he speaks to her again later, she tries a different tack. She concedes that men of lesser power would risk grave peril trying to use the stone's magic; but Ged is a superior wizard: he has the power to control the stone. It requires both power and will to harness the stone's magic. Neither she nor her husband can fully tap into its powers; but Ged can. The stone told her he could. It was she who sent the friendly stranger to direct Ged to Osskill, and she, with the stone's help, who guided Ged's footsteps to the Terrenon's gate. And the stone can help him. "Only shadow can fight shadow. Only darkness can defeat the dark. ... You will be mightier than all men, a king among men. You will rule, and I will rule with you --"

Ged is sorely tempted. But in a moment he suddenly sees things more clearly. "It is light that defeats the dark, ...light."

Lord Benderesk comes in at this moment. He and his wife had conspired together to use Ged as a puppet, but she had failed to manipulate Ged as she had hoped. What's more, her husband heard Serret's suggestion that she and Ged rule things together and he is not amused. Benderesk is about to cast a spell of Changing upon his wife as punishment, but Ged stops him.

Ged and Serret flee from the castle. Although Lord Benderesk cannot fully use the stone's power, Serret tells Ged that her husband can raise the Servants of the Stone. As they leave the palace gate, Ged spots something half buried in the snow: the dead body of Hoek, Ged's otak, presumably killed in the fight with the gebbeth.

Serret urges Ged to transform himself so that he can flee the place. Vile, winged creatures out the prehistoric past, the Servants of the Stone, are on their way from one of the towers of the castle. Serret changes herself into a seagull and flies away, but Ged, burning with anger, uses magic to create a staff for himself out of a blade of grass and uses the staff to fight the beasts.

It is only when he sees the creatures pursuing Serret, that he changes himself into a falcon and flies to her rescue. He is too late; the creatures have caught their prey, and now they turn to pursue Ged.
He flies to the edge of the island, whose shores the Stone's Servants cannot cross; and continues flying from there, driven by anger and fear, across the wide, winter seas.


NEXT: The Apprentice's Return: "You Must Turn Around:" The Shadow Pursued; the Two Castaways; A Happy Reunion; and the Final Voyage. Rules Change in the Reaches, so be ready for anything!

A Wizard of Earthsea part 1: The Shadow is Loosed

Ursula K. Le Guin was among the first generation of feminist science fiction writers. There were women writing science fiction in the preceding era, such and Andre Norton, Liegh Brackett and C. L. Moore, but as a rule they had to use male or gender-neutral pseudonyms in order to be accepted by the male editors and predominantly male readers of the science fiction magazines.

Le Guin's Earthsea Trilogy of fantasy novels is among her best-known work. Perhaps it is not as innovative and groundbreaking as some of her science fiction novels, seeing as it deals with the traditional fantasy theme of the Boy Growing to Manhood and Achieving Greatness, but she set her hero in a unique world. Despite drawing inspiration from J.R.R. Tolkien, Le Guin managed to create a fantastic world of wizards and even dragons without copying him -- no easy task, as decades of bad fantasy series have demonstrated.

The Earthsea books are not a trilogy in the sense of many post-Tolkien fantasy works; they are not a single epic spread across three (or in the case of Robert Jordon, dozens of) books. Each novel is a complete work, a single individual story, linked together by the world of Earthsea and the central character of Ged, the young wizard who becomes the Archmage of Earthsea. Le Guin expanded the original trilogy with several short stories and two additional novels, but to my mind, the trilogy, A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, and The Farthest Shore, form a thematic unit showing the wizard Ged in his youth, his adulthood, and his old age.

For this series, we'll be looking at the first book in the trilogy, A Wizard of Earthsea. Although written for a young adult audience, the Earthsea books are examples of that superior type of novel C.S. Lewis had in mind when he said, “No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.”

Le Guin calls her world Earthsea for good reason. If it is true that epic fantasies always start with a map -- at least that's the way it seems -- then that map usually depicts a continent. That's how Tolkien's Middle-Earth looked, and most of the fantasy authors who have followed him have taken a similar geographic approach. Le Guin, however sets her story in an archipelago, myriad islands scattered about a wide, encircling ocean. The chief means of traveling anywhere is by boat, and wind and wave have a much greater presence throughout the entire book than in other land-locked epics.

Duny, the boy who will become the wizard Ged, is the youngest son of the local bronzesmith in a small village on the remote island of Gont. The island is noted for producing three things: pirates, goats and wizards. There are no pirates in this story. When Duny shows an early aptitude for magic, his aunt takes him on as an apprentice.

Duny's aunt is only a hedge-witch and her knowledge of magic is mixed with rubbish and humbug. The author quotes a Gontish saying, "weak as woman's magic," and another one, "wicked as woman's magic." Which seems a peculiar sentiment to come from a feminist author, but then she is describing the attitudes of a culture rather than making an endorsement of them. Still, there are few female characters in A Wizard of Earthsea, and most of them are wicked to one degree or another. Many years after writing the Earthsea Trilogy, Le Guin wrote another Earthsea book titled Tehanu looking at wizardry from the female point of view, and revealing that the assumptions about women and magic found in the original trilogy had been largely shaped by male chauvinist wizards and the magical tradition outside of the males-only formal school of wizardry has its own power and value.

Be that as it may, under his aunt's tutelage Duny takes his first steps in learning magic. He delights in spells to summon animals, and his control of the birds of prey in the Gontish hills earns him the nickname of "Sparrowhawk"

One day sea-raiders from the Kargad Islands come to Gont and attack Duny's village. The Kargs are blond-haired and viking-like with white skin, and this is a subtle but important point that I missed when I first read the book and a lot of other people (including television executives) missed as well. Le Guin wanted to differentiate her story from the bog-standard European Medieval Fantasy and one of the things she did was give her protagonist and most of the other characters reddish-brown skin. It bugged her when illustrators, and the producers of the TV miniseries adaptation, made the hero Caucasian. In fairness, though, I have to say the point is an easy one to miss; she does not come out and explicitly mention Ged's skin color until a few chapters in.

As the boy Duny stands ready to defend his village with his father and the other men, he gets an idea. He improvises a spell, based on some of the weather spells he has learned, to conceal the village in a thick, enshrouding fog. The mists confuse the raiders and under it's protection the men of the village are able to scatter them and drive them away. Duny has saved the village, but the effort of creating such a massive enchantment proves too much of a strain to the boy. When the mists clear, the villagers find him standing dazed and in a trance.

He remains that way, in a virtual coma, for several days, until Ogion the Silent, the Mage of Re Albi, arrives. Ogion is the greatest wizard on Gont and is renowned for having stopped an earthquake which once threatened the chief city of the island. "The tale of his deed with the fog has come to Re Albi, which is my home," he says. "I have come here to give him his name, if as they say he has not yet made his passage into manhood."

Part of the culture's Rite of Passage into adulthood is to give a new name which will be his True Name, one which will be known only to himself and to his closest friends. This is important because the magic of Earthsea is based on names and knowledge of the True Names of things. The name Duny, which the boy was given at birth, is only a placeholder to serve until his thirteenth birthday, when he will be given his own True Name.

Ogion heals the boy, and when Duny's thirteenth birthday comes, returns to the village to preside over the boy's Passage. He gives the boy the name Ged. Then he bids the boy come with him to be his apprentice.
At first, Ged expects to enter a whole new world of magic, but during the journey back to the wizard's hermitage in the town of Re Albi, Ogion the Silent lives up to his name. Finally Ged asks him, "When will my apprenticeship begin, Sir?"

"It has begun," Ogion replies.

"But I haven't learned anything yet!"

"Because you haven't found out what I am teaching."

Eventually, Ogion sets Ged to learning the Six Hundred Runes of Hardic and the words of the Old Speech, the language of the Creator in which things are named with their true names -- useful stuff like that -- but what Ged really needs to learn is patience. His aunt promised him that sorcery would be his key to fame and fortune, but Ogion, who's supposed to be a great mage, lives in a humble hut and doesn't even use his magic to keep the rain off it.

One spring day, while exploring the meadows near Ogion's hut, Ged meets a girl who starts to chat with him and ask to learn more about sorcery. Ged recognizes the girl as the daughter of the local lord, and although he doesn't think her very pretty, he feels the urge to impress her. He summons a falcon with a spell, although the bird does not light on his wrist as he intended and instead flies away again. The girl asks if Ged can summon the spirits of the dead to come too. Ged tries to act cool. "I might if I chose."

She goes on to ask about transformations, and again, Ged boasts that he could change himself into an animal "if I chose." She wheedles and cajoles him to prove it, but since he doesn't actually know those spells, he puts her off. She mockingly accuses him of being afraid, which shames him.

After they part, Ged returns to his master's hut and pulls down the two great lorebooks that Ogion never opened in his presence. He wants to find a spell of self-transformation, but for some reason he stops at a page containing a spell for summoning the spirits of the dead.

To his horror, he finds himself compelled to keep reading the spell, unable to turn his eyes away from the runes on the page. The girl's mother is an enchantress, and she sent her daughter with the purpose of wheedling some of Ogion's secrets out of his young apprentice. Ged notices a shadow crouching near the door, darker even than the already darkened room. It whispers to him in words he cannot understand.
Then Ogion enters the room, much as the scene from "The Sorcerer's Apprentice", driving away the shadow and breaking the charm Ged was under.

Ogion rebukes his pupil, and Ged responds in shame and anger. "How am I to know these things, when you teach me nothing? Since I lived with you I have done nothing, seen nothing--"

Ogion ponders his student gravely. Then he offers Ged a choice. Although the boy is still young, he offers to send Ged to the Island of Roke, where the great school of wizardry is. Or he can stay in Re Albi and learn what Ogion has to teach him.

Ged is torn, because he does sincerely love his master; but in the end his thirst for magic wins out. "I will go to Roke."

Roke Island is located in the middle of the Inner Sea, a large body of water sheltered by some of the larger, more populated islands of Earthsea. As the natives of Easter Island called their home 'the Navel of the World', Roke could be thought of as the navel of Earthsea, where its greatest wizards learn in quiet contemplation.

Le Guin has said that the idea for her book came from wondering where wizards came from and how they became wizards. The Roke School is perhaps the first depiction in fantasy of a School of Magic, and few writers, perhaps no writers , have done it better.

Unlike Tolkien, who was vague about how magic worked and even had one character complain about how inconsistent mortals were with the term, Le Guin worked out a largely consistent Theory of Magic which she stuck to throughout the story and which became an integral part of the plot. Magic is based on knowing the True Names of things, and by knowing something's name you can control it to a greater or lesser degree. But in doing so, you affect the Balance; changing one aspect of reality has a Butterfly Effect on the rest of it. This is why Ogion declined to alter the weather around him, or even do much obvious magic at all, to Ged's frustration.

Ogion sent a message with Ged to the Archmage of Roke, who serves as head of the school, reading: "I send you one who will be greatest of the wizards of Gont, if the wind blows true." This is certainly news to Ged, who was unaware Ogion thought he had that kind of potential.

He meets two companions: Vetch, a darker-skinned heavyset youth from the far Eastern Reach of the Archipelego, a friendly, agreeable comrade who soon becomes his friend; and Jasper, a wealthy nobleman's son to whom Ged takes an immediate dislike. Both Vetch and Jasper are a couple years older than Ged and further along in their studies, but Jasper has a smug, condescending attitude towards Ged which infuriates him.

Is Jasper really that big a jerk? It's hard to tell, because we see him through Ged's eyes and Ged is blinded by envy and a sense of inferiority. He is certain that Jasper looks down on him and Ged is determined to wipe that smug grin off his aristocratic face.

The earliest spells the students at Roke learned were spells of Illusion, which made no changes to the physical world and therefore had little effect on the Balance; from there they spent an entire year simply memorizing long lists of names in the Old Tongue. "He who would be Seamaster must know the true name of every drop of water in the sea," the Loremaster tells his students.

Ged pushes himself to excel. He graduates from the Loremaster's tower far ahead of his classmates. He studies other, more advanced forms of magic with the other masters of the school, and shows a talent for transformations, the very subject the young witch in Re Albi had teased him about. He also gains a new companion, a small, furry ferret-like creature called an otak who becomes his pet and likes to ride about on his shoulder. Still, Jasper regards him with his mocking smirk, and Ged's hatred of him burns all the hotter.

One day, their quarrel reaches a breaking point, and Ged challenges Jasper to a contest to see which can perform the greater feat of magic. Vetch tries to mediate between the two, to no avail. Jasper is dismissive of the goat-herder from Gont who only knows a few tricks and illusions.

"What would you like me to do, Jasper?" Ged asks.

Jasper shrugs. "Summon up a spirit from the dead for all I care."

A thoughtless jibe at one whom Jasper doesn't take seriously; but Ged accepts the challenge. He offers to raise the spirit of a legendary beauty, told of in one of the old songs sung by the bards. He knows he can do this; he remembers the page of Master Ogion's book that he read back in Re Albi as if it were right before him. Ged begins to conjure.

For a moment, the image of a beautiful woman, sorrowful and afraid, appears between Ged's outstretched hands. Then something opens, like a rent in the fabric of reality, and a dark creature like a living shadow, a hideous black beast the size of a child leaps out and pounces on Ged's face.

Almost immediately, the Archmage arrives, alerted by the disruption to the Balance. He drives off the Black Beast and heals the rent in reality. But like Ged's earlier deed of the fog, the effort of repairing the damage Ged recklessly caused is more strain than he can bear; the Archmage is fatally weakened and soon dies.
Ged, his face scarred by the creature's claws, lies close to death also, but he survives.

As does the creature of evil he has inadvertently summoned.


NEXT:  Ged goes forth, the Dragon of Pendor, pursuit by the Shadow and the Sparrowhawk's Flight.