The Tombs of Atuan

They were both twelve years old. They were supposed to be in the weaving room of the Big House, a huge stone attic; they were supposed to be at the great looms always warped with dull black wool, weaving black cloth for robes. They had slipped outside for a drink at the well in the courtyard, and then Arha had said, “Come on!” and had led the other girl down the hill, around out of sight of the Big House, to the wall. Now they sat on top of it, ten feet up, their bare legs dangling down on the outside, looking over the flat plains that went on and on to the east and north.

“I’d like to see the sea,” said Penthe.

“What for?” said Arha, chewing a bitter stem of milkweed she had picked from the wall. The barren land was just past its flowering. All the small desert blossoms, yellow and rose and white, low-growing and quick-flowering, were going to seed, scattering tiny plumes and parasols of ash white on the wind, dropping their hooked, ingenious burrs. The ground under the apple trees of the orchard was a drift of bruised white and pink. The branches were green, the only green trees within miles of the Place. Everything else, from horizon to horizon, was a dull, tawny, desert color, except that the mountains had a silvery bluish tinge from the first buds of the flowering sage.

“Oh, I don’t know what for. I’d just like to see something different. It’s always the same here. Nothing happens.”

“All that happens everywhere, begins here,” said Arha.

“Oh, I know… But I’d like to see some of it happening!”

Penthe smiled. She was a soft, comfortable-looking girl. She scratched the soles of her bare feet on the sunwarmed rocks, and after a while went on, “You know, I used to live by the sea when I was little. Our village was right behind the dunes, and we used to go down and play on the beach sometimes. Once I remember we saw a fleet of ships going by, way out at sea. The ships looked like dragons with red wings. Some of them had real necks, with dragon heads. They came sailing by Atuan, but they weren’t Kargish ships. They came from the west, from the Inner Lands, the headman said. Everybody came down to watch them. I think they were afraid they might land. They just went by, nobody knew where they were going. Maybe to make war in Karego-At. But think of it, they really came from the sorcerers’ islands, where all the people are the color of dirt and they can all cast a spell on you easy as winking.”

“Not on me,” Arha said fiercely. “I wouldn’t have looked at them. They’re vile accursed sorcerers. How dare they sail so close to the Holy Land?”

“Oh, well, I suppose the God-king will conquer them some day and make them all slaves. But I wish I could see the sea again. There used to be little octopuses in the tide pools, and if you shouted `Boo!’ at them they turned all white. -There comes that old Manan, looking for you.”

Arha’s guard and servant was coming slowly along the inner side of the wall. He would stoop to pull a wild onion, of which he held a large, limp bunch, then straighten up and look about him with his small, dull, brown eyes. He had grown fatter with the years, and his hairless yellow skin glistened in the sun.

“Slide down part way on the men’s side,” Arha hissed, and both girls wriggled lithe as lizards down the far side of the wall until they could cling there just below the top, invisible from the inner side. They heard Manan’s slow footsteps coming by.

“Hoo! Hoo! Potato face!” crooned Arha, a whispering jeer faint as the wind among the grasses.

The heavy tread halted. “Ho there,” said the uncertain voice. “Little one? Arha?”

Silence.

Manan went forward.

“Hoo-oo! Potato face!”

“Hoo, potato belly!” Penthe whispered in imitation, and then moaned, trying to suppress giggles.

“Somebody there?”

Silence.

“Oh well, well, well,” the eunuch sighed, and his slow feet went on. When he was gone over the shoulder of the slope, the girls scrambled back up onto the top of the wall. Penthe was pink with sweat and giggles, but Arha looked savage.

“The stupid old bellwether, following me around everywhere!”

“He has to,” Penthe said reasonably. “It’s his job, looking after you.”

“Those I serve look after me. I please them; I need please nobody else. These old women and half-men, these people should leave me alone. I am the One Priestess!”

Penthe stared at the other girl. “Oh,” she said feebly, “oh, I know you are, Arha-”

“Then they should let me be. And not order me about all the time!”

Penthe said nothing for a while, but sighed, and sat swinging her plump legs and gazing at the vast, pale lands below, that rose so slowly to a high, vague, immense horizon.

“You’ll get to give the orders pretty soon, you know,” she said at last, quietly. “In two more years we won’t be children any more. We’ll be fourteen. I’ll go into the Godking’s temple, and things will be about the same for me. But you’ll really be the High Priestess then. Even Kossil and Thar will have to obey you.”