Often compared to Tolkien''s Middle-earth or Lewis''s Narnia,
Ursula K. Le Guin''s Earthsea is a stunning fantasy world that grabs
quickly at our hearts, pulling us deeply into its imaginary realms.
Four books A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, The Farthest
Shore, and Tehanu tell the whole Earthsea cycle--a tale about a
reckless, awkward boy named Sparrowhawk who becomes a wizard''s
apprentice after the wizard reveals Sparrowhawk''s true name. The
boy comes to realize that his fate may
內容簡介：
Ged was the greatest sorcerer in all Earthsea, but once
he was called Sparrowhawk, a reckless youth, hungry for power
and knowledge, who tampered with long-held secrets and loosed
a terrible shadow upon the world. This is the tale of his
testing, how he mastered the mighty words of power, tamed
an ancient dragon, and crossed death''s threshold to
restore the balance.
關於作者：
Ursula Kroeber Le Guin was born in 1929; her parents were the
anthropologist Alfred Kroeber and the writer Theodora Kroeber. She
writes both poetry and prose, including realistic fiction, science
fiction, fantasy, young children''s books, books for young adults,
screenplays, essays, verbal texts for musicians, and voicetexts for
performance or recording. She has published five books of poetry,
seventeen novels, over a hundred short stories collected in eight
volumes, two collections of essays, eleven books for children, and
two volumes of translation. Several of Le Guin''s major titles have
remained continuously in print for over thirty years. Her best
known fantasy works, the first four Books of Earthsea, have sold
millions of copies in America and England, and have been translated
into sixteen languages. Three of Le Guin''s books have been
finalists for the American Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and
among the many honors her writing has received are the National
Book Award, five Hugo Awards, five Nebula awards, the Kafka award,
a Pushcart Prize, the Howard Vursell award of the American Academy
of Arts and Letters, and the L.A. Times Robert Kirsch Award.
內容試閱：
WARRIORS IN THE MIST
The island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile
above the storm-racked Northeast Sea, is a land famous for wizards.
From the towns in its high valleys and the ports on its dark narrow
bays many a Gontishman has gone forth to serve the Lords of the
Archipelago in their cities as wizard or mage, or, looking for
adventure, to wander working magic from isle to isle of all
Earthsea. Of these some say the greatest, and surely the greatest
voyager, was the man called Sparrowhawk, who in his day became both
dragonlord and Archmage. His life is told of in the Deed of Ged and
in many songs, but this is a tale of the time before his fame,
before the songs were made.
He was born in a lonely village called Ten Alders, high on the
mountain at the head of the Northward Vale. Below the village the
pastures and plow lands of the Vale slope downward level below
level towards the sea, and other towns lie on the bends of the
River Ar; above the village only forest rises ridge behind ridge to
the stone and snow of the heights.
The name he bore as a child, Duny, was given him by his mother,
and that and his life were all she could give him, for she died
before he was a year old. His father, the bronze-smith of the
village, was a grim unspeaking man, and since Duny''s six brothers
were older than he by many years and went one by one from home to
farm the land or sail the sea or work as smith in other towns of
the Northward Vale, there was no one to bring the child up in
tenderness. He grew wild, a thriving weed, a tall, quick boy, loud
and proud and full of temper. With the few other children of the
village he herded goats on the steep meadows above the
river-springs; and when he was strong enough to push and pull the
long bellows-sleeves, his father made him work as smith''s boy, at a
high cost in blows and whippings. There was not much work to be got
out of Duny. He was always off and away; roaming deep in the
forest, swimming in the pools of the River Ar that like all Gontish
rivers runs very quick and cold, or climbing by cliff and scarp to
the heights above the forest, from which he could see the sea, that
broad northern ocean where, past Perregal, no islands are.
A sister of his dead mother lived in the village. She had done
what was needful for him as a baby, but she had business of her own
and once he could look after himself at all she paid no more heed
to him. But one day when the boy was seven years old, untaught and
knowing nothing of the arts and powers that are in the world, he
heard his aunt crying out words to a goat which had jumped up onto
the thatch of a hut and would not come down: but it came jumping
when she cried a certain rhyme to it. Next day herding the
longhaired goats on the meadows of High Fall, Duny shouted to them
the words he had heard, not knowing their use or meaning or what
kind of words they were:
Noth hierth malk man
hiolk han merth han!
He yelled the rhyme aloud, and the goats came to him. They came
very quickly, all of them together, not making any sound. They
looked at him out of the dark slot in their yellow eyes.
Duny laughed and shouted it out again, the rhyme that gave him
power over the goats. They came closer, crowding and pushing round
him. All at once he felt afraid of their thick, ridged horns and
their strange eyes and their strange silence. He tried to get free
of them and to run away. The goats ran with him keeping in a knot
around him, and so they came charging down into the village at
last, all the goats going huddled together as if a rope were pulled
tight round them, and the boy in the midst of them weeping and
bellowing. Villagers ran from their houses to swear at the goats
and laugh at the boy. Among them came the boy''s aunt, who did not
laugh. She said a word to the goats, and the beasts began to bleat
and browse and wander, freed from the spell.
"Come with me," she said to Duny.
She took him into her hut where she lived alone. She let no child
enter there usually, and the children feared the place. It was low
and dusky, windowless, fragrant with herbs that hung drying from
the crosspole of the roof, mint and moly and thyme, yarrow and
rushwash and paramal, kingsfoil, clovenfoot, tansy and bay. There
his aunt sat crosslegged by the firepit, and looking sidelong at
the boy through the tangles of her black hair she asked him what he
had said to the goats, and if he knew what the rhyme was. When she
found that he knew nothing, and yet had spellbound the goats to
come to him and follow him, then she saw that he must have in him
the makings of power.
As her sister''s son he had been nothing to her, but now she
looked at him with a new eye. She praised him, and told him she
might teach him rhymes he would like better, such as the word that
makes a snail look out of its shell, or the name that calls a
falcon down from the sky.
"Aye, teach me that name!" he said, being clear over the fright
the goats had given him, and puffed up with her praise of his
cleverness.
The witch said to him, "You will not ever tell that word to the
other children, if I teach it to you."
"I promise."
She smiled at his ready ignorance. "Well and good. But I will
bind your promise. Your tongue will be stilled until I choose to
unbind it, and even then, though you can speak, you will not be
able to speak the word I teach you where another person can hear
it. We must keep the secrets of our craft."
"Good," said the boy, for he had no wish to tell the secret to
his playmates, liking to know and do what they knew not and could
not.
He sat still while his aunt bound back her uncombed hair, and
knotted the belt of her dress, and again sat cross-legged throwing
handfuls of leaves into the firepit, so that a smoke spread and
filled the darkness of the hut. She began to sing. Her voice
changed sometimes to low or high as if another voice sang through
her, and the singing went on and on until the boy did not know if
he waked or slept, and all the while the witch''s old black dog that
never barked sat by him with eyes red from the smoke. Then the
witch spoke to Duny in a tongue he did not understand, and made him
say with her certain rhymes and words until the enchantment came on
him and held him still.
"Speak!" she said to test the spell.
The boy could not speak, but he laughed.
Then his aunt was a little afraid of his strength, for this was
as strong a spell as she knew how to weave: she had tried not only
to gain control of his speech and silence, but to bind him at the
same time to her service in the craft of sorcery. Yet even as the
spell bound him, he had laughed. She said nothing. She threw clear
water on the fire till the smoke cleared away, and gave the boy
water to drink, and when the air was clear and he could speak again
she taught him the true name of the falcon, to which the falcon
must come.
This was Duny''s first step on the way he was to follow all his
life, the way of magery, the way that led him at last to hunt a
shadow over land and sea to the lightless coasts of death''s
kingdom. But in those first steps along the way, it seemed a broad,
bright road.
When he found that the wild falcons stooped down to him from the
wind when he summoned them by name, lighting with a thunder of
wings on his wrist like the hunting-birds of a prince, then he
hungered to know more such names and came to his aunt begging to
learn the name of the sparrowhawk and the osprey and the eagle. To
earn the words of power he did all the witch asked of him and
learned of her all she taught, though not all of it was pleasant to
do or know. There is a saying on Gont, Weak as woman''s magic, and
there is another saying, Wicked as woman''s magic. Now the witch of
Ten Alders was no black sorceress, nor did she ever meddle with the
high arts or traffic with Old Powers; but being an ignorant woman
among ignorant folk, she often used her crafts to foolish and
dubious ends. She knew nothing of the Balance and the Pattern which
the true wizard knows and serves, and which keep him from using his
spells unless real need demands. She had a spell for every
circumstance, and was forever weaving charms. Much of her lore was
mere rubbish and humbug, nor did she know the true spells from the
false. She knew many curses, and was better at causing sickness,
perhaps, than at curing it. Like any village witch she could brew
up a love-potion, but there were other, uglier brews she made to
serve men''s jealousy and hate. Such practices, however, she kept
from her young prentice, and as far as she was able she taught him
honest craft.
At first all his pleasure in the art-magic was, childlike, the
power it gave him over bird and beast, and the knowledge of these.
And indeed that pleasure stayed with him all his life. Seeing him
in the high pastures often with a bird of prey about him, the other
children called him Sparrowhawk, and so he came by the name that he
kept in later life as his use-name, when his true-name was not
known.
As the witch kept talking of the glory and the riches and the
great power over men that a sorcerer could gain, he set himself to
learn more useful lore. He was very quick at it. The witch praised
him and the children of the village began to fear him, and he
himself was sure that very soon he would become great among men. So
he went on from word to word and from spell to spell with the witch
till he was twelve years old and had learned from her a great part
of what she knew: not much, but enough for the witchwife of a small
village, and more than enough for a boy of twelve. She had taught
him all her lore in herbals and healing, and all she knew of the
crafts of finding, binding, mending, unsealing and revealing. What
she knew of chanters'' tales and the great Deeds she had sung him,
and all the words of the True Speech that she had learned from the
sorcerer that taught her, she taught again to Duny. And from
weatherworkers and wandering jugglers who went from town to town of
the Northward...
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