A Wizard of Earthsea

North yers, malk man, yall can 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 the yellow eyes. Doonie laughed and shouted it out again, the rhyme that gave him power over the goats. They all 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 round 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 didn't 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 Doonie. 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 cross-pole of the roof, mint and moly and thyme, yarrow and rush-wash and paramal, kingsfoil, clove-on-foot, tansy and bay. There his aunt sat cross-legged by the fire-pit, and looking side-long 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'd 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 fire-pit, 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 didn't 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 Dooney in a tongue he didn't 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 couldn't 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 Dooney'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 be a wizard.