Karego-At

Karego-At is the foremost of the four great lands that make up the Kargad Empire, lying between the Northern and Eastern Reaches of Earthsea. The other three are Atuan, Hur-at-Hur, and Atnini. The Kargish people are described as a savage, white-skinned, yellow-haired race, fierce and fond of bloodshed and the smell of burning towns. Their language is unlike any spoken in the Archipelago or the other Reaches, marking them as culturally and linguistically distinct from the Hardic-speaking peoples of the inner islands.

The Kargish Raid on Gont

In the days of Ged's boyhood, the Kargad Empire was strong and aggressive. They had already attacked the Torikles and the strong island Torheven, raiding in great force with fleets of red-sailed ships. After Spevy fell to them and was looted and laid waste, its people taken as slaves, the Kargs sailed next to Gont in a host of thirty great longships. They fought through East Port, took it, and burned it, then went up the Northward Vale wrecking and looting, slaughtering cattle and men. The smoke from the burning fields and orchards darkened the eastern sky above Ten Alders village. It was during this invasion that the young Duny, later known as Ged, first proved his great power by weaving a fog that concealed his village and tricked the Kargish warriors into falling from the High Fall cliff, saving the villagers. The Kargs were later harried back down to the beaches above East Port, where they found their own ships burnt and fought with their backs to the sea until every man was killed, the sands of Armouth brown with blood until the tide came in.

Karego-At in Ged's Later Voyages

Years later, Ged sailed past the long, faint shoreline of Karego-At during his sea-quest for the shadow. He was in the very sea-roads of those white barbaric folk and kept a sharp watch out for any Kargish longship or galley. The memory of the morning of his boyhood in Ten Alders village—the plumed warriors, the fire, the mist—came back to him vividly as he sailed through the red evening. He realized then how the shadow had tricked him with his own trick, bringing that mist about him on the sea as if bringing it out of his own past, blinding him to danger and fooling him to his death. Later, on a nameless isle far out in the Reach, east of Gont but still west of Karego-At, Ged encountered two old castaways whom he guessed were children of some royal house of the Kargad Empire, sent to be cast away on an uncharted islet by a tyrant or usurper. The old woman showed him a little child's dress of silk brocade stiff with seed-pearls, stained with salt and yellow with years, bearing the double arrow of the God-Brothers of the Kargad Empire surmounted by a king's crown. She also gave him a bit of dark metal, the half-circle of a broken ring, which years later would lead him to the Tombs of Atuan and the quest for the Ring of Erreth-Akbe.

Racial and Cultural Depiction

The Kargish are consistently portrayed as the racial and cultural other in the novel. They are white-skinned and yellow-haired, in contrast to the copper-brown and black-skinned peoples of the Archipelago. The Kargish raiders in the first chapter are white, and Serret, who both as a girl and as a woman betrays Ged, is also white. The author later noted that she was deliberately bucking the racist tradition by making the Archipelagans various shades of copper and brown, while the light-skinned people among them have far-northern or Kargish ancestors. The Kargish are also depicted as a savage, warlike people, and their language is described as a barbaric jargon. The novel's portrayal of the Kargad Empire thus serves as a foil to the Archipelago, highlighting the cultural and racial differences that define the world of Earthsea.