Shipwreck on the Isle of Castaways

Shipwreck on the Isle of Castaways is the pivotal event in which Ged, pursuing the shadow he loosed, is lured onto a desolate sandbar in the East Reach, nearly drowns, and is forced to recover among two elderly Kargish castaways—a prince and princess abandoned decades earlier—before rebuilding his boat and resuming the hunt that will lead him to the final confrontation on the Open Sea. The episode marks the low point of Ged's quest, stripping him of his magical resources and forcing him to rely on sheer endurance, while also revealing the shadow's cunning and the human cost of the Kargad Empire's cruelty.

Shipwreck and Near-Death

Ged had been chasing the shadow across the sea, using the magewind to drive his boat at tremendous speed. The shadow, fleeing before him, suddenly vanished into a thick, ragged mist that Ged could not dispel. In that instant, his boat ran aground on shoal rocks hidden by the blowing mist, smashing up so violently that Ged was pitched nearly out. A great wave threw the little boat up out of water and brought her down on a rock, crushing her like a snail's shell. The yew-wood staff Ogion had shaped did not break, and buoyant as a dry log it rode the water. Still grasping it, Ged was pulled back by the breakers streaming from the shoal, saved from battering on the rocks only by being in deep water. Salt-blinded and choked, he tried to keep his head up and fight the enormous pull of the sea. He glimpsed a sand beach a little aside of the rocks and struggled to swim free of the next breaker, but the surge and recoil of the swells tossed him back and forth like a rag, and the cold of the deep sea drew warmth from his body, weakening him till he could not move his arms. A wave swelling in under the ragged fog took him and rolled him over and over and flung him up like a stick of driftwood on the sand. He lay there, still clutching the yew-wood staff with both hands, while lesser waves dragged at him and a sleety rain beat on him.

Crawling to Shelter

After a long time, Ged moved. He got up on hands and knees and began slowly crawling up the beach, away from the water's edge. It was black night, but he whispered to the staff, and a little werelight clung about it. With this to guide him, he struggled forward, little by little, up toward the dunes. The crawling through wet sand in the whistling, sea-thundering dark was the hardest thing he had ever had to do. Once or twice it seemed to him that the great noise of the sea and the wind died away and the wet sand turned to dust under his hands, and he felt the unmoving gaze of strange stars on his back, but he did not lift his head, and crawled on. The moving brought a little warmth back into him at last, and after he had crept up into the dunes, where the gusts of rainy wind came less hard, he managed to get up on his feet. He spoke a stronger light out of the staff, for the world was utterly black, and then leaning on the staff he went on, stumbling and halting, half a mile or so inland. Then on the rise of a dune he heard the sea again, louder, not behind him but in front: the dunes sloped down to another shore. This was no island but a mere reef, a bit of sand in the midst of the ocean. Too worn out to despair, he gave a kind of sob and stood there bewildered, leaning on his staff, for a long time. Then doggedly he turned to the left, so the wind would be at his back, and shuffled down the high dune, seeking some hollow among the ice-rimed, bowing sea-grass where he could have a little shelter. As he held up the staff to see what lay before him, he caught a dull gleam at the farthest edge of the circle of werelight: a wall of rain-wet wood.

The Hut of the Castaways

It was a hut or shed, small and rickety as if a child had built it. Ged knocked on the low door with his staff. It remained shut. He pushed it open and entered, stooping nearly double to do so. He could not stand up straight inside the hut. Coals lay red in the firepit, and by their dim glow Ged saw a man with white, long hair, who crouched in terror against the far wall, and another, man or woman he could not tell, peering from a heap of rags or hides on the floor. Ged whispered, "I won't hurt you." They said nothing. Their eyes were blank with terror. When he laid down his staff, the one under the pile of rags hid whimpering. Ged took off his cloak that was heavy with water and ice, stripped naked and huddled over the firepit. "Give me something to wrap myself in," he said, hoarse and hardly able to speak for the chattering of his teeth and the long shudders that shook him. If they heard him, neither of the old ones answered. He reached out and took a rag from the bed-heap—a goat-hide, it might have been years ago, but it was now all tatters and black grease. The one under the bed-heap moaned with fear, but Ged paid no heed. He rubbed himself dry and then whispered, "Have you wood? Build up the fire a little, old man. I come to you in need, I mean you no harm." The old man did not move, watching him in a stupor of fear. Ged paused, and then asked, "Kargad?" At that word, the old man nodded all at once, one nod, like a sad old puppet on strings. But as it was the only word Ged knew of the Kargish language, it was the end of their conversation. He found wood piled by one wall, built up the fire himself, and then with gestures asked for water, for swallowing sea-water had sickened him and now he was parched with thirst. Cringing, the old man pointed to a great shell that held water, and pushed towards the fire another shell in which were strips of smoke-dried fish. So, cross-legged close by the fire, Ged drank, and ate a little, and as some strength and sense began to come back into him, he wondered where he was. Even with the magewind he could not have sailed clear to the Kargad Lands. This islet must be out in the Reach, east of Gont but still west of Karego-At. It seemed strange that people dwelt on so small and forlorn a place, a mere sandbar; maybe they were castaways, but he was too weary to puzzle his head about them then. He kept turning his cloak to the heat. The silvery pellawi-fur dried fast, and as soon as the wool of the facing was at least warm, if not dry, he wrapped himself in it and stretched out by the firepit. "Go to sleep, poor folk," he said to his silent hosts, and laid his head down on the floor of sand, and slept.

Recovery and the Gift of the Broken Ring

Three nights Ged spent on the nameless isle, for the first morning when he woke he was sore in every muscle and feverish and sick. He lay like a log of driftwood in the hut by the firepit all that day and night. The next morning he woke still stiff and sore, but recovered. He put back on his salt-crusted clothes, for there was not enough water to wash them, and going out into the grey windy morning looked over this place whereto the shadow had tricked him. It was a rocky sandbar a mile wide at its widest and a little longer than that, fringed all about with shoals and rocks. No tree or bush grew on it, no plant but the bowing sea-grass. The hut stood in a hollow of the dunes, and the old man and woman lived there alone in the utter desolation of the empty sea. The hut was built, or piled up rather, of driftwood planks and branches. Their water came from a little brackish well beside the hut; their food was fish and shellfish, fresh or dried, and rockweed. The tattered hides in the hut, and a little store of bone needles and fishhooks, and the sinew for fishlines and firedrill, came not from goats as Ged had thought at first, but from spotted seal; and indeed this was the kind of place where the seal will go to raise their pups in summer. But no one else comes to such a place. The old ones feared Ged not because they thought him a spirit, and not because he was a wizard, but only because he was a man. They had forgotten that there were other people in the world. The old man's sullen dread never lessened. When he thought Ged was coming close enough to touch him, he would hobble away, peering back with a scowl around his bush of dirty white hair. At first the old woman had whimpered and hidden under her rag-pile whenever Ged moved, but as he had lain dozing feverishly in the dark hut, he saw her squatting to stare at him with a strange, dull, yearning look; and after a while she had brought him water to drink. When he sat up to take the shell from her she was scared and dropped it, spilling all the water, and then she wept, and wiped her eyes with her long whitish-grey hair. Now she watched him as he worked down on the beach, shaping driftwood and planks from his boat that had washed ashore into a new boat, using the old man's crude stone adze and a binding-spell. This was neither a repair nor a boat-building, for he had not enough proper wood, and must supply all his wants with pure wizardry. Yet the old woman did not watch his marvelous work so much as she watched him, with that same craving look in her eyes. After a while she went off, and came back presently with a gift: a handful of mussels she had gathered on the rocks. Ged ate them as she gave them to him, sea-wet and raw, and thanked her. Seeming to gain courage, she went to the hut and came back with something again in her hands, a bundle wrapped up in a rag. Timidly, watching his face all the while, she unwrapped the thing and held it up for him to see. It was a little child's dress of silk brocade stiff with seed-pearls, stained with salt, yellow with years. On the small bodice the pearls were worked in a shape Ged knew: the double arrow of the God-Brothers of the Kargad Empire, surmounted by a king's crown. The old woman, wrinkled, dirty, clothed in an ill-sewn sack of sealskin, pointed at the little silken dress and at herself, and smiled: a sweet, unmeaning smile, like a baby's. From some hidingplace sewn in the skirt of the dress she took a small object, and this was held out to Ged. It was a bit of dark metal, a piece of broken jewelry perhaps, the half-circle of a broken ring. Ged looked at it, but she gestured that he take it, and was not satisfied until he took it; then she nodded and smiled again; she had made him a present. But the dress she wrapped up carefully in its greasy rag-coverings, and she shuffled back to the hut to hide the lovely thing away. Ged put the broken ring into his tunic-pocket with almost the same care, for his heart was full of pity. He guessed now that these two might be children of some royal house of the Kargad Empire; a tyrant or usurper who feared to shed kingly blood had sent them to be cast away, to live or die, on an uncharted islet far from Karego-At. One had been a boy of eight or ten, maybe, and the other a stout baby princess in a dress of silk and pearls; and they had lived, and lived on alone, forty years, fifty years, on a rock in the ocean, prince and princess of Desolation. The truth of this guess he did not learn until, years later, the quest of the Ring of Erreth-Akbe led him to the Kargad Lands, and to the Tombs of Atuan.

Departure and the Blessing of the Spring

His third night on the isle lightened to a calm, pale sunrise. It was the day of Sunreturn, the shortest day of the year. His little boat of wood and magic, scraps and spells, was ready. He had tried to tell the old ones that he would take them to any land, Gont or Spevy or the Torikles; he would have left them even on some lonely shore of Karego-At, had they asked it of him, though Kargish waters were no safe place for an Archipelagan to venture. But they would not leave their barren isle. The old woman seemed not to understand what he meant with his gestures and quiet words; the old man did understand, and refused. All his memory of other lands and other men was a child's nightmare of blood and giants and screaming: Ged could see that in his face, as he shook his head and shook his head. So Ged that morning filled up a sealskin pouch with water at the well, and since he could not thank the old ones for their fire and food, and had no present for the old woman as he would have liked, he did what he could, and set a charm on that salty unreliable spring. The water rose up through the sand as sweet and clear as any mountain spring in the heights of Gont, nor did it ever fail. Because of it, that place of dunes and rocks is charted now and bears a name; sailors call it Springwater Isle. But the hut is gone, and the storms of many winters have left no sign of the two who lived out their lives there and died alone. They kept hidden in the hut, as if they feared to watch, when Ged ran his boat out from the sandy south end of the isle. He let the world's wind, steady from the north, fill his sail of spell-cloth, and went speedily forth over the sea.