Fog-weaving at Ten Alders

The Fog-weaving at Ten Alders is the decisive magical act by which the boy Duny, later known as Ged, first proved his great innate power, saving his village from a Kargish raiding band by transforming a simple weatherworker's trick into a complex defensive spell that concealed the villagers, confused the invaders, and drove many of them to their deaths over the High Fall cliff.

Background and the Kargish Threat

The Kargad Empire, a savage people of white skin and yellow hair who delighted in the sight of blood and the smell of burning towns, had grown strong. After sacking Spevy and laying it waste, they sailed to Gont in a host of thirty great longships, took and burned East Port, and then advanced up the Northward Vale, wrecking, looting, and slaughtering cattle and men. Fugitives brought warning to the heights. The people of Ten Alders saw smoke darken the eastern sky, and those who climbed the High Fall looked down on the Vale hazed and red-streaked with fires where fields ready for harvest had been set ablaze, orchards burned with fruit roasting on blazing boughs, and barns and farmhouses smoldered in ruin. Some villagers fled up the ravines to hide in the forest; the witch of Ten Alders hid alone in a cave on the Kapperding Scarp, sealing its mouth with spells. Duny's father, the bronze-smith, stayed, laboring all night at his forge to beat up what ready metal he had into spear-points, which others bound to the handles of hoes and rakes. There were no proper weapons in the village but hunting bows and short knives, for the mountain folk of Gont are not warlike.

The Spell and Its Weaving

With sunrise came a thick white fog, as on many autumn mornings in the heights. The villagers stood waiting among their huts, peering into the fog that hid shapes and distances and dangers. Duny was with them. He had worked all night at the forge-bellows, pushing and pulling the two long sleeves of goathide that fed the fire with a blast of air, and now his arms ached and trembled so that he could not hold out the spear he had chosen. He raged at his weakness, for he knew his strength: there was power in him, if he knew how to use it. He sought among all the spells he knew for some device that might give him and his companions an advantage. Need alone is not enough to set power free, but when the villagers saw a band of about a hundred Kargish warriors coming up the mountain, armored with bronze helmets and greaves and breastplates of heavy leather, armed with swords and the long Kargish lance, need called knowledge out. Duny, seeing the fog blow and thin across the path before the Kargs, remembered a charm called fogweaving, a binding-spell that gathers mists together for a while in one place, which an old weatherworker of the Vale had taught him. The boy had no skill at shaping the mist into fair ghostly seemings, but his intent was different, and he had the strength to turn the spell to his own ends. Rapidly and aloud he named the places and the boundaries of the village, spoke the fogweaving charm, and enlaced among its words the words of a spell of concealment, and last cried the word that set the magic going. Even as he did so, his father came up behind him and struck him hard on the side of the head, knocking him down, telling him to be still and hide if he could not fight. Duny got to his feet. He could hear the Kargs now at the end of the village, as near as the great yew-tree by the tanner's yard, but they could not be seen: the fog had closed and thickened all over the village, greying the light, blurring the world till a man could hardly see his own hands before him. "I've hidden us all," Duny said sullenly, for his head hurt from his father's blow and the working of the doubled incantation had drained his strength. "I'll keep up this fog as long as I can. Get the others to lead them up to High Fall."

The Battle in the Mist

The smith stared at his son who stood wraithlike in that weird, dank mist, then ran noiselessly to find the others and tell them what to do. The Kargs set fire to the thatch of a house, a blur of red blooming through the grey fog, but still they did not come up into the village, waiting at the lower end till the mist should lift. The tanner, whose house it was that burned, sent a couple of boys skipping right under the Kargs' noses, taunting and yelling and vanishing again like smoke into smoke. Meanwhile the older men, creeping behind fences and running from house to house, came close on the other side and sent a volley of arrows and spears at the warriors, who stood all in a bunch. One Karg fell writhing with a spear, still warm from its forging, right through his body. Others were arrow-bitten, and all enraged. They charged forward to hew down their puny attackers, but found only the fog about them, full of voices. They followed the voices, stabbing ahead into the mist with their great, plumed, bloodstained lances, and ran right through the village without knowing it, as the empty huts and houses loomed and disappeared again in the writhing grey fog. The villagers ran scattering, most keeping well ahead since they knew the ground, but some boys or old men were slow, and the Kargs stumbling on them drove their lances or hacked with their swords, yelling their war-cry, the names of the White Godbrothers of Atuan: "Wuluah! Atwah!" Some of the band stopped when they felt the land grow rough underfoot, but others pressed on, seeking the phantom village, following dim wavering shapes that fled just out of reach. One group of the Kargs chased the wraiths straight to the High Fall, the cliff's edge above the springs of the River Ar, and the shapes they pursued ran out onto the air and vanished in a thinning of the mist, while the pursuers fell screaming through fog and sudden sunlight a hundred feet sheer to the shallow pools among the rocks. Those who came behind and did not fall stood at the cliff's edge, listening.

Consequences and Aftermath

Dread came into the Kargs' hearts, and they began to seek one another, not the villagers, in the uncanny mist. They gathered on the hillside, yet always there were wraiths and ghost-shapes among them, and other shapes that ran and stabbed from behind with spear or knife and vanished again. The Kargs began to run, all of them, downhill, stumbling, silent, until all at once they ran out from the grey blind mist and saw the river and the ravines below the village all bare and bright in morning sunlight. They stopped, gathered together, and looked back at a wall of wavering, writhing grey that hid all that lay behind it. Not one Karg looked back more than that once; all went down in haste, away from the enchanted place. Farther down the Northward Vale, those warriors got their fill of fighting. The towns of the East Forest, from Ovark to the coast, had gathered their men and sent them against the invaders. Band after band came down from the hills, and that day and the next the Kargs were harried back down to the beaches above East Port, where they found their ships burnt; so they fought with their backs to the sea till every man of them was killed, and the sands of Armouth were brown with blood until the tide came in. On that morning in Ten Alders, the dank grey fog clung a while, then suddenly blew and drifted and melted away. Men stood up in the windy brightness, looking about them wondering. Here lay a dead Karg with yellow hair long, loose, and bloody; there lay the village tanner, killed in battle like a king. Down in the village, the house that had been set afire still blazed. They ran to put the fire out. In the street, near the great yew, they found Duny standing by himself, bearing no hurt, but speechless and stupid like one stunned. They led him into his father's house and went calling for the witch to come down out of her cave and heal the lad who had saved their lives and their property, all but four who were killed by the Kargs, and the one house that was burnt. No weapon-hurt had come to the boy, but he would not speak nor eat nor sleep; he seemed not to hear what was said to him, not to see those who came to see him. His aunt said, "He has overspent his power," but she had no art to help him. While he lay thus dark and dumb, the story of the lad who wove the fog and scared off Kargish swordsmen with a mess of shadows was told all down the Northward Vale, and in the East Forest, and high on the mountain and over the mountain even in the Great Port of Gont. So it happened that on the fifth day after the slaughter at Armouth, a stranger came into Ten Alders: Ogion the Silent, the Mage of Re Albi, who healed the boy with a touch and, recognizing his great power, gave him his true name, Ged, and took him as his apprentice. The fog-weaving thus became the first public demonstration of Ged's power, the event that brought him to the attention of the wider world and set him on the path to Roke and his destiny.