Noth hierth malk manhiolk han merth han!

The goat-calling rhyme, a string of words in the Old Speech that the seven-year-old Duny overhears his aunt shouting at a stubborn goat, is the first spell he ever speaks and the event that reveals his innate magical power. Uttered without any understanding of its meaning or use, the rhyme compels the village goats to gather around him in fearful silence, and this draws the attention of his aunt, the witch of Ten Alders, who recognizes in him the makings of power. This moment sets Duny on the path of wizardry, a path that will lead him to become the greatest mage of his age, the dragonlord and Archmage Ged.

Discovery and First Use

Duny, a wild and unruly boy of seven, knows nothing of the arts and powers that exist in the world until he hears his aunt crying out a certain rhyme to a goat that had jumped onto a thatched roof and would not come down. The goat came jumping when she cried the rhyme. The next day, while herding the longhaired goats on the meadows of High Fall, Duny shouts the words he had heard, not knowing their use or meaning or what kind of words they were: "Noth hierth malk manhiolk han merth han!" He yells the rhyme aloud, and the goats come to him very quickly, all of them together, not making any sound. They look at him out of the dark slot in their yellow eyes. Duny laughs and shouts it out again, and the goats come closer, crowding and pushing round him. All at once he feels afraid of their thick, ridged horns and their strange eyes and their strange silence. He tries to get free of them and to run away, but the goats run with him, keeping in a knot around him, and so they come charging down into the village, 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.

The Witch's Recognition

Villagers run from their houses to swear at the goats and laugh at the boy. Among them comes the boy's aunt, who does not laugh. She says a word to the goats, and the beasts begin to bleat and browse and wander, freed from the spell. She takes Duny into her hut, a low, dusky, windowless place fragrant with herbs hanging from the crosspole of the roof: mint and moly and thyme, yarrow and rushwash and paramal, kingsfoil, clovenfoot, tansy and bay. There his aunt sits cross-legged by the firepit and, looking sidelong at the boy through the tangles of her black hair, asks him what he had said to the goats and if he knew what the rhyme was. When she finds that he knows nothing and yet had spellbound the goats to come to him and follow him, she sees that he must have in him the makings of power. As her sister's son he had been nothing to her, but now she looks at him with a new eye. She praises him and tells 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.

The Beginning of Magery

This is Duny's first step on the way he is to follow all his life, the way of magery, the way that leads 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 seems a broad, bright road. The rhyme itself, a fragment of the Old Speech, is a tool of power that works through the true naming of a thing, a principle that will become central to Ged's understanding of magic. The witch, though an ignorant woman among ignorant folk who knows nothing of the Balance and the Pattern, teaches him what she knows, and he learns quickly. The goat-calling rhyme, crude and simple as it is, is the seed from which all his later mastery grows, and its echo can be heard in the great spells he will one day wield, from the fog-weaving that saves his village to the summoning that looses the shadow, and finally to the naming of that shadow with his own name on the Open Sea.