otak

The otak is a small, sleek, fierce creature with a broad face, dark brown or brindle fur, and great bright eyes. Its teeth are cruel and its temper fierce, so it is not made a pet of. It has no call or cry or any voice. These creatures are found only on four southern isles of the Archipelago: Roke, Ensmer, Pody, and Wathort. Ged first encounters one when, waking at dawn after a night spent sheltering under a pendick-tree on his walk south from the Isolate Tower, he finds a little animal curled up asleep in the folds of his cloak, having crept there for warmth. He strokes it, and it wakes and yawns, showing a small brown tongue and white teeth, but it is not afraid. Ged calls it by its true name in the Old Speech, "Hoeg!" and asks if it wants to come with him. The otak sits itself down on his open hand and begins to wash its fur. He puts it up on his shoulder in the folds of his hood, and there it rides. Sometimes during the day it jumps down and darts off into the woods, but it always comes back to him, once with a woodmouse it has caught. He laughs and tells it to eat the mouse, for he is fasting, this night being the Festival of Sunreturn. So he comes in the wet dusk past Roke Knoll, and sees bright werelights playing in the rain over the roofs of the Great House, and he enters there and is welcomed by his Masters and companions in the firelit hall.

Bond with Ged and Role at Roke

The otak rides on Ged's shoulder, nestling in the fold of his hood as they sit at dinner at long tables set up for the festival in the Hearth Hall. Vetch marvels at the little creature, and once puts up his hand to stroke it, but the otak snaps its sharp teeth at him. Vetch laughs and says, "They say, Sparrowhawk, that a man favored by a wild beast is a man to whom the Old Powers of stone and spring will speak in human voice." Jasper, sitting on the other side of Vetch, mocks the otak, saying he never heard of any sorcerer keeping a rat in his hood. At that they all laugh, and Ged laughs with them, but the jest sets his teeth on edge. The otak is said by some students to be a disguised spirit who whispers wisdom in Ged's ear, and tales grow up concerning it. When Ged is not moved by pure rage, he keeps at his work and goes on as usual. At the end of summer the work is slackened somewhat, so there is more time for sport: spell-boat races down in the harbor, feats of illusion in the courts of the Great House, and in the long evenings, in the groves, wild games of hide-and-seek where hiders and seeker are both invisible and only voices move laughing and calling among the trees, following and dodging the quick, faint werelights. Then as autumn comes they set to their tasks afresh, practicing new magic. So Ged's first months at Roke go by fast, full of passions and wonders.

The Loosing of the Shadow and the Otak's Intervention

On the night of the Long Dance, when Ged challenges Jasper and summons the spirit of Elfarran on Roke Knoll, the otak is present. Ged puts the little otak into Vetch's hands, saying, "Keep Hoeg for me a little while, will you?" It has never let any but Ged touch it, but it comes to Vetch now, and climbing up his arm cowers on his shoulder, its great bright eyes always on its master. When the shadow-beast leaps out at Ged's face, the little otak watching from Vetch's shoulder, the animal that had no voice, screams aloud also and leaps as if to attack. After the shadow is driven off by the Archmage Nemmerle, Ged lies sprawled on his back, his face blackened with blood and great black stains on his shirt. The little otak cowers by his shoulder, quivering. During Ged's long illness, the otak stays with Vetch. When Vetch visits Ged before leaving Roke, the otak is on Vetch's shoulder. Vetch says, "He stayed with me while you were sick, and now I'm sorry to part with him. And sorrier to part with you, Sparrowhawk. But I'm going home. Here, hoeg! go to your true master!" Vetch pats the otak and sets it down on the floor. It goes and sits on Ged's pallet, and begins to wash its fur with a dry brown tongue like a little leaf. Vetch laughs, but Ged cannot smile. He bends down to hide his face, stroking the otak.

The Healing Touch and the Boundary Encounter

Later, when Ged attempts to heal Pechvarry's son Ioeth and follows the dying child's spirit to the boundary wall between life and death, he encounters the shadow there. He returns to his body, but lies cold and lifeless. The little otak is hiding in the rafters of the house, as it does when strangers enter. There it stays while the rain beats on the walls and the fire sinks down and the night wears slowly along, leaving an old woman nodding beside the hearthpit. Then the otak creeps down and comes to Ged where he lies stretched stiff and still upon the bed. It begins to lick his hands and wrists, long and patiently, with its dry leaf-brown tongue. Crouching beside his head it licks his temple, his scarred cheek, and softly his closed eyes. Very slowly under that soft touch Ged rouses. He wakes, not knowing where he has been or where he is or what is the faint grey light in the air about him, which is the light of dawn coming to the world. Then the otak curls up near his shoulder as usual, and goes to sleep. Later, when Ged thinks back upon that night, he knows that had none touched him when he lay thus spirit-lost, had none called him back in some way, he might have been lost for good. It was only the dumb instinctive wisdom of the beast who licks his hurt companion to comfort him, and yet in that wisdom Ged sees something akin to his own power, something that goes as deep as wizardry. From that time forth he believes that the wise man is one who never sets himself apart from other living things, whether they have speech or not, and in later years he strives long to learn what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great slow gestures of trees.

The Otak's Death and Ged's Transformation

When Ged is lured to the Court of the Terrenon in Osskil, the otak is with him, hiding in his pocket as is its wont in cold weather. During his flight from the gebbeth, the otak is lost. After escaping the Court, Ged finds the otak's body: a small dark thing half buried in snow, a few paces from the gate. He stoops, and then softly picks it up in his two hands. It is the otak, its fine short fur all clogged with blood and its small body light and stiff and cold in his hands. Anger wells up in Ged's heart, a hot rage of hate against all the cruel deathly things that tricked him, trapped him, hunted him down. He stoops and plucks a blade of wild grass that pokes up dry and frail out of the snow where the otak had lain dead. This blade he holds up, and as he speaks aloud to it in the True Speech it lengthens, and thickens, and when he is done he holds a great staff, a wizard's staff, in his hand. No banefire burns red along it when the black, flapping creatures from the Court of the Terrenon swoop over him and he strikes their wings with it: it blazes only with the white magefire that does not burn but drives away the dark. The otak's death thus directly catalyzes Ged's transformation and his escape from the Old Power's servants.

The Otak's Absence and Memory

When Ged visits Vetch in Iffish, Yarrow asks about the otak: "Oh, Sir, my brother has told me often of the pet you had, the wild thing, the otak—do you have it still?" Ged answers, "No. No longer." The otak is gone, but its memory remains. Later, when Ged and Vetch are sailing on the Open Sea, Ged remembers what Yarrow had said when he stole a cake from the hearth, that he would regret his theft when he came to hunger on the sea; but hungry as he is the remembrance pleases him. For she had also said that he, with her brother, would come home again. The otak, though dead, is woven into the fabric of Ged's journey and his eventual return to wholeness.