Ahira's Hangar

Arha is sick for some time folllowing the incident with the prisoners. She has problems sleeping, as she keeps have nightmares about the men not being dead yet. While awake she tries to plan better ways for them to die the next time to king sends prisoners - more ceremoniously, perhaps, better suited for her spirit masters. But even while she thinks of such things while awake, her deeper sleeping self has dreams of desperately trying to find people in the darkness to bring them food and drink. Poor Arha is still very young, and despite her dark duties, she still has a lot of basic decency.

Her old childhood aquaintance, Penthe, a young priestess in training, brings her apples, after hearing she has been sick. Penthe is one of the younger children in a huge family, and her parents gave her to a temple. She does not actually wish to be a priestess at all - she would rather be married to a pig herder and be living out in a ditch somewhere than being there at the temple complex. And further - she does not consider the God King to be a god at all - she thinks he is just a man, some thing Arha secretly agrees with.

Arha slowly feels better, as time goes by. She performs her duties and her sacred dances, and no more prisoners are sent to the tombs.

And she begins to go underground, learning the ways of the undertomb, and finally the great Labyrynth. These have been her places for hundreds of lives and years. In her last life, she had verbally taght the ways to the stern but not unkind priestess Thar, and now Thar verbally teaches the ways back to Arha, who then must go underground and actually experience them. The Labyrynth is vast and the undertomb is dark, and she must find her way by touch and remembering the numbers of openings.

She also learns from Thar and the evil Kessel about the rest of the world - the wizards and dragons from the Inner Lands, islands across the sea. This might be our first full comfirmation that we really are in the same world we read about in Wizard of Earthsea. The Kargs are diferent in race, culture, and history than Ged's people. Among many other things, the Kargs view death in a very different way then the rest of the peoples of Earthsea. The Kargs believe in reincarnation, as we already know from Arha's story of being reborn again and again to serve the Tombs. The dead of the others go to a dry joyless place, as we briefly glimpsed when Ged had tried to save that sick child...and while this view of death seems like a simple cultural difference, it will be of vast importance in later books in the series...

The older priestesses also tell Arha that once wizards once came to the Tombs to steal treasures (which invariably resulted in the deaths of the wizards). They tell her that one of the greatets treasures in the world is down in the Labyrynth - half of the ring of Ereth-Akbe. But the other half had been lost long ago, when a Karg noble house had been defeated by the God Kings. With the other half of the ring permanently lost, no more wizards will come searching for the half hidden in the Tombs. there is no point in it for them.

You may all laugh at me, and I may laugh at myself later - but I've only read up to this point: here are my thoughts so far.

I find the scene with Penthe and Arha to be sad and distressing. Mainly because Penthe know what she's talking about (IMO), and Arha knows it (IMO!) but uses petty childhood spite to wound her friend.

Thar and Kessel (particularly Kessel) have the classic symptom of fearing the unknown by ridiculing it - wizards from the west with great powers etc. They fear, and are in awe of, it.

And there was an interesting story about the half amulet that was supposedly lost when one of the Godkings routed the Hupun palaces. I'm assuming that Ged has it in his possession and the next story is about that - or maybe later in this story (that's the great thing about not knowing!).