sometimes attack inhabited islands in search of food or treasure and must be driven back by wizards. In A Wizard of Earthsea, the young wizard Ged guesses a dragon's true name and forces him to promise that neither he nor his sons will come to the Archipelago. Dragons in Earthsea are neither good nor evil by human standards, but are always extremely dangerous. There are several references to the dire consequences of looking a dragon in the eye, and Ged avoids doing so on several occasions. Most dragons in the books are of a positive, though not benevolent, nature. Dragons consider most men to be uninteresting, short-lived mayflies. The exceptions are the dragonlords. In The Tombs of Atuan, Tenar asks Ged what a dragonlord is: Ged explains that it is not someone with a mastery of dragons, but "one the dragons will speak with" rather than attack immediately. In the setting of the five Earthsea novels, Ged is the only living dragonlord. The most famous dragonlord was Erreth-Akbe, who is a legendary hero by Ged's time. Only the most powerful of mages are able to fight a dragon. The most famous duel is between Erreth-Akbe and the dragon Orm, in which each slew the other. Many centuries later, in the same place, dragon Orm-Embar was killed by the undead mage Cob. Dragons speak only in the Language of the Making, from which the language of human magic is derived. Wizards cannot lie when they speak that language, but dragons can; they are able to twist what they say and mislead the unwary because it is their native tongue, while no wizard can live long enough to fully master it. Indeed, much of the True Speech remains unknown to humans. Dragons have a strange connection to the language: one wizard described it by saying they live in it as a fish lives in water. In Tehanu, Ged says that perhaps dragons do not learn it. Rather, it seems to be inherent in them and they simply 'are' the language. Tehanu, Dragonfly and The Other Wind reveal that in ancient times humans and dragons were one people. They chose to part ways because of their very different natures. However, a few in each generation are born who are both human and dragon, among them Tehanu and Orm-Irian, and can transform themselves from one form to the other. Gebbeth A gebbeth is a