Yet, even though she seemed much friendlier than hitherto, she maintained the same relentless pace. I commented on it, after a week of travel, with a jocular remark to the effect that one would think she would have given up trying to wear me down. But she shook her head.
“It’s not you I’m thinking about. I’ve got to get into the Mutt as soon as possible, so I can start warning the underground about the Rap Sheet.”
“What is this Rap Sheet?” I asked. “And why are you so concerned about it?”
My question astonished her so much that she actually stopped and turned around.
“You’re an Ozarine!” she exclaimed. “You own all the Rap Sheets! Well, at least most of them.”
I threw up my hands with exasperation.
“Will you kindly relent with this Ozarine business?” I demanded. “Gwendolyn, I don’t own anything except the clothes on my back and the few possessions in my pack. And my easel,” I finished, pointing to it slung over my shoulder. “As for the Rap Sheets, it’s true that every year the Senate organizes a great parade on Victory Day in which the Rap Sheets along with other great relics and magic artifacts are paraded around to awe the populace. But the truth is I never really paid much attention to the whole business.”
“Can you really be such an innocent? It’s hard to believe, even for an artist.” She frowned. “Oh, stop looking so aggrieved. It’s not that I don’t believe you, it’s just—”
I started to say something, but she held up a hand to quiet me.
“Just give me a moment. I’m trying to make a decision. Meanwhile, let’s keep moving.”
A half hour later, without turning her head, she began to tell me about her life, a subject she had hitherto avoided completely. I listened, saying not a word, recognizing the acceptance. She spoke steadily for a long time, describing the life of a girl born into abject poverty in a province of Sfinctria, the most powerful—and venal, by all accounts—of Grotum’s many realms. A father never known, a mother dead—of exhaustion, essentially—by the time she was six. Her only family a twin brother, her account of whom, as a boy, was filled with affection. Her world, as she grew up, was a fearsome place, full of perils and injustices. The coarse brutality of the Groutch past, increasingly overlaid by the callous rapacity of the Groutch future.
Her incredible size and strength—manifest at an early age—protected her as a girl from the routine dangers of poverty. There was also, whenever needed, the aid of a brother who was an even more fearsome specimen than herself. And another waif, whom she and her brother more or less adopted, whose diminutive size was offset by the kind of ferocity sometimes found in small animals. The three orphans, as children, had formed themselves into a small family, relying on each other for everything and fending for themselves against as harsh a world as I could imagine.
She said little about her brother and the other boy. It was clear enough, though I understood none of the particulars, that there was a great heartbreak lurking beneath her terse account. An estrangement of some sort, apparently, the nature of which she did not touch upon.
By the time she was fourteen, Gwendolyn had come to realize that the evils of her immediate surroundings were but the manifestations of a vastly greater and more impersonal cruelty. By the time she was sixteen, she was a fully-fledged activist in the revolutionary movement of Grotum.
Of this movement, I understood little of what she said. I gained the impression of a far-flung, complex network of organizations, tendencies, individuals and currents, concentrated in the toiling classes, but not without friends in higher places. Wolfgang seemed to occupy some unique position in this movement, from what little she said about him—not really part of it, but held by all Groutch revolutionaries in a weird combination of awe and bemusement.
“Ideological as a Groutch” is, of course, a well-known expression the world over. Listening to Gwendolyn talk, I began to gain some inkling of the reality captured in the old saw. Yet, despite the manifold and subtle—and, to one of my temperament, utterly confusing—disputes and divisions within the revolutionary movement, there were a few key points on which all were agreed. These can be summarized as: