I visited the village one last time, shortly after midnight. I
certainly didn’t intend to leave empty-handed. A storage shed provided
me with as much food as I could carry conveniently, and, since it’s not
prudent to travel unarmed, I also took a fairly large knife. I’d
fashioned a sling a year or so previously, and the tedious hours spent
watching over other people’s cows had given me plenty of time for
practice. I wonder whatever happened to that sling.
I looked around the shed and decided that I had everything I really
needed, and so I crept quietly down that dusty street, waded across the
river again, and went from that place forever.
When I think back on it, I realize that I owe that heavy-handed
villager an enormous debt of gratitude. Had he not come into that barn
when he did, I might never have climbed that hill on such a day to gaze
to the west, and I might very well have lived out my life in Gara and
died there. Isn’t it odd how the little things can change a man’s
entire life?
The lands of the Tolnedrans lay to the west, and by morning I was well
within their borders. I had no real destination in mind, just that odd
compulsion to travel westward. I passed a few villages, but saw no
real reason to stop.
It was two–or perhaps three–days after I left Gara when I encountered
a humorous, good-natured old fellow driving a rickety cart.
“Where be ye bound, boy?” he asked me in what seemed to me at the time
to be an outlandish dialect.
“Oh,” I replied with a vague gesture toward the west, “that way, I
guess.”
“You don’t seem very certain.”
I grinned at him.
“I’m not,” I admitted.
“It’s just that I’ve got a powerful urge to see what’s on the other
side of the next hill.”
He evidently took me quite literally. At the time I thought he was a
Tolnedran, and I’ve noticed that they’re all very literal-minded.
“Not much on the other side of that hill up ahead but Tol Malin,” he
told me.
“Tol Malin?”
“It’s a fair-size town. The people who live there have a puffed-up
opinion of themselves. Anybody else wouldn’t have bothered with that
“Tol,” but they seem to think it makes the place sound important. I’m
going that way myself, and if you’re of a mind, you can ride along. Hop
up, boy. It’s a long way to walk.”
I thought at the time that all Tolnedrans spoke the way he did, but I
soon found out that I was wrong. I tarried for a couple of weeks in
Tol Malin, and it was there that I first encountered the concept of
money.
Trust the Tolnedrans to invent money. I found the whole idea
fascinating.
Here was something small enough to be portable and yet of enormous
value. Someone who’s just stolen a chair or a table or a horse is
fairly conspicuous. Money, on the other hand, can’t be identified as
someone else’s property once it’s in your pocket.
Unfortunately, Tolnedrans are very possessive about their money, and it
was in Tol Malin that I first heard someone shout
“Stop, thief!” I left town rather quickly at that point.
I hope you realize that I wouldn’t be making such an issue of some of
my boyhood habits except for the fact that my daughter can be very
tiresome about my occasional relapses. I’d just like for people to see
my side of it for a change. Given my circumstances, did I really have
any choice?
Oddly enough, I encountered that same humorous old fellow again about
five miles outside Tol Malin.
“Well, boy,” he greeted me.
“I see that you’re still moving along westward.”
“There was a little misunderstanding back in Tol Malin,” I replied
defensively.
“I thought it might be best for me to leave.”
He laughed knowingly, and for some reason his laughter made my whole
day seem brighter. He was a very ordinary-looking old fellow with
white hair and beard, but his deep blue eyes seemed strangely out of
place in his wrinkled face. They were very wise, but they didn’t seem
to be the eyes of an old man. They also seemed to see right through
all my excuses and lame explanations.
“Well, hop up again, boy,” he told me.
“We still both seem to be going in the same direction.”
We traveled across the lands of the Tolnedrans for the next several
weeks, moving steadily westward. This was before those people
developed their obsession with straight, well-maintained roads, and
what we followed were little more than wagon tracks that meandered
along the course of least resistance across the meadows.
Like just about everybody else in the world in those days, the
Tolnedrans were farmers. There were very few isolated farmsteads out
in the countryside, because for the most part the people lived in
villages, went out to work their fields each morning, and returned to
the villages each night.
We passed one of those villages one morning about the middle of summer,
and I saw those farmers trudging out to work.
“Wouldn’t it be easier if they’d just build their houses out where
their fields are?” I asked the old man.
“Probably so,” he agreed, “but then they’d be peasants instead of
townsmen. A Tolnedran would sooner die than have others think of him
as a peasant.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I objected.
“They spend all day every day grubbing in the dirt, and that means that
they are peasants, doesn’t it?”
“Yes,” he replied calmly, “but they seem to think that if they live in
a village, that makes them townsmen.”
“Is that so important to them?”
“Very important, boy. A Tolnedran always wants to keep a good opinion
of himself.”
“I think it’s stupid, myself.”
“Many of the things people do are stupid. Keep your eyes and ears open
the next time we go through one of these villages. If you pay
attention, you’ll see what I’m talking about.”
I probably wouldn’t even have noticed if he hadn’t pointed it out. We
passed through several of these villages during the next couple of
weeks, and I got to know the Tolnedrans. I didn’t care too much for
them, but I got to know them. A Tolnedran spends just about every
waking minute trying to determine his exact rank in his community, and
the higher he perceives his rank to be, the more offensive he becomes.
He treats his servants badly–not out of cruelty, but out of a
deep-seated need to establish his superiority. He’ll spend hours in
front of a mirror practicing a haughty, superior expression. Maybe
that’s what set my teeth on edge. I don’t like having people look down
their noses at me, and my status as a vagabond put me at the very
bottom of the social ladder, so everybody looked down his nose at me.
“The next pompous ass who sneers at me is going to get a punch in the
mouth,” I muttered darkly as we left yet another village as summer was
winding down.
The old man shrugged.
“Why bother?”
“I don’t care for people who treat me like dirt.”
“Do you really care what they think?”
“Not in the slightest.”
“Why waste your energy then? You’ve got to learn to laugh these things
off, boy. Those self-important villagers are silly, aren’t they?”
“Of course they are.”
“Wouldn’t hitting one of them in the face make you just as silly–or
even sillier? As long as you know who you are, does it really matter
what other people think about you?”
“Well, no, but–” I groped for some kind of explanation, but I didn’t
find one. I finally laughed a bit sheepishly.
He patted my shoulder affectionately.
“I thought you might see it that way–eventually.”
That may have been one of the more important lessons I’ve learned over
the years. Privately laughing at silly people is much more satisfying
in the long run than rolling around in the middle of a dusty street
with them, trying to knock out all of their teeth. If nothing else,
it’s easier on your clothes.
The old man didn’t really seem to have a destination. He had a cart,
but he wasn’t carrying anything important in it–just a few half full
sacks of grain for his stumpy horse, a keg of water, a bit of food, and
several shabby old blankets that he seemed happy to share with me. The
better we grew acquainted, the more I grew to like him. He seemed to
see his way straight to the core of things, and he usually found
something to laugh about in what he saw. In time, I began to laugh
too, and I realized that he was the closest thing to a friend I’d ever
had.
He passed the time by telling me about the people who lived on that
broad plain. I got the impression that he spent a great deal of his