time traveling. Despite his humorous way of talking–or maybe because
of it– I found his perceptions about the various races to be quite
acute. I’ve spent thousands of years with those people, and I’ve never
once found those first impressions he gave me to be wrong. He told me
that the Alorns were rowdies, the Tolnedrans materialistic, and the
Arends not quite bright. The Marags were emotional, flighty, and
generous to a fault.
The Nyissans were sluggish and devious, and the Angaraks obsessed with
religion. He had nothing but pity for the Morindim and the Karands,
and, given his earthy nature, a peculiar kind of respect for the
mystical Dals. I felt a peculiar wrench and a sense of profound loss
when, on another one of those cool, cloudy days, he reined in his horse
and said,
“This is as far as I’m going, boy. Hop on down.”
It was the abruptness more than anything that upset me.
“Which way are you heading?” I asked him.
“What difference does it make, boy? You’re going west, and I’m not.
We’ll come across each other again, but for right now we’re going our
separate ways. You’ve got more to see, and I’ve already seen what lies
in that direction. We can talk about it the next time we meet. I hope
you find what you’re looking for, but for right now, hop down.”
I felt more than a little injured by this rather cavalier dismissal, so
I wasn’t very gracious as I gathered up my belongings, got out of his
cart, and struck off toward the west. I didn’t look back, so I
couldn’t really say which direction he took. By the time I did throw a
quick glance over my shoulder, he was out of sight.
He had given me a general idea of the geography ahead of me, and I knew
that it was late enough in the summer to make the notion of exploring
the mountains a very bad idea. The old man had told me that there was
a vast forest ahead of me, a forest lying on either side of a river
that, unlike other rivers, ran from south to north. From his
description I knew that the land ahead was sparsely settled, so I’d be
obliged to fend for myself rather than rely on pilferage to sustain me.
But I was young and confident of my skill with my sling, so I was
fairly sure that I could get by.
As it turned out, however, I wasn’t obliged to forage for food that
winter. Right on the verge of the forest, I found a large encampment
of strange old people who lived in tents rather than huts. They spoke
a language I didn’t understand, but they made me welcome with gestures
and weepy smiles.
Theirs was perhaps the most peculiar community I’ve ever encountered,
and believe me, I’ve seen a lot of communities. Their skin was
strangely colorless, which I assumed to be a characteristic of their
race, but the truly odd thing was that there didn’t seem to be a soul
among them who was a day under seventy.
They made much of me, and most of them wept the first time they saw me.
They would sit by the hour and just look at me, which I found
disconcerting, to say the very least. They fed me and pampered me and
provided me with what might be called luxurious quarters–if a tent
could ever be described as luxurious. The tent had been empty, and I
discovered that there were many empty tents in their encampment. Within
a month or two I was able to find out why. Scarcely a week went by
when at least one of them didn’t die. As I said, they were all very
old. Have you any idea of how depressing it is to live in a place
where there’s a perpetual funeral going on?
Winter was coming on, however, and I had a place to sleep and a fire to
keep me warm, and the old people kept me well fed, so I decided that I
could stand a little depression. I made up my mind, though, that with
the first hint of spring, I’d be gone.
I made no particular effort to learn their language that winter and
picked up only a few words. The most continually repeated among them
were
“Gorim” and
“UL,” which seemed to be names of some sort and were almost always
spoken in tones of profoundest regret.
In addition to feeding me, the old people provided me with clothing; my
own hadn’t been very good in the first place and had become badly worn
during the course of my journey. This involved no great sacrifice on
their part, since a community in which there are two or three funerals
every few weeks is bound to have spare clothes lying about.
When the snow melted and the frost began to seep out of the ground, I
quietly began to make preparations to leave. I stole food–a little at
a time to avoid suspicion–and hid it in my tent. I filched a rather
nice wool cloak from the tent of one of the recently deceased and
picked up a few other useful items here and there. I scouted the
surrounding area carefully and found a place where I could ford the
large river just to the west of the encampment. Then, with my escape
route firmly in mind, I settled down to wait for the last of winter to
pass.
As is usual in the early spring, we had a couple of weeks of fairly
steady rain, so I still waited, although my impatience to be gone was
becoming almost unbearable. During the course of that winter, that
peculiar compulsion that had nagged at me since I’d left Gara had
subtly altered. Now I seemed to be drawn southward instead of to the
west.
The rains finally let up, and the spring sun seemed warm enough to make
traveling pleasant. One evening I gathered up the fruits of my
pilferage, stowed them in the rude pack I’d fashioned during the long
winter evenings, and sat in my tent listening in almost breathless
anticipation as the sounds of the old people gradually subsided. Then,
when all was quiet, I crept out of my temporary home and made for the
edge of the woods.
The moon was full that night, and the stars seemed very bright. I
crept through the shadowy woods, waded the river, and emerged on the
other side filled with a sense of enormous exhilaration. I was free!
I followed the river southward for the better part of that night,
putting as much distance as I possibly could between me and the old
people enough certainly so that their creaky old limbs wouldn’t permit
them to follow.
The forest seemed incredibly old. The trees were huge, and the forest
floor, all over-spread by that leafy green canopy, was devoid of the
usual underbrush, carpeted instead with lush green moss. It seemed to
me an enchanted forest, and once I was certain there would be no
pursuit, I found that I wasn’t really in any great hurry, so I
strolled–sauntered if you will–southward with no real sense of
urgency, aside from that now gentle compulsion to go someplace, and I
hadn’t really the faintest idea of where.
And then the land opened up. What had been forest became a kind of
vale, a grassy basin dotted here and there with delightful groves of
trees verged with thickets of lush berry bushes, centering around deep,
cold springs of water so clear that I could look down through ten feet
of it at trout, which, all unafraid, looked up curiously at me as I
knelt to drink.
And deer, as placid and docile as sheep, grazed in the lush green
meadows and watched with large and gentle eyes as I passed.
All bemused, I wandered, more content than I had ever been. The
distant voice of prudence told me that my store of food wouldn’t last
forever, but it didn’t really seem to diminish–perhaps because I
glutted myself on berries and other strange fruits.
I lingered long in that magic vale, and in time I came to its very
center, where there grew a tree so vast that my mind reeled at the
immensity of it.
I make no pretense at being a horticulturist, but I’ve been nine times
around the world, and so far as I’ve seen, there’s no other tree like
it anywhere. And, in what was probably a mistake, I went to the tree
and laid my hands upon its rough bark. I’ve always wondered what might
have happened if I had not.
The peace that came over me was indescribable. My somewhat prosaic
daughter will probably dismiss my bemusement as natural laziness, but
she’ll be wrong about that. I have no idea of how long I sat in rapt
communion with that ancient tree. I know that I must have been somehow