ready.’
‘Ready for what?’
,Torak’s coming. He’s left Ashaba, and he’s on his way to Mal Zeth.
He’ll set aside the current king and assume total control of all of Mallorea.
Then he’ll come west to reclaim the Orb.’
‘How much time have we got?’
‘Probably not enough. You’ll lose more than your share of battles, but
that won’t matter. This is one of those things that have to be settled by
an EVENT. The Child of Light and the Child of Dark will meet in Arendia.’
‘Is Darel the Child of Light?’
‘No. The EVENT that involves Torak and the Rivan King’s still quite
a ways off.’
‘Well, who is the Child of Light?’
‘At the moment, I am.’
‘You?’
‘I won’t be the one who meets Torak in Arendia, though, and neither
will Darel. We’re involved in a series of EVENTS that’re preparing the
way-for the major one.’
‘Must you be so cryptic, mother?’ I asked with some asperity.
‘Yes, actually I must. If you know too much, you’ll do things differently
from the way you’re supposed to do them. Let’s not tamper with this, Pol.
This isn’t a good Place-for unrestrained creativity.’
And then she was gone.
An eclipse, that unnatural night at high noon, is normally followed
by an equally unnatural-seeming brightness when the sun returns.
The eclipse of 4850 was different. It didn’t get light again after the
eclipse had passed because thick, heavy clouds had rolled in while
the sun had been blotted out. Then it started to rain.
And it rained off and on for the next twenty-five years.
A day or so after ‘Torak’s Eclipse’, I sent my thought down to
the twins in their tower in the Vale. Perhaps I should note in passing
that I’m far more proficient in this mode of communication than
the rest of my family because I’ve had more practice. I did, as you’ll
recall, run my duchy from mother’s cottage following the fall of Vo
wacune. I kept malon Killaneson hopping during those years, so
I’m almost as good at thinking to people as I am at talking to them.
‘Uncles,’ I said to get the twins’ attention, ‘where’s my father?’
‘We haven’t heard from him, Pol,’ Belkira replied.
‘He’s probably running around warning everybody,’ Beltira added.
Wasn’t the eclipse spectacular?’
‘So’s the eruption of a volcano – or a tidal wave,’ I replied drily. ‘If
the Old Wolf happens to check in with you, tell him that I need to talk
with him – soon.’
‘We’ll pass it on, Pol,’ Belkira promised.
‘I’d appreciate it.
The months rolled by, however. and there was still no word from
my vagrant father. I started to grow irritated with him.
Then in the spring of 4851, Darel’s heart stopped beating while
he was hammering at a piece of white-hot steel in his smithy. I’ve
always taken these sudden heart stoppages as some kind of personal
insult. There aren’t enough overt symptoms in advance to let you
know that they’re coming. If the victim survives the first attack. a
physician can do things to prevent or delay the second. All too often,
however, the first one is fatal. What appears to be a perfectly normal,
healthy person simply dies in his tracks, and he’s dead before he
hits the floor. It’s only then. in retrospect. that the physician realizes
that there’ve been quite a number of subtle warnings that are so
ordinary that they’ve been overlooked. I’d assumed that Darel had
a red face because of the heat of his forge, and the fact that his left
arm sometimes ached wasn’t remarkable, because his right arm also
ached. He was a blacksmith, after all. and you don’t spend your
days pounding on hot steel without earning a few aches and pains.
There was absolutely nothing I could do. and the frustration of
that drove me almost wild.
Adana and Carel. who was ten at the time, were absolutely
devastated by Darel’s death. The only good thing about a lingering illness
lies in the fact that it prepares the family for the inevitable. Part of
the tragedy of the death of a craftsman in most societies lies in the
fact that his widow and orphans are not only bereaved but also
immediately cast into poverty. With no money coming in, they
frequently descend to the status of beggars at the local church door.
My secret hoard of inconvenient money suddenly stopped being
. Inconvenient. We were able to keep our house on the outskirts of
Aldurford. and we ate regularly.
I’m sure that I profoundly disappointed several budding
entrepreneurs in Aldurford by laughing in their faces when they made offers
to buy Darel’s smithy. There are people in this world who are ye
much like vultures. They hover over death-beds drooling in
anticipation
. Then, when the new widow is virtually out of her mind with
grief, they make ridiculously low offers for the family business. The
vultures of Aldurford got a quick lesson in civil behavior when they
came swooping in this time, however. I told them quite casually that
I wasn’t interested in selling the smithy and that I was seriously
thinking about expanding the business. By now I was conversant with
almost all useful trades and crafts, so I talked of furniture marts,
clothing shops, bakeries, and butcher shops – all attached to the smithy.
‘it’d be so much more convenient for the people of Aldurford, don’t
you think?’I suggested brightly. ‘They wouldn’t have to spend whole
days wandering around town to buy what they needed. They could
do all their shopping – and buying – in one place.’
The local tradesmen all turned pale at the thought of that kind
of well-organized competition, so they formed a kind of consortium,
pooled their cash reserves, and bought me out at about three times
what the smithy was worth.
I love to do that to people who think they’re more clever than I am.
It’s so much fun to watch that look of condescending superiority
melt off their faces to be replaced by stark terror.
Finally, in the early summer of 4852, father spoke briefly with the
twins and asked them to advise me that he was preparing to honor
me with a visit. Between the time when he spoke with them and
the time they finally passed the word to me, they evidently were
permitted to make a breakthrough in one of the murkier passages
of the Mrin. When they told me that Brand would be the Child of
Light in the meeting in Arendia, I was just a bit put out with mother
for being so cryptic about it during the eclipse. What had been the
point? I was going to find out anyway, so why had she worked so
hard to hide it from me? I suspected that her reasons may have
been obscurely wolfish.
It took father about two weeks to finally get around to stopping
by in Aldurford. and I was just a bit short with him when he finally
arrived. It seemed that my whole family was getting some kind of
vast entertainment out of keeping me in the dark.
The sky had temporarily cleared, and it was bright blue as father
and I walked down to the river and on out past the last house in
Aldurford. The sun was very bright, and a breeze rippled the surface
Of the water. ‘I hope you’ve been enjoying yourself, father,’ I said.
I’ll admit that I was just a bit spiteful about it.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘It’s been two years since the eclipse, Old Man,’ I pointed out. I
hadn’t realized just how far down I was on your list of priorities.’
‘Don’t get your nose out of joint, Pol,’ he told me. ‘You know
how to move at a moment’s notice. Other people take quite a bit
longer. I wanted to get them moving before I came here. I wasn’t
deliberately ignoring you.’
I turned that over a few times, trying to find something wrong
with it. Then I gave up on that. ‘The twins asked me to pass
something on,’ I told him.
‘Oh?’
‘Brand’s the one who’s going to meet Torak when this all comes
to a head in Arendia.’
‘Brand?’
‘That’s what the Mrin says.’ Then I quoted the obscure passage
to him.
‘That’s ridiculous!’ he fumed. ‘Brand can’t take up Riva’s sword.
The Orb won’t permit it. Give me your hand, Pol. You and I need
to talk with the twins. I want some clarifications, and I think you’d
better hear it too.’ Father absolutely refuses to admit that I’m much
better at communicating with others over long distances than he is.
He can be such a little boy sometimes.
The twins were having a great deal of difficulty with the Mrin,
so about the best they could do was to give us a sketchy sort of
outline of what we were supposed to do.
‘Absolutely out of the question!’ I responded when Beltira told me