kill you before you have a son.’
‘I guess I lost sight of that, Aunt Pol,’ he confessed. ‘When that
Chamdar fellow called me the Rivan King, it went to my head. I
thought I was important.’
‘You are important, Gelane,’ I told him very firmly. ‘You and your
wife are probably the most important people in the world right
now. That means that you’ve got the heaviest burden of duty in the
world, and it can all be boiled down to one word. “Hide.” Wherever
you go, hide. Stay out of sight. The best way to do that is to be
ordinary.’
‘You’d better listen to her, Gelane,’ father said. ‘Oh, and one word
of advice from a professional – and I am, you know, – a professional,
I mean. Don’t let that “I’ve got a secret” look start getting the best
Of You. Pretend to be stupid, if you have to.’ Then the old fraud
gave me a sly look. ‘Would you like to have me give him some
acting lessons, Pol?’
‘Now that you mention it, I think you should, father.’
The look of consternation that crossed his face was the high point
of my entire evening.
Father came up with all sorts of lame justifications for what was
probably his spur-of-the-moment decision to move us all to Cherek.
That’s another indication of the difference between men and women.
A man always feels the need to justify his decisions with logic, and
logic, in a formal sense, usually has nothing to do with an important
decision. Our minds are far too complex to make choices that way.
Women know that, but men appear to have skipped school on the
day the subject was discussed.
Enalla and I circulated the usual ‘family emergency’ fiction,
identifying our ancestral home as Muros this time. Then Gelane sold his
shop, gathered up his tools, and bought a wagon and a team of
horses.
We traveled southeasterly for about ten leagues to further the
ruse that we were bound for Muros. but then we turned off the
imperial highway and followed a back road to the capital at Sendar.
While father was down at the harbor looking for a Cherek
seacaptain who was bound for Val Alorn, I went to King Ormik’s palace
to visit my money. I was a little startled by how much my hoard
had grown since the last time I’d made a withdrawal. If you leave
money alone, it reproduces itself almost as fast as rabbits do.
Anyway, I took some thirty-five pounds or so of gold coins out of my
contingency fund’ and then rejoined Gelane, Enalla, and Aravina
at the sedate inn where we’d taken rooms. I didn’t make an issue
of what I’d been doing. The presence of money does strange things
to people sometimes.
Father had located a burly, bearded, and probably unreliable
Cherek sea-captain, and the next morning we sailed for Val Alorn.
The key to the prosperity of Cherek and Drasnia has always been
the existence of the Cherek Bore, that intimidating tidal maelstrom
that blocks the narrow strait between the northern tip of Sendaria
and the southern tip of the Cherek peninsula. Chereks find a passage
through the Bore exhilarating. I don’t. Why don’t we leave it at that?
It was autumn by the time we reached the harbor at Val Alorn,
and father put us up in a substantial inn far enough back from the
harbor to avoid the rowdier parts of the city along the waterfront.
After we’d settled in, he drew me off to one side. ‘I’ll go talk to
Eldrig,’ he told me. ‘Let’s keep Celane away from the palace this
time. He seems to be settling down now, but just to be on the safe
side, let’s not expose him to throne-rooms and other regal trappings.’
‘Well put,’ I murmured.
Father never told me what sort of threats he used to brow-beat
King Eldrig into permitting his royal visitor to leave Val Alorn for
the back country without making his presence in Cherek a matter
of public record. Eldrig himself needed to know that we were here,
but nobody else did.
We left Val Alorn the following morning and followed a poorly
maintained road up into the foothills of the Cherek mountains to
the village of Eingaard several leagues to the west of the capital.
have you ever done much fishing, Celane?’ father asked casually
once we were underway.
‘A few times, grandfather,’ Celane replied. ‘Seline’s right on the
lakeshore, after all, but I never saw much point to it, personally. If
I want fish for supper, I can buy some at the market. Sitting in the
rain in a leaky boat waiting for some fish to get hungry isn’t very
exciting, and I did have a business to run, after all.’
‘There’s a world of difference between lake-fishing and stream
fishing, Celane,’ father told him. ‘You’re right about how boring
lake fishing can be. Fishing a mountain stream’s altogether different.
When we get to Eingaard, we’ll have a try at it. I think you might
like it.’ What was father up to now?
The village of Eingaard was one of those picturesque mountain
towns with houses that looked as if they’d come straight out of a
cookie-cutter. It had steep roofs, ornamentally scrolled eaves, and
neatly kept yards, each closely cropped by the resident goat. Goats
make excellent pets in a land where garbage disposal is rudimentary
at best.
As we approached the little town, father told us that King Eldrig
had assured him that no veterans of the Battle of Vo Mimbre lived
here, so we weren’t likely to come across any former
comrades-inarms. We took rooms in the local inn, and even before we were
settled in, my father sent Celane out to cut a couple of fishing poles.
‘Fishing, father?’ I asked. ‘Is this some new pastime? You’ve never
taken much interest in it before.’
‘Oh, fishing’s not so bad, Pol. You don’t have to work at it very
hard. Eldrig tells me that most of the locals here are enthusiastic
about it, though, and this is a way for Celane to gain access to the
town and its people. The region’s supposed to be famous for the
trout fishing, and a true fanatic would move anywhere to pursue
his hobby. That should explain why he left Sendaria. Nobody really
expects rational behavior from a fanatic.’
I was just a little dubious about it. ‘You heard him back on the
road, father. He’s not really that interested in fishing.’
Father grinned at me. ‘I can fix that, Pol ‘ he assured me. ‘Gelane’s
not interested because he’s never caught a big one. I’ll see to it that
he takes a large trout in fast water this very afternoon, and that’ll
hook him as neatly as he hooks the fish. After today, he’ll be so
addicted to trout fishing that it’ll be all he talks – or thinks – about.
He won’t even remember the Bear-Cult or his hereditary throne.
.Have you got plenty of money?’
‘Enough.’ I’ve learned that it’s not a good idea to be very specific
about numbers when you’re discussing money with my father.
‘You can go ahead and buy him a shop – and you’ll need a house
to live in, but don’t expect him to pay much attention to business.,
‘One fish isn’t going to change him overnight, father.’
‘There’ll be two fish, Pol – the big one he catches, and the much,
much bigger one that gets away from him. I can almost guarantee
that he’ll spend the rest of his life chasing that one. I’d imagine that
a year from now
he’ll have forgotten all about what happened in Seline.’
‘You’re more clever than you look, father.’
‘I know,’ he said with a wicked grin. ‘That’s one of my many
gifts, Pol.’
I gathered from the look of disappointed yearning on Gelane’s face
that evening that ‘the one that got away’ had been of monumental
proportions. It must have been, since the one he did catch and
deprecatingly referred to as ‘this minnow’ fed everybody at the inn for
two nights running.
‘Hooked him,’ father murmured smugly to me while Celane was
showing off his prize in the common room of the inn.
‘I noticed that,’ I replied. ‘Was the other fish really so big?
‘He was the biggest one I could find in that part of the creek. I
didn’t submerge myself in his awareness, but I got the impression
that he sort of owns a large pool at the foot of a waterfall. Fish have
very strange minds. They don’t eat because they’re hungry; they
eat to keep other fish from getting all the food. That’s why that big
one struck Gelane’s lure.’
‘Did you break Celane’s fish-line?’
‘No. The fish took care of that all by himself. He’s a clever old
fish, and he’s been hooked many times before, so he knows exactly