brewery before dawn and made some modifications in the favorite
beverage of every Alorn who’s ever lived. The beer tasted like beer,
and it looked and smelled exactly like beer, but it didn’t produce
the usual results. The wedding guests, as wedding guests always
do, drank to excess, but nothing happened. There were no
arguments, no fights, no falling down, no snoring in corners, and no
throwing up. There were some monumental headaches the following
morning, however. I was certainly not cruel enough to take all the
fun out of drinking too much.
After the ceremony had taken place, I spent most of the rest of
the day with my brother-in-law. Riva Iron-grip’s hair was almost
snow-white by now, and he seemed to be in failing health. ‘It’s
almost all finished now, isn’t it, Pol?’ he said a bit sadly.
‘I didn’t exactly follow that, Riva.’
,My work’s almost all done, and I’m very tired. As soon as Larana
produces an heir, I’ll be able to rest. Would you do me a favor?’
,of course.’
‘Have some workmen build a new crypt for Beldaran and me. I
think we should sleep beside each other.’
The natural response to such a request would be to scoff with
such idiocies as, ‘You aren’t going to need a burial place for a long
time,’ and the like, but I loved and respected Iron-grip too much to
insult him that way. ‘I’ll see to it,’ I promised.
‘Thank you, Pol,’ he said. ‘Now, if you don’t mind, I think I’ll go
to bed. It’s been a hectic day, and I’m very, very tired.’ Then
he rose and with stooped shoulders, he quietly left the banquet
hall.
Things went along smoothly on the Isle for several years after the
wedding. There was a certain concern about the fact that Larana
didn’t immediately blossom into motherhood, but I calmed
everyone as best I could. ‘These things take time,’ I said.
I said it so often that I got sick of hearing it myself.
Then, in 2044 by the Alorn calendar, Cherek Bear-shoulders died,
plunging all of Aloria into mourning. Cherek had been a titan, and
his death left a huge vacancy.
That winter, Larana quietly advised us that she was with child,
and we were all moderately thrilled by the news. Her son was born
the following summer, and Daran named him Cherek, in honor of
his deceased paternal grandfather. After the ceremony when the
infant’s hand was placed on the Orb and it responded in the usual
way, we took him to Riva’s quarters to allow the king to see his
grandson.
‘It’s all right, isn’t it, father?’ Daran asked, ‘naming him after your
father, I mean?’
‘Father would be pleased,’ Riva said, his voice sounding very
weary. He reached out, and I handed his grandson to him. He held
the baby for quite some time with a gentle smile on his aged face.
Then he drifted off to sleep.
He never woke up.
The funeral was solemn, but not really marred by excessive grief.
Riva’s seclusion had removed him from public view, and many on
the Isle were probably a bit surprised to discover that he’d still been
alive.
After the funeral, I did some thinking. Daran and Kamion had
things well in hand, and there was no real reason for me to remain.
And so, in the spring of 2046, I packed up all my things in
preparation for my return to the Vale.
PART THREE
Vo Wacune
……….
*CHAPTER12
As luck had it – although luck probably had nothing to do with it
– Anrak stopped by the Isle on one of those pointless voyages of his
just as I was making my preparations to leave, and he volunteered to
take me as far as Camaar. I’d never really understood Anrak. About
half the time he didn’t even have a cargo when he put out to sea.
His arrival gave me a perfect excuse to cut short the tedious business
of farewells. Why do people always drag that out so much? After
you’ve said ‘goodbye’ a couple of times, you’ve said it, haven’t
you?
The weather was partially cloudy when Anrak’s sailors slipped
the hawsers and raised the sails, and I stood on the aft deck
watching the Isle of the Winds slowly receding behind us. I’d matured
on the Isle. There’d been happy times and times filled with almost
unbearable grief and pain, but that’s the nature of life, isn’t it?
The rocky island was still low on the horizon astern when a
peculiar certainty came over me. I’d not only said farewell to friends
and relatives when I’d boarded Anrak’s ship, but I’d also said
goodbye to what most people would call a normal life. I was forty-six
years old now, and if the lives of my father and my uncles were
any indication of what lay ahead of me, I was entering unexplored
country. I would come to know and love people and then watch
them drop away one by one while I went on. There was a dreadful
kind of loneliness implicit in that realization. Others would leave,
but I would continue on down through all the uncertain, endless
years stretching out before me.
‘Why so sad, Pol?’ Anrak, who was standing at the tiller not far
away, asked me.
‘No particular reason.’
‘We’ll hit open water soon,’ he assured me. ‘That should make
you feel better.’ He looked out at shafts of sunlight moving
majestically across the water.
‘I didn’t exactly follow that, Anrak.’
‘She’ll wash off your melancholy. She’s very good at that.’
‘She? She who?’
‘The sea, Pol. No matter how bad things get, she always takes the
sorrow away and clears your head. Landsmen don’t understand
that, but we do.’
‘You love the sea, don’t you, Anrak?’
Of course. She surprises me sometimes, and she’s occasionally
bad-tempered, but most of the time she and I get along fairly well.
I love her, Pol. She’s all the wife I’ve ever needed.’
I always remind myself of that conversation when I’m obliged to
have dealings with that rogue, Captain Greldik. Greldik and Anrak,
though separated by three thousand years, are cut from the same
bolt of cloth, viewing the sea as a living thing with a personality all
her own.
I bought a horse named Baron in Camaar. Baron was a good, sensible
bay who was old enough to have outgrown that silliness so
characteristic of younger horses, and he and I got along well. I wasn’t
really in any hurry, so I didn’t push him, and Baron seemed to
approve of that. We more or less strolled across the neat fields of
southern Sendaria toward Muros. We stayed at village inns along
the way, and when no inn was available, we slept outdoors. With the
exception of that peculiarly cosmopolitan port at Camaar, southern
Sendaria was in the domain of the Wacite Arends in those days, and
I found the lilting brogue of the Wacite peasants rather charming. I
didn’t find the repeated warnings of innkeepers and stablemen about
robbers and outlaws on the road very entertaining, though. ‘But,
me Lady,’ one officious village innkeeper warned when I told him
that I was traveling alone, “tis fearful dangerous for a woman alone
out there. Robbers be wicked men who’ll most likely want t’ take
advantage of th’ fact that y’ have no protection, don’t y’ know.’
‘I can deal with them, good master innkeeper,’ I told him quite
firmly. These continual warnings were starting to make me tired.
The River Camaar branched about half-way to Muros, and the
land beyond that fork in the river was as thickly forested as northern
Arendia now is. For most people in the modern era the term
‘primeval forest’ has a poetic sound to it, calling up images of park-like
surroundings inhabited by fairies, elves, and occasional trolls. The
reality was far more gloomy. If you leave a tree to its own devices
for fifteen hundred or so years, it just keeps growing. I’ve seen trees
eighteen to twenty feet thick at the base, trees that go up a hundred
and fifty feet before they sprout a limb. The limbs of that tree and
its neighboring trees interlock to form a roof high overhead that
blocks out the sun and sky and creates a permanent damp green
twilight on the forest floor. The undergrowth is dense in most places,
and wild creatures abound in the dim light – and wild men as well.
The Wacite Arends had brought the melancholy institution of
serfdom with them when they’d midgrated north of the Camaar
River, and a serf who lives near a forest always has an option
available to him if serfdom becomes too tedious’. Once he’s taken
up residence in the woods, however, the only occupation available
to him is banditry in most cases, and travelers are his natural prey.
The two that I met on the muddy forest road to Muros late one