Dulse thought sometimes in those years about sons and fathers. He had quarreled with his own father, a sorcerer-prospector, over his choice of a teacher; his father had shouted that a student of Ard’s was no son of his, had nursed his rage and died unforgiving.
Dulse had seen young men weep for joy at the birth of a first son. He had seen poor men pay witches a year’s earnings for the promise of a healthy boy, and a rich man touch his gold-bedizened baby’s face and whisper, adoring, “My immortality!” He had seen men beat their sons, bully and humiliate them, spite and thwart them, hating the death they saw in them. He had seen the answering hatred in the son’s eyes, the threat, the pitiless contempt. And seeing it, Dulse knew why he had never sought reconciliation with his father.
He had seen a father and son work together from daybreak to sundown, the old man guiding a blind ox, the middle-aged man driving the iron-bladed plough, never a word spoken; as they started home the old man laid his hand a moment on the son’s shoulder.
He had always remembered that. He remembered it now, when he looked across the hearth, winter evenings, at the dark face bent above a lore-book or a shirt that needed mending. The eyes cast down, the mouth closed, the spirit listening.
“Once in his lifetime, if he’s lucky, a wizard finds somebody he can talk to.” Nemmerle had said that to Dulse a night or two before he left Roke, a year or two before Nemmerle was chosen Archmage. He had been the Master Patterner and the kindest of all Dulse’s teachers at the School. “I think, if you stayed, Heleth, we could talk.”
Dulse had been unable to answer at all for a while. Then, stammering, guilty at his ingratitude and incredulous at his obstinacy-“Master, I would stay, but my work is on Gont-I wish it was here, with you-“
“It’s a rare gift, to know where you need to be, before you’ve been to all the places you don’t need to be. Well, send me a student now and then. Roke needs Gontish wizardry. I think we’re leaving things out, here, things worth knowing….”
Dulse had sent students on to the School, three or four of them, nice lads with a gift for this or that; but the one Nemmerle waited for had come and gone of his own will, and what they had thought of him on Roke Dulse did not know. Silence did not say. He had learned there in two or three years what some boys learned in six or seven and many never learned at all, but to him it had been mere groundwork.
“Why didn’t you come to me first?” Dulse had demanded. “And then Roke, to put a polish on it?”
“I didn’t want to waste your time.”
“Did Nemmerle know you were coming to work with me?”
Silence shook his head.
“If you’d deigned to tell him your intentions, he might have sent a message to me.”
Silence looked stricken. “Was he your friend?”
Dulse paused. “He was my master. Would have been my friend, perhaps, if I’d stayed on Roke. Have wizards friends? No more than they have wives, or sons, some would say…. Once he said to me that in our trade it’s a lucky man who finds someone to talk to. Keep that in mind. If you’re lucky, one day you’ll have to open your mouth.”
Silence bowed his rough, thoughtful head.
“If it hasn’t rusted shut,” Dulse added.
“If you ask me to, I’ll talk,” the young man said, so earnest, so willing to deny his whole nature at Dulse’s request that the wizard had to laugh.
“I asked you not to,” he said, “and it’s not my need I spoke of. I talk enough for two. Never mind. You’ll know what to say when the time comes. That’s the art, eh? What to say, and when to say it. And the rest is silence.”
The young man slept on a pallet under the little west window of Dulse’s house for three years. He learned wizardry, fed the chickens, milked the cow. He suggested, once, that Dulse keep goats. He had not said anything for a week or so, a cold, wet week of autumn. He said, “You might keep some goats.”