as a child I was expected to earn my keep; the villagers weren’t very keen about maintaining me in idle luxury. They put me to work as a cow-herd, but I wasn’t very good at it, if you must know the truth. Our cows were scrubby and quite docile, so not too many of them strayed off while they were in my care, and those that did usually returned for milking in the evening. All in all, though, being a cow-herd was a good vocation for a boy who wasn’t all that enthusiastic about honest work.
My only possessions in those days were the clothes on my back, but I soon learned how to fill in the gaps. Locks had not yet been invented, so it wasn’t too difficult for me to explore the huts of my neighbors when they were out working in the fields. Mostly I stole food, although a few small objects did find their way into my pockets from time to time. Unfortunately, I was the natural suspect when things turned up missing. Orphans were not held in very high regard at that particular time. At any rate, my reputation deteriorated as the years went by, and the other children were instructed to avoid me. My neighbors viewed me as lazy and generally unreliable, and they also called me a liar and a thief – often right to my face! I won’t bother to deny the charges, but it’s not really very nice to come right out and say it like that, is it? They watched me closely, and they pointedly told me to stay out of town except at night. I largely ignored those petty restrictions and actually began to enjoy the business of creeping about in search of food or whatever else might fall to hand. I began to think of myself as a very clever fellow.
I guess I was about thirteen or so when I began to notice girls. That really made my neighbors nervous. I had a certain rakish celebrity in the village, and young people of an impressionable age find that sort of thing irresistibly attractive. As I said, I began to notice girls, and the girls noticed me right back. One thing led to another, and on a cloudy spring morning one of the village elders caught me in his hay-barn with his youngest daughter. Let me hasten to assure you that nothing was really going on. Oh, a few harmless kisses, perhaps, but nothing any more serious. The girl’s father, however, immediately thought the worst of me and gave me the thrashing of my life.
I finally managed to escape from him and ran out of the village. I waded across the river and climbed the hill on the far side to sulk. The air was cool and dry, and the clouds raced overhead in the fresh young wind. I sat there for a very long time considering my situation. I concluded that I had just about exhausted the possibilities of Gara. My neighbors, with some justification, I’ll admit, looked at me with hard-eyed suspicion most of the time, and the incident in the hay-barn was likely to be blown all out of proportion. A certain cold logic advised me that it wouldn’t be too long before I’d be pointedly asked to leave.
Well, I certainly wasn’t going to give them that satisfaction. I looked down at the tiny cluster of dun-colored huts beside a small river that didn’t sparkle beneath the scudding clouds of spring. And then I turned and looked to the west at a vast grassland and white-topped mountains beyond and clouds roiling titanic in the grey sky, and I felt a sudden overwhelming compulsion to go. There was more to the world than the village of Gara, and I suddenly wanted very much to go look at it. There was nothing really keeping me, and the father of my little playmate would probably be lying in wait for me – with cudgel – every time I turned around. I made up my mind at that point.
I visited the village one last time – shortly after midnight. I certainly didn’t intend to leave empty-handed. A storage shed provided me with as much food as I could conveniently carry, and, since it’s not prudent to travel unarmed, I also took a fairly large knife. I’d fashioned a sling a year or so previously, and the tedious hours spent watching over other people’s cows had given me plenty of time for practice. I wonder whatever happened to that sling.
I looked around the shed and decided that I had everything I really needed, and so I crept quietly down that dusty street, waded across the river again, and went from that place forever.
When I think back on it, I realize that I owe that heavy-handed villager an enormous debt of gratitude. Had he not come into that barn when he did, I might never have climbed that hill on such a day to gaze to the west, and I might very well have lived out my life in Gara and died there. Isn’t it odd how the little things can change a man’s entire life?
The lands of the Tolnedrans lay to the west, and by morning I was well within their borders. I had no real destination in mind, just that odd compulsion to travel westward. I passed a few villages, but saw no real reason to stop.
It was two – or perhaps three – days after I left Gara when I encountered a humorous, good-natured old fellow driving a rickety cart. ‘Where be ye bound, boy?’ he asked me in what seemed to me at the time to be an outlandish dialect.
‘Oh,’ I replied with a vague gesture toward the west, ‘that way, I guess.’
‘You don’t seem very certain.’
I grinned at him. ‘I’m not,’ I admitted. ‘It’s just that I’ve got a powerful urge to see what’s on the other side of the next hill.’
He evidently took me quite literally. At the time I thought he was a Tolnedran, and I’ve noticed that they’re all very literal-minded. ‘Not much on the other side of that hill up ahead but Tol Malin,’ he told me.
‘Tol Malin?’
‘It’s a fair-sized town. The people who live there have a puffed-up opinion of themselves. Anybody else wouldn’t have bothered with that “Tol”, but they seem to think it makes the place sound important. I’m going that way myself, and if you’re of a mind, you can ride along. Hop up, boy. It’s a long way to walk.’
I thought at the time that all Tolnedrans spoke the way he did, but I soon found out that I was wrong. I tarried for a couple of weeks in Tol Malin, and it was there that I first encountered the concept of money. Trust the Tolnedrans to invent money. I found the whole idea fascinating. Here was something small enough to be portable and yet of enormous value. Someone who’s just stolen a chair or a table or a horse is fairly conspicuous. Money, on the other hand, can’t be identified as someone else’s property once it’s in your pocket.
Unfortunately, Tolnedrans are very possessive about their money, and it was in Tol Malin that I first heard someone shout, ‘Stop, thief!’ I left town rather quickly at that point.
I hope you realize that I wouldn’t be making such an issue of some of my boyhood habits except for the fact that my daughter can be very tiresome about my occasional relapses. I’d just like for people to see my side of it for a change. Given my circumstances, did I really have any choice?
Oddly enough, I encountered that same humorous old fellow again about five miles outside Tol Malin. ‘Well, boy,’ he greeted me. ‘I see that you’re still moving along westward.’
‘There was a little misunderstanding back in Tol Malin,’ I replied defensively. ‘I thought it might be best for me to leave.’
He laughed knowingly, and for some reason his laughter made my whole day seem brighter. He was a very ordinary-looking old fellow with white hair and beard, but his deep blue eyes seemed strangely out of place in his wrinkled face. They were very wise, but they didn’t seem to be the eyes of an old man. They also seemed to see right through all my excuses and lame explanations. ‘Well, hop up again, boy,’ he told me. ‘We still both seem to be going in the same direction.’
We traveled across the lands of the Tolnedrans for the next several weeks, moving steadily westward. This was before those people developed their obsession with straight, well-maintained roads, and what we followed were little more than wagon tracks that meandered along the course of least resistance across the meadows.
Like just about
