me as we were leaving one Arendish village after I’d finally persuaded a particularly difficult man that his daughter’s happiness – and his own health – depended on the girl’s marriage to the young fellow we’d selected for her.
‘They will produce young ones,’ I tried to explain.
‘What an amazing thing,’ she responded dryly. A wolf can fill the simplest statement with all sorts of ironic implications. ‘Is that not the usual purpose of mating?’
‘Our purpose is to produce specific young ones.’
‘Why? One puppy is much like another, is it not? Character is developed in the rearing, not in the blood-line.’
We argued about that off and on for centuries, and I strongly suspect her of arguing largely because she knew that it irritated me. Technically, I was the leader of our odd little pack, but she wasn’t going to let me get above myself.
Arendia was a mournful sort of place in those days. The melancholy institution of serfdom had been well-established among the Arends even before the war with the Angaraks, and they brought it with them when they migrated to the west. I’ve never understood why anyone would submit to being a serf in the first place, but I suppose the Arendish character might have had something to do with it. Arends go to war with each other on the slightest pretext, and an ordinary farmer needs someone around to protect him from belligerent neighbors.
The lands the Arends had occupied in the central part of the continent had been open, and the fields had long been under cultivation. Their new home was a tangled forest, so they had to clear away the trees before they could plant anything. This was the work that fell to the serfs. The wolf and I soon became accustomed to seeing naked people chopping at trees. ‘One wonders why they take off their fur to do this,’ she said to me on one occasion. There’s no word in wolfish for ‘clothing,’ so she had to improvise.
‘It is because they only have one of the things they cover their bodies with. They put them aside while they are hitting the trees because they do not want them to be wounded while they work.’ I decided not to go into the question of the poverty of the serfs nor of the expense of a new canvas smock. The discussion was complicated enough already. How do you explain the concept of ownership to a creature that has no need for possessions of any kind?
‘This covering and uncovering of their bodies that the man-things do is foolishness,’ she declared. ‘Why do they do it?’
‘For warmth when it is cold.’
‘But they also do it when it is not cold. Why?’
‘For modesty, I suppose.’
‘What is modesty?’
I sighed. I wasn’t making much headway here. ‘It is just a custom among the man-things,’ I told her.
‘Oh. If it is a custom, it is all right,’ Wolves have an enormous respect for customs. Then she immediately thought of something else. She was always thinking of something else. ‘If it is the custom among man-things to cover their bodies sometimes but not others, it is not much of a custom, is it?’
I gave up. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Probably not.’
She dropped to her haunches in the middle of the forest path we were following with her tongue lolling out in wolfish laughter.
‘Do you mind?’ I demanded.
‘One is merely amused by the inconsistencies of the man-side of your thought,’ she replied. ‘If you would take your true form, your thought would run more smoothly.’ She was still convinced that I was really a wolf and that my frequent change of form was no more than a personal idiosyncrasy.
In the forests of Arendia, we frequently encountered the almost ubiquitous bands of outlaws. Not all of the serfs docilely accepted their condition. I don’t like having people point arrows at me, so after the first time or two, I went wolf as soon as we were out of sight of the village we’d just left. Even the stupidest runaway serf isn’t going to argue with a couple of full-grown wolves. That’s one of the things that’s always been a trial to me. People are forever interfering with me when I’ve got something to attend to. Why can’t they just leave me alone?
We went down into Tolnedra after a number of years, and I continued my activities as a marriage-broker, ultimately winding up in Tol Nedrane.
Don’t bother trying to find it on a map. The name was changed to Tol Honeth before the beginning of the second millennium.
I know that most of you have seen Tol Honeth, but you wouldn’t have recognized it in its original state. The war with the Angaraks had taught the Tolnedrans the value of defensible positions, and the island in the center of the Nedrane – ‘the River of Nedra’ – seemed to them to be an ideal spot for a city. It may very well be now, but there were a lot of drawbacks when they first settled there. They’ve been working on it for five thousand years now, and I suppose they’ve finally ironed out most of the wrinkles.
When the wolf and I first went there, however, the island was a damp, marshy place that was frequently inundated by spring floods. They’d built a fairly substantial wall of logs around the island, and the houses inside were also built of logs and had thatched roofs – an open invitation to fire, in my opinion. The streets were narrow, crooked, and muddy; and quite frankly, the place smelled like an open cesspool. My companion found that particularly offensive, since wolves have an extremely keen sense of smell.
My major reason for being in Tolnedra was to oversee the beginnings of the Honethite family. I’ve never really liked the Honeths. They have an exalted opinion of themselves, and I’ve never much cared for people who look down their noses at me. My distaste for them may have made me a little abrupt with the prospective bridegroom’s father when I told him that his son was required to marry the daughter of an artisan whose primary occupation was the construction of fireplaces. The Honeths absolutely had to have some hereditary familiarity with working in stone. If they didn’t, the Tolnedran Empire would never come into existence, and we were going to need the empire later on. I wouldn’t bore you with all of this except to show you just how elemental our arrangements in those days really were. We were setting things in motion that wouldn’t come to fruition for thousands of years.
After I’d bullied the bridegroom’s father into accepting the marriage I’d proposed for his son, the wolf and I left Tol Nedrane – by ferry, since they hadn’t gotten around to building bridges yet. The ferryman overcharged us outrageously, as I recall, but he was a Tolnedran, after all, so that was to be expected.
I’d finally finished the various tasks my Master had given me, and so the wolf and I went eastward toward the Tolnedran mountains. It was time to go home to the Vale, but I wasn’t going to go back through Ulgoland. I wasn’t going to go near Ulgoland until I found out what had happened there. We tarried for a while once we got into the mountains, however. My companion entertained herself chasing deer and rabbits, but I spent my time looking for that cave our Master had told us about on several occasions. I knew it was in these mountains somewhere, so I took some time to do a little exploring. I didn’t plan to do anything about it if I found it, but I wanted to see the place where the Gods had lived while they were creating the world.
To be honest about it, that wasn’t the only time I looked for that cave. Every time I passed through those mountains, I’d set aside a week or so to look around. The original home of the Gods would be something to see, after all.
I
