villagers are silly, aren’t they?’
‘Of course they are.’
‘Wouldn’t hitting one of them in the face make you just as silly – or even sillier? As long as you know who you are, does it really matter what other people think about you?’
‘Well, no, but – ’ I groped for some kind of explanation, but I didn’t find one. I finally laughed a bit sheepishly.
He patted my shoulder affectionately. ‘I thought you might see it that way – eventually.’
That may have been one of the more important lessons I’ve learned over the years. Privately laughing at silly people is much more satisfying in the long run than rolling around in the middle of a dusty street with them trying to knock out all of their teeth. If nothing else, it’s easier on your clothes.
The old man didn’t really seem to have a destination. He had a cart, but he wasn’t carrying anything important in it – just a few half-full sacks of grain for his stumpy horse, a keg of water, a bit of food and several shabby old blankets which he seemed happy to share with me. The better we grew acquainted, the more I grew to like him. He seemed to see his way straight to the core of things, and he usually found something to laugh about in what he saw. In time, I began to laugh, too, and I realized that he was the closest thing to a friend I’d ever had.
He passed the time by telling me about the people who lived on that broad plain. I got the impression that he spent a great deal of his time traveling. Despite his humorous way of talking – or maybe because of it – I found his perceptions about the various races to be quite acute. I’ve spent thousands of years with those people, and I’ve never once found those first impressions he gave me to be wrong. He told me that the Alorns were rowdies, the Tolnedrans materialistic, and the Arends not quite bright. The Marags were emotional, flighty, and generous to a fault. The Nyissans were sluggish and devious, and the Angaraks obsessed with religion. He had nothing but pity for the Morindim and the Karands, and, given his earthy nature, a peculiar kind of respect for the mystical Dals. I felt a peculiar wrench and a sense of profound loss when, on another one of those cool, cloudy days, he reined in his horse and said, ‘This is as far as I’m going, boy. Hop on down.’
It was the abruptness more than anything that upset me. ‘Which way are you heading?’ I asked him.
‘What difference does it make, boy? You’re going west, and I’m not. We’ll come across each other again, but for right now we’re going our separate ways. You’ve got more to see, and I’ve already seen what lies in that direction. We can talk about it the next time we meet. I hope you find what you’re looking for, but for right now, hop down.’
I felt more than a little injured by this rather cavalier dismissal, so I wasn’t really very gracious as I gathered up my belongings, got out of his cart, and struck off toward the west. I didn’t look back, so I couldn’t really say which direction he took. By the time I did throw a quick glance over my shoulder, he was out of sight.
He had given me a general idea of the geography ahead of me, and I knew that it was late enough in the summer to make the notion of exploring the mountains at this point a very bad idea. The old man had told me that there was a vast forest ahead of me, a forest lying on either side of a river which, unlike other rivers, ran from south to north. From his description I knew that the land ahead was sparsely settled, so I’d be obliged to fend for myself rather than rely on pilferage to sustain me. But I was young and confident of my skill with my sling, so I was fairly sure that I could get by.
As it turned out, however, I wasn’t obliged to forage for food that winter. Right on the verge of the forest, I found a large encampment of strange old people who lived in tents rather than huts. They spoke a language I didn’t understand, but they made me welcome with gestures and weepy smiles.
Theirs was perhaps the most peculiar community I’ve ever encountered, and believe me, I’ve seen a lot of communities. Their skin was strangely colorless, which I assumed to be a characteristic of their race, but the truly odd thing was that there didn’t seem to be a soul among them who was a day under seventy.
They made much of me, and most of them wept the first time they saw me. They would sit by the hour and just look at me, which I found disconcerting, to say the very least. They fed me and pampered me and provided me with what might be called luxurious quarters – if a tent could ever be described as luxurious. The tent had been empty, and I discovered that there were many empty tents in their encampment. Within a month or two I was able to find out why. Scarcely a week went by when at least one of them didn’t die. As I said, they were all very old. Have you any idea of how depressing it is to live in a place where there’s a perpetual funeral going on?
Winter was coming on, however, and I had a place to sleep and a fire to keep me warm, and the old people kept me well-fed, so I decided that I could stand a little depression. I made up my mind, though, that I’d be gone with the first hint of spring.
I made no particular effort to learn their language that winter, and picked up only a few words. The most continually repeated among them were ‘Gorim’ and ‘UL,’ which seemed to be names of some sort, and were almost always spoken in tones of profoundest regret.
In addition to feeding me, the old people provided me with clothing; my own hadn’t been very good in the first place, and had become badly worn during the course of my journey. This involved no great sacrifice on their part, since a community in which there are two or three funerals every few weeks is bound to have spare clothes lying about.
When the snow melted and the frost began to seep out of the ground, I quietly began to make preparations to leave. I stole food – a little at a time to avoid suspicion – and hid it in my tent. I filched a rather nice wool cloak from the tent of one of the recently deceased and picked up a few other useful items here and there. I scouted the surrounding area carefully and found a place where I could ford the large river just to the west of the encampment. Then, with my escape route firmly in mind, I settled down to wait for the last of winter to pass.
As is usual in the early spring, we had a couple of weeks of fairly steady rain, so I still waited, although my impatience to be gone was becoming almost unbearable. During the course of that winter, that peculiar compulsion that had nagged at me since I’d left Gara had subtly altered. Now I seemed to be drawn southward instead of to the west.
The rains finally let up, and the spring sun seemed warm enough to make traveling pleasant, and so one evening I gathered up the fruits of my pilferage, stowed them in the rude pack I’d fashioned during the long winter evenings, and sat in my tent listening in almost breathless anticipation as the sounds in the camp of the old people gradually subsided. Then, when all was quiet, I crept out of my temporary home and made for the edge of the woods.
The moon was full that night, and the stars seemed very bright. I crept through the shadowy woods, waded the river, and emerged on the other side filled with a sense of enormous exhilaration. I was free!
I followed the river southward for the better part of that night, putting as much distance as I possibly could between me and the old people – enough certainly so that their creaky old limbs would not permit them to follow.
The forest seemed incredibly old. The trees were huge, and the forest floor, all overspread by that leafy green canopy, was devoid of the usual underbrush, carpeted instead with lush green moss. It seemed to me an enchanted forest, and once I was certain there would be no pursuit, I found that I wasn’t really in any great hurry, so I strolled – sauntered if you will – southward with no real sense of urgency, aside from that now-gentle compulsion to go someplace, and I hadn’t really the faintest idea of where.
