We stayed there for several years, and to pass the time – and provide for the future – I taught Geran the rudiments of the healing arts. He was an attentive, though hardly gifted, student, and I had some hopes for his future. When we came out of seclusion and I set him up in practice in Medalia, however, I soon realized that he’d never be a firstrate physician. He seemed to lack the ability to diagnose the illnesses his patients brought to him.
He married late – in his mid-thirties – and his wife bore him a son to continue the line, and four daughters as well.
Despite my disappointment in Geran professionally, I’ll concede that his status as a mediocre physician served our ultimate purpose far better than might have been the case were he a world-renowned healer. He earned enough to get us all by, but that was about all, and that helped to lower his son’s expectations. The first Geran had been a prince, and Davon and Alten had been extremely prosperous tradesmen. The second Geran was a near-failure in his own profession, so his son didn’t grow up in a splendid house surrounded by servants. He was good with his hands, though, so I apprenticed him to a carpenter when he was about twelve. Circumstances seemed to be cooperating with Hattan’s grand scheme for submerging Iron-grip’s heirs in obscurity.
Over the next couple of centuries, I sampled most of the trades and crafts in Sendaria. I raised coopers and weavers, stone-cutters and cabinet-makers, blacksmiths and masons. My young nephews were all serious, rather self-effacing craftsmen who took some pride in their work, and with rare exceptions, I didn’t provide them with too many details about their heritage. Royal blood doesn’t really mean very much to a young fellow who spills it every time a tool slips and he barks his knuckles.
We weren’t exactly vagabonds, but we moved rather frequently, descending, in the view of some I’m sure, to smaller and smaller towns and villages with each move. The notion of all our neighbors serving as watch-dogs appealed to me, and it worked rather well. I received ample warning whenever a Murgo passed through whichever village we were living in, and if the Murgo lingered, I could come up with ‘a family emergency’ to get us out of town in a hurry.
I was living in the improbably named village of Remote Rundorun which lay some leagues off the main road that linked Sendar and Seline. My only family at that time was a descendant of Iron-grip and Beldaran whose name was Darion. When the gossip about a Murgo merchant passing through town reached me, I decided that a change of scene might be appropriate. This time, however, I decided to change tack and move to a large town rather than an even smaller village with an even more ridiculous name. Darion and I packed up our clothing, and I paid a passing wagoner to take us to the town of Sulturn in central Sendaria.
I’ve always rather liked Sulturn anyway. It’s not as cramped as Medalia or Seline, and the breeze off the lake is refreshing during the hot summer months. Darion was about fourteen or so when we moved there, and I apprenticed him to a cabinet-maker. He was a strapping young man who gave some promise of being quite a bit larger than his immediate ancestors. He wouldn’t be quite as big as Bull-neck had been, but that was all right with me. Hiding giants might have been very challenging. Darion spent the first year of his apprenticeship whittling wooden pegs. The craftsman to whom he was apprenticed was a traditionalist who absolutely despised nails, believing that good furniture must be pegged together, since nails work themselves loose, and wobbly cabinets are a sin against the Gods.
After his year of whittling, Darion was allowed to start building the backs and sides of wardrobes – those freestanding clothes-closets that were popular in Sendaria at the time. A wardrobe is an awkward piece of furniture, but it does allow you to rearrange your bedroom in ways that aren’t possible when your clothes closets are built into the wall.
After a couple of years, Darion’s employer – I won’t use the traditional ‘master’, since it has a different meaning in my family – finally relented and allowed his apprentice to build the front of a cabinet. The gruff fellow inspected the result rather carefully, pointed out a slight flaw in a piece of molding, and then grudgingly admitted that my nephew wasn’t a total incompetent.
Darion’s next project was a china cabinet, and try though he might, the sour tempered master-builder couldn’t find anything wrong with it.
By the time Darion was twenty, he was doing most of the work in the shop, and his teacher was puttering around building bird-houses and other frivolities. The people of Sulturn knew who was really producing the fine furniture that came out of the shop, and a number of them suggested to me that Darion might be wise to go into business for himself.
I had a simpler answer, however. I went to Darion’s employer and bought him out, suggesting that it might be nice if he were to spend his twilight years with his son and his grandchildren on their farm at the south end of the lake.
‘Where did you get the money, Aunt Pol?’ Darion asked me curiously when I told him what I’d done.
‘I have certain resources, dear,’ I replied evasively. Money’s always been a problem for me – not its lack, but its excess. Over those long centuries I almost always had several hundred Sendarian gold nobles tucked away somewhere. I didn’t make an issue of the fact, largely because a craftsman works harder if he doesn’t know about the treasure lying under the hearthstone or hidden inside a wall. I wanted those young men to be absolutely convinced that they were the family’s sole support, and frugality’s a virtue anyway, isn’t it?
In 4413, when Darion was about 22, he began ‘walking out’ with a very pretty Sendarian girl named Selana. That silent bell mother and I had spoken of was still working, and it rang inside my head the first time I saw the tall blonde girl.
Darion and Selana were married in the early spring of 4414, and prior to the wedding Darion put aside his cabinetry and started work on converting the loft over his shop into living quarters for us. Our lease on the somewhat shabby house near the lake was running out anyway, and our incipient groom thought it appropriate to bring his new wife home to a place he actually owned. There are some drawbacks to living and working in the same building, but at least Darion didn’t have to walk very far to work in the morning.
After the wedding of Darion and Selana, we settled down in a kind of blissful domesticity. Selana and I cooked and kept house upstairs, and Darion built and sold cabinetry down below. In many respects our circumstances were an ideal fulfillment of Hattan’s design for the proper way for an heir to live. Darion was respected as a reliable craftsman, but he was not prominent. He made a comfortable living, but a man who lives upstairs over his shop could hardly be called a merchant prince.