Then in the spring of 4851, Darel’s heart stopped beating while he was hammering at a piece of white-hot steel in his smithy. I’ve always taken these sudden heart stoppages as some kind of personal insult. There aren’t enough overt symptoms in advance to let you know that they’re coming. If the victim survives the first attack, a physician can do things to prevent or delay the second. All too often, however, the first one is fatal. What appears to be a perfectly normal, healthy person simply dies in his tracks, and he’s dead before he hits the floor. It’s only then, in retrospect, that the physician realizes that there’ve been quite a number of subtle warnings that are so ordinary that they’ve been overlooked. I’d assumed that Darel had a red face because of the heat of his forge, and the fact that his left arm sometimes ached wasn’t remarkable, because his right arm also ached. He was a blacksmith, after all, and you don’t spend your days pounding on hot steel without earning a few aches and pains.
There was absolutely nothing I could do, and the frustration of that drove me almost wild.
Adana and Garel, who was ten at the time, were absolutely devastated by Darel’s death. The only good thing about a lingering illness lies in the fact that it prepares the family for the inevitable. Part of the tragedy of the death of a craftsman in most societies lies in the fact that his widow and orphans are not only bereaved but also immediately cast into poverty. With no money coming in, they frequently descend to the status of beggars at the local church door. My secret hoard of inconvenient money suddenly stopped being inconvenient. We were able to keep our house on the outskirts of Aldurford, and we ate regularly.
I’m sure that I profoundly disappointed several budding entrepreneurs in Aldurford by laughing in their faces when they made offers to buy Darel’s smithy. There are people in this world who are very much like vultures. They hover over death-beds drooling in anticipation. Then, when the new widow is virtually out of her mind with grief, they make ridiculously low offers for the family business. The vultures of Aldurford got a quick lesson in civil behavior when they came swooping in this time, however. I told them quite casually that I wasn’t interested in selling the smithy and that I was seriously thinking about expanding the business. By now I was conversant with almost all useful trades and crafts, so I talked of furniture marts, clothing shops, bakeries, and butcher shops – all attached to the smithy. ‘It’d be so much more convenient for the people of Aldurford, don’t you think?’ I suggested brightly. “They wouldn’t have to spend whole days wandering around town to buy what they needed. They could do all their shopping – and buying – in one place.’
The local tradesmen all turned pale at the thought of that kind of well-organized competition, so they fomed a kind of consortium, pooled their cash reserves, and bought me out at about three times what the smithy was worth.
I love to do that to people who think they’re more clever than I am. It’s so much fun to watch that look of condescending superiority melt off their faces to be replaced by stark terror.
Finally, in the early summer of 4852, father spoke briefly with the twins and asked them to advise me that he was preparing to honor me with a visit. Between the time when he spoke with them and the time they finally passed the word to me, they evidently were permitted to make a breakthrough in one of the murkier passages of the Mrin. When they told me that Brand would be the Child of Light in the meeting in Arendia, I was just a bit put out with mother for being so cryptic about it during the eclipse. What had been the point? I was going to find out anyway, so why had she worked so hard to hide it from me? I suspected that her reasons may have been obscurely wolfish.
It took father about two weeks to finally get around to stopping by in Aldurford, and I was just a bit short with him when he finally arrived. It seemed that my whole family was getting some kind of vast entertainment out of keeping me in the dark.
The sky had temporarily cleared, and it was bright blue as father and I walked down to the river and on out past the last house in Aldurford. The sun was very bright, and a breeze rippled the surface of the water. ‘I hope you’ve been enjoying yourself, father,’ I said. I’ll admit that I was just a bit spiteful about it.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘It’s been two years since the eclipse, Old Man,’ I pointed out. ‘I hadn’t realized just how far down I was on your list of priorities.’
‘Don’t get your nose out of joint, Pol,’ he told me. ‘You know how to move at a moment’s notice. Other people take quite a bit longer. I wanted to get them moving before I came here. I wasn’t deliberately ignoring you.’
I turned that over a few times, trying to find something wrong with it. Then I gave up on that. “The twins asked me to pass something on,’ I told him.
‘Oh?’
‘Brand’s the one who’s going to met Torak when this all comes to a head in Arendia.’
‘Brand?’
‘That’s what the Mrin says.’ Then I quoted the obscure passage to him.
‘That’s ridiculous!’ he fumed. ‘Brand can’t take up Riva’s sword. The Orb won’t permit it. Give me your hand, Pol. You and I need to talk with the twins. I want some clarifications, and I think you’d better hear it too.’ Father absolutely refuses to admit that I’m much better at communicating with others over long distances than he is. He can be such a little boy sometimes.
The twins were having a great deal of difficulty with the Mrin, so about the best they could do was to give us a sketchy sort of outline of what we were supposed to do.
‘Absolutely out of the question!’ I responded when Beltira told me to take Garel and Adana to the Stronghold. ‘It’s directly in Torak’s path if he’s bound for Arendia.’
‘I’m only passing on what the Mrin says, Pol,’ Beltira replied. ‘The Stronghold won’t fall to Torak. The Mrin’s very clear about that. There’ll be a siege, but it won’t accomplish anything.’
‘I don’t like it.’
‘It’ll be all right, Pol,’ father told me, speaking aloud. ‘You and I have things to do. We have to go to Riva, and we can’t take Garel to the Isle of the Winds. If he gets that close to the Orb, it’ll light up like a new-risen sun, and every star in this end of the universe will start to ring like a bell. Then that sword’ll attach itself to his hand as if it’s been glued there. He isn’t the one who’s going to use the sword, so we’ve got to keep him away from it.’ Then he sent his thought back to the twins. ‘Have you heard from Beldin?’ he asked them.