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 everybody else in the world in those days, the Tolnedrans were farmers. There were very few isolated farmsteads out in the countryside, because for the most part the people lived in villages, went out to work their fields each morning, and returned to the villages each night.
We passed one of those villages one morning about the middle of summer, and I saw those farmers trudging out to work. ‘Wouldn’t it be easier if they’d just build their houses out where their fields are?’ I asked the old man.
‘Probably so,’ he agreed, ‘but then they’d be peasants instead of townsmen. A Tolnedran would sooner die than have others think of him as a peasant.’
‘That’s ridiculous,’ I objected. ‘They spend all day every day grubbing in the dirt, and that means that they are peasants, doesn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ he replied calmly, ‘but they seem to think that if they live in a village, that makes them townsmen.’
‘Is that so important to them?’
‘Very important, boy. A Tolnedran always wants to keep a good opinion of himself.’
‘I think it’s stupid, myself.’
‘Many of the things people do are stupid. Keep your eyes and ears open the next time we go through one of these villages. If you pay attention, you’ll see what I’m talking about.’
I probably wouldn’t even have noticed if he hadn’t pointed it out. We passed through several of those villages during the next couple of weeks, and I got to know the Tolnedrans. I didn’t care too much for them, but I got to know them. A Tolnedran spends just about every waking minute trying to determine his exact rank in his community, and the higher he perceives his rank to be, the more offensive he becomes. He treats his servant badly-not out of cruelty, but out of a deep-seated need to establish his superiority. He’ll spend hours in front of a mirror practicing a haughty, superior expression. Maybe that’s what set my teeth on edge. I don’t like having people look down their noses at me, and my status as a vagabond put me at the very bottom of the social ladder, so everybody looked down his nose at me.
‘The next pompous ass who sneers at me is going to get a punch in the mouth,’ I muttered darkly as we left one village as summer was winding down.
The old man shrugged. ‘Why bother?’
‘I don’t care for people who treat me like dirt.’
‘Do you really care what they think?’
‘Not in the slightest.’
‘Why waste your energy then? You’ve got to learn to laugh these things off, boy. Those self-important 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.