Following her own advice, she finally confided in Gulda.
‘Don’t be afraid,’ said the old woman. ‘You’re Orthlundyn. You understand really. Your father’s waking, like many others round here. Just the touch of those weapons has taught him so much. Look.’ She clumped around her spartan room and returned with a long black arrow which she held up for Tirilen’s inspection. ‘This was only your father’s first attempt. The ones Hawklan took with him were better yet.’
Tirilen knew enough about her father’s work to know that the arrow, for all its simplicity, was probably better than anything he had ever made before, but the bright barbed killing points brought confusion to her face.
Gulda put an arm around her shoulder. ‘The quality of his craft is a measure of a man’s striving for greater understanding. In this understanding, terrible needs are sometimes seen, Tirilen. Needs which will destroy if they aren’t faced and answered. Your father’s work answers them in his way. This… ’ she tapped the arrow gently, ‘is an act of faith by him. Faith in the rightness of the truth he sees. Faith in Hawklan as the man who can use this bitter gift wisely to answer those needs that he alone can see.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Tirilen.
Unexpectedly, Gulda embraced her. ‘I doubt any of us do,’ she said. ‘At the end of our reasoning there’s only trust and faith.’
Chapter 25
Loman stopped abruptly as he strode out along the broad curving corridor. ‘What’s the rush, man?’ he muttered to himself. ‘What’s the rush?’ There was so much to do these days. But he didn’t have to do it all at full tilt, did he?
Satisfied with his own answer he prescribed himself a brief pause in the sun-laden air and, sitting down on a low window-sill, he leaned back against the warm stone and closed his eyes.
Anderras Darion had become the focus of Orthlund. People were coming to it from all over the country. Yet there was ample room for them all. Loman wondered again what kind of people had built such a place, and why, and how many it once might have held. It seemed as though it could hold the entire population of Orthlund and still feel spacious and empty. For all his familiarity with it, Anderras Darion was indeed a mysterious and wonderful place.
In all his years as Castellan, scarcely a day had passed when he did not find some new wonder. Sometimes it would be tiny-a small carving or piece of metalwork, some exquisite miniature. At others it had been unbelievably large. Several times he had found entire chambers, and the feeling was always with him that there were many still to be found. In fact, the feeling was almost that they were hiding from him playfully.
Now, the presence of so many other people seemed to be accelerating this rate of discovery. There was a liveliness about the place that he had never known before. Voices, laughing, earnest, loud and secretive, whispered and rattled along corridors that for many years had known only the occasional soft footstep, until they floated expansively into empty halls and up into hidden crannies and crevices to fade into the Castle’s ancient calm. The Castle soaked up the many new sounds like the sands of the parched southlands soaked up rain and, like a great creature waking cell by cell, it seemed to take them as nourishment and transmuted them into a low background harmony note to under-score its song of welcome to the newcomers.
For all the dark purpose of the visitors, the Castle forbade gloom. Time enough for that should the skills they were learning ever be needed, then perhaps memories of the happy sounds of Anderras Darion might carry them through when all else failed.
Loman smiled to himself and opened his eyes. Standing up he stepped up on to the low windowsill and looked out of the tall narrow window down to a courtyard, dotted with lawns and flower beds and the strangely comfortable stone benches that were a characteristic feature of much of the Castle’s outdoor furniture.
Two liveried apprentices scurried past, intent on some errand and unaware of his watchful gaze. He was pleased with his apprentices. In his hastier moments he normally categorized them as insensitive little devils, but the new atmosphere seemed to have reached even them now.
He took in the rest of the scene playing before him. Assiduously avoiding the lawns, a small group of younger children were pursuing each other in an elaborate chase game that he remembered vaguely from his own childhood. One or two figures sat isolated on the benches and lawns reading with varying degrees of attentiveness, while an equal number just lay about idly in the sunshine, books discarded. In the far corner, Gulda was holding court to a group of older men and women. He regretted he could not hear what she was saying, because even though he still carried a substan-tial residue of his childhood terror of the woman, he had come to admire and enjoy her great expositions.
They were liable to happen at any time and any-where and when she started a small crowd invariably gathered to stand enthralled. He watched her now for several minutes talking apparently without pausing for breath, hands and arms flying expressively from one gesture to the next, an occasional thrust with her stick for emphasis, and her great nose wafting through the air like the sail of a tacking yacht as her head moved rapidly from side to side scanning her audience for the telltale signs of blankness in the eyes.
Loman had ceased to ponder about Gulda’s nature, as he had Hawklan’s many years earlier. Not a topic could be raised but what she knew something of it. And she worked tirelessly. Ferreting through the Library, unearthing the most remarkable old books on military lore, organizing the newcomers, organizing those leaving, organizing him!
And she never seemed to sleep.
Once Loman had met her walking slowly down a long moonlit corridor deep in the dark hours of the night. He had been poring over some old books and, having neglected the time, was hurrying to his quarters to catch a little sleep before rousing his apprentices.
‘Memsa, can’t you sleep? You’ll be exhausted,’ he said anxiously.
Gulda started a little, then continued her slow pace, acknowledging his concern with a nod that brought her hood forward and threw her face into shade. Loman did not have the skills of his brother but he was Pedhavin-born and shadow lore was in his blood. He saw what she had intended to hide. A look of despairing loneliness that almost made him step back.
Instead he stepped forward.
‘Gulda,’ he said gently. ‘You do too much. Perhaps Tirilen can help you. She’s no Hawklan, but… ’
In response to his gentleness, a soft smile appeared in the shade of the hood and she laid a hand on his arm. ‘What would I do with sleep, Loman?’ she asked distantly. ‘There’s nowhere for Gulda to hide, least of all in sleep, where memories run unfettered.’ Then she walked slowly past him.
He had watched the stooped black form retreating down the moon-shadowed corridor. In the glistening light her shape became so black and dense that it looked like the entrance to a long dark tunnel and, for an instant, he had the feeling of long interminable years stretching back endlessly from this brief time of his to times and peoples unimaginable. ‘Nowhere for Gulda to hide’, had floated back to him as she slowly merged with the distant shadows. He had swayed slightly as if he had woken suddenly to find himself exposed on a great height, his stomach fluttering with vertigo.
The sun now streaming through into the deep em-brasure of the window could not illuminate that haunting memory and Loman stepped away from the courtyard scene thoughtfully. There could be no understanding someone like Gulda. Nor anything gained from wondering who she was or why she was now here. Shaking off his reverie he strode out again. He needed to think, but not about this. Hawklan’s last message had been the one he had feared most of all.
Such was the impetus given by Gulda, Loman and the Morlider veterans, and such was the natural adaptability of the Orthlundyn, that within weeks of Hawklan’s leaving the many vague ideas that had started the enterprise had settled into familiar routines, and offshoots had begun to branch out. Already the more capable trainees were returning to their villages to start preliminary training locally in order to spare the limited time of the Castle’s instructors and to minimize the disruption of ordinary village life. They would also survey their own districts to note features of tactical value should conflict develop.