Roger Taylor - The waking of Orthlund

‘What’s the matter, Tirilen?’ he asked, his face con-cerned.

‘Nothing,’ she said, shaking her head, slightly em-barrassed. Then, deftly, she swept her loose blonde hair back into a single shining mare’s tail and tied it with a green ribbon.

Loman watched this little ritual of avoidance and raised his eyebrows knowingly. Tirilen shrugged. ‘Well. Everything, really,’ she conceded.

Smiling, Loman swung himself into a sitting posi-tion, stretched and then stood up. ‘Everything, eh?’ he echoed in a slightly mocking tone as he joined her at the window. Tirilen did not respond to this gentle probe but turned to look out again over the sun-swept village and plains.

Loman’s face became more serious and he gazed at her solemn profile for a little while before he too looked out into the warm twilight.

Castellan of Anderras Darion and a smith by calling, he did not have the deep shadow-lore of his brother, Isloman; but he was no mean carver and he had enough to appreciate the long clear-cut shadows below him. He nodded. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Isloman would’ve been out prowling the streets tonight, wouldn’t he? Finding shapes and patterns that the rest of us are too blind or too oblivious to see.’

Tirilen’s mouth suddenly pinched tight and her face twisted. She was on the verge of tears. Loman put his arm around her and gently led her back to the couch.

‘Come on, healer,’ he said. ‘Sit down and talk.’

Loman had noticed Tirilen’s manner growing qui-eter over the weeks but had been uncertain how to deal with it. In any event, like everyone else, he had had precious little time to look to anything other than the myriad new tasks that circumstances had brought down on him. Awkwardly he had watched his daughter quell her mounting unease with her own tasks of the moment, promising himself that he would speak to her soon.

Now, however, a natural lull had entered into both the training programmes and the farming that sustained the Orthlundyn, and Loman saw in Tirilen’s impending tears, a release for both of them. He pulled her head down on to his shoulder and handed her a rather soiled kerchief.

She wiped her moistening eyes and then looked at the kerchief with amused resignation. ‘Well,’ he conceded, ‘I suppose some things never change.’

Somewhat to Loman’s surprise however, Tirilen’s tears never came, and her solemn mood passed almost immediately, as if the small letting of moisture had released all the pressure that was there. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, unnecessarily. ‘It was just the long shadows made me think of uncle Isloman… and then Hawklan… and then… ’

‘Everything?’ said Loman, finishing her sentence.

She nodded and smiled. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Everything.’

A silence fell between the two for a moment, then Loman said, ‘I think I’ll tell Gulda to incorporate a little reflection time into our training schemes. We’re all so busy we’re forgetting why we’re doing all this.’

Tirilen nodded. ‘I sewed up a gash in Englar’s arm today,’ she said, seemingly irrelevantly. Loman frowned uncertainly at the name. ‘You know,’ Tirilen said, impatiently. ‘Ireck’s grandson.’ Loman’s frown deep-ened briefly for a moment and then vanished as the young man’s face came to him. Tirilen returned to her tale. She held out her open hand, fingers spread wide. ‘It was a span and a half long, father, a span and a half. He’s lucky it didn’t happen out in the mountains, he’d have bled to death. As it is it’s damaged some muscles that I can’t repair, and I doubt even Hawklan could.’

Loman frowned again, and involuntarily rubbed his arm.

‘He’ll not be able to use the arm at all for some time,’ Tirilen continued. ‘And he’ll probably lose some use of it permanently.’

She looked straight at Loman.

‘What are we doing, father?’ she asked. ‘The lad’s been permanently damaged. Permanently damaged in a training exercise! And he doesn’t seem to mind. When I’d finished and told him what it meant, he just grinned. As if we were children again and he’d grazed himself falling over. What are we turning into?’

Her questions were made the more penetrating by the fact that her voice was calm and steady. Loman turned away from her and, standing up, moved over to a nearby table.

For a little while, he tapped his hand gently on the polished grain while his mind blundered around, looking for easy phrases that would protect them both from the grim reality of events. Phrases that would enable him to hold his daughter tight and soothe away childish hurts in a warm closeness. But Tirilen was no child. And she had the clear sight of the Orthlundyn, perhaps even clearer, thanks to the influence of Hawklan on her healing skills. She would accept her father’s love, and gain solace from it from time to time in their normal daily intercourse, but for her inner peace she would accept only that which could withstand the scrutiny of this sight.

‘You know what we’re doing, Tirilen,’ he said, even-tually, almost offhandedly. ‘We’re training to defend our land… Preparing to defend ourselves from attacks from the outside. We’re learning to be warriors as well as farmers and carvers. All of us. Even you.’

Tirilen wrapped her arms around herself as if she were cold, and bowed her head, but she did not speak.

Loman went on.

‘Hawklan told us the obvious. Told us to look at what we knew and act accordingly; to be Orthlundyn.’ Still Tirilen did not respond. Loman enumerated the points on his fingers.

‘That creature Dan-Tor brought corruption here. Hawklan was lured to the Gretmearc and attacked. Fyordyn High Guards, of all people, kidnapped you, and then Mandrocs slaughtered them on our land. And we could do nothing about any of it except stand by like helpless spectators.’

Abruptly, he stood up and walked back to the win-dow. Hitching himself up on to the sill he looked at his daughter. ‘Helpless, Tirilen. Without Hawklan and Gavor we’d never have taken those High Guards by surprise. You’d have been with them when they met those Mandrocs.’

Tirilen nodded slowly. Her hand moved absently to the small blemish on her throat that marked where Dan-Tor’s pendant had rested. ‘Without Hawklan, Dan-Tor and the High Guards might never have come,’ she said quietly.

Loman started as if he had been struck. Tirilen looked up and met his gaze steadily. There was no reproach in either her look or her tone. She saw what she saw and could not deny it to herself or anyone.

Looking into her sloe eyes, Loman found himself floating on a stream of memories. How much darker would life have been these last twenty years, without Hawklan? Could he have found the peace he needed to free his mind of the screaming nightmare of the Morlider War? Would Isloman’s poisoned wound have healed itself, or would it have continued draining him day by relentless day? And the village and its people? How would they have fared, nestling under an Anderras Darion, silent and enigmatic?

Happily enough, presumably, he concluded, un-changed and unchanging. But the word ‘stagnation’ hovered in his mind, and then Aynthinn’s reproach. ‘Our work has deteriorated through the years. We live in the shadow of those who went before, when we should have learnt their lessons and moved forward.’ That would have been their fate. They would simply have been mourners on the death cortege of the Great Harmony of Orthlund. And what would grow where that had once flourished?

Hawklan had opened the Great Gate of Anderras Darion and shone a warm guiding light through far more than that bitter winter night twenty years ago. True, through no apparent act of his own he had become the focus of harmful forces, but perhaps only because it was he who had inadvertently begun to awaken the Orthlundyn from what might have proved to be a fatal torpor.