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.
Loman saw in his daughter’s eyes that she under-stood this, for all the pain that such understanding brought. He nodded. ‘Hawklan merely told us what we already knew in our hearts. No one can answer the final "why?", but we know that evil’s abroad, and not to oppose it is to aid it.’
Tirilen stood up and straightened her green robe. ‘Yes, I know,’ she said. ‘But I find no joy in what we’re doing, and I’m frightened by what might happen if we have to use all our new-found "skills".’
Loman nodded again. ‘You’re right to be,’ he said gently. ‘But we still have no choice. To remain wilfully weak and defenceless in the face of a known evil when we have the means to protect ourselves would be… ’ He searched for a word. ‘… a betrayal. A betrayal of past and future generations. A betrayal of ourselves… of those here and now who can’t defend themselves: the old, the young, the sick.’
He found his gaze locked with his daughter’s again: that clear-eyed healer’s vision that allowed no escape. There was pain, open on her face now. ‘I know, father,’ she said. ‘And I know we’ll threaten no one who doesn’t threaten us. But how clear is our vision going to be?’ She pointed to the scar on her throat. ‘We didn’t see Dan-Tor’s corruption when it was waved in our faces.’
Loman scowled and turned away to look out at the village below. Hidden from his sight at the far edge of the village was the leaving stone and the still moulder-ing pile of Dan-Tor’s wares left there as a constant reminder to them all that not all evils come armed and armoured; that the worst might come with a smile and a jest, and a secret promise to the darker shadows in each of them.
‘I can’t answer you, Tirilen,’ he said almost angrily, looking at her. This time it was she who turned from his pain. ‘When all talk with a foe has failed, you find yourself trapped on the finest edge.’ His voice rose as if he were justifying some old mistake. ‘If you wait until you’re attacked, how do you answer to your own people, dead and maimed through your inaction? Yet how can you justify attacking first? That’s why violence is a bad thing, Tirilen. It has no point of true balance. It’s a demented flux in the order of things, the antithesis of harmony. It destroys in moments things that have taken years to build. People, buildings, things… trust, faith… everything.’
As suddenly as it had come, his brief passion waned, but a remnant of it swirled around inside him irritably as if waiting an opportunity to burst into life again. ‘All I know, Tirilen, is that the finer a tool is honed, the more precisely it can be used. I just hope that in the honing comes the wisdom to see when to use it. You can accept that, can’t you? It’s all I know.’
A silence fell between the two and there was no movement in the room for a long time except the creeping progress of the yellow light from the setting sun. Their talk could go no further.
Eventually Tirilen raised her eyes and looked at her father.
‘We’ll need more people trained in healing,’ she said, simply.
Loman closed his eyes and nodded. Into his mind came a memory of the aftermath of the last battle of the Morlider War. Sights and sounds were there in night-marish clarity, in a picture that he could neither watch nor ignore.
‘Yes,’ he said.
The following day found Loman busying himself in the Armoury. His conversation with Tirilen had lingered persistently in his mind and, combined with the old memories it had stirred, it had given him a restless night. Furthermore, he felt that something was eluding him, something that could be important. Something in his anger.
On waking, the unease persisted and he reorganized his amp;mdashGulda’s amp;mdashroutine so that he could decamp to the Armoury. There he could find the peace that he needed on the rare occasions that the Morlider War returned to trouble him.