Crystal Gorge. David Eddings

       1

      It was summer in the lands of the west, and the young boy with red hair woke up even before the sun had risen above the mountains to the east of the village of Lattash and decided that it might be a good day to go fishing in the small river that flowed down from the mountains. There were quite a few things that he was supposed to do that day, but the river seemed to be calling him, and it wouldn’t be polite at all to ignore her – particularly when the fish were jumping.

      He quietly dressed himself in his soft deerskin clothes, took up his fishing-line, and went out of his parents’ lodge to greet the new summer day. Summer was the finest time of the year for the boy, for there was food in plenty and no snow piled high on the lodges and no bitterly cold wind sweeping in from the bay.

      He climbed up over the berm that lay between the village and the river and then went on upstream for quite a ways. The fishing was usually better above the village anyway, and he was sure that it wouldn’t be a very good idea to be right out in plain sight when his father came looking for him to remind him that he was neglecting his chores.

      The fish were biting enthusiastically that morning, and the boy had caught several dozen of them even before the sun rose up above the mountains.

      It was about midmorning when his tall uncle, the eldest son of the tribal chief, came up along the graveled riverbank. Like all the members of the tribe, his uncle wore clothes made of golden deerskin, and his soft shoes made little sound as he joined his young nephew. ‘Your father wants to see you, boy,’ he said in his quiet voice. ‘You did know that he has quite a few things he wants you to do today, didn’t you?’

      ‘I woke up sort of early this morning, uncle,’ the boy explained. ‘I didn’t think it would be polite to wake anybody, so I came on up here to see if I could catch enough fish for supper this evening.’

      ‘Are the fish biting at all?’

      ‘They seem to be very hungry today, uncle,’ the boy replied, pointing toward the many fish he’d laid in the grass near the riverbank.

      His uncle seemed quite surprised by the boy’s morning catch. ‘You’ve caught that many already?’ he asked.

      ‘They’re biting like crazy this morning, uncle. I have to go hide behind a tree when I want to bait my bone hook to keep them from jumping up out of the water to grab the bait right out of my fingers.’

      ‘Well, now,’ his uncle said enthusiastically. ‘Why don’t you keep fishing, boy? I’ll go tell your father that you’re too busy for chores right now. A day when the fish are biting like this only comes along once or twice a year, so I think maybe our chief might want all the men of the tribe to put everything else aside and join you here on the riverbank.’ He paused and squinted at his nephew. ‘Just exactly what was it that made you decide to come here and try fishing this morning.’

      ‘I’m not really sure, uncle. It just sort of seemed to me that the river was calling me.’

      ‘Any time she calls you, go see what she wants, boy. I think that maybe she loves you, so don’t ever disappoint her.’

      ‘I wouldn’t dream of it, uncle,’ the boy replied, pulling in yet another fish.

      And so it was that all of the men of the tribe came down to the river and joined the red-haired boy. The fishing that day was the best many of them had ever seen, and they thanked the boy again and again.

      The sun was very low over the western horizon as the boy carried the many fish he’d caught that day up over the berm to the lodges of Lattash, and all of the women of the tribe came out to admire the boy’s catch, and even Planter, who seldom smiled, was grinning broadly when he delivered his catch to her.

      And then the boy went on down to the beach to watch the glorious sunset, and the light from the setting sun seemed almost to lay a gleaming path across the water, a path that seemed somehow to invite the boy to walk on out across the bay to the narrow channel that opened out onto the face of Mother Sea.

      ‘Are you still sleeping, Red-Beard?’ Longbow asked.

      ‘Not any more,’ Red-Beard told his friend sourly. He sat up and looked around his room in the House of Veltan. It was a nice enough room, Red-Beard conceded, but stone walls were not nearly as nice as the lodges of Lattash had been. ‘I was dreaming about the old days back in the village of Lattash, and I’d just caught enough fish to feed the whole tribe. Everybody seemed to be very happy about that. Then I went on down to the beach to watch the sunset, and I was about to stroll on across the bay to say hello to Mother Sea, but then you had to come along and wake me up.’

      ‘Did you want to go back to sleep?’ Longbow asked him.

      ‘I guess not,’ Red-Beard replied. ‘If I happened to doze off now, the fish would probably start biting my toes instead of the bait I’d been using. Have you ever noticed that, Longbow? If you’re having a nice dream and you wake up before it’s finished, your next dream will be just awful. Is there something going on that I should know about?’

      ‘There’s a little family squabble in Veltan’s map-room is about all. Aracia and Dahlaine have been screaming at each other for about an hour now.’

      ‘Maybe I will go back to sleep then,’ Red-Beard said. ‘You don’t need to tell anybody I said this, but the older gods seem to be slipping more and more every day.’

      ‘You’ve noticed,’ Longbow said dryly.

      ‘Do you have to do that all the time?’ Red-Beard demanded, throwing off his blanket and struggling to his feet.

      ‘Do what?’

      ‘Try to turn everything into a joke.’

      ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to poach in your territory. Shall we go?’

      ‘It’s fairly certain that the creatures of the Wasteland will come east now, Dahlaine,’ Aracia was saying as Red-Beard and Longbow entered Veltan’s map-room. ‘After Yaltar’s volcano destroyed the ones in Zelana’s Domain, they turned south to attack the nearest part of the Land of Dhrall, and east is closer to south than north. They’ll attack me next. That should be obvious.’

      ‘You’re overlooking something, Aracia,’ Dahlaine disagreed. ‘The servants of the Vlagh are cramming thousands – or even millions – of years of development into very short periods of time. If we assume that they’re