CHAPTER XVIII: The Apprentice's Daydream
Tatya tossed his quill aside in exasperation as Greagoir's grumbly snoring commenced. The apprentice hastily dried the ink on his parchment, and then went outside for a breath of fresh air, as the stale reek of pipeweed still inundated the cottage. With a stretch and an involuntary yawn, Tatya stumbled lazily from the porch and into the garden. Why Greagoir, being blind these many years, still insisted on the rigorous upkeep of the rose trellises, flowering bushes, hostas and box yews, was beyond the apprentice's comprehension. Perhaps, like Greagoir's precious Elves, the master wished to stay the advance of time and decay, keeping the garden inviolate: a living memory of his younger days when he was still sighted and could enjoy the bright dashes of reds, violets, whites and yellows.
It had been some time since the young apprentice had been away from the cottage and his elderly master. It was in late spring, Tatya recalled; but there was a time when he left on his own once a week (usually on Sundays), venturing the few miles it took to reach the great seaport of Caladh. He would spend hours walking aimlessly amidst the hustle and bustle of the bazaars: awash with the vivid colors of manifold fabrics, outrageously plumed birds, tropical fruits and vegetables, shining brass and ruddy copper; scented with the pungent aromas of spices, herbs and incense which barely masked the stench of discarded offal from the fish-mongers and butchers' blocks, and the rank refuse of the green-grocers; a swirling, hectic and discordant riot of strange folk from all corners of the East, hawking their wares from horse-drawn carts, single-wheeled barrows, or, for the more affluent vendors, stationary market stalls. Tiring of the teeming bazaars, he would journey to the quaysides and watch with envious excitement as single-sparred triremes, three-sailed junks, and many-masted galleasses vied for precious dockage in a maddening but majestic dance of arrival and departure in the sprawling harbor.
Yet always his wayward path led eventually to Wordwright Street, with its tottering post and beam buildings leaning precariously over the cramped and muddy lane, wherein resided the booksellers ('parsimonious parasites', as Greagoir called them), stationers, renderers (who practiced the revolting art of vellum-making), binders, illuminators and scribes, all densely packed one on top of the other up and down the narrow thoroughfare, or closeted away in dankly cavernous alleyways which crept like the shadowy legs of a supine spider from Scrivener's Square, where the street ended at the ramshackle guild hall.
There, within the dilapidated confines of the once-stately Scrivener's Hall, Tatya would seek out the boisterous camaraderie of the other scribal apprentices, sharing lewd limericks and bawdy sea chanteys, telling tall tales, or relating with indignant relish the latest degradations leveled by their overbearing masters -- commiserating over a bottle of purloined wine or cask of tepid ale, as is the wont of brash youths chafing at the restraints of authority. Tatya rarely said anything about his master, but the other apprentices, knowing Greagoir by his reputation alone, looked upon Tatya with pity, and heaped derision on the curmudgeonly bard. 'Greagoir the Mad' they styled him, forever lost in legends of his own making. But Tatya would merely shrug, smile and change the subject, for he had grown quite fond of the old man. He admired the master's wisdom and his zest for life, but most of all the apprentice discovered that, more and more, he wished to fill the great lorist's shoes and set off on his own journeys of discovery some day.
To Tatya's mind, it was the other apprentices who should be pitied, for their masters led drab work-a-day lives of mundane drudgery: accountants, merchants, barristers, bores. The miserable lots of his scribal comrades were to be that of bookkeepers, spending every waking hour filling ledgers with numbers, or as notaries, compiling tedious reams of legalistic hyperbole for lawsuits. Once the formulas were memorized, it all became rote gibberish, a mindless spewing of nonsense like so many worker bees disgorging their crops and never once tasting the nectar they stored. Even those lucky few who apprenticed for the position of court scribes to the great peers spent countless hours on nothing but bureaucratic reiteration and stale statecraft. But Tatya had gotten a taste of life on the open road, having joined Greagoir on his last few expeditions before the master's failing eyesight finally robbed him of his near-legendary treks across the trackless plains and deserts of the East, and the primeval forests on the dark continent of Mu across the straits to the south.
Tatya shrugged. "Yes, this is the life!" he muttered irritably under his breath, then kicked one of the bushes he had pruned earlier in the day.
He had never even seen a troll, nor one of those Hobbitish creatures Greagoir seemed to love and despise all at once. And the Elves? Merely more enchanted characters populating the stories the master was never at a loss for. Then it dawned on Tatya: what if Greagoir's endless recitations were in fact simply fables and folklore the blind old scribe had gathered from his travels? The other apprentices from the Scrivener's Guild certainly believed Greagoir was daft; could it be then that their scorn had actual merit? Had he blindly followed Greagoir about, hanging on his every word like some trusting puppy, while all along he was being made sport of – a bumbling boy bowing before a babbling buffoon? Recalling his fellow apprentices' mirthful sniggers and looks of pity every time Tatya spoke, it became suddenly evident to the young scribe that he was included with Greagoir in his mates' ridicule. He had been the oblivious butt of an ongoing joke, the punch line to a jest of which he was now only dimly aware. He kicked the bush again for good measure.
"Tatya, my lad," the master's voice rumbled enthusiastically from the cottage, as he was newly roused from his brief nap, "let us strike while the iron is still hot! For I am not yet tired and there is much I need to relate."
Tatya swore under his breath. Greagoir, in his dotage, was no longer aware when he was awake or when he slumbered. The apprentice felt betrayed by the master. How could he ever trust Greagoir again? Where were the proofs of his grandiose acquaintances, these great personages who enlivened his tales? Sullenly, he made his way back to the cottage, each step one of slow, trudging indifference towards an unwanted objective. Tatya wanted to run away, to return to the Scrivener's Hall and laugh again with his compatriots. His master had become a stranger to him -- an anchor weighted with lies -- an old man wrapping his failing years in a cloak of self-importance and falsity so as to keep warm during his inevitable journey to the other side.
But when Tatya reluctantly laid his eyes upon Greagoir once more, the master was still clutching the enormous Black Pearl of Leannan, a thing of incalculable worth that no ordinary man (or a an inveterate liar, for that matter) could possibly possess. Tatya became conflicted with doubt and veneration, wonder and wonder. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the great black staff leaning solidly against the wall -- a supposed gift from a wizard.
"Master," Tatya said hesitantly, hefting the unusually heavy piece of smooth, obsidian wood in his hand, "that wizard…Pallando, I believe you called him…you say you met him once?"
Greagoir caught the queer note in Tatya's voice, but shrugged off the incredulity wound about the question with humored irritability. "Blast it, Tatya!" he boomed. "Ever do your seemingly simple questions require day-long answers! A cunning device to slough off chores, to be sure, but I am not so dotardly as to be unable to see through your contrivances. Yet you are like a wavering shaft of young wheat, blown this way and that on capricious winds. At one moment you beset me with strident urgency to complete the tale of Cui-Baili -- smothering as a lap dog in search of a treat in his master's pockets -- then the next you wander off onto a wholly different road, forgetting the first path in a rush for more knowledge than that addled pate of yours can obviously hold! You ask much for little, and more for less."
Tatya knew Greagoir well enough to see that the master --without actually broaching the subject -- had found him out, and in his own inimitable and roundabout manner had laid bare the apprentice's disbelief. Abashed that he could have doubted the master, and more so that now the old scribe was aware of his doubt, Tatya mumbled miserably, "I merely wondered…it is nothing."
Greagoir smiled. "There are many impossible truths that make lies seem more palatable, Tatya," the master replied sympathetically, "and great tidal lies that whelm the sodden shores of sincerity . "A healthy skepticism is the sign of a well-rounded mind. I have not trained you these many years to be a blind cipher, merely regurgitating what you have heard into written blather filling empty pages. You shall take my place one day soon, or at the least that is my fervent hope. In order to continue the histories of the East, you must learn to separate the truth from the tale and the lie from the legend. Fables are fine for campfires and children's bedsides, but they are not seemly for the life's work of a scholar."
There was a twinkle upon the opaque cataracts that covered the old man's eyes. "As far as the wizard Pallando," Greagoir added, deftly changing the subject (much to the relief of a grateful Tatya), "he was and is of the Istari, an order most ancient and arcane, and not of the waking realms of mortal men. Many years ago I did indeed meet him, or rather he saved me from exposure and frostbite on the frozen rim of the Great North Sea, where he made his home in exile. The black staff is a testament of his friendship. There is no wood likened to it, save in the far west of the world."
Tatya looked more closely at the great staff. He had never examined it thoroughly, nor handled it for more than a moment. He had never considered the wood to be black in and of itself, rather he had considered the ebony hue to be the patina of aged varnish, turned dark by years of exposure to the elements and the sweat of the master's hand; but the gnarled root -- for so it seemed, as he had never seen a limb of a tree so contorted, burled and winding -- still gleamed dully as if newly hewn and carved, without a hint of shellac or stain. Yet even where there were gashes and splits from years of hard travel and expansion and contraction from heat and cold, Tatya could discern the blackness of the wood far beneath its weathered but still resilient surface.
"No magic is there in the staff," Greagoir continued while Tatya remained engrossed in his examination, "though such a wizard as Pallando or his brethren can imbue an implement with their innate power -- or magic, if you prefer the naïve superstitions of Men -- to meet their needs; but the power that lies within such a tool would diminish rapidly once the wizard no longer had use for it. Such a thing would only remain enchanted if the wizard surrendered some of his netherworldly force and placed his mark on the object forever. But that would require much effort on the part of the maker, and drain him of some or all of his essential nature: his power would then reside in the object itself, and be lost to him if the object were ever stolen or taken by force. Whoever wielded the object would then retain the wizard's expended energy, so long as the tool remained in their possession. The dire consequences of such a sundering of power can be seen in the loss and eventual destruction of Sauron's Ring, the ultimate folly of the ultimate gamesman."
All this talk of magic and wizards made Tatya uneasy, and he gingerly laid the staff aside (whether it had ever been enchanted or not). "Then Sauron was a wizard as well?" he asked, rather confused by the hierarchy of supernatural beings that seemingly lurked behind every doorway.
"No…yes…well, only in a manner of speaking," the flustered Greagoir replied. "You see, Tatya, it is Men who place such names on beings who are beyond their muddled comprehension, using ill-defined terms to make sense of that which defies their weak grasp of the Powers-That-Be. Sauron, Morgoth, the Valar and the Istari are all spirits of the same incarnation. Their powers may vary in magnitude and they may be of different orders, but whether they have been considered by Men to be good, evil or benign, they came to be before the making of the world, and were of one unified assembly, the Ainur. They are not merely immortal, they are infinite."
Greagoir took Tatya's continued silence to mean he was more than likely flummoxed. "But let us leave the concept of immortality for another day," the master sighed. "Pick up your pen and paper and let us return to Tsin-Quinqan. I wish to finish this episode before we become further enmeshed in the vagaries of the Valar. Time is fleeting, and there is much left that has yet to be written."
Tatya did not like the Greagoir's continued references to the brief span of time that remained to them, but spurred on by the master's sense of urgency, the apprentice quickly began to scribble as the old scribe recited.