Chapter Text
NOTA BENE
The accounts in these pages are compiled from journals and correspondence penned during the period of my travels; where necessary I have expanded from my own recollections, suspect though they may be these many years on. Those who anticipate a scholarly compendium will be disappointed. Those who hope for salacious tale-telling, more so. It is a series of memories and impressions, a personal record of travel in good company: no more and no less. I trust that you are sufficiently forewarned.
Anon.
Enbarr, Imperial Year 1215
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Excerpted from The Thousand Roads and Seven Seas, Chapter One.
On the Beginnings of Our Journey
I suppose I must explain how I came to undertake such a journey in the first place. Indeed, certain wits purporting to be friends have begged me over and over to account for this inexplicable turn of fortune. I, the connoisseur of the restorative nap, the devotee of the featherbed. I, the sleeping serpent of our school days!
As with any good tale, it began with a knock at the door. It was a fine spring night, a light breeze weaving through the warm air: perfect for a smooth and soothing slumber. The knock was therefore less than welcome. Nor was I appeased to discover an old friend upon my doorstep. (Note that I use the adjective purely to mark that our acquaintance stretches beyond my earliest memories; in fact, he is often mistaken for well short of his years.) Not in the habit of entertaining nocturnal company—the reader has perhaps ascertained I hold the night hours sacred—I naturally suspected a prank, and expressed my opinion briefly yet forcefully. My friend was quick to clarify. He was, so he said, here to bid me farewell before departing on a voyage for parts unknown. Imagine my surprise to discover that this journey was to begin the following day!
Although he was one of the most exhausting people I have ever met, and indeed retains that honor to this day, the thought of months—years—decades—passing before we were to meet again brought me up quite short. That was of course assuming that we did meet again. A journey such as the one he outlined, in the most fiery and overblown of descriptions, must necessarily entail extreme hardship and hazard, to say nothing of mortal danger.
I hasten to make clear that I know my friend to be as courageous as any man or woman alive. However, it is one thing to brave enemy steel; it is another to secure food, shelter, and safe passage, and though blessed with many sterling qualities my friend is far from a strategic thinker. He is of that happy character that staunchly prefers a physical, rather than intellectual, resolution to life's myriad difficulties. Indeed, should you need a thing punched, you will find no finer puncher in all the Empire. It is a sad reality that so many hurdles in this journey we call life must be surmounted with thought and deliberation, rather than with punching.
I expressed this opinion, along with many practical and concrete considerations he had by all appearances failed to take into account. My friend responded to these arguments with what seemed to me slipshod, nay, willfully irresponsible counterpoints. Nor was he dissuaded by my characterization of them as such. A full hour ticked by as we volleyed arguments—or what passed for them—back and forth. My spring slumber was long since lost. I was on the verge of calling this to his attention, with all the force and condemnation such a violation deserved, when out of the blue my friend took an entirely unexpected tack.
"Linhardt," said he to me, "if you're so worried, then why don't you come with me?"
"And I suppose next you'll ask me to besiege Fort Merceus," I said.
It was no slipshod hyperbole, for thirty years ago there was only one prospect more distasteful to me than that of exhausting and interminable travel, and I had every reason to believe that under the reign of the new Emperor I would never face that nightmare again. Indeed, it was this assurance that left me so dismayed at my friend's determination to throw himself willy-nilly into the teeth of danger. To imagine I should join him! Unthinkable.
Yet I could not deny that I immediately recognized the logic of his suggestion—an occasion in itself worthy of commemoration in these pages.
"Suppose I were to join you," I said, and got no farther, as his enthusiasm quite overwhelmed the both of us.
I shall not bore the reader with a recitation of the tedious negotiations that followed. Suffice it to say that it was not a week later that I found myself bouncing on horseback like a sack of oranges as we rode through the southeastern part of the country for the port of Nuvelle. Had I known how many years would pass before I was to see this view again, I might have tried to pay more attention to my surroundings, rather than attempt to doze ahorse. On second thought—unlikely.