‘He always does,’ another fisherman noted. ‘There’s a lot of feed in that beaver pond of his. There’s not much current to wash it away.’
‘Who’s Crooked Jaw?’ Gelane asked, just a little timidly. He sat in a chair away from the fireplace, obviously not wanting to push himself in on the veterans.
‘He’s a big old trout who made a stupid mistake when he was hardly more than a minnow,’ the first angler replied. ‘He took the hook of some earl or something who didn’t know very much about fishing. Anyway, as close as we can tell, the earl yanked a whole lot too hard, and he broke that young fish’s jaw. That’s how the fish got his name. His lower jaw’s all twisted off to one side. As far as we know, Crooked Jaw spent all the time while his jaw was healing up thinking about the mistake he’d made. Believe you me, young feller, it takes a real clever lure to get Crooked Jaw to even look at it. He don’t hardly ever make no mistakes.’
‘Have all the fish around here got names?’ Gelane asked.
‘Naw,’ another fisherman laughed, ‘just the big ones as is too smart t’ get therselves caught.’
‘I hooked a fairly large one in the pool below that waterfall just outside of town the first day I was here,’ Gelane said modestly. ‘He wasn’t on the end of my line very long, though – and there wasn’t much of my line left after he broke free. I think he took about half of it with him.’
‘Oh, that was Old Twister,’ another grizzled angler immediately identified the fish. ‘That pool there’s his private property, and he collects fishing line.’
Gelane gave him a puzzled look.
‘All the big ones hereabouts have their own favorite pools,’ another old fisherman explained. ‘Crooked Jaw lives in that beaver pond, Twister lives in that pool under the falls, Dancer lives near the deep bend a mile or so above the falls, and the High Jumper lives in the riffle on the downstream side.’ He looked around at the other anglers with an unspoken question in his eyes, and they all nodded. ‘Why don’t you pull your chair closer to the fire, young feller?’ the old man suggested. ‘I get a crick in my neck when I try to talk to somebody back over my shoulder.’
And that was when Gelane joined the local fraternity. He pulled his chair up into the place the other fishermen made for him, and then he spoke, politely, of course. ‘I didn’t quite follow what you meant when you said that Twister collects fishing line,’ he said to the grizzled man who’d identified the fish in question.
‘It’s a trick he’s got,’ the angler explained. ‘I think Twister’s got delicate lips, and he don’t like the way a fishhook bites in. So what he does is roll over and over in the water, wrappin’ the fish-line around him. Then, after he’s got your line all snarled up, he swims on downstream at about a mile a minute. Now, Twister’s a big, heavy rascal, an’ when he hits the end of your line, he snaps it like a cobweb. Happens all the time.’
‘That was Twister I hooked then,’ Gelane said excitedly. ‘That’s exactly what he did to me.’ His eyes grew dreamy. ‘I’ll get him, though,’ he predicted. ‘Someday I’ll get him.’
‘I wish you all the luck in the world, friend,’ a balding angler said. ‘Old Twister’s almost pushed me into poverty just buying new fishing line every time I walk by that pool of his.’
The ‘fishing club’ was comprised for the most part of local businessmen, and when Gelane modestly admitted that he’d just set up his barrel-works, he was immediately accepted as a kindred spirit – which is to say that everybody realized that barrels took second place in his view of the world. My father’s a sly one, I’ll give him that. Nothing Gelane could have done in Emgaard would have gained him acceptance quite as quickly as picking up his fishing pole had.
When autumn finally rolled around and the fishing season more or less ended, Gelane went back to making barrels and attending to various other domestic duties. He hadn’t as yet caught Old Twister, but he did catch Enalla at an appropriate time, so by Erastide she was quite obviously pregnant.
It’s a peculiarity of village life that nothing cements a family’s position in the community quite so much as the wife’s first pregnancy. In a peculiar sort of way, the incipient infant becomes the property of the entire village. The ladies all stop by to give the new motiier-to-be advice – most of it bad – and the men-folk spend hours congratulating the father-to-be. We’d only lived in Emgaard for about a year and a half, but in the eyes of our fellow villagers were now ‘old-timers’. We’d merged with the rest of the village, and there’s no better way to become invisible.
In the early summer of 4899 Enalla went into labor, and it was an easy delivery. Enalla didn’t think so, but it was. The infant was a boy, naturally. It almost always is in the Rivan line for a number of very good reasons, heredity being only one of them.
Gelane insisted that his son be named Garel, in honor of his own father, and I really had no objection to that. It wasn’t a Cherek name, but it was Alorn enough not to be considered unusual. On the evening of the eventful day, when Enalla was sleeping and Gelane and I sat by the small fire, he with his infant son and I with my sewing, he looked reflectively into the fire. ‘You know something, Aunt Pol?’ he said quietly.
‘What’s that, dear?’
‘I’m really happy about the way things have turned out. I didn’t really like it in Sendaria.’
‘Oh?’
‘When I lived at the Stronghold back during the war, I got all puffed up. I lived with King Cho-Ram’s family, and everybody went around calling me “Your Highness”. Then after Vo Mimbre, you took us to Seline and made me learn how to make wooden barrels. I didn’t really like that, you know. I thought it was beneath me. That’s how Chamdar got his hook in my jaw. That “Rivan King” business was like an angle-worm waved in Old Twister’s face. If I did that, Twister wouldn’t be able to help himself; he’d have to bite my bait. Does Chamdar ever do any fishing, Aunt Pol? If he does, he’s probably very good. He certainly hooked me easily enough.’ He laughed then, just a bit ruefully. ‘Of course, I’m not nearly as clever as Old Twister is.’
‘We broke Chamdar’s line, though,’ I told him.
‘You mean you did. If you hadn’t made it possible for me to hear what he was thinking, he’d have had me on a platter for supper. Anyway, I’m glad we moved here to Cherek. The people here in Emgaard aren’t quite as serious as the Sendars in Seline were. Is it against the law to laugh in Sendaria? Sendars never seem to enjoy life. If I’d have hung my “gone fishing” sign on the door of the barrel-works in Seline, everybody in town would have talked about it for a year. Here in Emgaard, they just shrug and let it go at that. You know, I go for whole weeks without even thinking about crowns and thrones and all that foolishness. I’ve got good friends here, and now I’ve got a new son. I love it here, Aunt Pol, I really do. Everything I want in the whole wide world is here.’