Tales: The Call To Adventure (An Unfortunate Autobiography)

Once in a far off kingdom, when the world was young and still smelled new, there was a man who lived close to the King’s Road all of his life.  There was always a stream of interesting people from interesting places pacing by his home.  From the brightly colored gypsies, to weapon wielding soldiers, to hard driving messengers of the king he could some times only hear go by more than see, he encountered the all.  It was a common place enough thing for him, though surely it would fascinate you or I.  

As a boy he delighted in watching them all pass by, often stopping at the spring near his home to refresh themselves and their horses.  If it was a group of merchants, soldiers, or gypsies they would often camp there and the evening breeze would carry their unique scent of charred meat, sweating horses, or incense up to his bedroom window.

Curiosity would often sneak up on him like a kitten and pounce during such nights. He would slowly, quietly open his window and crawl out of it stealing across the field between with a child’s silent agility and speed towards the camps.

It was on one such night when a gypsy camp came to the spring just off the King’s Road that he was first spotted.  He peeked out from behind a rock that had always served him well in the past.  From there he had learned a great many things about life along the road and out in the wider world.  But that night, a pair of elderly eyes caught a glimpse of him.  The old woman with clear eyes of the brightest blue made her hobbling way toward the rock.  Caught like a bird in a thicket seized with fear of a hunter, he was frozen in place.  

She teased him for thinking he was still as small as the rock and invited him to join their fire in repayment for the blessing of the spring that sat on his parent’s land.  She was so polite and yet so insistent that he meekly complied, cautious every step of the way to where smiling ruddy faces looked back at him highlighted by the fire’s glow.

The old woman asked him to place his hand in her larger more wrinkled hand.  He thought how strange it was that her hand should be so soft on his before he realized that he had done as she asked.  Turning it over so that the palm faced up, she began to trace the lines there with the tip of her gnarled finger. 

“Ah!” She exclaimed with her aged, and raspy voice.  “But this is very interesting.  You are a very remarkable boy.”

The boy scrutinized his own hand, studying it far more closely than he ever had before.  

“What do you mean?  How can you tell from my just looking at my palm?”

“These lines here show much about who you are,” she explained to him with a kindness and patience that the greatest teachers use with their students.  “Understand that unlike many believe, I cannot see your future here.  I can only see what might be.  I can only see what you were made for.  And here, this line here, is the deepest of its kind that I have ever seen.  Notice the many many branches, and they way each reaches out at nearly touches these others?  It looks like they connect, but if you look closely you can see that they only just do not.”

The boy looked at his hand and saw that it was so.

“Most people have but a handful of these lines of destiny.  They only have a few opportunities to find what they were made to do, which comes to the greatest adventure of their lives.  But you, dear boy, will have many many opportunities to make many many adventures in your life.  Your future could never be read by anyone because it is in your hands to make of it what you will not just once but many times.  There is a greatness in you that will have many opportunities to find fulfillment in many areas.  Your life will be one of great adventure.”

The old woman tussled his hair after returning his hand to him.  

The young boy stared and stared at it, and then compared the one hand with the other back and forth. Possibilities swam through his mind like minnows in a stream.

“How do I begin?” He said in wonder.

“That is up to you, remarkable child,” the old woman with the clearest blue eyes replied.  “Take any opportunity for adventure, any quest, every call that comes your way, and you will find it full.”

Looking up, the boy noticed the brightly colored lamps and cloths, and the ornately carved wagons that surrounded the fire.  Life crossing the Kingdom traveling everywhere sounded like more than adventure enough to him. 

“Could I join you all?”

The grins that reflected the firelight widened even farther, and some opened enough to allow full chuckles to escape.  The boy looked into the clearest blue eyes for a sign as to what had been so funny.

“Maybe one day when you are older,” she replied with a grandmother’s warmth and reassuring pat on his shoulder. “Right now you are a child and your mother and father would miss you greatly.  But one day if you wish, should we return this way, you may join us.  Now, off with you back to your home, your warm stone walls, and into your feather bed.  Enjoy them while you have them, child of adventure.”

The boy politely bid them goodnight and slowly returned to his home staring at his hand for the entire small journey.  

In the moonlight, the channels in his palm didn’t seem as deep, but he knew he had seen them as surely as when he turned back to the camp he could see the barrel shaped wagons in the glow of both moon and fire. 

Upon waking the next morning, in the light of the rising sun, he could see the marks boldly upon his palm again.  When the sun peaked over the horizon and cast its pink and orange glow over the perpetually cloud covered peaks to the north, the boy threw back his blanket and ran out to the spring not caring a wit that he was still in his nightshirt.

The gypsies had left without a single sound.  The wagon ruts in the dirt and the smoldering ashes of the campfire were the only evidence they had been there at all.

The days, weeks, and months went by in their bewilderingly quick dance in the embrace of their deft partner we call The Years, and our young man became an older man.  Old enough to hold down a job to support himself, and with his parents having been swept away into the world beyond, he lived alone in the house by the King’s Road by the spring.  

He had never forgotten that day and was always on the lookout for his opportunity to adventure, but the years grew on and the gypsies hadn’t returned.

One day a knight came by upon the King’s Road with his armor gleaming, and his fierce horse garbed in the red and white that indicated the flag of the realm.  The man had been laboring in the garden outside his home when he saw the Knight walk the horse down the path to the spring to give it a cool refreshing drink and a belly-full of grass.

“Halloo!” The knight called to him from the spring with a wave.  The metal of his armor creaked and clanked with the friendly gesture.

The young man rolled his eyes and continued weeding.

“I say, halloo!”  The knight called again.

It wouldn’t do to ignore a knight of the King, the young man decided. And so after wiping his filthy hands on his coveralls he ambled, as slowly as he could without giving offense, towards the knight.

He was a grand looking fellow, easily over six feet tall, and with a broad mustache that curled at the ends.

“Hallo, my good man.  Nicodemus of Cru,” the knight said in a great booming voice while reaching out a hand to the young man.

The young man shook it and gave his name in return though hesitantly and with the minimum politeness.

“Well met,” Nicodemus of Cru replied in the ancient phrase that was quite new and fashionable at that time.  “I am a knight of the King.  Well.  Obviously,” he said with a chuckle indicating his garb.  “And I am on a quest to slay a certain giant a few villages over.  He is quite a nasty brute.  Well, he would have to be for them to call for a knight to dispatch him.  I left in such a hurry that I didn’t even stop to requisition a squire to aid me in the adventure.  When I saw you there it occurred to me that a strapping young man like yourself might fit the bill quite well indeed.  Are you at all interested?”

The young man gave an awkward sheepish expression and used one hand to rub at the back of his head.

“I understand the hesitation. Believe me, I do.  Giants are fearsome, but I assure you I am well experienced, well armed, and…well…very good at my job.  I know that you might very well be wondering, ‘What’s in it for me?’ And I can assure you that once you have a taste of this particular adventure you will quickly learn everything I can teach.  And I dare say you may even exceed me, should you commit to knight training.”

It would have been impolite to simply reject the knight’s offer with a terse, “No”.  Instead the young man hemmed and hawed and herpped making excuses about the garden and his parent’s house and his job in the village.  Running off with the gypsies was one thing when it came to adventure but slaying giants was something altogether undesirable. He told the knight that he appreciated the offer and maybe next time the man in his gleaming armor and majestic mustache came to the spring.  

“Pity,” the knight said simply as he put on his gauntlets and mounted his noble steed.  “I can’t say that I am not disappointed.  But if you are certain…?”

The young man indicated that he was and the knight rode off to meet a giant who was awaiting death but simply hadn’t realized it yet.  Watching the armored man and draped horse disappear into the distance, he let out a sight of relief and returned to his gardening.

It wasn’t long, perhaps a month later, that while digging in his garden, as he was harvesting potatoes, he pulled up something on the end of his hoe that was very much not a potato.  After cleaning it off he realized that it was a leather cylinder with a toggle and tie at one end.  He looked around to see if someone was playing a prank on him, he undid the tie, and unfastened the toggle.  Inside he found a sheaf of papers.  The pages were colored with age, and the ink looked faded, but he could still make out words.  The first word his eyes could make out was the word “trove” and next to it the word “treasure”.  Once he made sense of those combinations of letters his eyes nearly bugged out of his head and a yelp of joy came to his lips.

The young man composed himself enough to look around to see if anyone was watching. He returned the pages to the leather cylinder, which he now noted bore the seal of the King’s Own Explorers on the top and the base, and took it inside deciding it was time for a cup of tea.

Such joy bloomed within his chest as he waited for the tea to boil while gazing at the cylinder on his chair-side table.  At long last, an adventure was at his doorstep, sitting in his parlor, and all he need do was follow the map. 

In an effort to not appear too eager he determined to do precisely as he intended which was to first make his cup of tea and then calmly sit down with the pages.  He was, of course, not nearly as calm as he appeared.  His imagination fired constant images of wealth, and the joy of discovery, and future prosperity into his mind.  He nearly didn’t register the whistling of the kettle.  The kettle was especially treasonous by revealing his emotional state when it began to shake in his hand as he poured the boiling water into the pot. The leaves swirled franticly in a further mirror of his mind.  

Two minutes later it was time to pour into the cup, shaky again, applied sugar and creamer and sat down with more caution than usual.  One sip later his hands went to work, and three pages of ancient vellum were flattened before him. Where once there was joy abounded it was soon replaced by prickling doubt and panicky fear.

It was not the distance or the location that was troublesome.  The young man knew the general area where the spot was marked with an X, and was fairly certain he had seen the rock formation indicated from which he could take his bearings and make his paces.  It was at most a two day walk from where he sat drinking tea.  The contents of the trove were certainly the opposite of meager.  He knew that he could borrow a horse and cart from his friend who lived a mile away with no questions asked and was not worried about thieves along the way.  The location was so remote from civilization that few would have any reason to be there.  It was safe as houses.

But, because there is always a but in such stories, the fly in the ointment, the worms in the proverbial can, was what surrounded the trove.

One whole page was dedicated to listing the dangers, traps, and how to counter each of such difficulties.  The documentation was absolutely thorough, so thorough that a boy of ten could do it.  A doubt rose within his mind and nagged at him like a woodpecker on a front door, taunting him every time he tried to close it.  The counter to the fire trap was all well and good, but what if it failed?  What if it wasn’t enough?  A face full of dragon fire wasn’t something he wanted to experience.  A way to bypass the poison trap was theoretically sound, and an antidote for the poison was given.  What if the poison had become more potent with age?  

At least thirteen other concerns rose the surface of his mind and refused to be easily drowned again.

Delicately the young man picked up the pages, rolled them, placed them back into the cylinder, and then gingerly set the cylinder in the bottom of a chest in the basement.  

He wanted adventure.  He craved adventure.  Those pages were an adventure, for certain, with the greatest possible return and reward.  

It would still be an adventure when he got around to feeling better about accepting it.  The map and instructions had kept that long in the fertile earth, so it stood to reason that the sheaf of paper and the treasure trove would wait a little longer, safe within the chest in the basement.

The young man returned to his tea and stared out over his garden.

Seasons spun around him in their landscape altering shift from autumn, to winter, spring all the way around to winter again before the young man felt another pull on his heart toward adventure.

Throughout the year he often thought about the map in the chest in the basement.  A few times he went down to the basement to be sure it was there, as it was quite understandably valuable to him.  Always it lay precisely where he had placed it.  Always it brought a smile of a bright future to his face.  He would smile and then close the lid over it and return to his life.  

It was during one of these visits to reassure himself that the map was more than a dream, and could still be followed, that there was a knock at the door.  He closed the chest, locked it, and climbed the stairs to find another young man standing on his porch with a letter for him.  He had been invited to a dance to celebrate the shortest day of the year, to dance in the sun’s growing return to the skies.  

Although he had never been to a dance he thanked the messenger and gave his reply in the affirmative.  He would attend.  He would, as the message instructed him to do, be wearing his best finery, and would be prompt.

It was there, on that fateful night, that he met a young woman about his age and his heart flew into a flutter. It was not the hushed flutter of an owl in flight but the noisy-winged flight of a dove or pigeon.  There was no hiding how much her eyes, her smile, her nose and her voice delighted him.  He plucked up the courage to court her, in the manner of fine gentleman.  Around the village all were sure that the two would be wed.  They made great plans regarding what to do with the house by the road by the spring.  They planned how many children they would prefer to have, and ultimately how they would likely retire and watch their grand children grow.  

One night, alone in his bed, the frost crept over the window pane in spiraling arcs that mimicked the motion of his thoughts.  He rose and looked out across the snow crusted fields and saw a firelight near the spring.  There were no horses, no carriages; just two men huddled under blankets laughing and shivering.  

He wondered where they are headed, what business they had, and what adventures they were out upon and the thought occurred yet again in spiraling fractals of anxiety.  What if the gypsies returned?

What if he accepted whatever adventure might next come calling?  How could he travel and see and risk much with a wife and child at home?  He would succeed at any adventure he put his hand to, he remembered. 

His thoughts climbed out of bed and went down the stairs to find the map in the bottom of the chest in the basement. He couldn’t imagine going alone or taking his love along with him.  He wasn’t about to go off without her before their marriage, for what if he came back injured or misshapen?  He wouldn’t risk making her a widow even before their wedding day let alone after.

Naturally, you and I can see his mistake.  It is as plain as day.  The young man did not see marriage and children as one of the lines of promised adventure that made a potential future in his palm.

Full of doubt, full of anxiety, full of idiocy, the young man quietly set about releasing them both from the engagement.  He couldn’t think of how to tell her what lay in his heart; half worried she would take it wrongly and somehow half worried she would be able to answer each of his worries and fears with solutions he wouldn’t be able to den.  It was better this way, was the lie he told himself out of cowardice.  And so it went, though he assured himself that, like the map, she would still be there when he was ready.

Time spun on, the sun doing its spiral curtsy and flight in the skies over head. The young man became just a man, no longer young, and then finally an old man alone in the house by the road near the spring.

Adventures had called to just as frequently as ever; begging him to come along for some fun, some enchantment, some joy, some excitement.  

There was the cockatrice wrangler who was making a trip across the ocean for another season of cockatrice catching, which was quite lucrative and very exciting.  Only basilisks were more danger, pound for pound, he had said.  

The Great King himself called for him across the leagues of kingdom to join him at the palace.  He was in need of a confidante, someone with no political aspirations whatsoever to speak to and join him on the journeys about the far off kingdom, and wondered if he was at all interested.

A peddler came with his wares to the man’s front door and offered to sell him a bag of magic seeds.  He was a little scant on the details regarding what would happen if he planted them.  But the old feeling came back again and he knew if he bought them his life would change forever.  Oh, what a tale he would have to tell.  How much more different all things would become!    

As always the joyous fire leapt inside him, wonder ensued, and then he would reply to the call for adventure, “Not just yet.”  

One day, well into his age when the bones would no longer take a remedy against aching, he looked out the front window of his house and saw a figure dressed in black sitting casually upon his porch.  The old man hobbled his way to the front door and, upon opening it, discovered that the man in black was gone as if he had never been there.  For a moment he was confused until he felt the fiery joy begin to kindle in his heart.  He looked left and then right and then turned the corner of his home to see the figure in black walking through the wild grass in the direction of the old spring.

His joints and bones told him, “No” but he was nearly vibrating in joy and so ignored the nearly useless calcified pegs.  The old man was more than aware that he was nearing the end of his days and had long determined to lay ahold of whichever adventure would offer itself next.  Time was short and he was assured of success, unless the old gypsy had been mistaken.

Panting and wheezing, the old man wiped his brow reflecting that the effort required to reach the spring camp was harder than he had ever known it to be.  It had been long years now since he last had been out that way.  As he made it through the wild grass finally, he saw the man in black with a hood up over his head sitting with his back to him.  He was holding his hands out to the fire ring as if warming though all that lay within the ring of stones was grey ash and charred black coals.  

The old man was about to say something until he saw the man’s staff and tool laying on the ground next to him.  He half considering hobbling his way back across the field to his house, but was certain it would be of no use.

“So,” the man in black said without turning around, without making any indication that he had noticed the old man.  “You’ve figured me out.  You know who I am.”

It was disconcerting to be talked to without seeing the man’s face.  The old man wasn’t certain that speaking to that face instead of the back of a man’s hood wouldn’t make it worse.

“I promise you, my face is much like yours.  You have nothing to fear.  You’ve already left, you just don’t realize it yet.”

The old man pulled back in shock and confusion.  He looked over his shoulder and noticed someone else sitting on the porch.  Perhaps the feeling of adventure calling was pushing him towards that person rather than this black figure whom he really didn’t want to talk to.

“Sit,” the figure said not so much as a command but as a friendly entreaty that the old man felt was too warm to deny.

He hobbled around to the other side and sat down more easily upon the ground than he expected.  The joyful fire continued to grow within his chest as he looked into the man in black’s face.

It was a kind face, a round face, with a ready smile and the clearest blue eyes he had ever seen; clearer even than the gypsy woman’s eyes had been by an easy mile.  That didn’t change who the old man knew him to be.  Maybe if he hadn’t seen the staff and tool on the ground he might have forgotten.  There was no fear no under the hooded man’s gaze, but it was still unpleasant to sit there.  

Without warning the old man began to cry.  “Sob” is probably a better word for the undignified tear and snot smeared display that followed.

It had all been so ridiculous, the old man couldn’t help but thinking.  He always believed he had all the time in the world; that his life was a buffet that he could pick and choose from whenever he was finally ready and craving this delicacy or that.  The number of possibilities before him he counted as his riches.  But in the end he realized that the plate he held in his hand was empty.  

“You’re thinking about the map in the chest in your basement,” the liquid smooth but sand paper rough voice of the man in black declared.  It wasn’t a question.  Somehow he knew every thought of the old man’s heart.  

“You trust that old gypsy’s word so much that you foolishly think that if you try to grasp the parchment in hand now, if you somehow stiffly waddle your way across the field and finally choose that adventure, you’re assured success and you can put me off for a little while longer.”

The old man wiped his leaking face with his sleeves and nodded without a word.  What is there to say when the being across from you knows all anyway.

“You had the opportunity for a hundred adventures, a hundred riches, a hundred glories.  Do you even know why you didn’t take them?”

The old man reflected back at each decision and choice to put off each adventure.  The tears began again as he saw each was a complicated reasoning, each was messy in its own way.  There was so much that he couldn’t yet admit, couldn’t yet see.  But the one thing he could see was that it had been such a shame; such a wasted, pointless shame.  And now it was all gone.  No wonder the lines in his hand only nearly connected, were only points of possibility.  He hadn’t chosen.

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that.  Look again.  Look at the last line.”

The old man looked into his hands which were much larger and more wrinkled now than that old gypsy woman’s.  He hadn’t admired the possibility written on his hand in ages.  He couldn’t remember the last time he had.  But then again there wasn’t much he remembered before he’d had a chance at love.  No.  It hadn’t been a chance.  It had been the real thing, genuine love that would have transcended the ages. But he walked away, ostensibly for something greater that he never tried to lay hold of.  What a shame.  What a wasteful, embarassing, senseless shame.

Squinting, it took a moment to see what the man across from him had meant.  The lines diverged from the main deeply, reaching out and nearly connecting but not quite…all except that last one.  It connected for real, deeply, and for certain.  There was no mistaking it.

His eyes when bug-eyed wide as they had so many years ago and he stared into the smiling, warm face surrounded by a black hood.

“I am the undeniable adventure. The final act.  I am the one journey you can’t help but chase after.  And, as I said, there’s no point in heading back for your map to your trove, because you’ve already left.”

The old man had thought the figure sitting on the porch looked familiar, but rarely having seen himself beyond his face in the mirror it hadn’t registered immediately.

In shock he looked back down at his hands he saw them change from gnarled and wrinkle, calloused and warped with rheumatism, to the hands of his youth.  The figure across from him only nodded with a slight smirk on his lips as if he had seen it all before but it still delighted him.  But where were they going?

The pair walked from the spring to the King’s Road and headed toward the mountains perpetually covered by cloud.