How much easier sound my footfalls when I know I am walking a road of righteousness, when I know that my course is true. Without doubt, without hesitation, I stride, longing to get to the intended goal, knowing that when I have arrived there I will have left in my wake a better path than that which I walked.
Such was the case in my road back to Gauntlgrym, to rescue a lost friend. And such was the case leaving that dark place, to Port Llast to return the rescued captives to their homes and proper place.
And so now the road to Longsaddle, where Thibbledorf Pwent will be freed of his curse. Without hesitation, I stride.
What of our intended journey after that, to Mithral Hall, to Many Arrows . . . to start a war?
Will my steps slow as the excitement of adventuring with my old friends ebbs under the weight of the darkness before us? And if I cannot come to terms with Catti-brie’s assertions of goblinkin as irredeemable, or cannot agree with Bruenor’s insistence that the war has already begun in the form of orc raids, then what does this discordance portend for the friendship and unity of the Companions of the Hall?
I will not kill on the command of another, not even a friend. Nay, to free my blades, I must be convinced heart and soul that I strike for justice or defense, for a cause worth fighting for, worth dying for, and most importantly, worth killing for.
That is paramount to who I am and to how I have determined to live my life. It is not enough for Bruenor to declare war on the orcs of Many Arrows and begin its prosecution. I am not a mercenary, for gold coins or for friendship. There must be more.
There must be my agreement with the choice.
I will enjoy the journey to Mithral Hall, I expect. Surrounding me will be those friends I hold most dear, as we walk the new ways together again. But likely my stride will be a bit tighter, perhaps a bit heavier, the hesitance of conscience pressing down.
Or not conscience, perhaps, but confusion, for surely I am not convinced, yet neither am I unconvinced!
Simply put, I am not sure. Because even though Catti-brie’s words, so she says and so I believe, come from Mielikki, they are not yet that which I feel in my own heart—and that must be paramount. Yes, even above the whispers of a goddess!
Some would call that insistence the height of hubris, and pure arrogance, and perhaps they would be right in some regard to place that claim upon me. To me, though, it is not arrogance, but a sense of deep personal responsibility. When first I found the goddess, I did so because the description of Mielikki seemed an apt name for that which I carried in my thoughts and heart. Her tenets aligned with my own, so it seemed. Else, she would mean no more to me than any other in the named pantheon of Toril’s races.
For I do not want a god to tell me how to behave. I do not want a god to guide my movements and actions—nay! Nor do I want a god’s rules to determine that which I know to be right or to outlaw that which I know to be wrong!
For I surely do not need to fear the retribution of a god to keep my path aligned with what is in my heart. Indeed, I see such justifications for behavior as superficial and ultimately dangerous. I am a reasoning being, born with conscience and an understanding of what is right and what is wrong. When I stray from that path, the one most offended is not some unseen and extra-worldly deity whose rules and mores are relayed, and often subjectively interpreted—inevitably by mortal priests and priestesses with humanoid failings. Nay, the one most wounded by the digressions of Drizzt Do’Urden, is Drizzt Do’Urden!
It can be no other way. I did not hear the call of Mielikki when I fell into the gray-toned company of Artemis Entreri, Dahlia, and the others. It was not the instructions of Mielikki that made me, at long last, turn away from Dahlia on the slopes of Kelvin’s Cairn, not unless those instructions are the same ones etched upon my heart and my conscience.
Which, if true, brings me back full circle to the time when I found Mielikki.
At that moment, I did not find a supernatural mother to hold the crossbar to the strings supporting a puppet named Drizzt.
At that moment, I found a name for that which I hold as true. And so, I insist, the goddess is in my heart, and I need look no further than there to determine my course.
Or perhaps I am just arrogant.
So be it.
* * *
I have lived through two centuries, and much of those years have known conflict—battle and war, monstrous ambushes and unexpected dangers.
Yet if I add together all of the actual fighting I have done in my life, that total measure of time would pale against the number of practice hours I might devote to my fighting in a single tenday! Indeed, how many hundreds of hours, thousands of days of time, have I spent in turning my weapons against imaginary opponents, training my muscles to bring the blade to bear as fast as I can manage, in perfect balance, at the right angle, at the right moment?
In a single session of training, I might execute a middle thrust more times than in all the fights I have ever known, combined. This is the way of the warrior, the only way, and the way, I have come to know as truth, of anyone and everyone who deigns to rise to excellence, the way of anyone and everyone who seeks perfection even while knowing that there is no such thing.
For there is no perfect strike, no perfect defense, no perfection of the muscles. The word itself defines a state that cannot be improved, but such is not the case, is never the case with muscle and mind and technique.
So there is no state of perfection, but to seek it is not folly, nay, for it is that very seeking, the relentless journey, which defines the quality of the warrior.
When you see the journey and focus not merely on the goal, you learn humility.
A warrior must be humble.
Too often do people too greatly measure their lives by their goals, and, subsequently, by that which they consider accomplishments. I have reflected on this many times in my life and so the wisdom of years has taught me to constantly move the goal just beyond my stretching reach. For is the downside to achievement complacency? I have come to believe that too often do we name a goal and achieve it, then think the journey at its end.
I seek perfection, with my blades, with my body. I know there is no such thing, and that knowledge drives me forward, every day, and never inspires frustration or regret. My goal is unattainable, but the truth is that it is my journey toward that goal which is more important.
This is true of every goal of every person, but rarely do we see it. We seek goals as if their achievement will grant magical happiness and unending fulfillment, but is that ever the case? Bruenor would find Mithral Hall, and so he did—and how many years subsequent to that achievement did my dwarf friend seek ways to un-discover the hall? At least, to remove himself from the goal he had set, as he sought new adventures, new roads, and new goals, and ultimately abdicated his throne in Mithral Hall altogether!
As this is true for the king, so it is true for the commoner, so it is true for almost everyone, living their lives in a mad rush for the next “if only,” and in doing so, missing the most important truth of all.
The journey is more important than the goal, for while the goal might be worthwhile, the journey is, in fact, the thread of your life.
And so I set an unreachable goal: perfection of the body, perfection in battle.
That lifelong quest keeps me alive.
How many times have I narrowly escaped the bite of a monstrous maw, or the murderous edge of an enemy’s blade? How many times have I won out because of the memory within my muscles, their ability to move as I need of them before I register the thought to move them? The relentless practice, the slow dance, the swift dance, the repetition of repetition, ingrains carefully considered movements to the point of mere reflex. When I dance, I see in my mind’s eye the angle of my opponent’s attack, the balance of his feet, the posture of his form. I close my eyes and put the image there in my mind, and react to that image with my body, carefully calculating the proper response, the correct parry or riposte, the advantage and opening.
Many heartbeats will pass in that single imagined movement, and many times will many heartbeats pass as the movement is executed again and again, and altered, perhaps, as better angles present themselves to my practiced imagination. Over and over, I will do this same dance. The pace increases—what took fifty heartbeats will take forty-nine, then forty-eight, and down the line.
And when in real combat my eyes register the situation pictured in my mind’s eye during practice, the response will happen without conscious thought, a flicker of recognition demanding reflexive counters that might be fully played before the time span of a single beat of my heart.
This is the way of the warrior, honing the muscles to act correctly upon the slightest call, and training the mind to trust.
Aye, there’s the rub of it all! Training the body is easy, and it is useless if the mind, too, cannot be properly conditioned.
This is the calm of the hero.
From my experiences and encounters, from speaking to warriors, wizards, priests, from watching incredible courage under incredible duress, I have come to believe that in this regard, there are three kinds of people: those who run from danger, those who freeze when in danger, and those who run into danger. This is no great revelation to anyone, I expect, nor would I expect anyone to believe of himself or herself anything but the latter of those three choices!
But that reaction, to run toward danger, to face it forthright and calmly, is the least likely among all the races, even the drow and even the dwarves.
The moment of surprise stuns the sensibilities. Often will a person caught in a sudden emergency spend too long in simply processing the truth of the moment, denying its reality as that very reality overwhelms the onlooker.
“It cannot be!” are among the most common of final words.
Even when the situation is consciously accepted, too many thoughts often blur the reaction. When faced with a grievously wounded companion, for example, a person’s fears of unintentionally doing something harmful can hold back the bandage while the friend bleeds out.
When battle is joined, the situation becomes even more complicated, for there is also the matter of conscience and fear. Archers who can hit a target from a hundred paces often miss an enemy at much closer range, a much easier shot. Perhaps it is conscience, a nerve in a person’s soul telling him that he is not a killer, that he should not kill. Perhaps it is fear, since the consequences of missing the mark could soon thereafter prove fatal to the shooter!
In the drow martial academy of Melee-Magthere, when I began my training, one of our first classes involved an unexpected attack by duergar marauders. The raiders burst through the doors of the training hall and took down the instructors in a matter of eye-blinks, leaving the students, young drow all, to fend or to die.
I witnessed dark elves of noble houses fleeing out the back of the chamber—some threw down their weapons as they went, screaming in terror. Others stood dumbfounded, easy kills for the enemy gray dwarves (had it been an actual ambush).
A few leaped in for the battle. I was among that group. It wasn’t courage that drove my feet forward, but instant calculation—for I understood that my duty, my best chance for doing the greatest good for Menzoberranzan and my fellows at the Academy, and indeed, my best chance for surviving, lay forward, in the fight, ready to do battle. I don’t know how, but in that moment of sudden and overpowering stress, my mind overcame my heart, my fears fell away beneath the call of my duty.
This expression and reaction, the masters of the academy called “the calm of the hero,” and we who faced the duergar properly were acknowledged, if not applauded.
For those who ran or froze, there came angry recriminations, but none were summarily dismissed from the Academy, a clear signal that the masters had expected as much. Nay, those who failed were trained—we were all trained—hour after hour, long day after day, endlessly, relentlessly, brutally.
This test was repeated many months later, in the form of another unexpected battle with a different enemy in a different location.
Now many more of us had been taught what some of us had instinctively known, and relying on that training, few fled and fewer froze in place. Our enemy in that battle in a wide tunnel just outside the city was a band of goblins, and this time, unlike with the duergar, they had been instructed to actually attack us.
But this time, unlike with the duergar, the ambushers met a force that had trained under skilled masters, not just physically, but mentally. Hardly a scratch showed on black drow skin when the last goblin fell dead.
Those dark elves who fled or froze, however, would get no more chances in Melee-Magthere. They were not possessed of the mind of a warrior and so they were dismissed, summarily.
Many, I later learned, were also dismissed from their houses and families in shame.
In the cold and heartless calculations of the Spider Queen and her wicked matrons, there is no place in Menzoberranzan for those who cannot learn the way of the warrior.
Watching Regis these last tendays reminded me of those days in Melee-Magthere. My halfling friend returned to mortal life determined that he would rewrite the impulses in his heart and brain, that he would teach himself the way of the warrior. When I consider my own experiences, and the progress of those many dark elves who failed the first encounter with the gray dwarves, but fought well against the goblins, I nod and understand better the truth of this new and formidable companion.
Regis sometimes calls himself Spider Parrafin, the name he found in this new life, but in the end, he is Regis, the same Regis we knew before, but one who through determination and the pursuit of an unattainable goal has found confidence enough in himself to walk the road of the warrior.
He has confided to me that he still has doubts and fears, at which I laughed.
For that, my halfling friend, is a truth universal to all the folk of all the reasoning races.
* * *
It itches on the collective consciousness of a society, nagging and nattering, whispering unease.
The tiny bubbles of criticism appear, about the bottom of the pot at first, hanging on, secret.
Quiet.
They dart upward, roiling the surface, just a few, then a few more, then a cascade.
This is the critical moment, when the leaders must step forth as one to calm the brew, to lift the pot from the fire, but too often, I fear, it is the ambitious opposition to these leaders stoking the flames among the citizenry, poking the folk with one malicious whisper after another.
Veracity matters not; the emotional response takes hold and will not let go.
The bubbles become a boil, the heat flowing through the water and wafting up into the air on the souls of the many who will surely die in this symphony of hatred, this expression of rage seeking focus.
This war.
I have seen it over and over through the decades, in campaigns sometimes worthy, but most often involving nefarious designs beneath the lies and feigned purposes. And in that turmoil and misery and carnage, the warrior is held high and the flag is tightly wrapped—too tightly to allow for any questioning of purpose and method.
This is how society is convinced to plant the fireball beneath its own pot.
And when it is over, when the rubble replaces the homes and the graveyards overfill and still the bodies rot in the streets, do we look back and wonder how it came to this.
That is the greatest tragedy, that the only time when questioning is allowed is when the ultimate failure of war has come to pass.
When the families are shattered.
When the innocent are slaughtered.
But what of war against monstrous intrusion, against the goblinkin and giantkind, would-be conquerors? Catti-brie, with Bruenor’s loud echo, insisted to me that this was different, that these races, on the word of Mielikki herself, could not be viewed through the prism we hold to measure the rational and goodly races—or even the rational and not-so-goodly societies like that of my own people. Goblinkin and giantkind are different, so they assert, in that their malicious ways are not the teachings of an aberrant society, but a matter much deeper, to the very soul of the creatures.
Creatures?
How easily does that pejorative flow from my lips when I ponder the orcs and goblins of the world! Even with my experiences telling me differently, as with Nojheim the goblin, the slave.
It is all too confusing, and in the heat of that boiling pot, I desperately want to hold on to Catti-brie’s words. I want to believe that those I shoot down or cut down are unrepentant and foul, are ultimately destructive and wholly irredeemable.
Else, how would I ever look in a mirror again?
I admit my relief upon entering the Silver Marches to find the Kingdom of Many Arrows marching to war.
My relief upon finding war . . .
Can there be a more discordant thought? How can war—any war—be seen as a relief? It is the tragic failure of better angels, the loss of reason to emotion, the surrender of the soul to the baser instincts.
And yet I was relieved to find that Many Arrows had marched, and I would be lying to myself to deny it. I was relieved for Bruenor, for he would have started a war, I am confident, and so the inevitable misery would then have weighed more heavily upon his shoulders.
I am relieved for Catti-brie, so determined in her declaration, her epiphany that there can be no redemption for goblinkin.
This is her interpretation of the song of the goddess.
Her interpretation shakes my faith in the goddess.
She is not as sure of herself as she claimed; her voice before we faced this truth of war held steadier than now, as we huddle against Nesmé’s wall awaiting the next charge, awaiting the next round of carnage. Her fireballs and fire pets have slain many these days, and have done so in gallant and correct defense of the city.
And still I see the perpetual wince in her fair face, the pain in her blue eyes, the frown beneath her mask of smile. She holds to Mielikki’s words, her own proclamations, and hurls her spells with deadly force. But each death within and without Nesmé’s walls takes from her, wounds her heart, crushes her hopes.
“It’s what it be,” Athrogate keeps saying as he stalks about the parapets.
Indeed, but “what it be” is not what Catti-brie wishes it could be, and so the battle pains her greatly and taxes her heart more than her body and mind.
For that I am glad. It is one of the reasons I so love her.
And so I can be relieved for my dear friends, for their hearts and the scars they will carry from this war—there are always scars from war!—and still be dismayed by the carnage and brutality and the sheer stupidity of waging a war, this war, in the Silver Marches.
If we measure victory as a condition better than what was in place before the conflict, then there will be no winners.
Of that I am certain.