33

Once when Father and I were returning home after I had accompanied him on a visit to his military camp, he stared for the longest time at the terraces of ripening grain cut through by irrigation channels. Shades of brilliant green stretching away to the horizon mark the richness of the soil of Efea, the land that nourishes us.

To my astonishment he said, “Even after all this time I can never quite get over how different the fields look here.”

“Father,” I asked daringly, “why did you leave your home and come to Efea?”

He almost smiled. “Funny you should ask in quite that way, Jessamy. For when I told my family, kin, friends, and acquaintances that I had decided to take my chances and sail to the fabled land of Efea, that was the only question they asked me. ‘Why are you leaving?’”

“What did you tell them?”

He leaned out from under the carriage awning to watch a falcon fly past. When it was gone, he sat back and addressed me.

“I told them that the choice was made for me when I was born the youngest son in a poor household. My older brothers would inherit the bakery. My father could not afford me the bride-price for a wife, so I had no expectation that I would ever marry. In Saro-Urok, men of our caste could be nothing but foot soldiers with no rank in the army, because only men of wealth and connection can become officers. But we had all heard the poets and sailors and merchants and tale-tellers. They said that in Efea a man from Saro can be anything he wants.”

He took my hand in his, an affectionate gesture he so rarely made that I was stricken and tongue-tied. His grave face made me think he was about to impart his most precious secret.

“There will come a moment in your life where you find yourself confronted with two choices, and both are bad ones. For me it was to stay in a place where I was choked and had nothing to look forward to and no way to prove my talents, or to leave everyone I knew and loved behind forever for a chance that might not work out. That is how the gods test us, by laying before us what seems to be a choice and yet is no choice at all. When we come to that fork in our path down which no road is clean, all we can control is with what dignity and honor we take our inevitable step.”