Sojourn

by R. A. Salvatore

  “You did right in killing the gnolls,” Montolio said when Drizzt had finished. “Release your guilt for that act and let it fall to nothingness.”

  “How could I know?” Drizzt asked honestly. “All of my learning ties to Menzoberranzan and still I have not sorted the truth from the lies.”

  “It has been a confusing journey,” Montolio said, and his sincere smile relieved the tension considerably. “Come along, and let me tell you of the races, and of why your scimitars struck for justice when they felled the gnolls.”

  As a ranger, Montolio had dedicated his life to the unending struggle between the good races—humans, elves, dwarves, gnomes, and halflings being the most prominent members—and the evil goblinoids and giantkind, who lived only to destroy as a bane to the innocent.

  “Orcs are my particular unfavorites,” Montolio explained. “So now I content myself with keeping an eye—an owl’s eye, that is—on Graul and his smelly kin.”

  So much fell into perspective for Drizzt then. Comfort flooded through the drow, for Drizzt’s instincts had proven correct and he could now, for a while and to some measure at least, be free from the guilt.

  “What of the bounty hunter and those like him?” Drizzt asked. “They do not seem to fit so well into your descriptions of the races.”

  “There is good and bad in every race,” Montolio explained. “I spoke only of the general conduct, and do not doubt that the general conduct of goblinoids and giantkind is an evil one!”

  “How can we know?” Drizzt pressed.

  “Just watch the children,” Montolio answered. He went on to explain the not-so-subtle differences between children of the goodly races and children of the evil races. Drizzt heard him, but distantly, needing no clarification. Always it seemed to come down to the children. Drizzt had felt better concerning his actions against the gnolls when he had looked upon the Thistledown children at play. And back in Menzoberranzan, what seemed like only a day ago and a thousand years ago at the same time, Drizzt’s father had expressed similar beliefs. “Are all drow children evil?” Zaknafein had wondered, and through all of his beleaguered life, Zaknafein had been haunted by the screams of dying children, drow nobles caught in the fire between warring families.

  A long, silent moment ensued when Montolio finished, both friends taking the time to digest the day’s many revelations. Montolio knew that Drizzt was comforted when the drow, quite unexpectedly, turned to him, smiled widely, and abruptly changed the grim subject.

  “Mooshie?” Drizzt asked, recalling the name McGristle had tagged on Montolio at the rock wall.

  “Montolio DeBrouchee.” The old ranger cackled, tossing a grotesque wink Drizzt’s way. “Mooshie, to my friends, and to those like McGristle, who struggle so with any words bigger than ‘spit,’ ‘bear,’ or ‘kill!’”

  “Mooshie,” Drizzt mumbled under his breath, taking some mirth at Montolio’s expense.

  “Have you no chores to do, Drizzit?” the old ranger huffed.

  Drizzt nodded and started boisterously away. This time, the ring of “drizzit” did not sting so very badly.

  * * *

  “Morueme’s Cave,” Roddy griped. “Damned Morueme’s Cave!” A split second later, a small sprite sat atop Roddy’s horse, staring the stunned bounty hunter in the face. Tephanis had watched the exchange at Montolio’s grove and had cursed his luck when the ranger had turned the bounty hunter away. If Roddy could catch Drizzt, the quickling figured, they’d both be out of his way, a fact that did not alarm Tephanis.

  “Surely-you-are-not-so-stupid-as-to-believe-that-old-liar?” Tephanis blurted.

  “Here!” Roddy cried, grabbing clumsily at the sprite, who merely hopped down, darted back, past the startled dog, and climbed up to sit behind Roddy.

  “What in the Nine Hells are you?” the bounty hunter roared. “And sit still!”

  “I am a friend,” Tephanis said as slowly as he could.

  Roddy eyed him cautiously over one shoulder.

  “If-you-want-the-drow, you-are-going-the-wrong-way,” the sprite said smugly.

  A short while later, Roddy crouched in the high bluffs south of Montolio’s grove and watched the ranger and his dark-skinned guest going about their chores.

  “Good-hunting!” Tephanis offered, then he was gone, back to Caroak, the great wolf that smelled better than this particular human.

  Roddy, his eyes fixed upon the distant scene, hardly noticed the quickling’s departure. “Ye’ll pay for yer lies, ranger,” he muttered under his breath. An evil smile spread over his face as he thought of a way to get at the companions. It would be a delicate feat. But then, dealing with Graul always was.

  * * *

  Montolio’s messenger returned two days later with a note from Dove Falconhand. Hooter tried to recount the ranger’s response, but the excitable owl was completely inept at conveying such long and intricate tales. Flustered and having no other option, Montolio handed the letter to Drizzt and told the drow to read it aloud, and quickly. Not yet a skilled reader, Drizzt was several lines through the creased paper before he realized what it was. The note detailed Dove’s accounts of what had happened in Maldobar and along the subsequent chase. Dove’s version struck near to the truth, vindicating Drizzt and naming the barghest whelps as the murderers.

  Drizzt’s relief was so great that he could hardly utter the words as the letter went on to express Dove’s pleasure and gratitude that the “deserving drow” had taken in with the old ranger.

  “You get your due in the end, my friend,” was all that Montolio needed to say.

  Part 4.

  Resolutions

  I now view my long road as a search for truth—truth in my own heart, in the world around me, and in the larger questions of purpose and of existence. How does one define good and evil?

  I carried an internal code of morals with me on my trek, though whether I was born with it or it was imparted tome by Zaknafein—or whether it simply developed from my perceptions—I cannot ever know. This code forced me to leave Menzoberranzan, for though I was not certain of what those truths might have been, I knew beyond doubt that they would not be found in the domain of Lloth.

  After many years in the Underdark outside of Menzoberranzan and after my first awful experiences on the surface, I came to doubt the existence of any universal truth, came to wonder if there was, after all, any purpose to life. In the world of drow, ambition was the only purpose, the seeking of material gains that came with increased rank. Even then, that seemed a little thing to me, hardly a reason to exist.

  I thank you, Montolio DeBrouchee, for confirming my suspicions. I have learned that the ambition of those who follow selfish precepts is no more than a chaotic waste, a finite gain that must be followed by infinite loss. For there is indeed a harmony in the universe, a concordant singing of common weal. To join that song, one must find inner harmony, must find the notes that ring true.

  There is one other point to be made about that truth: Evil creatures cannot sing.

  Drizzt Do’Urden

  16. Of Gods and Purpose

  The lessons continued to go quite well. The old ranger had lessened the drow’s considerable emotional burden, and Drizzt picked up on the ways of the natural world better than anyone Montolio had ever seen. But Montolio sensed that something still bothered the drow, though he had no idea of what it might be.

  “Do all humans possess such fine hearing?” Drizzt asked him suddenly as they dragged a huge fallen branch out of the grove. “Or is yours a blessing, perhaps, to make up for your blindness?”

  The bluntness of the question surprised Montolio for just the moment it took him to recognize the drow’s frustration, an uneasiness caused by Drizzt’s failure to understand the man’s abilities.

  “Or is your blindness, perhaps, a ruse, a deception you use to gain the advantage?” Drizzt pressed relentlessly.

  “If it is?” Montolio replied offhandedly.

  “Then it is a good one, Montolio DeBrouche
e,” Drizzt replied. “Surely it aids you against enemies… and friends alike.” The words tasted bitter to Drizzt, and he suspected that he was letting his pride get the best of him.

  “You have not often been bested in battle,” Montolio replied, recognizing the source of Drizzt’s frustrations as their sparring match. If he could have seen the drow then, Drizzt’s expression would have revealed much.

  “You take it too hard,” Montolio continued after an uneasy silence. “I did not truly defeat you.”

  “You had me down and helpless.”

  “You beat yourself,” Montolio explained. “I am indeed blind, but not as helpless as you seem to think. You underestimated me. I knew that you would, too, though I hardly believed that you could be so blind.”

  Drizzt stopped abruptly, and Montolio stopped on cue as the drag on the branch suddenly increased. The old ranger shook his head and cackled. He then pulled out a dagger, spun it high into the air, caught it, and, yelling, “Birch!” heaved it squarely into one of the few birch trees by the evergreen grove.

  “Could a blind man do that?” Montolio asked rhetorically.

  “Then you can see,” Drizzt stated.

  “Of course not,” Montolio retorted sharply. “My eyes have not functioned for five years. But neither am I blind, Drizzt, especially in this place I call my home!

  “Yet you thought me blind,” the ranger went on, his voice calm again. “In our sparring, when your spell of darkness expired, you believed that you had gained the edge. Did you think that all of my actions—effective actions, I must say—both in the battle against the orcs and in our fight were simply prepared and rehearsed? If I were as crippled as Drizzt Do’Urden believes me, how should I survive another day in these mountains?”

  “I did not… ” Drizzt began, but his embarrassment silenced him. Montolio spoke the truth, and Drizzt knew it. He had, at least on an unconscious level, thought the ranger less than whole since their very first meeting. Drizzt felt he showed his friend no disrespect—indeed, he thought highly of the man—but he had taken Montolio for granted and thought the ranger’s limitations greater than his own.

  “You did,” Montolio corrected, “and I forgive you that. To your credit, you treated me more fairly than any who knew me before, even those who had traveled beside me through uncounted campaigns. Sit now,” he bade Drizzt. “It is my turn to tell my tale, as you have told yours.”

  “Where to begin?” Montolio mused, scratching at his chin. It all seemed so distant to him now, another life that he had left behind. He retained one link to his past, though: his training as a ranger of the goddess Mielikki. Drizzt, similarly instructed by Montolio, would understand.

  “I gave my life to the forest, to the natural order, at a very young age,” Montolio began. “I learned, as I have begun to teach you, the ways of the wild world and decided soon enough that I would defend that perfection, that harmony of cycles too vast and wonderful to be understood. That is why I so enjoy battling orcs and the like. As I have told you before, they are the enemies of natural order, the enemies of trees and animals as much as of men and the goodly races. Wretched things, all in all, and I feel no guilt in cutting them down!”

  Montolio then spent many hours recounting some of his campaigns, expeditions in which he acted singly or as a scout for huge armies. He told Drizzt of his own teacher, Dilamon, a ranger so skilled with a bow that he had never seen her miss, not once in ten thousand shots. “She died in battle,” Montolio explained, “defending a farmhouse from a raiding band of giants. Weep not for Mistress Dilamon, though, for not a single farmer was injured and not one of the few giants who crawled away ever showed its ugly face in that region again!”

  Montolio’s voice dropped noticeably when he came to his more recent past. He told of the Rangewatchers, his last adventuring company, and of how they came to battle a red dragon that had been marauding the villages. The dragon was slain, as were three of the Rangewatchers, and Montolio had his face burned away.

  “The clerics fixed me up well,” Montolio said somberly. “Hardly a scar to show for my pain.” He paused, and Drizzt saw, for the first time since he had met the old ranger, a cloud of pain cross Montolio’s face. “They could do nothing for my eyes, though. The wounds were beyond their abilities.”

  “You came out here to die,” Drizzt said, more accusingly than he intended.

  Montolio did not refute the claim. “I have suffered the breath of dragons, the spears of orcs, the anger of evil men, and the greed of those who would rape the land for their own gain,” the ranger said. “None of those things wounded as deeply as pity. Even my Rangewatcher companions, who had fought beside me so many times pitied me. Even you.”

  “I did not… ” Drizzt tried to interject.

  “You did indeed,” Montolio retorted. “In our battle, you thought yourself superior. That is why you lost! The strength of any ranger is wisdom, Drizzt. A ranger understands himself, his enemies, and his friends. You thought me impaired, else you never would have attempted so brash a maneuver as to jump over me. But I understood you and anticipated the move.” That sly smile flashed wickedly. “Does your head still hurt?”

  “It does,” Drizzt admitted, rubbing the bruise, “though my thoughts seem to be clearing.”

  “As to your original question,” Montolio said, satisfied that his point had been made, “there is nothing exceptional about my hearing, or any of my other senses. I just pay more attention to what they tell than do other folks, and they guide me quite well, as you now understand. Truly, I did not know of their abilities myself when I first came out here, and you are correct in your guess as to why I did. Without my eyes, I thought myself a dead man, and I wanted to die here, in this grove that I had come to know and love in my earlier travels.

  “Perhaps it was due to Mielikki, the Mistress of the Forest—though more likely it was Graul, an enemy so close at hand—but it did not take me long to change my intentions concerning my own life. I found a purpose out here, alone and crippled—and I was crippled in those first days. With that purpose came a renewal of meaning in my life, and that in turn led me to realize again my limits. I am old now, and weary, and blind. If I had died five years ago, as I had intended, I would have died with my life incomplete. I never would have known how far I could go. Only in adversity, beyond anything Montolio DeBrouchee had ever imagined, could I have come to know myself and my goddess so well.”

  Montolio stopped to consider Drizzt. He heard a shuffle at the mention of his goddess, and he took it to be an uncomfortable movement. Wanting to explore this revelation, Montolio reached inside his chain mail and tunic and produced a pendant shaped like a unicorn’s head.

  “Is it not beautiful?” he pointedly asked.

  Drizzt hesitated. The unicorn was perfectly crafted and marvelous in design, but the connotations of such a pendant did not sit easily with the drow. Back in Menzoberranzan Drizzt had witnessed the folly of following the commands of deities, and he liked not at all what he had seen.

  “Who is your god, drow?” Montolio asked. In all the weeks he and Drizzt had been together, they had not really discussed religion.

  “I have no god,” Drizzt answered boldly, “and neither do I want one.”

  It was Montolio’s turn to pause.

  Drizzt rose and walked off a few paces.

  “My people follow Lloth,” he began. “She, if not the cause, is surely the continuation of their wickedness, as this Gruumsh is to the orcs, and as other gods are to other peoples. To follow a god is folly. I shall follow my heart instead.”

  Montolio’s quiet chuckle stole the power from Drizzt’s proclamation. “You have a god, Drizzt Do’Urden,” he said.

  “My god is my heart,” Drizzt declared, turning back to him.

  “As is mine.”

  “You named your god as Mielikki,” Drizzt protested.

  “And you have not found a name for your god yet,” Montolio shot back. “That does not mean that you have no god. Your
god is your heart, and what does your heart tell you?”

  “I do not know,” Drizzt admitted after considering the troubling question.

  “Think then!” Montolio cried. “What did your instincts tell you of the gnoll band, or of the farmers in Maldobar? Lloth is not your deity—that much is certain. What god or goddess then fits that which is in Drizzt Do’Urden’s heart?”

  Montolio could almost hear Drizzt’s continuing shrugs.

  “You do not know?” the old ranger asked. “But I do.”

  “You presume much,” Drizzt replied, still not convinced.

  “I observe much,” Montolio said with a laugh. “Are you of like heart with Guenhwyvar?”

  “I have never doubted that fact,” Drizzt answered honestly.

  “Guenhwyvar follows Mielikki.”

  “How can you know?” Drizzt argued, growing a bit perturbed. He didn’t mind Montolio’s presumptions about him, but Drizzt considered such labeling an attack on the panther. Somehow to Drizzt, Guenhwyvar seemed to be above gods and all the implications of following one.

  “How can I know?” Montolio echoed incredulously. “The cat told me, of course! Guenhwyvar is the entity of the panther, a creature of Mielikki’s domain.”

  “Guenhwyvar does not need your labels,” Drizzt retorted angrily, moving briskly to sit again beside the ranger.

  “Of course not,” Montolio agreed. “But that does not change the fact of it. You do not understand, Drizzt Do’Urden. You grew up among the perversion of a deity.”

  “And yours is the true one?” Drizzt asked sarcastically.

  “They are all true, and they are all one, I fear,” Montolio replied. Drizzt had to agree with Montolio’s earlier observation: He did not understand.