Chapter Seventeen

Mid-afternoon of the third day, Tarn's eyes fluttered open. He felt confused and disoriented. Slowly, like a fog lifting from a lake, his memories returned, disconnected. Fragmented. He recalled fighting the sabre leopard. Bits and pieces of the trek to the cave came to him. After that, nothing: blank. Exhausted and thirsty, bound hand and foot, his attempt to raise himself onto one elbow failed.

Torrocka sat quietly, reading at a roughly hewn log table when Tarn asked, "Am I a prisoner or dinner?" his words rasped out of a parched throat.

"Ye be free to come and go," said Torrocka, and rose from the table. "The bonds were for thy welfare, as well as my protection while I nursed ye. Ye be a vigorous lad and thrashed about right proper," he said, setting the yellowed leaves of parchment down tenderly.

"How many days have I lain idle," probed Tarn while Torrocka released the binding cords and pressed a large draft of water into weak and shaky hands.

"Nearly four days. Be ye hungry?"

"No," Tarn replied weakly, his meagre supply of energy depleted.

Feeling word and haggard, he drifted into a deep, healing sleep.

The next time Tarn woke, he felt considerably stronger, though ravenous, and joined Torrocka at the table despite the old man's admonitions that he rest. Torrocka let Tarn eat in silence while he studied his features as if confirming an earlier conviction.

When the plate was clean, Torrocka exclaimed, "By the Gods, ye can eat!"

"More?" queried Tarn, holding his plate up.

A crooked half-smile split Torrocka's mouth. Lest his hand be mistaken for provender, Torrocka cautiously pushed a plate overflowing with late autumn apples and cheese into reach and rested his hands in his lap. A grunt, followed by the sound of apples crunching, took the place of conversation. Torrocka appraised his guest, measuring the vitality that seemed to be pouring into the youth, replacing the weakness that had bedridden him yesterday. Adolescence, Torrocka thought. No potion in the land engendered greater restorative powers. Youthful vigour and vitality were only half of it, he reminded himself. His thoughts slipped unbidden to his own adolescence. Remembering. Recalling the hours of instruction, he had received from an Atlantean Priest, his mentor and teacher. Embracing a sacred role passed down from one generation to the next for untold millennia. Re-experiencing the duty-call of a sacred charge yet uncompleted.

Once Tarn finished the last pieces of cheese and apple, cores included, he relaxed on the stool with a satiated gleam in his eyes.

Torrocka waited for Tarn to look up, and then asked, "How did Connor perish?" Caught unawares by the question, Tarn shot the wrinkled hermit a questioning look that softened with Torrocka's next words. "Ye spoke of him during thy delirium."

"In battle," began Tarn, collecting his thoughts to regale Torrocka with his father's bravery. Torrocka sat forward, laced his fingers together, and listened quietly. Then and again he offered a 'hmm' or a 'haa', but no more. Tarn summed up with, "For all I know, I'm the last descendent of the once mighty, and great city of Atlantis."

"Do ye know the story of Kalen then?"

Pausing in length, Tarn studied the old man, staring deeply into the elder's brown eyes. Torrocka met his piercing gaze unflinching. There was something innocuous about his calm visage that put Tarn at ease, and prompted his reply, "When I was but five with my mother dead and Atlantis sunk before my eyes, did I hear the tale from my father. He sought to lift my year to a purpose when I owned only grief," Tarn shared. A wistful aspect fell over the expression.

"Did he impart Kalen's prophecy?"

"No," he said shaking his head. "My father said naught about a prophecy. How does it come to pass that one who dwells on the edge of my people's mountains recounts the lore of a nation long swallowed by the sea?"

A reflective, wayward gaze stole into Torrocka's misty eyes as he recalled a life long ago in another city, in another lifetime, it seemed to him now. Fingering the worn surface of the pendant he wore around his neck, turning it this way and that, so it caught the flickering light of the lantern, he said, "I was not born here. Ye are not of these mountains either." Tarn nearly corrected him, but an underlying sureness in the tone of the old man's voice stayed his words. Although his mother was Atlantean, Tarn considered himself mountain-bred, and Atlantis but a dim memory. "I am Torrocka, son of Demma, once second only to the High priest of the city of Atlantis, the sacred holder of the key to Kalen's Sword Chamber," he announced formally, bowing slightly. "And I have spent my life searching for you, Tarn, son of Jayleen."

At the ancient priest's declaration, Tarn's eyes widened in disbelief. Could it be that others lived? No, he was the last. "Do ye have proof of that claim?"

"I do. The same proof as you hold."

���What proof do ye possess if ye have the same as I? What game do ye play at Torrocka? I will hear no more of this babble," he blurted out reproachfully, beginning rise.

Ere he straightened his legs, Torrocka raised the circular pendant off his bony chest and showed it to him.

"Know ye this symbol?"

Tarn leaned forward and examined its familiar geometric contours. Recognition softened his expression. He rose from his seat to retrieve his sword that Torrocka had hung on a peg driven into a crack in the wall, and returned to the table where he unsheathed it. The pendant's design matched the symbol engraved into the base of the blade. With curious wonder etched in his gaze, he met Torrocka's pellucid eyes.

"That's right, Tarn. They're identical. That blade was only held in trust by your father. It belongs, by right, to the first male heir."

"How did ye survive the volcano, earthquake, and tidal wave, then come to live in a cave on the side of a mountain?"

Torrocka inhaled a deep breath and let his gaze wander around the cave. It noted the hearth and his sleeping platform. It took in several spears and the teardrop-shaped snow walkers. Each item and the peg it was hung from jogged a different memory. Each memory was tied to a common goal. A sacred goal that others had given theirs live in exchange for Torrocka to be able to succeed in their common quest. When his eyes fell back upon the youth sitting across from him, he knew deep inside his core that his answer would be the beginning of the end. The beginning of renewed hope. The end of Torrocka's purpose. For he had almost fulfilled his charge. Torrocka centred his spiritual being and allowed calm to cascade over his soul.