Description: Threshold ONE V ILAND is a cold, brutal place, yet I grew there and loved it as much as it would allow. Cruel seas batter rocky harbors through winters that last a good nine months of the year, months when all crowd about fires amid the cheerful belchings of onion and ale fumes, and tell endless stories of adventure at the end of the harpoon. In the brief flowering of summer, the Vilanders hurriedly eke out their living from the whales that throng the icy coastal waters, selling the great fish''s meat, oil, hide, and bones to any who care to pay for it. Not many, some years. Yet in those years when the whale sold well, my father gained enough in commissions to keep us through the leaner seasons. But there wasn''t much to spare, as we came to discover to our sorrow. Despite the ice and the ever-threatening poverty, my father and I were happy, content. Until the day my father''s thoughtlessness and poorly buried heartache matured into the sour fruit that destroyed us both. Mam had died young, before I was two. Rather than hire a nursemaid, my father took me into his workshop, and my earliest memories are of the fascinating world encompassed by the shadowed spaces beneath my father''s worktable. Here I played blithely all day amid the shavings of glass and globs of discarded enamel, scraping the bright shards into piles and sifting them through hands too small and fat to be of practical use to my father. The table protected me from the worst of the furnace heat and from most of the problems of the outside world, and when the workday was over my father liftedme into his strong arms and carried me back to our cold, motherless home. Always I yearned for the morning, and the warmth of the workshop. When I was five, and too curious to fit comfortably beneath the table, my father decided to teach me his craft. Along with the techniques of mixing, firing, and working the glass, I had to learn the common trading tongue of nations, as well as several other languages. All craft workers needed to converse with those merchants who might bring them the one commission to keep starvation at bay for another month or two. I was young and quick-witted, and I learned the languages and the craft easily. By the age of ten, my hands were slim and capable enough to take on some of the fine work my father increasingly found too difficult, and my tongue was sufficiently agile to chatter to the occasional merchant from Geshardi or Alaric who passed by the workshop. I did not mind spending my days at the worktable, learning a trade, when I could have been imbibing the raucous street games of my contemporaries. My father and the glass formed the boundaries of the only world I needed, and if my father was more often silent than talkative, then I found all the conversation and company I desired in the shifting colors of the glass. The glass told me many things. When I was eighteen my father often left me working on the final engraving of a goblet or, more and more frequently, the finishing work for cage lace, while he wandered the streets in search of old friends with whom to pass an hour or two. At least, that''s what I thought until the bailiffs came. I did not know that my father''s long festering grief for my mother had found outlet in the quest for luck at fate. But luck deserted him as completely as my mother had. My thoughtless, loving father lost our freedom on the spin of a coin and the sorry futility of a fighting cock with a broken wing. I was at the table in the workshop when they came. The vase I had in my hands was the result of four weeks'' tireless work and it was at last approaching its final beauty. My father had fashioned the mold, mixed the glass, and added the deft flurries of base metals and gold that produced the exquisite marbled walls that were the mark of the master craftsman. Then he had sat over the kiln as the fires patiently birthed his creation. It was his finest effort for six months, and he could hardly bear to pass it over to me to cage. But caging would produce a work guaranteed to feed us for the next year, and his hands could no longer be trusted with the delicate touch. It was one of our best works. I had caged to create one of the Vilanders''favorite myths--Gorenfer escaping the maddened jungles of Bustian-Halle. The workroom door burst in and I spun around on my stool, the vase in my hands. My father stumbled in, followed by five men I knew by sight and reputation. Instantly, intuitively, I understood the reason for this ungracious entrance. One of the debt collectors shouted my name, his face red and sweaty, his hand outstretched and demanding. Shocked, and frightened beyond any fear I''d experienced before, I dropped the vase--its death cry adding to the terror about me. That vase could have saved us, it could have paid my father''s debts, but I let it shatter on the floor. After that I could blame my father for nothing. If he had temporarily impoverished us, then he had also created the beauty that would have saved us. But I dropped it ... and condemned us to slavery. Neither my father''s entreaties, nor my tears, could move these five hard-souled men. There were debts, and they must be paid. Now. Nothing in our poor house (save the once beautiful vase scattered in useless shards at my feet) could be sold to pay recompense--except us. We were handed directly to the local slaver who dusted us down, inspected us from head to toe, and stood back, considering. I had learned my father''s craft well. For that reason the slaver kept us together, even though, at nineteen and fair enough, I would have fetched a reasonable price hawked to some tired bureaucrat or lordling bored with his wife. So I was saved from the bed of some paunch-bellied magnate, and my father kept his tools and the last living reminder of his wife. After our initial tears and protests, we resigned ourselves to our fate. It was regrettable but not unknown; over past years I had seen three other craftsmen sell themselves and their families to escape starvation. We would still practice our craft, if to the dictates of a master rather than to the satisfactions of free choice. And we would still be together. We did not stay in Viland long. The slaver, Skarp-Hedin, decided we''d fetch the best price in the strange, hot realms to the south. "They have fine sand a-plenty for you to melt," he said, "and the nobility to buy what you craft of it. You''ll fetch five times what you will here in this sorry land." My father bowed his head, but I stared indignantly at the slaver. "But Viland is our--" "You have no home!" the man shouted. "And no country, save that of the marketplace !" Within the day we were bundled into the belly of a whaler for cheap transport south. For six weeks we rolled and pitched in that loathsome cavern, my father clutching his tools, I retching over whatever stale food the crew provided us. We were chained, he and I, although where anyone thought we would escape to in the glassy gray waters of the northern seas I do not know, and the chains ate at our ankles until they festered and screamed. The pain drowned out the soft whisperings of the metal links. Finally, gratefully, the whaler docked. My father and I sat in the hold, trying to ignore the bright pain of our ankles, listening to the muted sounds of a bustling port. Over the past ten days the weather had warmed until the interior of the hold sweltered day and night. The whale meat stank with putrefaction, and I wondered to what possible use it could now be put. After an hour the crew swarmed into the hold to begin the disagreeable task of forking the meat into cargo nets to be off-loaded. On the fourth load one of them remembered we were confined somewhere in the dim hold as well; he soon caused us to be netted along with the rotting meat, and we were unceremoniously swung ashore. Outside, the intense sunlight seared my eyes. I cried out in pain, and my father tried to comfort me, but his mumblings did nothing to ease my terror. I felt the net swing high in the air, and I almost vomited, clutching at the rough rope, trying to gain any handhold that might help save me should the net break. Beside me I heard the bag of tools rattle as my father clutched it closer to his chest. The next instant there was a sickening jolt as the net landed on the wharf. I lost my grip, and my father and I slid down the pile of sweating whale meat to land in a tangle of chains and rope and greasy, rotting fish flesh on the splintery boards of the pier. " Kus! Is this what you have brought me, you god-cursed whale-man? Look at them!" The man spoke in the common trading tongue of nations. He was bending down, a robe of shimmering green weave drifting free and cool about him. His hand grasped the net and shook it free as men hurried to unhook the loading chains. Then he caught my upper arm and hauled me to my feet. I stumbled, my ankle chains snagging amid the rope and fish. The man breathed in sharply, then he helped my father to his feet. "Strike these chains from their ankles. Now!" And men hurried to do his bidding. I wept as those hateful metal bars and links fell free. Our rescuer was a man of middle age, dark-haired and ebony-eyed, with swarthy skin stretched tight over a strong-boned face. His robe was of good linen, loose-fitting and hanging unbelted to his sandaled feet. He looked clean and cool and very sur

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