Five Hundred Years After (Phoenix Guards) - Plot & Excerpts
WAS THE MATTER UPON WHICH Khaavren was summoned trivial in fact? This is not a judgment the historian is willing to make. The reader need not, of course, be reminded of the “Tale of the Smudged Letter,” in which a drop of water causes the sinking of an island; and there can be no doubt of its basic, though apocryphal, truth: history is, for the most part, a recitation of paltry insignificant deeds that, taken together, or in sequence, reveal the complex workings of Man and how he came to the place he occupies. We cannot say if the single event for which Khaavren was ordered back to the Palace (which was, to be sure, of more moment than a love-letter to a cobbler’s servant) was a vital link in the chain of events that we have chosen to narrate; we can only narrate it, and allow the reader to make this decision for himself. Yet it behooves the historian, as one who has taken upon himself the task of relating historical fact and revealing causality and logic in the interrelationships of these facts, to consider the following: how poorly must this letter have been worded, that one drop of water could change its meaning so completely?
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