Peregrine was brought to Arden by Julian about four years after the Patternfall War. Cedric, Alice and Mallory were already there.
Peregrine has fairly conflicting memories of his mother. When he was very little, before she went away, she was always warm, moving, and mercurial as a living flame. She loved him ferociously, and left him in the best of hands. Several years went by, and Julian showed up one day. He introduced himself as his uncle. He told Perry that his mother's mind had been badly damaged in a war...
"You will be coming to live at my home in the forest Arden," he told the child, "to be near her." Fiona's condition seems to honestly concern Julian. He tries to prepare the boy for meeting her
"She and the King were in a mental combat with another of your uncles, Brand. He was defeated, and he's dead, it seems that she took the brunt of his attacks." It is still a shock when he sees her. Arriving in Amber, he is introduced to a pale, trembling woman who doesn't remember him at all. Fiona cocks her head to one side and seems honestly puzzled to be told that Peregrine is her son.
"I'm so sorry, Peregrine, I... I'm afraid I don't remember new things very well?" She looks at Julian for confirmation. Julian has no reaction. In fact, he seems very different around Perry's mother. He's as cold and hard as a statue. Fiona's maids are all very good to you. She doesn't remember their names from one day to the other, either. Her 'castle arrest' status is the King's way of showing that someone is paying for things while taking tender care of his sister and preserving her in the memory of the people as a brilliant intellectual.
Peregrine says quite flatly and hotly "That's not my Mummy! It's horrible to say such things. You've taken her away and now you're being mean." It takes months before he comes out of this phase of denial. He has nightmares where he sees his dimly remembered mother smiling, hugging him and then dancing. He reaches for her. She skips away. He chases her, laughing. They play hide and seek. He starts to get worried. He sees her disappear round a corner. He chases after only to find this pale, frail woman, cocking her head and saying in a kindly, worried tone "Who are you?" He wakes up on the verge of screaming "Mummy!" but usually chokes it down to sobbing in the darkness. He never, ever plays hide and seek. He becomes very possessive about his toys. Everything that is his, he marks in some way. If he has a collection of objects, you catch him counting them often.
Julian is as good to and for Perry as a substitute parent can possibly be. For some time he holds out hope that seeing Peregrine would trigger some memory in Fiona, but that day never comes. This upsets Perry. He gets very cold and uncommunicative. He is very unhappy. He never willingly wants to visit Fiona.
Perry's mother is honestly puzzled by him every time he goes to see her. She cannot recall his name from one visit to the next. She remembers other things from before the war with great clarity... just not Peregrine.
Julian takes him on long camping trips, keeps Perry's mind occupied, comes in to silently sit beside him in the dark when he can't sleep, holds him when he cries. The smell of pipe smoke probably has all kinds of comforting connotations for Perry. He absolutely never forces him to go see his mother.
Slowly he thaws to Julian. Eventually, he asks to see the forgetful lady. He
never calls her Mummy. At the last minute he hangs back and refuses to go up to
her. He hangs back and watches her from afar. He repeats this a few times. At
last on one visit he picks a bunch of bright fresh flowers and shyly gives them
to her. He doesn't seem to know what to say. He doesn't go often. He finds a
bright semi-precious stone. Something really noticeable and startling. He takes
it to her explaining to Julian that this won't go away and that she can still
enjoy it afresh every day because for her it will be as fresh and wondrously
beautiful to her as it was to Perry the first time he saw it.
Fiona's maids find that amazingly sweet. It chokes them up. So it's safe to assume they think little Perry is the sun and moon.
The
first time Peregrine sets out on his first solo camping trip, Julian presents
him with a brass-cased pocket compass.
Before the compass gift, a common companion on his wandering was Tracker. He doesn't talk much (an observer might guess at a garbled speaking vocabulary of about 500 words or so), but he understands everything you say, and they don't make creatures more stealthy or with more endurance. He either can't or doesn't cook, and he eats bugs, but he also doesn't feel a huge need to tell Julian where you've been.
Julian trains him in camping, hunting and travelling. Later one of his
favourite sojourns was mountaineering with sherpas in the Himalayas. He served
as a commando with the Ghurkas. His personal knife is the big, in-curved kukri.
He fought guerilla actions against the Chinese in Tibet and learned a little
philosophy, martial arts and self-control in the process.
On
that first occasion, before setting out, and on every successive occasion, Perry
again
takes his mother flowers and always, always in there are some of whatever flower
Forget-me-knots are the shadow. He keeps a pressed collection, drawings, dried
ones mounted under glass, anything so he always has one, whatever the season.
When he returns, he always brings her a stone, a pebble, a jewel, glass, a rock
egg or crystal geode, some durable beautiful thing which can delight her anew
every day. If he goes only to a city then some statuette or piece of jewelry. He
learns to slice and polish agate, to facet crystal, to split and mount opals, to
polish mother-of-pearl.
He asks Wayland how to work metal. He goes beyond filigree to casting and then to creating pieces of blended copper, gold, blue, gray and white metals both shiny and satin, smooth, wavy and facetted. He is delighted when he discovers electro-treating titanium into rainbow colours. He discovers Zuni and Hopi mosaic techniques. This becomes his permanent hobby; crafting jewelry and sculpture. He becomes interested in metal-glazed pottery, and then in simpler glazes and finally in Japanese-style raku. Finally he has worked through the obsession and got something out of it just for himself, though he still maintains his interest in the earlier techniques. He blends the two by embedding stones in randomly thrown and glazed pots, creating fantastic galaxies of coloured stars in softly glowing nebulae of metallic glaze over a dark slip.
When he visits space, he becomes even more fascinated by zero-g techniques
and extraterrestrial materials.
Pattern is a natural topic of curiosity for a wanderer. Peregrine is also driven by his mother's condition to study psychiatry, neuro-surgery, biochemistry, meditation and telepathy with a strong sideline in the interaction of Pattern and Amberite cells.
Weyland is delighted with Perry's interest in metalworking. He even brings Perry stuff - metal that does weird things or is a weird color, stones from out past Ygg, whatever might spur his creativity.
Peregrine's masterwork is an artifact to heal his mother, a circlet with extra-ordinary psychic sensitivity, transfer limited-shape-shift, "combat mastery" in the sense of the ability to exercise extreme control of its psycho-physical manipulations, ability to mold shadow-reality to maximize its chances of success and control the environment for its own operation, transfer regeneration to aid the targets ability to adapt to the neuro-physical modification.
Even so, when experiments on lesser creatures work well, he realizes it will require something more to affect the Blood Of Amber and for this reason he researches Pattern more deeply to permit his conjuration to affect true Reality.
Weyland had told him long ago about a trick which has helped work such powerful enchantments into the metal... he told you how to draw a bit of Amberite blood, enchant it so that it doesn’t simply burn away, and forge the blood into the metal.
"Don’t do it just as an experiment, Peregrine," he warns. "Only for a specific goal. It’s past dangerous to leave trials lying around."
Weyland’s usually pretty casual about wounds, maimings, and general deadly hazards, so his warning is to be taken seriously.
It takes Perry years to master the technique. When he asks Weyland about it, the big smith just scratches his head and grins. "Did I say that? I musta been pretty damn drunk." This is obvious codswallop, because as near as anyone can tell Weyland doesn’t forget *anything*.
Perry uses his own blood - he can’t seem to make it work with Fiona’s blood. The tough part is that a failure is a complete failure - the metal implodes; and when he succeeds he must be ready to make the crown instantly as a part of the same process. Perry has to use artificial enchantments to keep himself going, and when he finishes, he collapses. It takes him a month to recover enough to do the finishing.
When Peregrine completes the final polishing, he holds his creation up and sees fine traceries of the Pattern deep in the gold. He spends a long time checking out its properties before thinking of taking it into Amber itself.
When summoned by Eric he was doing post-graduate studies in planetology at a
Federation star-base in orbit. He liked to hang out in the arboretum a lot, but
he also loved any chance to get outside and practice space-walking and zero-g
just for the amazing view and for the appreciation of gravity. He likes
skydiving from orbit (special equipment required of course).
He goes camping or vacationing in mountain cabins whenever he gets the chance.
Last edited 13 June 2003