Seventeen.

Selden waited for Geoffrey at the front of the cottage, tempted to sit down and light a pipe, but he thought better of it. His enjoying a diverting smoke wouldn’t seem quite right, not with the bishop so ill. Instead, he looked down the darkened path toward the village and dished into his memories.

He remembered his naming day, him just turned sixteen and the vital force of him just beamed. He would see the world and conquer its four corners, clearly. And would there be love? Yes. And sorrow? Don’t you know it, he told himself. They came packaged together. One didn’t need the gift to know as much. Didn’t women cry so, and even the men would let loose in tears when they were deep in their cups.

I’ll have my name and then make my place in the world, he thought. His father would have him help keep the farm, but there was a brother just a year older and strong as an ox and another son of the soil just two years behind him. The family might do without him. It’d be one less mouth to feed at least and Selden admitted, I can’t stand the filth of it ... and all the slaughter. Even the piggy faces had a beauty to them. There was kinship among the living and the squealing before the bloodletting would tug hard at his heart. They know ... and he felt their desperate fear and he’d turn desperate, too, his father shouting his commands, his eldest brother with the bloody knife, and him nearly in the mud with the pigs, holding one fast and telling it, “Shush now, shush now. You’ll see it’s soon over.”

So he was named. The village priest stood down current from him, holding him by the belt and muttering prayers. The man had lost nearly all his teeth and the psalms and all he spoke came out in a slush of rhythms and long vowels. The bishop waited in the center of the fast-moving stream–it was spring and the snow melt came racing down to them–and he grabbed the boy’s hand and asked, more gently than Selden had expected, “Who are you?” And then he felt like the weather. Storm and thunder, gentle breeze, parching summer, the sweet nostalgia of the gold and falling leaves, the tender dew, and the odd singularity of a snow flake, the prism of it and the commonsense of all its angles.

He was named. The bishop whispered it to him, though he had to shout it to the village pater so that he’d hear too and remember. No matter, the stream rushed so hard, no one else might hear.

“Master,” Geoffrey called. The boy was within ten feet of him and he never knew, so deep the reverie.

Selden turned to him. “All right, then?”

“Yes, well enough, if a hayloft will do. They wanted you in a bed, but I told them you wouldn’t have it.”

“And the boy and his family?”

“Noon, just as you asked.”

Selden was quiet then, but spoke up before the boy grew uncomfortable being read. “You’re afire.”

“I was knocked clean down, by an oaf shouting about his bowlegs and followed by his niece banging a spoon on a pan. They made it all fun, and me in the mud!”

“Go on, Geoffrey. They were achase, after their bees.”

Geoffrey just looked on.

“It was a swarm they were after,” Selden said.

The boy looked dull still.

“You know nothing about the country, Geoffrey. Do you?”

Geoffrey smiled, shaking his head, the rhythm reminding him of the girl’s running off, the laughing as loud as the spoon against pot.

“A beekeeper maintains his claim on the swarm so long as he chases it," the master explained.

“And the pot? And banging spoon?”

“Sure she was tanging the bees. It drives them to cover, they say, like thunder.”

“Rubbish,” Geoffrey claimed.

Selden was silently amused. Sure the boy was stung.