Twenty-one. (The close of Chapter One.)

Rian ran the short distance back to his home. The master and the student who accompanied him had already arrived, which was an embarrassment for Rian's father but, for his mother, a chance to entertain and search for gossip from the cities to the south. Even his father asked after the King’s interests. Rian’s older brother was away to the coast, somewhere too far away for much news. He served as a scout of sorts, a horse always waiting to help him spread word if the barbarians invaded his stretch of shore.

The boy charged through the door and came to a quick halt in front of Selden.

“Rian,” his father announced, with some amount of censure.

“I’m sorry, Father. And I apologize to you, Pater.”

He made no excuses for himself. It was clear where he had been, and why. The heavy emotion ringed him still.

“You’ve tracked mud in the room, Rian,” Selden told him. Geoffrey turned to the priest, surprised that he corrected the boy when it was really the parents’ place. Reading the master was always difficult, impossible now while he addressed the boy.

“Yes, Pater.” Rian was humble enough. “May I step out and clean them?”

“We’ll both step out,” and he stood. “Will you show me where you harvest the asparagus?”

Rian smiled, getting an understanding of the man.

Selden added, “Your mother’s promised a feast for us after we’ve talked.”

God, but he’s testing me, Rian thought. It was rude to ask where people collected food. At least it wasn’t mushrooms he hunted; asking after mushrooms would be the height of ill-mannered requests. It was bad enough asking after asparagus.

“Will the Pater share its truename? That should lead us to stalks and stalks. There’ll be no fasting when we’re flush with them.”

Well played, Selden thought. The boy’s lively.

Rian’s father was standing now and told his son, “Along with the pater, son. Show him the ways you take.”

Out of doors, the boy told Selden, “I am sorry for being late. Our village priest is ill.”

“He’s dying." Selden announced. "But you know that, don’t you?”

Rian sighed. The words were gentle really. Well, that’s not true, Rian thought. The words were plain-faced, but Rian felt the respect the priest held for the bishop.

The boy steeled himself. “He feels he’s failed me. He has been my only teacher, when it comes to words and arguments.”

“He’s a wise man, not unlettered, as you know.” He looked at the boy, as they headed across the fields. “Shall we see if you’ve failed him?”

“Pater, you seem harsh with me.” Rian thought it best to get it in the open.

Selden wouldn’t apologize. At least not now. He was testing the boy, pushing him to feel uncomfortable and tense. But he remembered what the Archmage had asked: Just concentrate on the surface, will you?

In a kind of answer, Selden said, “I’m told that I am sometimes blunt. I only meant to ask if you learned what you’ve been taught.”

“Yes.”

“Yes?”

“Yes, I see, Pater. And yes, I’ve learned a small portion of it.”

Was this false modesty? Selden asked himself. No, the boy is sincere in everything he says. Could there be even a grain of deceit in the boy?

“Perhaps you should refer to me as hlaford.”

“Are you to be my master? You’ve decided so quickly?”

“So you do know the old speech?”

“I learned it more from my mother than anyone else. My bishop taught me Latin. And he recited Greek, though it’s just a gabble of noise to me.”

"Gabbelen.”

“Like a duck!” Rian laughed.

“It’s good to hear you laugh, Rian.”

“I laughed even when my brother went to scout for the King. I told him I would follow in his footsteps. It was ridiculous, you see, I’m accident prone and I couldn’t kill a bug.” Rian’s eyes shined, remembering. “My mother and father nearly cried with their sadness. My brother did. He bawled and bawled. And then came my tears.”

“Tears ought not be thwarted,” Selden said, though he hadn’t cried in years. Instead, he felt the welling of them and ... then? Then came the emptiness that sometimes overcame him. He was past tears, he realized, swallowed up in the hopelessness that tried to crush him.

“I cried all this morning,” Rian admitted.

There wasn’t any shame found in the boy either. Nature’s son, Selden thought.

“Your eyes are red with it.”

Rian nodded. He was beginning to feel comfortable with this man.

So Selden began his quizzing, the fencing with the boy put aside.

“How few points define a plane?”

“Three.”

“Verdigris?”

“Vert-de-Gris.”

“Choleric?”

“One of the four humours.”

“Yes?”

“It was Galen who wrote about the humours, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“And the gift?”

“Yes, though it’s something...”

“Beyond words, isn’t it?” Rian was enthused, though he moderated his excitement, “From what I can understand, I mean.”

“What can you tell me about the gift?”

“Very little,” the boy told him, truthfully enough. For Rian, it was something beyond words.

“Do you think it might be like poetry?”

“Naming must be like poetry,” the boy answered.

“What can I know about naming?” Selden said. “But poetry, let’s try.”

“The heart in the breast of Hlorrithi laughed
When the hard-souled one his hammer beheld;
First Thrym, the king of the giants, he killed,
Then all the folk of the giants he felled.

“The giant's sister old he slew,
She who had begged the bridal fee;
A stroke she got in the shilling's stead,
And for many rings the might of the hammer.”

And Rian finished the verse, “And so his hammer got Odin's son.”

“Not Othin?”

“If you will, Pater.”

The quizzing seemed to last forever, though the boy never faltered. Selden was impressed. The boy was remarkably prepared for the school, even if he was a child of the near pagan reaches. The other boys will make fun of his accent. But he’s likely to win them over, Selden thought.

Selden was quiet.

“So is it asparagus now, Pater?”

“Your mother means to feed us.”

“Is it not an ember day?”

“It’s love’s bread she’ll serve.”

“Love’s bread,” Rian laughed. “Your student will be pleased. Didn’t his stomach rumble?!”

Selden joined in the laughing and, then, when the laughter came to chuckling, then silence, he couldn’t help himself. The boy’s charm was too much, his own curiosity too great.

So he opened his mind to him, in a guarded fashion.

He felt immediately foolish. What does a sixteen-year-old boy know? How could he understand how I feel after all that I’ve seen, after all I’ve done, things that have no real meaning, even to me.

The boy stared into Selden’s eyes ... and came to know him. For the master, it was uncanny. So many of his private thoughts were laid out like one’s morning clothes. Taken by surprise, Selden closed his mind with a ferociousness that must have alarmed the boy, but he remained seemingly undisturbed, now watching the master instead of reading him. Selden was taken aback. So complete was the boy’s knowing, it was frightening. Even the Archmage stumbled a bit when making sense of others. Primus had admitted as much. This boy seemed to absorb thoughts and feelings like a sponge. And with a curiosity that was unnerving.

“I’m sorry,” Rian told him. “I was...”

“No, no,” the master told him.

“I was indiscreet.”

“Quite all right.” And Selden changed the subject. He told the boy, “Come, let’s have our meal. You’re a good candidate for us. You’re bright. A little undisciplined, I would venture, but you’ll learn, if you join us.”

“My parents would like that.”

“And not you? You would waste my time?”

“I have doubts, too.”

So the boy had seen. Selden turned red with embarrassment, though the boy hadn’t judged him, had he? Instead, the master could feel that Rian was gentle, understanding, patient. He was a remarkably large-hearted boy.

“We always pray for a stronger faith,” Selden said. He might as well admit it out loud. He would make no excuses for himself.

He lifted himself from the boulder where they were seated, as did Rian. The master headed a short way up the path that had brought them to the river's edge.

And then he turned, “Just how completely do you see?” Selden could have just as well asked, “Who are you?”

The boy smiled, pleased with himself for his knowing, confused by his knowing so much, and ashamed for being so different than others.

A silence filled the air between the two.

“Your truename is Kinderring,” Rian told the master.

And Selden could not have been more shocked.

Twenty.

Rian stayed the night with his catechist. The widow who cared for the bishop, her name was Nuala, made a shake-down for the boy on the porch off the cottage. The boy lay under a bison skin, his eyes staring heavenward, the stars distant and moving so slowly across the sky. His emotions were unlike the heavens’ predictable course. He cursed the end to his bishop’s life and lamented him, mourned him, though he lay not far away, dreaming, Rian knew, and piecing together memories from a lifetime.

Where there is life, there is hope. So we're told.

There is life, and will, and acceptance. The bishop had already decided, had surrendered almost joyfully to what the Lord had planned for him. And me? Rian wondered. Can I do the same?

When I was named, I saw the same star-filled sky and then the daystar and the climbing dawn, Rose-fingered, the Poet wrote, and I was spun. Past mountains and dales, ice flows and a green horizon of turf, the waving symphony of prairie, the parched expanse of a red-rock desert that sang with hope. And came the rains. And flowers. They cascaded out from bough and hollow, seemingly blossomed from air. And I took it in, so solitary my breathing was another life pressing against me and my shouts came crowding back in echoes.

But where were the ones I loved?

Was I here alone? Here in the center of a garden–I could smell the roses. I heard fountains. And then the light failed. Crushed rosemary, geraniums, mint...

And I was named.

“Rian,” the bishop called. His mind had cleared, had returned to the proper day and hour. “You’ll be late. Take leave of me now. I feel fine.”

“I know the truth,” Rian answered. “You would not have sent me.”

“I’m a fool, Rian. You have to go. See the wide world, while you can and while your life shines before you.”

“And the rooks?”

“I don’t know. Wives' tales.” The bishop stirred, his eyes now opened and he looked at the boy who now hovered above, his head crowned by the midday sun. “One remains. He’s met the master from your new school.”

“A bird?”

“A mystery.”

The bishop reached for Rian’s hand and told him, “You should know my truename,” and the tears welled up in Rian’s eyes and poured like rain.

“No one remains who knows me so well, failings and all.”

Still Rian cried.

“Search me, Rian; I have no fear of dying. Face your doubts and you’ll erase them.”

Nineteen.

A cock crowed and the farm slowly took to life. And Geoffrey finally climbed down out of the loft, entering into the daylight with heavy-lidded eyes. Selden thought, “The young sleep deep,” and he called to the boy, “You’ll see to the horse and mule, won’t you? I won’t be a minute.”

Geoffrey nodded yes.

“Good lad.”

The farmer’s oldest son came to milk the cows, a cat or two at his heels. And the farmer’s wife came out too, presumably to remind the priest that he could have had a bed inside.

“Wasn’t it cold a might, Pater? Not hardly spring, is it?”

“Not too cold, Matron. It’s how I slept as a boy. Always nice to visit the past.”

The woman looked at the priest with a serious expression. “It’s the future I look to. And will it bring promise?” She spat. Granted, away from the priest, but crude manners nevertheless.

Selden had seen pessimism before. Even in the brightest times, some people held on to their dark thoughts. And it came with age, along with aches and pains, a distaste for the naive young, a fear of falling or disease. There was no lack for things to dread, but still...

“Have you heard about the rooks then, Pater?”

Selden just stared.

“That they’ve all flyed away? You haven’t heard?”

“Matron, it’s no reason to fret a soul.”

“A soul’s one thing, but what about meat on the table? What about broke bones, those that won’t heal?”

Wives’ tales, Selden knew. “We’ll pray, Matron.”

“There’s that.” She looked unconvinced.

“Matron, here, please,” and he reached out his hand to hers and dropped a copper into it.

“Thank you, Pater.” She was quiet a moment, but then asked, “Are you sure?”

“Sure you’ll make good use of it.”

“Yes, Pater. Times what they are.”

He lifted an arm to bless her, and recited, “Every day I will praise You, for You open Your hand and satisfy the desires of all things. May you and all your family be so blessed, Matron.”

“God bless you, Pater.” She placed one hand on his arm. “Are you sure you won’t break the fast with us?”

“No. Thank you, but no. The boy and I are fasting till sundown.”

“So we best stay busy,” he added. “God bless.”

Geoffrey had the master’s mule and his own horse prepared and the two walked them back to the village church. Inside, the candle on the altar had burned down and gone out. Selden decided to save the other candles until the wake and funeral, if it came to that. When it comes to it, he realized.

Eighteen.

The night passed. Selden felt the restlessness that burned off the boy, who was wrapped up in his cloak in a far corner. It was Selden who suggested the boy sleep away from the draft of the shuttered door. Instead, the older man took the space by the square-shaped door where the hay and straw might be easily loaded into the loft. The barn was built into a low hillside and the door, just large enough, looked out away from the barnyard and the farm’s cottage, a building smaller in fact than the barn. The boy would have a small measure of privacy.

The master was soon asleep. The small shifting of the milk cows below seemed to lull him like a mother’s lullaby might. The plop of manure and faint rustling of mice bothered him not the least. “This is how I always slept as a boy,” he told Geoffrey when they turned in, after their prayers. Except on the coldest nights, he remembered, when my brother would consent to my sharing the bed, head to toe and shivering as the wind blew through any chinking we could manage between the logs of the cottage. My father would sleep next to the fire in our one chair. He’d feed the fire through the night–we never lacked for wood–while my mother slept with her latest swaddled child.

We were a large family, he almost said aloud. Branches! He nearly exclaimed. And who am I talking to? Selden chided himself. As he got older, he noticed, he conversed with nearly anything. At the school, he would complain to a small portrait he hung on one wall, an image of a church father whose writing Selden especially enjoyed. He wrote almost as one might really speak and in these written sermons confessed to nearly every sin. He was a sainted man.

That dawn came without interruption was something that pleased the master. He rose out of the tangle of his cloak and scarf and the blanket the farm family insisted he take. He scratched and shook his head. Squeezed a louse. (Damn things.) And half considered unshuttering the hay door so he might relieve himself with ease. Instead, he headed down the ladder from the loft and found the edge of the mews in the half-light.

The village priest must be no worse. Someone would have come for me otherwise, he thought. Uninterrupted sleep, that’s a blessing, too. Maybe today will be manageable, though an ember day. “No disappointments, Father; it will be a long enough day.”

Interlude.

“Hayfoot! Strawfoot!” the brother cried. “And are you a fool, too?” he asked, his voice like thunder, deep and rumbling.

Just last night the lightning cracked upon us, the booming steps of the storm like a giant’s pace. “Gad, but it’s loud,” and me at the edge of the bed, ready to run for a mother's shelter. “Is it war?” I might have shouted. “Abed with thee, child” the prefect told me. “It’s just a storm, is it not? And you shoutin’ war. What overcomes you so? Hush. It’s abed, to be sure.”

To be sure, Brother, a fool I am. And, Brother, fool enough to know, I’m not made for marching, though I might grow in fondness for murder. I sent to him as much, but he could not read me. He just heard my wheezing and was disgusted. And me, I heard his complaints, his blasted tooth aching so and they’d tear it out. They will, God help me, he thought. Like something for shoein’ a horse, the clamp they wave about. God. And the crunch of it. That’s the worse. Poor lamentable me, I ache so. Worse than a kick to me sack. But what good is me stand anyway?

“Left and right, you whelp! Do you not know them by now?”

“Brother, if you would just ask? I know the Latin, too.”

“Vile cur, I say. Dogs have no Latin, I won’t hear it!”

“Pater.” Rian said, and he took the priest’s hand. “I heard you were poorly. Well ... I thought of you, and it was clear.”

The priest didn’t stir, but his breathing was easy. Rian felt the fever leave.

“I was out grubbin’ for asparagus.” And he thought, What might be its truename?

“Oh, stand to, you sorry pup. Left, right and bother. You’ll never march. Your head’s too big for it. You’re heart’s too big for it, too. So who will you fool next? Go back to your books and your candle wax.

“Brother, I’ll try harder...”

“Laddie, don’t go bother a brother,” the man told him. “Bugger a brother,” he muttered. “Oh, the whole lot of you." He cast eyes eyes over us. "I’d best go shovel coal.”

And the winter came hard. I remember the troughs gone froze over and the cows’ staring. Like licking for salt with less chance. Chaney-eyed, the beasts, the breath of them a vapor. Was it their prayers, like the incense we burned on the Lord’s day, our plea for the Christ, the Son of God? When would he come ... and would we know him? Pater asked just so, “Will you know him?” and the lot of us shook our heads. Would it be poetry he spoke? Like the psalms? Or will he just speak with his sword and have at us sinners?

We’d know then.

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.

Sixteen.

“No, thank you, Matron,” Geoffrey told her. “Pater will be waiting for me.”

“And have you made arrangements for the night, Geoff? We’ll happily find a place for you two. We haven’t much room, but it’s a roof, init?

“Pater’s taken care of all that, Matron. But thank you. Thank you all the same.”

Geoffrey nodded his head to take his leave. He asked, “With your license?”

“What’s that, Geoff?” Rian’s mother smiled, clearly perplexed by the expression but patient enough with the student’s high manners.

“With your leave, Matron?”

“Yes, yes. Don’t let grass grow through your toes.”

Geoffrey turned outdoors and soon enough he heard the banging of pots coming closer. What in the world? he wondered. He just reached the corner of the cottage and was mowed down by a beast of a man, not tall at all, but with a chest the breadth of a barrel. And squat legs that kept to their awkward running.

“Blast!” the man shouted. “And me so bowlegged!”

Could that have been an apology?

And now came a young women banging a metal spoon against a metal pot, laughing at the collision and the tumble of a boy.

Geoffrey looked up and saw her and thought, She's beautiful. Her light brown hair done up in braids and her figure so appealing to the boy’s imagination. Blue eyes that seemed to spark and white teeth that gleamed as the girl laughed.

“He is my uncle, young sir,” she expressed between her laughing and the banging of the pot. “He is quite bowlegged.” And off she raced. The sight of her joyful to Geoffrey’s eyes, and him not a bit mindful of his toppled pride.

Well, he thought, as he pulled himself up. I’ll be the bowlegged one.