The Three Lands Omnibus (2011 Edition) (129 page)

"You understand that I am under the curse?" Prosper said, trying to keep his voice level.
Orel nodded. "I saw you arrive, the first day. And my mother told me to stay away from you."
Prosper frowned. "Are you in the habit of disregarding your mother's warnings?"
Orel looked down at the grass and began scuffing it with his toes. "Not usually. But a priest's orders come first, don't they? Huard taught us in catechism class that we should help those in need, even if we think they're the God's enemies. And if you teach me, you'll be doing a service to the God, won't you? And that will help drive the demons from you."
Prosper reflected that Orel had learned his catechism well. "Very well," he said, trying to keep the joy out of his voice. "Since your father has overruled your mother, I'll overlook your initial disobedience to her. Come over here."
Orel did so promptly, which was a good sign. Prosper, watching Orel's slouched posture as he walked, waited until Orel was standing beside him before he took the boy by the shoulders and said, "Stand up straight."
Orel did so, looking up at Prosper with puzzlement. Prosper ran his hand through the boy's tousled hair. "Your hair is not combed," he observed.
"No," said Orel, looking even more puzzled at this elementary observation.
"Tomorrow, when you arrive for lessons, I expect your hair to be combed, your clothes to be neat, your shoes to be dust-free, your fingernails to be trimmed, and your face to be some color other than that disgusting grime-grey. Have a sugar ball."
As he spoke, he stooped and retrieved from the riverbank the bag of sugar balls that he had saved from the previous night's meal. He had already decided that, since he was taking the boy away from the time that he would normally spend playing with other boys, it would be too great a sacrifice to require him to give up the evenings' sweet-sharing as well. Besides, Prosper had relearned by now the proper tribal manner by which to bind oneself to another person.
The boy began to speak, then thought the better of it and was silent as he and Prosper made their way through the balls in the bag. Only once the bag was folded and put aside did Orel ask, "How does combing my hair help me to learn the ancient tongue?"
"It is part of the discipline I am teaching you. If you are careless in matters concerning the body, you will become careless in matters concerning the mind. Why do you think it is that Huard is always so neat in his appearance? He did not look that way when he first arrived at my school, I can assure you."
Orel considered this fact as he licked the sugar from his fingers; his face was caked with the white crystals. Prosper resisted an impulse to wipe the boy's mouth for him. Instead he said, "Now clean your hands and face, please."
Orel stooped obediently and dipped his hands so briefly into the river that Prosper sighed and crouched down on the grassy bank beside him. "Wash them thoroughly," he said. "You will be touching valuable manuscripts." He doused his own hands in the water as demonstration.
Orel, watching him, said, "Nobody can be so dirty that they need
that
much washing."
"The washing is not merely for the body but for the mind as well," Prosper told him. "Huard will no doubt have taught you the prayers to say before memorizing passages of the God's Law. Even manuscripts that deal with temporal matters require that sort of cleansing of the mind."
Orel looked skeptical. Touching the boy's face to remind him of the dirt there, Prosper said, "Before Huard begins any service, he spends several minutes purifying himself, so that both his body and his spirit will be clean when he enters the sanctuary. The first time he entered the altar area, he had to undergo a day and night of full-body purification. The purification helped to still his spirit, so that he was ready to accept any message the God might send him when he was lighting the sacred flame. It is the same with those of us who are temporal: we must take a few minutes before beginning language lessons to still our minds, so that we can enter fully into what we are taught. As you grow older, you may find your own method for stilling your mind. Washing is the one I use."
"Oh." Orel looked down at the water, leaping and tugging at the riverside plants, then plunged his head suddenly into the water. He emerged as wet as a fish, shaking his hair so that droplets spattered onto Prosper.
Prosper fought to hold back his laughter. "I did not mean for you to wash yourself that thoroughly."
Orel looked at him with surprise. "But you said that, the first time, Huard purified his whole body. I'd wash all of myself, but Huard said not to bathe here; the current is too strong. . . . Why are you smiling?"
"Because Huard's predecessor gave me the same teaching when I was a boy. In fact, he gave a thundering lecture to me when he found me trying to venture into the water when I was six. He told me how my body would be pulled away from the tribal territory and end up buried under a rock, so that I would die unpurified by a priest. It was quite an effective lecture; I was terrified to go near the river for weeks after that."
"Huard wasn't
that
frightening. But in the catechism class, he did have us memorize the passage in the law against self-slaying, about how willful recklessness leading to death can be considered self-slaying. He didn't say anything about the river, but we were sitting on the riverbank that day, and he kept tossing branches into the water and watching them be sucked under by the current."
Prosper reflected, not for the first time, that Huard's indirect methods of instilling discipline could be quite as effective as his own. He was tempted to hand Orel over to Huard for his language lessons. But the truth was – and Prosper again hoped that he was not engaging in vainglory in believing this – that none of the priests who had taught at Prosper's school over the years had ever been able to match him in his ability to impress upon boys the difficult spellings and vowel changes and grammatical forms and nightmarish pronunciations of the ancient tongue. True, the language was not an end in itself, but learning it properly was.
The sunlight's slant had deepened, sending bright rays into Prosper's eyes. He winced, then helped Orel to his feet and led the way to Huard's hut. As they reached the doorway, Orel hesitated. He looked up at his teacher and said, "This is like when Huard goes behind the God-mask and lights the sacred flame, isn't it?"
"It is."
Orel made an attempt to press down the tangle of wet hair at the back of his head, then looked up again at Prosper. "Tomorrow I'll make sure my hair is combed," he said.
Prosper did laugh then. Smoothing the boy's hair down with his hand, he guided him into the hut and into the back chamber, where the scrolls lay open, awaiting teacher and pupil.
During his years at the training school, Prosper had sometimes visited the nearby military yard to watch the soldiers there do mock battle. He had no intrinsic interest in the skills of warfare, but as City Priest he had sometimes been asked by the priest who had care over the soldiers to intervene in important disciplinary cases. Over the years, Prosper had found that he could learn much about the spiritual state of temporal men and women by observing them at their work. Now, shoving aside all temptation to ascertain the spiritual state of the boys doing mock battle before him, Prosper set out to discern what could be told of the states of their minds.
Dust scattered into the morning light as men and boys practiced their fighting skills in the small military yard of the Feasters. The two youngest boys of Orel's family were wrestling in a corner with each other, like mountain cubs at play. Orel's father had disappeared into the nearby armory with the tribe's smith, who had once flung a horseshoe at Prosper. Prosper barely noticed the father's departure, however. His gaze was upon a battle taking place near the tribe's stone pillar.
The younger of the boys in the battle was of about age ten, two years short of his catechism lessons. He had already learned enough of the God's Language to be able to participate in the recital of names, for Prosper had heard him begin his recital during the brief interval that it took each day for Prosper to slide his way carefully out the side door of the sanctuary. The boy's pronunciation of the names was atrocious, but Prosper guessed, as he watched the battle, that this was due to a lack of gift for languages rather than due to a lack of concentration, for the younger boy was now so intent on his work that he squinted his eyes and flared his nostrils.
The older boy was a different matter. His stance and position of blade were sloppy – even Prosper, uneducated in warfare, could tell as much. The older boy had a tendency to become distracted from the battle, though his occasional moments of clarity showed that he was by far the more skilled of the two boys in swordplay. The end result was that the younger boy was besting the older in two battles out of three. Prosper frowned.
At that moment, the older boy caught sight of him and lost all interest in what he was doing. If the younger boy had not been as alert as he was, his blade would have cut into the older boy's arm. The older boy, quite unaware of this, turned his head and said something briefly to the younger boy. Clearly relieved to be rid of so lackadaisical an opponent, the younger boy turned away in search of a fresh partner.
Now free of his younger brother, Orel came running forward, not bothering to sheathe his sword. As he reached Prosper, he asked breathlessly, "Did you wish to speak with me?"
"Not especially. I am sorry to see that your lessons with me have been wasted."
The shock on the boy's face was so sharp that Prosper's newly disciplined spirit immediately sent out a cry of warning. Quickly Prosper reached forward and laid a reassuring hand on Orel's shoulder.
"I spoke with undue harshness," he said. "What I meant to say was that I wish you would put to use the training I have been giving you in discipline. You were not focussing your full mind on your work there."
The boy was clearly startled at this criticism. After a moment, though, his face cleared and he boasted, "I was remembering the verb forms you had me memorize."
"That won't do," replied Prosper, letting his hand fall. "If you're thinking of language lessons during swordplay, you'll soon be thinking of swordplay lessons during your time at language. Whatever you do – be it scribe-learning or battle preparation or a mundane task such as fetching water for the soldiers – you must give your whole mind to the task. Otherwise, your ill discipline in one aspect of life will affect your discipline in other aspects."
"Oh." Orel's face brightened. "It's like combing my hair."
Prosper nearly sent up a prayer to the God in thankfulness for being given such a bright pupil. He stopped himself in time, though, from breaking his discipline of worship. "Exactly so. Now seek out your brother again and see whether you can give as much concentration to your task as he was."
"All right." But Orel did not seem inclined to move. He scuffed his toes on the ground for a moment before catching himself. Prosper, watching him dip his head shyly, was pleased to note that Orel was indeed keeping his hair combed and his appearance neat, even when at energetic battle work. Prosper had to resist an impulse to reach out and smooth down a bit of hair that had flown free as Orel ran toward him.
Orel said, without looking up, "I was wondering . . . When you leave the service this evening, at the recital of names, could I come with you? I've finished my vocabulary memorization – not only the ones you asked me to memorize, but the rest of the words as well. I can recite all of the ancient words now."
"Not all of them," said Prosper. "There remains one word which neither you nor I are permitted to speak. You may hear it at the worship service, if you give your full attention to it."
Orel looked up then. Prosper was pleased to see that the boy seemed properly abashed. Placing his hand once more on Orel's shoulder, Prosper said gently, "No, you may not neglect your worship discipline in favor of your lessons, but I will look forward to hearing your recital tonight. —See, your father is searching for you."
Orel looked over his shoulder at the same moment that his father, emerging from the armory, caught sight of the boy. The father frowned and took a step forward, only to be distracted at that moment by his two youngest sons, who came tumbling over and clung to his legs, like puppies seeking to be petted. Orel, seeing that he had been granted a moment's reprieve, looked back at Prosper and said quickly, "When you become a priest again, may I come to one of your services and listen to you say the sacred word?"
"Perhaps," Prosper replied non-committally. "Go now; your father looks as though he wishes to slice me open with his blade for interrupting your swordplay."
He spoke lightly, but the words were no exaggeration. Prosper was becoming alarmed by the look that Orel's father was giving him as the soldier sought to free himself from the embrace of his affectionate sons. Orel turned and ran to his father. As he did so, the father spoke sharply to him, in words that were lost amidst the tumult of the military yard, but which clearly chastened the boy.
Prosper decided that it would be politic to remove himself at this point, and he swiftly stepped behind the stone pillar. After a moment, however, he could not resist the impulse to look back at the military yard to see how matters were going between father and son. He found that the man and boy were now on the point of doing sword-battle against each other. Orel's eyes were narrow with concentration, and his sword was in the proper position for preparation.
Prosper felt something brush his arm. He turned to see that Huard was also watching the military yard. The priest, Prosper decided, must have had a particularly difficult struggle to keep discipline during the mid-morning meal-hostings, for he was sipping at a cup of water, as he was wont to do at moments of greatest stress.
Huard said nothing about this, though, remarking only, "A few years ago, I asked Iolo to teach me swordplay. I thought that the exercise would keep my body slender and that it would be good for me to know inwardly some of the duties of temporal men."
"Were you an apt pupil?" Prosper asked.
Huard smiled. "After the first lesson, Iolo told me that some men were meant to be temporal and some men were meant to be spiritual, and that I should stick with the discipline that suited my spirit best."