As winter passed, with one moon after another, I began to get used to the uncomfortable routine that made up my new daily life. There is little to say about the time I spent at the Lemis estate, shoveling snow or manure. It was hard and dull and humiliating, which was no doubt the intention of the owners. I learned to dread the cold nights, when the frost would set in under the white layer of snow and I would shiver in the straw thinking about the next day's work. The rest of the time I spent it moving the horses' manure from one pile to another, which served no other purpose than to keep myself busy and avoid the bruises caused by the stable master's blows. The mute girl who worked in the kitchens was named Crumby and she would bring me my bread when the sun reached its zenith. Holen would holler and give me a hard time, and I was so busy with my chores that I would need two pairs of eyes and arms to really pay attention to anything else. In fact, I was a very bad spy.

I never had anything interesting to tell Sesh, and the first-blade finally reduced the regularity of our meetings. I came to live exclusively for the three days I spent with Narsilap and, while I was wielding the shovel and blowing on my numb fingers, I was rehashing my lessons to kill time.

In medicine, I was making rapid progress, and I must say that this was as much the responsibility of the teacher as it was of the student. Narsilap was friendly and cheerful, but he was also a passionate person who appreciated my questions and comments. Narsilap's lessons were not professorial: he did not burden me under strict authority, did not expect me to memorize endless lists, and did not punish me when I failed. The Rajjan assumed that knowledge would come from practice, and that the desire to please would be a far better spur than the fear of the rod. He encouraged me to make my own observations, even if it meant correcting them later, and I found great pleasure in spending time with him. Although I don't think I would have needed such a caring teacher to be able to gobble up the knowledge he offered me, his engaging manner and the contrast with Holen made it all the more enjoyable for me. I was not only learning medicine, but also using my mind, and to this day it seems to me that this is the mark of a good teacher. He called me Mespa, which means disciple in the language of the Nine, and as he asked me I called him Rus'Narsi.

Although we were often busy in the infirmary, visiting legates' quarters, or entangled in theory lessons, the master surgeon did not miss an opportunity to improve my hesitant writing of the brownian. Even though I understood the usefulness of the texts and guessed which heaps of knowledge they would bring to my attention, I preferred by far the anatomical aspect of the lessons given to me by the master surgeon.

We had started with the study of bones, because the skeleton of Landros Grifal was there, hanging from the beams of the tower and it fascinated me terribly, but also because Rus'Narsi found it simple enough to be a good introduction. Generally speaking, human mechanics seemed to me horribly complex and, therefore, quite captivating.

In the course of the lessons, Rus'Narsi gave me bits and pieces about his past, which I was looking forward to as much as the rest. I had learned enough to reconstruct the essentials, and the details he gave me sparingly only reinforced my budding admiration for him. Narsilap Ail Shuri came from the other side of the Strait, where he was born in servitude, on the edge of an arid province where people lived harshly, far from the legendary luxury of Rajja. His mother had sold him when he was young to one of the most influential guilds in the capital, which prospered from the trade of cultured slaves with the cities of Carm. He was given the best education until the age of twenty, and then he was sold to the serifa of Orfys for a tenth of his weight in silver. The Carmians had cut the triangle in his cheek, and he had come to enlarge the ranks of the court doctors. Narsi had faithfully served Orfys and the kodia Noma for ten years, until the first pregnancy of the serif's favorite daughter.

Childbirth had been difficult, gold and cultured slaves had not changed that, and Narsilap had not been able to save either the mother or the child. After the angry serif took his left hand, the master surgeon fled. He had managed to cross the Denis and had landed in Val country, where he practiced for several years, traveling between Riteshell and Benkepp, near the brownian border. Finally, as Narsi grew tired of the vagrancy and customs of the Vals, the Rockin of Cover-Pass had offered him to serve their household. Listening to his adventures, I came to consider the Rajjan as a great man, despite the shock I had upon learning that he had been a slave. When he spoke of his turbulent past, it was usually to illustrate some of his remarks, and he never did so in a way that would put himself forward. I was proud to be a student of such a humble and wise man.

My obsession with Narsilap's lessons led me to spend as much time with him as I could, so I would hang out with him on calends, and sometimes even during the last days of the week, when I was theoretically free of my actions. Many, Morton first, were those who found it strange that a child my age could prefer to lock himself in a dark tower to study rather than go out to play when he had the chance. Most of the time, however, I was so exhausted from my efforts at Lemis' estate that my aching muscles had neither the strength nor the desire to go out running in the streets. In addition, the dull pain of being abandoned by Brindy and Ucar was such that I had become suspicious, certainly more than I should have been, and had resolved not to make new friends.

While my surveillance of the Lemis domain consisted in shovelling manure, the mysteries of biology managed to temper most of my frustration. However, despite my eagerness to learn and all the good will in the world, I sometimes stumbled on a few more devious subjects. Above all, I was particularly bewildered by the theological aspect of oriental medicine. In this regard, Narsi sometimes let himself be carried away by long exalted tirades, punctuated with a chopped rajjan, which left me lost and babbling.

Never having had to undergo the discourse of any organized cult beforehand, I was as reasonably superstitious as a child from High-Brown could afford to be, and little more than that. The streets I frequented did not resonate with the fervor of foreign preachers, as had become customary in Sand-Port or in the lively neighborhoods of Pulo. Feverish proselytes of the Stareid, nedos fetishists with wide eyes, who came to tell the mystical secrets of the Earth-Star, monials of Nuu'Dis devoted to the amazement of their drunken god, priest-philosophers of the nine divinities of Rajja, freshly arrived from the pious citadel of Bitrek to convert by the verb all along the Red coast, I had never known this, and it is hardly if I would have been able to conceive it.

It must be understood that religion has never been a subject of passion for the inhabitants of the primacy of Brown, and that it was probably the same in the time of their ancestors. There were altars, of course, scattered here and there, and dedicated to this or that local deity, to a ghost or a spirit, and these were treated with respect, and visited with reverence. At that time, at the Brown wharf, for example, there was this statuette celebrating the Lady of the waters, fishermen sometimes came with fish to thank her for being generous. In a sheltered courtyard in the lower part of the town was the unsightly altar of the Frail-Whore, and legend has it that those who touched her with a silver coin could curse their enemies with infertility. However, no organized philosophy was associated with these practices, and they were not strictly speaking cults.

This informal approach is shared by those in the clans, who willingly admit the existence of forces beyond their control - forces that should be treated with respect, but without undue concern. Despite their differences, Brownians and Clanics have a similar view of the supernatural: most of the time, spirits and gods have other things to do than meddle in the affairs of men, and that's how I understood it. Yet, according to Narsilap, it was the other way around. On the contrary, the gods were in us and in the world, and ignorance of the customs that his nine gods demanded could have very serious consequences. I found this preposterous idea both incomprehensible and disturbing.

It was on a foggy morning, when spring was still struggling to emerge from the winter maze, that Rus'Narsi addressed the question of religion for good, because, according to him, its practice was inseparable from that of medicine. His lessons and the treatises that I tried to read stuttering with the rajjan alphabet were full of references and reflections that I did not understand, and Narsilap had pushed it away again and again, dropping bits and pieces here and there, until it created more problems than benefits. We were working on the question of what to apply in case of fractures when Narsi, after a long period of discussion, decided to interrupt my instruction. He was vigorously wiggling his braided goatee, pacing back and forth in his quarters with frowned eyebrows. I was sitting at the tower office, as usual, and contemplating his discomfort with apprehension because, as we both knew, what was to follow would be difficult for me.

"You see, Mespa," he finally said, "there are three gods that are nine, and contrary to what many of your fellow worshipers believe, there are no others. The manifestation of the Nine is everywhere, even in those ungodly fetishes to which the Brownians turn when things go wrong, and the Nine are kind enough to grant their requests at times." In front of my incomprehension, he continued in a clear voice, as if he were reciting a long-prepared speech:

"Lu is the guardian, the one who maintains. Rek is the agitator, the one of movement. And Am, the creator, is the doer. The three interpenetrate and influence each other, and so they are nine. In everything we do, one of the nine is associated. In Rajja, when we build a tower, we raise a prayer to Am'Lu, so that what we are building can pass through the ages without collapsing. When I help a woman give birth, it is to Rek'Am that I turn so that the contractions of the womb will deliver new life. The gods are present in all our actions, and until you understand this, Mespa, my lessons will be of no use to you. For it is the Nine who inhabit my words and who have given the word to men."

I bowed my head, confused and not very convinced, and I answered in rajjan:

"I will try to understand, master Narsi."

"You have to do more than understand, you have to believe. Now let's start again. Do you see why it is necessary to make the request to Rek'Lu for the bone to solidify?"

I hesitated, racking my brains, before trying to find an answer. "Because it is with time that the bone will be able to heal?" Narsilap nodded.

"Yes, that's good Mespa. Rek represents the movement of the days that will allow the bone to regain and maintain the shape that Lu has given it. Similarly, the splint is the tool of Rek'Lu. The cords bind, are made and undone around the wood which is rigid. We mortals are only instruments of the gods, Mespa. It is up to us to apply their wisdom, but it is also good to make sure we get their blessing when we do so."

I nodded, but actually I felt a little lost. No doubt, if I had been a little more impressionable or if Narsilap had put more of the weight of his knowledge on me as some bad teachers do, I would have unconditionally embraced my master's beliefs without question. The fact remains that I had always been wary of gods and spirits. Two years earlier, I had thrown my last coin through the arms of the Opulent Fool, and watched him sink into the clear waters of his fountain, wishing that he would bring me out of my misery.

We had been hungry for the next two weeks, and I could have bought a large fillet of carp with that money. Yet Narsi seemed to take it very seriously. The respect I had for him encouraged me to give the gods another chance.

That evening, after my lessons, I meditated a lot before deciding to put to the test the nine gods that Narsi had been praising. I made a request to Rek so that my tasks at the Lemis' could pass more quickly, and then I fell asleep. The next day, while I was shoveling a particularly unpleasant manure heap, because the horses had gotten colic from bad hay, I came to the conclusion that my relative respect for the Nine would have to be limited to the medical field.

When I reported my experience to Narsi, he lectured me harder than he ever had. The gods were not to be tested, and the colic of the horses had been my punishment. I had even been lucky that they did not punish me more for my impudence. I remained sceptical, but in order not to offend these nine foreign gods I agreed to submit to their rituals and stopped trying to test their power.

When I wasn't busy with my lessons, or tied to the handle of a shovel, my partial existence at the castle had the advantage of keeping me informed of the rumors and news that came from other primacies. In the south, the winter had not been as clement as usual, and the political machinery had temporarily come to a standstill. In early spring, however, a particularly lively round table discussion had seen the resurgence of a whole string of small border quarrels that were as old as they were futile. Wadd and Hill had suspended their trade relations over a dispute over a tiny mountain canton lost somewhere in the foothills of the Thorns, and the Greyarm delegation had left the meeting prematurely when several other primates accused them of trying to take advantage of the situation by supporting Hill's claim. Cases of banditry were multiplying, especially in the forest cantons of Vaw and Cover-Pass, and there were darker rumors of agitation and witchcraft on the borders of the Brambles, that wild plateau imprisoned between the Thorns mountains and the carmian Wall.

I think it was around this time that the dreams began.

The term dream is insufficient in reality and only very partially depicts these strange fragments that came to intrude into my sleep. They were then pulsations, sensitive spurts that intersected my dreams, barely detectable in this early spring, but which would soon swell up like a wave. The contours were sketched out in greater detail as the moons passed, but this was of no help to me in defining the phenomenon. One can usually describe a dream, if one remembers it. However, when I woke up, despite the lingering memories, I had no words to describe what I had experienced during the night. It was as if an external entity, with senses and mind so different from mine that I had no hope of understanding them, knocked at the door of my dreamlike escapades and interspersed them with it. I had the firm impression that it was not by chance, that it was somehow destined for me, and yet the hidden meaning of these tumults, these nocturnal possessions and the indescribable sensations that accompanied them escaped me completely.

I told Narsilap, and even Sesh, about it, but they didn't understand how it was different from my other dreams, mainly because I couldn't explain it to them. Narsi told me about recurring dreams he had, and about the prophets of the Nine, of course, and if I was tempted to attribute a divine source to the phenomenon, my intuition was that it was something else entirely. If a spirit had wanted to speak to me, I imagined - perhaps - that I would be able to speak to it. I thought - maybe I was wrong - that it would have been able to make himself understood by me. So this nightly litany followed me, sometimes leaving me, but always finding me, with a growing persistence that resounded like a call. Eventually I got used to it, as to the rest, and despite my interest in it, other events soon caught my remaining attention.