The crystal cave - Mary Stewart [91]
Be sure I had never asked him again how he intended to use me. He made it clear enough, and between pride and fear and longing I fought to learn all that I could be taught, and to open myself for the power which was all I could give him. If he had wanted a prophet ready to hand he must have been disappointed; I saw nothing of importance during this time. Knowledge, I suppose, blocked the gates of vision. But this was the time for knowledge; I studied with Belasius till I outran him, learning, as he had never done, how to apply the calculations which to him were as much an art as songs were to me; even songs, indeed, I was to use. I spent long hours in the street of the engineers, and had frequently to be dragged by a grumbling Cadal from some oily piece of practical work which unfitted me, as he said, for any company but a bath-slave's. I wrote down, too, all I could remember of Galapas' medical teaching, and added practical experience by helping the army doctors whenever I could. I had the freedom of the camp and the town, and with Ambrosius' name to back me I took to this freedom like a hungry young wolf to his first full meal. I learned all the time, from every man or woman I met. I looked, as I had promised, in the light and the dark, at the sunshine and at the stale pool. I went with Ambrosius to the shrine of Mithras below the farmstead, and with Belasius to the gatherings in the forest. I was even allowed to sit silently at meetings between the Count and his captains, though nobody pretended that I would ever be much use in the field, "unless," said Uther once, half amused, half malicious, "he is to stand above us like Joshua holding the sun back, to give us more time to do the real work. Though joking apart, he might do worse...the men seem to think of him as something halfway between a Courier of Mithras and a splinter of the True Cross -- saving your presence, brother -- and I'm damned certain he'd be more use stuck up on a hill like a lucky charm where they can see him, than down in the field where he wouldn't last five minutes." He had even more to say when, at the age of sixteen, I gave up the daily sword practice which gave a man the minimum training in self-defense; but my father merely laughed and said nothing. I think he knew, though as yet I did not, that I had my own kind of protection.
So I learned from everyone; the old women who gathered plants and cobwebs and seaweeds for healing; the travelling peddlers and quack healers; the horse doctors, the soothsayers, the priests. I listened to the soldiers' talk outside the taverns, and the officers' talk in my father's house, and the boys' talk in the streets. But there was one thing about which I learned nothing: by the time I left Brittany at seventeen, I was still ignorant of women. When I thought about them -- which happened often enough -- I told myself that I had no time, that there was a lifetime still ahead of me for such things, and that now I had work to do which mattered more. But I suppose the plain truth is that I was afraid of them. So I lost my desires in work, and indeed, I believe now that the fear came from the god.
So I waited, and minded my own business, which -- as I saw it then -- was to fit myself to serve my father.
***
One day I was in Tremorinus' workshop. Tremorinus, the master engineer, was a pleasant man who allowed me to learn all I could from him, gave me space in the workshops, and material to experiment with. This particular day I remember how when he came into the workshop and saw me busy over a model at my corner bench, he came over to have a look at it. When he saw what I was doing he laughed.
"I'd have thought there were plenty of those around without troubling to put up any more."
"I was interested in how they got them there." I tilted the scale model of the standing stone back into place.
He looked surprised. I knew why. He had lived in Less Britain all his life, and the landscape there is so seamed with the stones that men do not see them any more. One walks daily through a