The Last Enchantment - Mary Stewart [147]
"The lamp?" I said. "You've not seen the fire called before? Well, that's one of the first things you'll learn; it was the first my own master taught me. Or was it the jars? You're looking at them as if you thought I was bottling poison. I was packing the garden herbs for winter's use."
"Hyssop," he said. I thought there was a glint of mischief, which in a girl I might have called demure. " 'To be burned with brimstone for inflammations of the throat; or boiled with honey to help pleurisy of the lungs.' "
I laughed. "Galen? Well, it seems we have a flying start. So you can read? Do you know -- ? No, it must wait till morning. For the present, have you had supper?"
"Yes, thank you."
"You said that Ninian was 'one of your names.' What do you like to be called?"
"Ninian will do...that is, unless you would rather not use it. What happened to him, the boy you knew? I think you said he was drowned?"
"Yes. We were at Corstopitum, and he went swimming with some other boys in the river beside the bridge where the Cor flows into the Tyne. They came running back to say he had been swept away."
"I'm sorry."
I smiled at him. "You will have to work very hard to make good his loss. Come, then, we must find you a place to sleep."
***
That was how I acquired my assistant, and the god his servant. He had had his hand over both of us all that time. It seems to me now that the first Ninian was but a forerunner -- a shadow cast before -- of the real one who came to me later, from the Lake. From the start it was apparent that instinct had deceived neither of us; Ninian of the Lake, though knowing little of the arts I professed, proved a natural adept. He learned quickly, soaking up both knowledge and art as a cloth soaks up clear water. He could read and write fluently, and though he had not, as I in my youth had had, the gift of languages, he spoke a pure Latin as well as the vernacular, and had picked up enough Greek to be able to read a label or be accurate about a recipe. He had once, he told me, had access to a translation of Galen, but knew nothing of Hippocrates beyond hearsay. I set him to reading in the Latin version I had, and found myself, in some measure, sent back to school by the score of questions he asked, of which I had taken the answers so long for granted that I had forgotten how they were reached. Music he knew nothing of, and would not learn; this was the first time I came face to face with that gentle, immovable stubbornness of his. He would listen, his face full of dreaming light, when I played or sang; but sing himself, or even try to sing, he would not; and after a few attempts to teach him his notes on the big harp, I gave it up. I would have liked it if he had had a voice; I would not have wanted to sit by while another man made music with my harp, but now with age my own voice was not as good as it had once been, and I would have liked to hear a young voice singing the poems I made. But no. He smiled, shook his head, tuned the harp for me (that much he could and would do), and listened.
But in everything else he was eager and quick to learn. Recollecting as best I could the way old Galapas, my master, had inducted me into the skills of magic, I took him, step by step, into the strange and misty halls of art. The Sight he had already in some degree; but where I had surpassed my master from the start, Ninian would do well if in time he could equal me, and he was still a stranger to the flights of prophecy. If he went half as far as I, I would be content. Like all old men, I could not believe that that young brain and