‘Master?’ he said, and laughed, a sound so cheerful that it made me almost want to dance. Where had I heard that laugh before? ‘I am not thy Master, boy,’ he said. Then he laughed again, and my heart sang with the splendor of his mirth. ‘Let us see to this thing of food. What dost thou require?’
‘A little bread perhaps - not too stale, if it’s all right.’
‘Bread? Only bread? Surely, boy, thy stomach is fit for more than bread. If thou wouldst make thyself useful - as thou hast promised - we must nourish thee properly. Consider, boy. Think of all the things thou hast eaten in thy life. What in all the world would most surely satisfy this vast hunger of thine?’
I couldn’t even say it. Before my eyes swam the visions of smoking roasts, of fat geese swimming in their own gravy, of heaps of fresh-baked bread and rich, golden butter, of pastries in thick cream, of cheese, and dark brown ale, of fruits and nuts and salt to savor it all. The vision was so real that it even seemed that I could smell it.
And he who sat by the glowing fire that burned, it seemed, air alone, laughed again, and again my heart sang. ‘Turn, boy,’ he said, ‘and eat thy fill.’
And I turned, and there on a table, which I had not even seen before, lay everything I had imagined. No wonder I could smell it! A hungry boy doesn’t ask where the food comes from - he eats. And so I ate. I ate until my stomach groaned. And through the sound of my eating I could hear the laughter of the aged one beside his fire, and my heart leapt within me at each strangely familiar chuckle.
And when I’d finished and sat drowsing over my plate, he spoke again. ‘Wilt thou sleep now, boy?’
‘A corner, Master,’ I said. ‘A little out-of-the-way place by the fire, if it isn’t too much trouble.’
He pointed. ‘Sleep there, boy,’ he said, and all at once I saw a bed which I had no more seen than I had the table - a great bed with huge pillows and comforters of softest down. And I smiled my thanks and crept into the bed, and, because I was young and very tired, I fell asleep almost at once without even stopping to think about how very strange all of this had been.
But in my sleep I knew that he who had brought me in out of the storm and fed me and cared for me was watching through the long, snowy night, and I slept even more securely in the comforting warmth of his care.
Chapter 2
And that began my servitude. At first the tasks my Master set me to were simple ones - ‘sweep the floor,’ ‘fetch some firewood,’ ‘wash the windows’ - that sort of thing. I suppose I should have been suspicious about many of them. I could have sworn that there hadn’t been a speck of dust anywhere when I first mounted to his tower room, and, as I think I mentioned earlier, the fire burning in his fireplace didn’t seem to need fuel. It was almost as if he were somehow making work for me to do.
He was a good master, though. For one thing, he didn’t command in the way I’d heard the Tolnedrans command their servants, but rather made suggestions. ‘Thinkest thou not that the floor hath become dirty again, boy?’ Or, ‘Might it not be prudent to lay in some store of firewood?’ My chores were in no way beyond my strength or abilities, and the weather outside was sufficiently unpleasant to persuade me that what little was expected of me was a small price to pay in exchange for food and shelter. I did resolve, however, that when spring came and he began to look farther afield for things for me to do, I might want to reconsider our arrangement. There isn’t really very much to do when winter keeps one housebound, but warmer weather brings with it the opportunity for heavier and more tedious tasks. If things turned too unpleasant, I could always pick up and leave.
There was something peculiar about that notion, though. The compulsion which had come over me at Gara seemed gone now. I don’t know that I really thought about it in any specific way. I just seemed to notice that it was gone and shrugged it off. Maybe I just thought I’d outgrown it. It seems to me that I shrugged off a great deal that first winter.
I paid very little attention, for example, to the fact that my Master seemed to have no visible means of support. He didn’t keep cattle or sheep or even chickens, and there were no sheds or outbuildings in the vicinity of his tower. I couldn’t even find his storeroom. I knew there had to be one somewhere, because the meals he prepared were always on the table when I grew hungry. Oddly, the fact that I never once saw him cooking didn’t seem particularly strange to me. Not even the fact that I never once saw him eat anything seemed strange. It was almost as if my natural curiosity - and believe me, I can be very curious - had been somehow put to sleep.
I had absolutely no idea of what he did during that long winter. It seemed to me that he spent a great deal of time just looking at a plain round rock. He didn’t speak very often, but I talked enough for both of us. I’ve always been fond of the sound of my own voice - or had you noticed that?
My continual chatter must have driven him to distraction, because one evening he rather pointedly asked me why I didn’t go read something.
I knew about reading, of course. Nobody in Gara had known how, but I’d seen Tolnedrans doing it - or pretending to. It seemed a little silly to me at the time. Why take the trouble to write a letter to somebody who lives two houses over? If it’s important, just step over and tell him about it. ‘I don’t know how to read, Master,’ I confessed.
He actually seemed startled by that. ‘Is this truly the case, boy?’ he asked me. ‘I had thought that the skill was instinctive amongst thy kind.’
I wished that he’d quit talking about ‘my kind’ as if I were a member of some obscure species of rodent or insect.
‘Fetch down that book, boy,’ he instructed, pointing at a high shelf.
I looked up in some amazement. There seemed to be several dozen bound volumes on that shelf. I’d cleaned and dusted and polished the room from floor to ceiling a dozen times or more, and I’d have taken an oath that the shelf hadn’t been there the last time I looked. I covered my confusion by asking, ‘Which one, Master?’ Notice that I’d even begun to pick up some semblance of good manners?
‘Whichever one falls most easily to hand,’ he replied indifferently.
I selected a book at random and took it to him.
‘Seat thyself, boy,’ he told me. ‘I shall give thee instruction.’
I knew nothing whatsoever about reading, so it didn’t seem particularly odd to me that under his gentle tutelage I was a competent reader within the space of an hour. Either I was an extremely gifted student - which seems highly unlikely - or he was the greatest teacher who ever lived.
From that hour on I became a voracious reader. I devoured his bookshelf from one end to another. Then, somewhat regretfully, I went back to the first book again, only to discover that I’d never seen it before. I read and read and read, and every page was new to me. I read my way through that bookshelf a dozen times over, and it was always fresh and new. That reading opened the world of the mind to me, and I found it much to my liking.
My new-found obsession gave my Master some peace, at least, and he seemed to look approvingly at me as I sat late into those long, snowy, winter nights reading texts in languages I could not have spoken, but which I nonetheless clearly understood when they seemed to leap out at me from off the page. I also noticed - dimly, for, as I think I’ve already mentioned, my curiosity seemed somehow to have been blunted - that when I was reading, my Master tended to have no chores for me, at least not at first. The conflict between reading and chores came later. And so we passed the winter in that world of the mind, and with few exceptions, I’ve probably never been so happy.
I’m sure it was the books that kept me there the following spring and summer. As I’d suspected they might, the onset of warm days and nights stirred my Master’s creativity. He found all manner of things for me to do outside - mostly unpleasant and involving a great deal of effort and sweat. I do not enjoy cutting down trees, for example - particularly not with an axe. I broke that axe-handle eight times that summer - quite deliberately, I’ll admit - and it miraculously healed itself overnight. I hated that cursed, indestructible axe!
But strangely enough, it wasn’t the sweating and grunting I resented, but the time I wasted whacking at unyielding trees which I could more profitably have spent trying to read my way through that inexhaustible bookshelf. Every page opened new wonders for me, and I groaned audibly each time my Master suggested that it was time for me and my axe to go out and entertain each other again.
And, almost before I had turned around twice, winter came again. I had better luck with my broom than I had with my axe. After all, you can only pile so much dust in a corner before you start becoming obvious about it, and my Master was never obvious. I continued to read my way again and again along the bookshelf and was probably made better by it, although my Master, guided by some obscure, sadistic instinct, always seemed to know exactly when an interruption would be most unwelcome. He inevitably selected that precise moment to suggest sweeping or washing dishes or fetching firewood.
Sometimes he would stop what he was doing to watch my labors, a bemused expression on his face. Then he would sigh and return to the things he did which I did not understand.