Though how they were supposed to enter into the situation "without any preconceptions" was beyond him.
When the time came, Alberich appeared at Healers' Collegium at the appointed hour, with three of the four Heralds he had recruited trailing in after him, one by one. It probably would have been amusing if they all hadn't looked so serious, even apprehensive; he could have been a tutor or nanny trailed by his three of his four charges. They were sent to a quiet chamber that held two narrow beds and a chair between them, and stood, as Alberich thought to himself, "like a gaggle of useless idlers," none of them particularly wishing to take a seat either on the couches or the chair. The young man still hadn't arrived there when Healer Crathach, long and lean and sardonic, appeared in the room to which they had been sent.
"Ah, good. I only need one of you volunteers at a time," he said, looking entirely too gleeful for Alberich's comfort. "Hmm—you, I think, Orven. Take a couch. Alberich, you take the other. Try to relax, and close your eyes."
The former herdsman made a bit of a face, and did as he was told, taking the farther of the two couches. In silence, Alberich did the same, taking the nearest. He closed his eyes, and heard a creak as the Healer sat down in the chair, felt a hand laid atop his forehead and suppressed the urge to knock it away, and—
And suddenly, he was in Karse.
But this was not exactly a memory. He had never lived in this cob-built hut—too small to be called a cottage—though he had seen plenty like it over the years. This was a typical mountain hut of the poorest sort, yet there was a poorer state than that in Karse, and that was to be the lowest of the kitchen or stable staff, who had not even a scrap of floor to call their own. Scullery maids, cook's boys—they slept on the kitchen floor and ate what they could scrape out of pots, never washed except what parts of them got immersed in water when they scrubbed things, never changed their clothing until it dropped from their body.
He and his mother had, thank Vkandis, never been that lowly.
However, in this incarnation, it appeared that the protagonists of this "memory" were.
A little boy, who was him, and was not him, about three years old, was watching a woman who was his mother, and was not his mother, scrubbing the floor of this hut—a floor, made, as was usual in these huts, of the scrap ends of boards gathered and pieced together. She did not own this place; whereas his mother had owned, or had at least rented, their little dwelling. This woman was a servant here, the only one; sleeping on the hearth, doing the heaviest of the work, taken on by the mean old woman who owned the place only because, in her outcaste state, she asked nothing but food and shelter for herself and the boy that was him, and not him. He looked through that boy's eyes, yet he did it from an adult perspective.
Now, he recognized the memory from the framework. If this had been his real memory, he would have been watching his mother scrubbing the floor of the inn where they lived. But this wasn't his village, it was another, in herding country, where he had served in his first year with the Sunsguard. It wasn't an inn, for this particular village had been too small to have one; this was just one of the many little houses, with a bush above the door to show that it sold ale and food. He didn't recognize the woman; she was something like his mother, but mostly not. And although he somehow knew that Orven was actually experiencing this episode as if he were the toddler, Alberich was watching it as a sort of dispassionate passenger in Orven's head.
This was fascinating; living fiction. Except that Orven was living it. Had he come from a background that was that impoverished? It could be; the MindHealer could be taking both sets of experiences and melding them together in a Karsite setting.
The bones of the experience were the same as his own; a group of fellows who considered themselves to be young toughs strolled past, and decided to abuse the woman because of his presence, calling her "whore" and worse. True, she was not married, and now had no prospect of ever wedding. True, she had not named his father to anyone but the Sunpriest. But his mother—and, in this manufactured memory, this woman—were hardly whores. They sold themselves to no man, and had been so tight-lipped about the identity of Alberich's father that nothing had ever made them reveal it except to their priest.
The boy knew none of this, nor did Orven who was actually living through this instead of observing it—nor had Alberich at the time. Orven, from his childish perspective, only knew that the men were large and loud, and were making his mother unhappy. They frightened him, and he began to cry.
Now all of this came with an incredible load of detail that Alberich had not even known was in his memory—the scent of the harsh tallow soap the mother was using and of the wet wood of the floor, the beer smell from the cask just inside the door, the aroma of the pease porridge over the hearth, and woodsmoke, the sharp not-quite-spring scent of the air itself, the sour-sweat smell overlaid with goat and sheep of the men. And that was just scent. There was the quality of the sunlight, thin and clear, giving a great deal of light, but not much warmth. He somehow knew the look of the cobbles and the dirt path outside the door, the shape of the hut, with its rough cob walls, whitewashed some time last spring, the whitewash shabby from all the winter storms—the shape of the other houses of the village, of the village itself, a straggle of houses along the road. He even knew the road, cobbled only where it passed through the village itself. Alberich knew where it had all come from; he'd seen dozens of villages like this one over the years. The story came from his life, and the setting, but both were tolerably confused together, creating a new "life" entirely.
It wasn't him. Orven, taken back in his mind to the level of a toddler, was the one feeling all of this; it would be Orven's reactions that counted here.
The flood of external detail was giving Orven plenty to take in; internal, of course, was something a good deal more primal, the uncertainty and all the turmoil of a small and terrified child.
Then he came striding up the path, as if the crying had summoned him; tall, bearded, straight-backed, dressed in a long black robe with something bright and shining and immediately attractive to the wailing child on the breast of it. He wasted no time, verbally laying into the men in a voice like thunder, somehow making it clear that it was their good fortune he wasn't going to lay into them physically as well. There was a great deal of what Alberich—from his dispassionate distance—recognized as Holy Writ being quoted, mostly about the poor, the fatherless, and the repentant. There was also a great deal of Writ quoted about the ultimate destination of those who abused the poor, the fatherless, and the repentant.
And a curious thing happened. The more the man spoke, the larger he seemed to become, and the smaller the woman's harassers became. As they shrank into themselves, unable to look either at the woman or the Sunpriest—that was clearly what he was, although it was Alberich, and not Orven, who knew this—the woman took on more confidence. Since none of the thunder was being directed at him or his mother, the child calmed and crept near to her, and she hugged him close.