In the evening Yarrel and I chased fireflies in the meadow. I had never seen them before, and we took immoderate pleasure in behaving like infants. Chance drank a great deal of wine and traded tall tales with the kitchen people. It was a generous and pleasant time.
By the third day, Silkhands’ work with the old man had made a difference we could all see. He was more alert, more erect, and his questioning of us was quick and incisive. Silkhands said she had made small changes in the flow of blood to his brain, had added a chemical here or there, dissolved bits of cloggy tissue in one place and another, and built small walls other places. “It is only small repair,” she said. “I cannot stop age nor forestall death. It will come, still, inevitably. But the small weaknesses and pains of age, those I can ameliorate, and to do it for him is a pleasure. His mind in mine feels like sunshine and rain.”
With his incisive questioning came also his own dialogue with himself. We heard for the first time about his own life, about who and what he was.
“They named me Seer,” he ruminated, remembering a time long past. “They named me Seer for I knew, as Seers do, what would happen in future times. Small things. A fall of rain here. A wager won there. The outcome of a Game. The life or death of a man. As a Talent it is seldom controllable, never dependable, and yet when it happens, it is unmistakable. Well. Every Demesne must have a Seer or two, or six, or a dozen. The more the better coverage, so they say. And so I became a Seer, attached to a King. That’s the best place for a Seer. At least the meals are dependable. Well, Seers have a lot of time on their hands. Seeing doesn’t require time. I began to read. Books. Old books, mostly. There aren’t many new ones except among certain classes of pawns and the Immutables. I read those, too. Everything. Old books half rotten. Old books all mouldy. Old books in pieces. Old books about still older books. You would not believe the trash which accumulates in the cellars of old School Houses or in old towns the Immutables no longer use or in some old ruins. I stopped thinking of myself as a Seer and began to think of myself as a Reader. Well, what one reads, one learns, of course, and it was not too many decades before I realized that all those books were the bits and pieces of a puzzle, shards of a broken pot, clues to a great mystery. It was all there, boys, in the past. Something shaped differently from the way things are shaped today.”
“Were you the only one,” asked Yarrel. “The only one reading? How did you get about? All those travels?”
The old man smiled. “Oh, told small lies and begged small favors. Whenever there was a particularly good Seeing, I’d beg a boon of the King, or the Prince, of whomever it happened to be at the time.” He smiled to himself at some ancient, innocent villainy. “Seers wander about a good deal, anyhow. It is said to improve the quality of the vision. And, as to your question, boy, no I was not the only one. Most of the others were Necromancers, however, or Shapeshifters, or Rancelmen. You don’t know Rancelmen? A little like Pursuivants. Their Talent is finding things which are lost.
“Well, I believed that there was a mystery in the past, far back, in the time of Didir and Tamor perhaps, at the beginning of things. I came to believe there would be a document, a book, a certain book…called the onomasticon, the Dictionary of True Names. I came to believe I would find it, that I needed to find it. Once I could learn the right names for things, you understand, I would be able to decipher the puzzle. You understand?”
“You mean that if there had been different names for things once and we knew what those names were we could…know how things started?” Yarrel seemed bemused by this idea. “But we wouldn’t even understand those words.”
Windlow was patient. “We might. They might not be strange words, you see, only words used differently. Or, so I think. And as I read the old books, then older ones and older still, I saw that the meanings of words did change. I stopped being a Seer and became a Historian.” He mocked himself with pursed lips, as though we should not take him too seriously.
Silkhands, however, took everything seriously. “That is not a name in the Index, sir. I know all the names in the Index, every one, and that one is not among them…”
“I know,” he hushed her. “Of course, I know. But it could be there. It isn’t a strange word, you see. All of you know immediately what it means.”
Yarrel said, “Well, yes. Among the pawns there are vegetarians who believe in eating only vegetables. And librarians who believe in keeping books. So, an historian would be…someone who believes in…keeping history?”
“But it isn’t in the Index,” complained Silkhands. “It has nothing to do with Talents…”
“It really does,” said the old man. “It takes certain talents to read and study and remember.”
“Those aren’t Talents,” she said.
He shrugged. “Not in today’s world, no. But, in History they may have been talents. History. Of the Game. Of the world. Why is a King a King? Why are Sorcerers what they are? Who was the first Immutable, and why?”
“That’s religion,” I objected. “All of that is religion.”
“Well, lad, I thought not, you see. I thought that if one asked a question and then found a definite answer to that question it was most certainly not religion. I thought it was History. But then, most Gamesmen believe precisely as you do, so it turned out I was not a Historian, after all. I was a Heretic.”
I made the diagonal ward to reflect evil. I didn’t believe for a moment he was a Heretic, but it was the automatic thing to do. He didn’t have horns, for one thing, and his teeth didn’t drip with acid. Everyone knew that Heretics were like that. I found him smiling at me in a pitying sort of way which made me squirm.
“I don’t think you’re a Heretic,” I said. “I don’t.”
“That’s kind of you,” he said drily. “I do appreciate that. I wish the High King would accept your opinion as fact, but he is a very religious man. Still, perhaps if one sends enough Rancelmen into the world to find what is lost, one may come up with some answers. Now, I find myself suddenly very tired…”
So, we went away to let him nap in the sunshine among the herb-scent and the birdsong and the laundrywoman’s slap, slap, slap of wet clothes and the far-off call of the herdboys in the meadow.
“You know, I understand what he means about words meaning different things,” said Yarrel. “In the village when I was a child, when the Gamesmen marched in Game Array we called it ‘trampling death.’ In Mertyn’s House we learned to call it a Battle Demesne of the True Game.”