away from the others. I missed the easy, lazy companionship of fishing with my uncle or with the young men, talking with Tisso and other girls, watching the boat builders, cutting reeds, planting ricegrass, the slow day rhythm that I had lived in for a year now, often bored into a kind of trance, but never unhappy.
I went out fishing daily here, and we often kept half the catch for ourselves, for the women provided few vegetables, little meal, no fruit. I certainly would have been willing to fry up our catch or make fish cakes with the coarse meal the women ground, but for a village man to cook would turn society inside out and upside down and make me an outcast from my people forever. As it was, Dorod and I ate a good deal of fish raw, as I'd done with Ammeda, but we didn't have any horseradish to give it a kick. Nobody here shot birds; they were forbidden in this village as sacred creatures—hassa—wild goose, duck, swan, and heron. Little freshwater clams, delicious and very common here, were a staple of the local diet, but they became poisonous at rare, unpredictable intervals; Dorod forbade himself and me to eat them.
Temec told me that Dorod's previous novice, a child, had died of the shellfish poisoning three years ago.
Dorod and I did not get on well. My heart is not naturally rebellious, and I wanted very much to learn what he could teach me about my power, but I'd learned to distrust my own trustfulness. Dorod demanded absolute trust. He gave me arbitrary orders and expected silent obedience. I questioned the reason for each act. He refused to answer. I refused to obey.
This went on for a half month or so. One morning he instructed me to spend the entire day kneeling in the hut with my eyes shut, saying the word erru. Two days earlier I had done just that. I told him I couldn't kneel that long again, my knees were still too painful from the last time. He said, "You must do as I say," and went off.
I'd had enough. I made up my mind to walk back round the lake to East Lake Village.
He came back into the hut and found me knotting up the little bundle of my belongings in the old brown blanket, which my uncle's cat Prut had nearly worn to shreds by kneading it with his claws before he went to sleep on it.
"Gavir, you cannot go," he said, and I said, "What can I learn if you keep me in ignorance?"
"The seerman is the guide. It is his burden and task to carry the mystery for the seer."
He spoke, as he often did, pompously, but I felt he believed what he said.
"Not this seer," I said. "I need to know what I'm doing and why I should do it. You want blind obedience. Why should a seer be blind?"
"The seer of visions must be guided," Dorod said. "How can he guide himself? He gets lost among the visions. He doesn't know whether he lives now or years ago or in years to come! You yourself, though you've barely begun to travel in time, have felt that. No one can walk that path by himself, unguided."
"My aunt Gegemer—"
"An ambamer!" Dorod said. "Women, babbling nonsense, screeching and screaming, seeing useless glimpses of things they don't understand. Phoh! A seer is trained and guided, he serves his clan and people, he is a man of value. I can make you a man of value. I know the secrets, the techniques, the sacred ways. Without a seerman a seer is no better than a woman!"
"Well, maybe I am no better than a woman," I said. "But I'm not a child. You treat me as a child."
New ideas came hard to Dorod, as perhaps they do to most villagers and tribesmen, but he could listen, he could think, and he was extremely, almost unnaturally, sensitive to mood and hint. What I said struck him hard.
He said nothing for a while and finally asked, "How old are you, Gavir?"
"About seventeen."
"Seers are trained young. Ubec, whom I was training, was only twelve when he died. And I took him when he was seven." He spoke slowly, thinking as he spoke. "You are an initiated man. A child can be trained to obey in all things."
"I was well trained in trust and obedience," I said with some bitterness. "As a child. Now I want to know