out. "That I went to school in Mesun, where the University is, and came down to Asion because there are too many scholars in Urdile, and the pay's better in Bendile."
"There'd be scholars there from the University who'd say no, that boy was never there."
"Hundreds of people go to the colleges. They can't all know one another."
I argued hard, but he shook his big curly head, and his laugh changed to a grimmer look. "Listen, Gav, I tell you a learned man stands out. And you're already famous. The lads talk as they go about, you know, winning folk in the villages and towns to come here to join us. They boast of you. We've got a fellow, they say, that can speak any tale or poem that was ever made! And only a boy yet, a wonder of the world! Well, you can't go to Asion with a name like that hanging about you."
I stared at him. "My name? Do they say my name?"
"They say the name you gave us," he said, untroubled.
Of course he, and everyone else but Chamry Bern, assumed that "Gav" was a false name. Nobody here, not even Barna, used the name he'd had as a slave.
As Barna saw my expression, his changed. "Oh, by the Destroyer," he said. "You kept the name you had in Etra?"
I nodded.
"Well," he said after a minute, "if you ever do leave, take a new one! But that's all the more reason for me to say stay here! Your old masters may have sent word around that their clever slave boy they'd spent so much money educating ran off. They hate to let a runaway escape. It gripes them to the soul. We're a good way from Etra here, but you never know."
I'd never given a thought to pursuit. When I left the graveyard and walked up the Nisas, it was a death. I had walked away from everything, into nothing, going nowhere. I had no fear, then, because I had no desire. As I began to live again, here, I still had no fear. I'd gone so far in my own mind that it never occurred to me that anyone from the old life would follow me.
"They think I'm dead," I said at last. "They think I drowned myself that morning."
"Why would they think that?"
I was silent.
I hadn't told Barna anything about my life. I'd never spoken of it to anyone but Diero.
"You left some clothing on the riverbank, eh?" he said. "Well, they might have fallen for that old trick. But you were a valuable property. If your owners think you might be alive, they'll have their ears open. It's been only a year or two, right? Don't ever think you're safe—except here! And you might tell the lads you came from Pagadi or Piram, so that they don't say Etra if they speak of you, eh?"
"I will," I said, humbled.
Had there been no end to my stupidity? No limit to the patience Luck had had with me?
But I did repeat my request to go into Asion. Barna said, "You're a free man, Gav. I give you no orders! But I tell you, it's not time yet for you to go. You wouldn't be safe. Your being in Asion now could endanger others there, and the whole scheme of the Uprising. When the time comes for you to go there, I'll tell you. Before then, if you go, you go against my heart."
I couldn't argue with that.
In early spring a couple of newcomers arrived, runaways from a household in Asion, who came hidden in a goods wagon driven by netmen. They brought with them, stolen from their masters' house, a good sum of money and a long box. "What's this stuff?" asked one of Barna's men who opened the box, holding up a scroll so that it slipped from the rod and unrolled at his feet. "Cloth, is it?"
"It's what I asked for, man," said Barna. "It's a book. Now take care with it!" He had indeed requested his netmen to bring books. Nobody had brought any until now, most of our recruits—and recruiters—being illiterate and having no idea where to look for books or even, like this fellow, what a book looked like.
The new pair of runaways were educated, one trained in accounting, the other in recitation. The books were a motley lot, some scrolls, some paged and bound; but all could be useful for teaching, and one was a treasure to me—a little, elegantly printed