Alta

“I suppose I can count on the fact that you read your assigned scroll?”

He sounded as if he meant the opposite, that he could count on Orest not having read the scroll.

“It is fifteen stanzas in praise of Te-oth, the god of scribes and the bringer of writing to mankind,” Orest replied, taking his seat on the cushion, and settling his desk on his lap. Kiron followed his example, a little awkwardly. “There are two initial stanzas about Te-oth specifically, several on how much a blessing writing and being able to write are, several more in praise of the profession of scribes and contrasting that profession with the misery of all others. I did notice that the author did not mention either Jouster or Councilor to the Great Ones as being inferior to the position of scribe, however.”

“Ah, but a Jouster is a sort of soldier, and a Councilor to the Great Ones has had to learn the craft of the scribe, so they are implied,” Arit retorted.

Orest shrugged. “The final two stanzas praise Te-oth for being the god who most consistently blesses mankind.”

All during this recitation, the tutor’s left eyebrow rose until it had climbed halfway up his forehead. “Well,” he said, when Orest was finished. “I must admit I am pleasantly surprised. If this new diligence is as a result of your association with my new pupil, I am going to revise my initial negative expectations of his influence on you. And as a reward—” Here he bent down, removed the jar of scrolls that had been at Orest’s side, and replaced it with a different one. “—here is literature you will find much more to your liking. Pick any of the three, you’ll be reading all of them and more eventually. I want you to read and then copy each of them, and since you will be needing them in your new career, I suggest you be more careful than you usually are in your copying.”

At that, Orest eagerly plucked a scroll out of the jar, unrolled it, and began scanning it. His face lit up. “Te- karna’s Natural History of Swamp Dragons! Thank you, Master!”

“Don’t thank me, thank your sister,” said the tutor, “and the Lord of Jousters. She’s the one who suggested that you would probably be more attentive if you were to concentrate on this particular subject, and she is the one who ran over after Dawn Rites with these scrolls borrowed from the temple librarian. What is more, by this time she has already spoken to the Lord of the Jousters about getting the loan of more scrolls. I fully expect him to agree. I believe he will be charmed by her audacity, which is just as well, since he is a man whom I would not care to cross.”

“Nor I,” Kiron murmured, earning himself a glance of approval from the tutor.

Orest’s face was a study in shock and chagrin. “I guess I owe her my thanks,” he said slowly.

“And an apology,” Kiron muttered, feeling as if Aket-ten was due more respect from her brother than he had seen. He had been very patronizing last night, even if she had been acting like a know-it-all, and this was how she had responded.

“You owe her more than that. You owe her the courtesy of being diligent from now on. Now, get to your work.” The tutor made an impatient gesture.

“And remember when it comes to your copying, if you mar the original—”

“—you have Father’s permission to beat me,” Orest said, with an air of having heard that before.

“No. I have the temple librarian’s orders to beat you until you will have to stand to eat,” the tutor said grimly. “She said, ‘A boy’s brains are in his buttocks; he learns better when beaten.’ I suggest that it would prove wise to take extra care and not force me to prove that theorem.”

Kiron was very glad that he’d had so much practice in keeping his feelings from showing, or he would probably have destroyed this new friendship by laughing at the expression on Orest’s face until he was sick.

But now it was his turn, as Orest bent over the scroll and the tutor turned to him. “So, boy, what do you know?”

“Nothing, master,” Kiron replied truthfully. “Or practically nothing. The little script I know is Tian.”

“Ah, chicken scratches.” The tutor dismissed Tian writing with an airy wave of his hand. “Just as well, then, you have nothing to unlearn. Well, here is your scroll, and here is a box of potsherds, and this is your pen. Take your scroll, and lay it out before you with the weights.”

It was a very short scroll, and fit perfectly across the top of his lap-desk. The weights were handsome ones, carved pale-brown soapstone images of—such a coincidence—the god Te-oth, in his bird-headed human form, his long, curved ibis bill poking out from beneath his wig.

“That’s right,” the tutor said approvingly. “Now take your pen in your hand as you see Orest doing. Good. Dip it in the ink. Not so much that you will drip, not so little that you will make an unreadable scratch.”

That was a little trickier; the reed pen had to be dipped several times before the tutor was happy.

“Now,” he said, pointing to the first symbol on the scroll with a longer reed. “This is aht.”

Slowly, the tutor took Kiron through the signs and hieratic shapes for the sounds of words. There were a great many of them, but fortunately the signs were all things that were easy to recognize, pictures of things which began with the sound in question, and the hieratic shapes were each a kind of sketch of that picture. Slowly, and with infinite care, he copied the hieratic shapes onto his potsherds. Over and over and over. When he came to the end of the scroll, he was required to go back to the beginning and copy again, forming the sound in his mind as he did so, melding shape, picture, and sound in his head. When he ran out of potsherds, it came as no great surprise to him that the tutor had another box ready for him. Bits of broken pottery were the logical thing to use to practice on; there were always plenty of them, and they served much better than precious papyrus.

It was harder work than it sounded, and by the time the lesson was over, he had a much greater respect for scribes than he had ever had before. Such a lot of shapes! He was certain he would never get them all right. And somehow, he was going to learn how to put those shapes together into words, and words into meaning. . . . Well, if Orest could manage, so could he.

Now he understood why the work of scribes was so important. Words, written words, must be magic, it took so much effort to set them down correctly. And he wondered, did scribes define the world and keep it from spinning off into other shapes with their hedge of words?

He was absolutely so mind-weary by the time the tutor declared that they were finished that he felt as if he had just done a week’s worth of work in a mere morning—

But there were, it seemed, to be a new set of lessons to replace the “mathematica” lessons that Orest had so despised.

As Orest carefully rolled up his scroll, and Kiron capped his pot of ink, the tutor addressed them both. “This will be something new for both of you, I think. You, Kiron, should have no difficulties, even injured as you are, but it is the opinion of the Lord of the Jousters that you, Orest, are in need of conditioning before you undertake to tame a dragon. Therefore, you are both to follow me, now, and I am to deliver you to the kymnasi.”

Now Kiron had not the faintest idea what the tutor was talking about; this was an Altan word that he had never heard before. But Orest looked considerably happier at that moment, so Kiron assumed that whatever it meant, it was not going to involve more scrolls and pens.

The tutor marched them out of the room, through several of the house’s public rooms, and straight out the door.

This was the first time that Kiron had been outside of Lord Ya-tiren’s house, for the ash pit where he took Avatre was well inside the garden walls. This was certainly the first time he had seen Alta City except for fleeting glances as he guided Avatre in that tricky bit of a hop, and he had to stop dead in his tracks and just look for a moment.

Lord Ya-tiren’s home was evidently in one of the outer rings of the city and stood, like its neighbors, on the top of a ridge. The ground sloped away toward the canal from this point. From here, Kiron got a good look at the area surrounding this—well, it was a minor palace, apparently. It stood among other fine homes; to the left was another palace like it, and to the right was a temple surrounded by a walled garden. He suspected that this was the temple to which Aket-ten was attached as a Nestling. These structures all stood along one side of a spacious avenue wide enough for several chariots to pass side by side. Beyond the avenue was one of the seven canals that ringed the city, and on the other side of the canal were more buildings, which seemed to be a bit smaller and crowded more closely together than those on this side of the canal. But beyond that, in the distance, was the heart and core of the city, a hill upon which the Palace of the Great Ones stood, as well as the Great Temple of Khum the Light-Bringer, and several other important buildings and temples. Built of alabaster and limestone, they shone in the