out like a bird.
“Deity! What have you done, boy? Idiot! Hooligan! You’ve
broken the eyepiece, and how I am ever going to remove it, let alone grind a
replacement…” I was about to tell him I was glad if I had, but his attitude was so much
that of outraged innocence that I was losing faith in my own inductions, and I merely stood
stubborn. If this were not a brass gun aimed at Sordaling, I could not guess what it was. Then the
charcoal fell out from where I had wedged it and Powl gave a great groan of relief. He put his eye
to and made the sort of face one makes when looking hard. He twisted the adjustment.
He began to laugh, with great good humor. Then he bade me look through. At last he told me what an astronomical observatory was.
So I failed my first test and failed it spectacularly, and by all rights Powl should have booted me out the door then and there. He was always an inexplicable man, however, and as soon as he assured himself that my monkeying had not destroyed either the telescope nor the roof mechanism, he sat down on the platform steps and asked me to explain to him how I had concluded that the thing was a cannon aimed at the city. I remember, sitting lower, as I was, that his shoes were glossy, caramel brown with gold threads in the laces.
I showed him the marks on the gears and explained how the sun’s disappearance from its obvious path of descent had clued me to the dome’s movement, and how the blockage (opaque, once past the test of charcoal) had led me to understand that the tube was hollow but closed at this end, and how the geography of the hill conspired to allow the tube to point straight down at the lamps of Sordaling and almost nowhere else, except at the empty sky. It had seemed obvious that no man would build such an enormous thing to look up into the empty sky.
Powl congratulated me at having been so brilliantly wrong. In this he seemed (most unlike him) not ironical at all. That morning he set me the task of sitting still and thinking seriously about the twin concepts of what was obvious and what was empty.
Perhaps if I had been easier to live with, Powl might have stopped more in the observatory with me, but I was nineteen, and the joints of my body were so fluid (so it seems, looking back) that it was less difficult to keep moving than it was to pause. Besides, I was totally unpracticed in the art of sitting still and very used to being kept hopping. I would begin the morning before light, getting wood for the stove, and by the time my teacher came to the five-hundred-weight door, I would have bathed and had breakfast ready—Powl’s second breakfast, I suspected, though I did not dare ask.
Then he would set me to some bodily endeavor: sword forms or dancing strapped with meal sacks fore and aft or beating three over four on my knees, while he sat in the doorway and read a book brought with him for that purpose. Afterward, with the noon sun squeezing in through the high windows to whiten the dusty air, he would lecture on the subject of optics. I was not to take notes, but to remember.
My responses to this branch of his curriculum were predictable. First I would twitch, then I would wiggle, and finally I would fall asleep. If free, I would paw the prisms and sample blanks from hand to hand and roll them down my knees until they were so covered with finger grease and woolen lint they were useless for illustration, and if tied (Powl resorted to tying me to the platform banister), I found myself subject to loud, distracting spells of asthma.
My teacher was alarmed, and though I do not blame him, I think he must have had very little experience with boys. By the end of the first week he had shelved optics in favor of teaching me to sit still and listen. Another few days and he decided to concentrate further: on sitting still.
“Nazhuret, I have a simple assignment for you,” he said, “I can guarantee you success in it.” We had been sparring with sword balks wrapped in
“Deity! What have you done, boy? Idiot! Hooligan! You’ve
broken the eyepiece, and how I am ever going to remove it, let alone grind a
replacement…” I was about to tell him I was glad if I had, but his attitude was so much
that of outraged innocence that I was losing faith in my own inductions, and I merely stood
stubborn. If this were not a brass gun aimed at Sordaling, I could not guess what it was. Then the
charcoal fell out from where I had wedged it and Powl gave a great groan of relief. He put his eye
to and made the sort of face one makes when looking hard. He twisted the adjustment.
He began to laugh, with great good humor. Then he bade me look through. At last he told me what an astronomical observatory was.
So I failed my first test and failed it spectacularly, and by all rights Powl should have booted me out the door then and there. He was always an inexplicable man, however, and as soon as he assured himself that my monkeying had not destroyed either the telescope nor the roof mechanism, he sat down on the platform steps and asked me to explain to him how I had concluded that the thing was a cannon aimed at the city. I remember, sitting lower, as I was, that his shoes were glossy, caramel brown with gold threads in the laces.
I showed him the marks on the gears and explained how the sun’s disappearance from its obvious path of descent had clued me to the dome’s movement, and how the blockage (opaque, once past the test of charcoal) had led me to understand that the tube was hollow but closed at this end, and how the geography of the hill conspired to allow the tube to point straight down at the lamps of Sordaling and almost nowhere else, except at the empty sky. It had seemed obvious that no man would build such an enormous thing to look up into the empty sky.
Powl congratulated me at having been so brilliantly wrong. In this he seemed (most unlike him) not ironical at all. That morning he set me the task of sitting still and thinking seriously about the twin concepts of what was obvious and what was empty.
Perhaps if I had been easier to live with, Powl might have stopped more in the observatory with me, but I was nineteen, and the joints of my body were so fluid (so it seems, looking back) that it was less difficult to keep moving than it was to pause. Besides, I was totally unpracticed in the art of sitting still and very used to being kept hopping. I would begin the morning before light, getting wood for the stove, and by the time my teacher came to the five-hundred-weight door, I would have bathed and had breakfast ready—Powl’s second breakfast, I suspected, though I did not dare ask.
Then he would set me to some bodily endeavor: sword forms or dancing strapped with meal sacks fore and aft or beating three over four on my knees, while he sat in the doorway and read a book brought with him for that purpose. Afterward, with the noon sun squeezing in through the high windows to whiten the dusty air, he would lecture on the subject of optics. I was not to take notes, but to remember.
My responses to this branch of his curriculum were predictable. First I would twitch, then I would wiggle, and finally I would fall asleep. If free, I would paw the prisms and sample blanks from hand to hand and roll them down my knees until they were so covered with finger grease and woolen lint they were useless for illustration, and if tied (Powl resorted to tying me to the platform banister), I found myself subject to loud, distracting spells of asthma.
My teacher was alarmed, and though I do not blame him, I think he must have had very little experience with boys. By the end of the first week he had shelved optics in favor of teaching me to sit still and listen. Another few days and he decided to concentrate further: on sitting still.
“Nazhuret, I have a simple assignment for you,” he said, “I can guarantee you success in it.” We had been sparring with sword balks wrapped in
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