Be sure I had never asked him again how he intended to use me. He made it clear enough, and between pride and fear and longing I fought to learn all that I could be taught, and to open myself for the power which was all I could give him. If he had wanted a prophet ready to hand he must have been disappointed; I saw nothing of importance during this time. Knowledge, I suppose, blocked the gates of vision. But this was the time for knowledge; I studied with Belasius till I outran him, learning, as he had never done, how to apply the calculations which to him were as much an art as songs were to me; even songs, indeed, I was to use. I spent long hours in the street of the engineers, and had frequently to be dragged by a grumbling Cadal from some oily piece of practical work which unfitted me, as he said, for any company but a bath-slave’s. I wrote down, too, all I could remember of Galapas’ medical teaching, and added practical experience by helping the army doctors whenever I could. I had the freedom of the camp and the town, and with Ambrosius’ name to back me I took to this freedom like a hungry young wolf to his first full meal. I learned all the time, from every man or woman I met. I looked, as I had promised, in the light and the dark, at the sunshine and at the stale pool. I went with Ambrosius to the shrine of Mithras below the farmstead, and with Belasius to the gatherings in the forest. I was even allowed to sit silently at meetings between the Count and his captains, though nobody pretended that I would ever be much use in the field “unless,” said Uther once, half amused, half malicious, “he is to stand above us like Joshua holding the sun back, to give us more time to do the real work. Though joking apart, he might do worse . . . the men seem to think of him as something halfway between a Courier of Mithras and a splinter of the True Cross—saving your presence, brother—and I’m damned certain he’d be more use stuck up on a hill like a lucky charm where they can see him, than down in the field where he wouldn’t last five minutes.” He had even more to say when, at the age of sixteen, I stopped the daily sword practice which gave a man the minimum training in self-defence; but my father merely laughed and said nothing. I think he knew, though as yet I did not, that I had my own kind of protection.