So I learned from everyone; the old women who gathered plants and cobwebs and seaweeds for healing; the travelling pedlars and quack healers; the horse doctors, the soothsayers, the priests. I listened to the soldiers’ talk outside the taverns, and the officers’ talk in my father’s house, and the boys’ talk in the streets. But there was one thing about which I learned nothing: by the time I left Brittany at seventeen, I was still ignorant of women. When I thought about them—which happened often enough—I told myself that I had no time, that there was a lifetime still ahead of me for such things, and that now I had work to do which mattered more. But I suppose the plain truth is that I was afraid of them. So I lost my desires in work, and indeed, I believe now that the fear came from the god.

So I waited, and minded my own business, which—as I saw it then—was to fit myself to serve my father.

*   *   *

One day I was in Tremorinus’ workshop. Tremorinus, the master engineer, was a pleasant man who allowed me to learn all I could from him, gave me space in the workshops, and material to experiment with. This particular day I remember how when he came into the workshop and saw me busy over a model at my corner bench, he came over to have a look at it. When he saw what I was doing he laughed.

“I’d have thought there were plenty of those around without troubling to put up any more.”

“I was interested in how they got them there.” I tilted the scale model of the standing stone back into place.

He looked surprised. I knew why. He had lived in Less Britain all his life, and the landscape there is so seamed with the stones that men do not see them any more. One walks daily through a forest of stone, and to most men it seems dead stone . . . But not to me. To me they still said something, and I had to find out what; but I did not tell Tremorinus this. I added, merely: “I was trying to work it out to scale.”

“I can tell you something straight away: that’s been tried, and it doesn’t work.” He was looking at the pulley I had rigged to lift the model. “That might do for the uprights, but only the lighter ones, and it doesn’t work at all for the cap-stones.”

“No. I’d found that out. But I’d had an idea . . . I was going to tackle it another way.”

“You’re wasting your time. Let’s see you getting down to something practical, something we need and can use. Now, that idea of yours for a light mobile crane might be worth developing . . .’