Lezek looked sideways at his brother, who was staring fixedly at the sky.
'I did hear you'd got a place going up at your farm, Hamesh,' he said.
'Ah. Got an apprentice in, didn't I?'
'Ah,' said Lezek gloomily, 'when was that, then?'
'Yesterday,' said his brother, lying with rattlesnake speed. 'All signed and sealed. Sorry. Look, I got nothing against young Mort, see, he's as nice a boy as you could wish to meet, it's just that —'
'I know, I know,' said Lezek. 'He couldn't find his arse with both hands.'
They stared at the distant figure. It had fallen over. Some pigeons had waddled over to inspect it.
'He's not stupid, mind,' said Hamesh. 'Not what you'd call stupid.'
'There's a brain there all right,' Lezek conceded. 'Sometimes he starts thinking so hard you has to hit him round the head to get his attention. His granny taught him to read, see. I reckon it overheated his mind.'
Mort had got up and tripped over his robe.
'You ought to set him to a trade,' said Hamesh, reflectively. 'The priesthood, maybe. Or wizardry. They do a lot of reading, wizards.'
They looked at each other. Into both their minds stole an inkling of what Mort might be capable of if he got his well-meaning hands on a book of magic.
'All right,' said Hamesh hurriedly. 'Something else, then. There must be lots of things he could turn his hand to.'
'He starts thinking too much, that's the trouble,' said Lezek. 'Look at him now. You don't think about how to scare birds, you just does it. A normal boy, I mean.'
Hamesh scratched his chin thoughtfully.
'It could be someone else's problem,' he said.
Lezek's expression did not alter, but there was a subtle change around his eyes.
'How do you mean?' he said.
'There's the hiring fair at Sheepridge next week. You set him as a prentice, see, and his new master'll have the job of knocking him into shape. 'Tis the law. Get him indentured, and 'tis binding.'
Lezek looked across the field at his son, who was examining a rock.
'I wouldn't want anything to happen to him, mind,' he said doubtfully. 'We're quite fond of him, his mother and me. You get used to people.'
'It'd be for his own good, you'll see. Make a man of him.'
'Ah. Well. There's certainly plenty of raw material,' sighed Lezek.
Mort was getting interested in the rock. It had curly shells in it, relics of the early days of the world when the Creator had made creatures out of stone, no-one knew why.
Mort was interested in lots of things. Why people's teeth fitted together so neatly, for example. He'd given that one a lot of thought. Then there was the puzzle of why the sun came out during the day, instead of at night when the light would come in useful. He knew the standard explanation, which somehow didn't seem satisfying.
In short, Mort was one of those people who are more dangerous than a bag full of rattlesnakes. He was determined to discover the underlying logic behind the universe.
Which was going to be hard, because there wasn't one. The Creator had a lot of remarkably good ideas when he put the world together, but making it understandable hadn't been one of them.
Tragic heroes always moan when the gods take an interest in them, but it's the people the gods ignore who get the really tough deals.
His father was yelling at him, as usual. Mort threw the rock at a pigeon, which was almost too full to lurch out of the way, and wandered back across the field.
And that was why Mort and his father walked down through the mountains into Sheepridge on Hogswatch Eve, with Mort's rather sparse possessions in a sack on the back of a donkey. The town wasn't much more than four sides to a cobbled square, lined with shops that provided all the service industry of the farming community.