While the leaves were beading from the birch branches like tears of blood that the stream was carrying away, the seeds that Ulrick had planted in me during our journey slowly began to germinate. It was in the growing cold at the end of the year, in the spring of my tenth birthday, that my initiation to the profession of arms began for good. At first, it was so parsimonious that it was frustrating, and this frustration added to the increasingly volcanic wrath I felt for my teacher. I felt as if Ulrick was putting a deliberate brake on my learning, and in the few moments I could still devote to reflection, I came to guess his reasons. He knew of my hatred towards him, and assumed that my hatred would prevent me from learning. I cursed him while at the same time despising him even more, because on one hand I could not consider that he might be right, and on the other hand his attitude towards me had not changed at all. He was still feigning ignorance, which I found deeply insulting. After all, had I not seen through his game?

During our first moon on the plateau, when the days were inevitably getting shorter, the Val had divided our schedule into two distinct activities. For an hour every day, Ulrick taught me the basics of hand-to-hand wrestling. How to hit, and where, how to grasp, and where, how to receive a blow. During these very theoretical classes, he didn't touch me, and we didn't really fight.

Paradoxically, while in the evening his fists hit me for real, most of my frustration was born from that hour. From that short and tiny little hour. Ulrick often told me, when after dinner he had decorated me with a new bruise, that my bruise was a lesson and that I hadn't completed it. I had concluded that the hitting would stop when I finally got to touch him, and I was acutely aware of how the day's workouts were bringing me closer to that goal. Since I was only allowed one hour, not only was I progressing far too slowly for my liking, but I was also developing a more accurate understanding of my opponent's demoralizing level. This was precisely the core of my frustration.

Although, for intellectual comfort, I liked to blame Ulrick for that short hour, the frozen winter cohorts were now fast approaching, and we had to devote most of our days to building a proper shelter. Of the hundred or so birch trees growing on the plateau, Ulrick chopped down half of them with a hatchet, which was hard and exhausting work, even for him. In addition, we had few tools at our disposal: the worn hatchet, a small hand saw, a thick iron knife and a large wood drill. The autumnal rain soon found us again and, even though the cliff behind us sheltered us from most of the wind, the canvas was only a thin rampart against the assaults of the water.

Because we had to work regardless of the weather, we often found ourselves soaking wet to the bone for entire days. I was continuously cursing the rain, and when he was within earshot, dripping as he was, Ulrick would mockingly repeat to me, "You're not made of salt, Sletling, you won't melt." I stopped mumbling, and hated him a little more.

While Ulrick was in charge of the logging, my role was to peel the bark from the felled birch trees, which I cut into a tile shape before storing it a little higher up under the stones in the gully, to flatten it and prevent the wind from carrying away my cuts. It was a monotonous job that required a lot of concentration to avoid knife wounds, and I hated every moment of it, even though the Val had explained to me what a vital role my bark would play in the finalization of our construction. We managed to transform about three trees a day into squares of bark and large pale trunks of various sizes, in which the val-warrior patiently drilled a series of holes for future dowelling. In spite of the ill will with which I performed the tasks that the Val entrusted to me, the urgency of the growing cold and the miserable conditions in which we lived were enough for me to perform these chores properly. I could take refuge in the idea that I was working for my own comfort, and not because the warrior asked me to, which made it slightly less ungrateful to me.

Since we worked side by side most of the time, Ulrick took the opportunity to tell me about the history of his people and the customs of his country and, because it was the only entertainment I could rely on, I listened to him. He told me how the ancestors of the Vals had fled the cold lands of Svajölt and the tyranny of a despotic king nearly five hundred years earlier and detailed their semi-mythological journey through the sea of foam. After many adventures, the sea convoy had ended up stranded on a deserted coast near the mouth of a large river. There, the refugees had undertaken to establish their new home: Valheld, the free city. From this first stronghold, their influence had gradually spread over these fertile but deserted lands, east to the Denis River and the border with Carm, and more loosely toward west, to Rig, where they had built Hartemet to trade with the nomadic tribes of the region.

While I found the story of the Vals quite distracting, I found it harder to imagine their way of life, so far from what I already knew. The Vals, Ulrick confirmed, had neither lords nor chiefs, and even though the clans of the Basin had a similar way of functioning, I think I didn't really imagine what this could mean on the scale of an organized and sedentary civilization. Even more astonishing and elusive was the fact that they only used gold to trade outside their borders: between citizens of the Val country, there was no money, or even barter. Ulrick interspersed his stories with expressions, then whole sentences in his mother tongue, and I understood that his ultimate intention was to teach me his language in the same way that Narsilap had introduced me to Rajjan.

"The handful of lords who arrived from Svajölt with the refugees had no more land, and no more soldiers to defend their titles," the warrior told me on a rainy afternoon. We were working on the eastern edge of the plateau, close to the gullied slope that was going down to the trees in the valley. The Val spoke without taking his eyes off his work, while the rain soaked his braid. His words were chopped, because at the same time he was vigorously sawing the end of a felled birch tree. "A title is nothing when you wear the same rags as the potter or the peasant, when you have to row, fuck and shit among others, and row again, so you don't drown. And they knew what they were running away from, and what they didn't want anymore. The pyres and the old masters. They were thinkers of a new kind. Men who weren't afraid to proclaim their ignorance loud and clear. That was their strength."

I looked up and put down for a few moments the cold knife to try to ease the cramp that was knotting my fingers around the handle like the claws of a bird of prey. "Narsilap Ail Shuri taught me that ignorance is the lot of those who do not take the time to remedy it," I recited venomously, cutting off the speech of the Val. I don't really know what I was trying to accomplish by defying him in this way, perhaps the tense pain was referring to my bitterness towards him, but Ulrick answered me with a faint smile and he briefly stopped his work. "A beautiful idea, Sletling, but it was his certainties that prevented your rajjan from finding his place among us." I looked down. "I wonder why," I whispered sarcastically, tapping my mail to make the heavy drops fall out. To my disappointment, Ulrick's grin only widened. "It's one thing to seek knowledge, Sletling, it's another to believe that you've found it, and that anything you don't understand beyond that knowledge is the domain of the gods. This is not how knowledge progresses."

"It was his knowledge that saved your knee, Ulrick," I said in a surly voice. I didn't like the turn the discussion was taking, nor the contemptuous tone Ulrick used to talk about my murdered master. The Val stared at me with a penetrating gaze. "It's his knowledge, yes. But I didn't hear his prayers in your mouth," he said slowly. "I prayed, though," I replied, frowning, but Ulrick continued relentlessly. "When you make a tower of knowledge, it remains a dead and unfinished thing. True wisdom is a growing tree, Sletling. Living branches fall and are reborn. They have no limits, except those that we are willing to give them." I spat my disgust into the bent fescue. "It would be known if the warriors knew anything to wisdom," I said furiously in the crackling rain. Ulrick raised an eyebrow. "Before I'm a warrior, I'm a Val," he simply replied. "We have no one to be wise in our place. In Rajja they have their priests, and you have your primates."

"I'm not Brownian!" I replied vehemently, my wrath titillated by the amused calm of my interlocutor. "And nobody thinks in my place!" The Val sneered in his beard. My anger amused him and, curiously, seemed to satisfy him. "My mother was half Rigan, and my father had carmian blood," he replied softly. "Doesn't that make me a Val anyways? We are what we are, Sletling, as real as stones, and blood doesn't mean much in that. But you're right, you're not Brownian. You're already a mixture, and I intend to mix you up some more." Without finding anything to say to that, I crouched down angrily to resume my work. Ulrick was mixing me up, I had no doubt about it, and he wasn't done. In the distance, in the valley, a lightning bolt struck the streaming forest, and thunder roared like an avalanche of stones. I was cursing, shaking my mail again. "I'll tell you something about Narsilap Ail Shuri" continued Ulrick, who had started sawing again. "He didn't understand why life had to be more uncomfortable for a free man than it was for a serifan slave. When Cover-Pass offered him gold, he left. Not because he lacked anything at home, but because with his knowledge he thought he deserved more. And also because his stupid prayers made us laugh, when they were the only thing he had been able to keep from his home."

My blade rippled on the soaked bark, I hit myself while swearing with the handle of the knife. "Watch what you're doing," Ulrick warned me, but I raised my hand to chase away his words as I would have done to keep a midge away. "I would have left too. You were mocking a great man," I said in an accusing voice. The storm was approaching, another flash of lightning zapped the sky, and I was startled when the thunder slammed like a metal drum and echoed across the valley. "No one made fun of him, but surely at every turn someone must have been pissing on his beliefs. Me first, even when he sewed me up in Benkepp," Ulrick said, tapping his slit brow line. He put his saw down to stare at me. "A great man, no doubt," he finally said.

"But we were talking about wisdom. And it seems to me that the time is perfect for a demonstration of wisdom." He straightened up waving his leather cape like a wet dog shakes his coat, his eyes glistening, his face wrinkled with a dangerous smile. "Look closely, Sletling, because I'm going to show you the wisdom of a free Val." With these words he walked towards the approaching storm, threw the cape at his feet, spread his arms and stretched them out towards the sky. Water streamed down his face as he scanned the swollen clouds. I watched him without understanding, saw his chest swelling as he took a deep breath. The heavy drops were crackling all around him. Then Ulrick shouted towards the thunder. His cavernous voice bounced off the surrounding hillsides. "The gods are shit-eaters and morons!" he shouted.

"I shit on the Hunter and the pissing spirits of this forest! I shit on the old gods as well as the new ones! Fuck the Nine of Rajja! I wipe my ass with the Stareid! All of you, I shit on you!" Unbelieving, I began to hiccup in terror, before falling on my knees, but the Val continued his unholy diatribe. I ended up taking refuge against the soggy ground, my rigid fingers stuck in the red carpet of dead leaves where I wanted to transform myself into water, disappear in the humus, and fear gripped me as close as a lover. Yet I was unable to turn away from the show.

Ulrick had gone crazy. I expected to see, at any moment, lightning and fire consuming him, a horde of vengeful ghosts coming out of the woods to make him pay for his slanders, and I feared the fate they would then reserve for me.

The Val spread his arms further apart and finally exclaimed: "Blast me! Hit me if you can!" A bolt of lightning lit up the heights on the other side of the valley, and the warrior kept shouting again and again. The voice of the Val became hoarse from shouting, and in front of him, in a dark procession, the black clouds passed between the heights. Eventually, the thunderstorm disappeared, rumbling toward the Brown. Ulrick had not moved, but he was no longer screaming, a frozen statue of dripping flesh that scanned the sky with its head held high and victorious. Finally, when the worst was over, he turned to me. When he saw me crouching by the felled birch tree, trying to become one with the earth, he laughed out loud. His laughter pulled me out of the mud and leaves, and I got up, ashamed and confused at the same time. The Val came to me, pointing to himself with his hand to let me know that nothing had happened to him. "So?" he mocked. "What did you learn?"

I stared at him in disbelief, not knowing whether he was proclaiming a luminous truth or absolute madness. "I learned that the gods don't care about insults," I said in a strangled voice. Ulrick shook his head. "Bullshit, Sletling. If gods exist and they are what men say they are, I should have died today. Then either the gods are not what men say they are, or they don't exist at all. The only wisdom that can exist here is that we don't know. The first thinkers I was telling you about earlier understood this. We call their philosophy the Padekke, and it's the foundation of the Val country as it exists today. Padekke is the difference between knowledge and belief. Believing that one knows is ignorant. Knowing that one believes is not. The wise man is able to discern the nuances between what he knows and what he believes, because belief is the most dangerous form of ignorance. The vaïdogans have never been defeated because we reason this way. This is the first lesson a Val child learns. Admitting one's own ignorance is a demonstration of strength."

I listened to Ulrick attentively, despite the anger, for the first time in weeks. "I don't see what this has to do with Narsi. He said himself that there were things he couldn't heal. He lost his hand for that," I argued plainly. Ulrick nodded before retorting softly. "Yes, but he was blaming everything on the intervention of his nine gods. And before their merchants brought back the mad-care from Three-Islands, or the treatises of ancient Bessan, other surgeons of Rajja must have said the same thing. It's not an admission of ignorance to declare the gods responsible, Sletling. It just means that we don't know. For sure, your Rajjan had a great deal of knowledge, but the rest, what he thought he knew, was no more than shit in a bucket."

"I prayed and your leg healed," I insisted in a dark voice. "Narsi was right." "Bullshit," replied the Var in a louder voice. "You treated my leg and it healed." He leaned back to methodically wring out his long salt and pepper braid. "Why would any of the gods I shit on would save my leg, Sletling?" he concluded. I shook my head stubbornly because the loss of Narsi was still painful, but I was so confused that I could find no answer. Ulrick tried to soothe me one last time, which only made my feelings about him swell. "Still, it was your Rajjan I was looking for to fix my leg, Sletling," he said. "The truth be told, despite his stupid prayers, he was an excellent surgeon, and I was lucky that he made you his student. It wasn't prayers that saved my leg. It was your hands and his knowledge."

I sniffed under my cloak so as not to cry, while hating the Val for having been able to conjure weakness in me. My jaw tightened, I bitterly bent over the slippery bark, imagining Ulrick's scarred face under the point of the knife.