He was sent from the table, in disgrace. Doctrine was clear on that point. Humans had always lived on Northshore and had always been governed by the gods. His bibulous remark was occasion for a loud, screaming battle among the Dons and the Stifes. Two days later when he returned home from a foray, he found a young woman named Shreeley at the table. He had seen her before. Not often. She was the daughter of a friend of his father’s, a pamet merchant from the other side of Bans.
“Your wife-to-be,” his father said in a stiff, unrelenting voice. “You have had entirely too much time on your hands to sit around dreaming up obscenities.”
Tharius Don was more amused than anything else. The girl wasn’t bad looking; she had a sweet, rounded body, and Tharius Don had had some experience with sweet, rounded bodies. It would not be a bad thing to have one of his own to play with. What he had not foreseen was the sudden loss of privacy. No more attic room. He had only time to hide the books before all his belongings were swept up and reinstalled in a room two stories below, one he would share. And after that, he found it difficult to be alone for a moment.
Shreeley made sure of that. She slept with him. She rose with him in the morning and walked with him to the job his grandparents Stife had obtained for him. “You show none of the family talent for art, Tharius Don,” said Stife grandfather. “We have apprenticed you, therefore, to Shreeley’s father, the pamet merchant.”
“I thought it was custom for young people to choose their own professions,” Tharius complained.
“Had you done so in your fifteenth or sixteenth year, as is also customary, we would have acceded to your choice, Tharius Don. Since you did not do so, you lost that opportunity.”
Shreeley came to walk home with him after work. She ate with him. She sat with him or walked with him after dinner. Went to bed with him. He tried to read one of his books only once, but Shreeley caught him at it. “Read to me,” she begged sweetly. “Read to me, Tharius Don.” He made up something about Thoulia, and she fell asleep while he was reciting. He hid the book away, sweat standing on his brow.
Still, for a time it was not impossible. Sex was more than merely amusing. Tharius had a great deal of imagination about sex, and Shreeley was compliant. Until she became pregnant, at which time everything stopped.
“No,” she said. “It might hurt the baby.”
“It won’t hurt the baby. And you like it.”
“I don’t like it. I only did it to get pregnant and comply with the laws, Tharius Don. I hope you don’t think I enjoyed all that heaving about.”
“Shreeley’s father says you have been neglecting your duties,” his father admonished. “With a baby on the way, you’d better start attending to business.”
It was that night Tharius Don went to the Tower of Baris and begged admittance as a novice. When the family learned of it, they never spoke of him again. When Tharius’s son was born, they named him Birald. When Tharius heard of it he uttered a heartfelt wish for the boy’s sanity, but without much hope considering that he, Tharius, might be losing his own.
He had sacrificed everything in hope of books, and there were no books in the Tower except those of a shameless falsity and unmitigated dullness. There were no books, and there was no leaving the Tower. For a time Tharius considered killing himself, but he could not think of any foolproof way to do it. And as time wore on, one factor of Tower existence saved him—the rigid, unvarying discipline which allowed much time for thought. Tharius was in the habit of thought. And as the months wore away, he began to find links in the behavior and beliefs of the Awakeners to things he knew from books.
And he saw early on a thing that many in that place never saw. He saw that the seniors did not believe what the juniors were told tobelieve.