Since I am beginning my notes here, and since it has been suggested that I write down everything as a personal history as well as a record of Malcolm's teachings, perhaps it would not be entirely out of place if I were to give a brief account of how it came to be that Malcolm and I are together. That is, after all, the most important thing that has happened having to do with the two of us. Without our coming together, none of the other events would have come about. I do not know if Malcolm means for me to include that sort of history, but as long as the supply of parchment upon which I write holds out, and as long as I find the time to add to these notes each day, I will put down here what seems to be of the greatest importance to me. If my master wishes to instruct me to do otherwise, then otherwise I will do.

In the village of my birth there is no such thing as magic, but then in truth there is very little of anything whatsoever there, other than a bare struggle for survival under the meanest of human conditions. When it comes to magic, however, there is a very good reason why it does not exist there, for the local priests and the constables, acting together, have intentionally and effectively banned it utterly from all human activity.

Not that they can entirely root out such simple country charms as hanging horseshoes over the doorways to ward off those evil spirits who are alleged to be allergic to that cold metal, or the growing of pots of basil in houses to keep away pestilential vapors and disease-carrying demons, or any of the other tasks that the people insist upon performing as a means of protecting themselves from harm. The current priest, a bitter-tongued and fanatical man named Dampster, with a knobby, oversized head and a withered, bent body hidden beneath the black, coarse robes of his office, has done everything in his power to prevent it. Every year without fail the people still set out flowers in the spring and dishes of dried fruits and vegetables in the fall for the dead. But for the most part the priesthood and the secular authorities between them have done all that they possibly can to make certain that there are no practitioners of the magical arts anywhere under their control.

Some of my earliest memories are of sitting on the hard, unyielding wooden benches in the village temple, listening to Dampster or one of his underlings giving the message for that evening. It was a tradition in that village that all of the people should gather in the temple every nightfall for a religious service. It was simply not done for any to fail to be there, short of an emergency equal to a lying-in-bed illness. They railed at the powers of darkness as they were said to manifest in the skills and practices of magicians, sorcerers, witches, and evil wizards.

As clearly as if it were only yesterday, I remember the tight, angry, thin-lipped expression on Dampster's face as he snarled and cursed at those who engaged in such nefarious practices. Perhaps it is partly my imagination, but I seem to recall the mass shudders of horror that passed through the congregation as the withered priest warned them against the virtually omnipotent forces of darkness. They were, as he described it, lurking outdoors at that very moment, virtually scratching at the windows of the small temple trying to get in so that they could defile everyone within.

Considering that background, the reader might wonder how it could possibly be that I came to be apprenticed to one of those horrible, black-hearted wizards instead of fleeing in terror from his very approach. If I had a simple answer to that question I would give it, but all I can say is, whatever message Dampster and his fellow priests were giving, it seemed not to stick; in my case at least.

Admittedly, I can remember, as a small child, lying in the near-dark on the small cot my parents set up for me every night before the banked fire on the hearth, shivering in near-paralyzing terror at the sound of the wind blowing, rattling the branches of the dry winter trees against the walls and shaking the loose shingles of the roof over my head. I imagined that huge, dark-clad men and women were striding about in the wind, casting arcane magical spells in the darkness to cause corpses and creatures of animated mud and dung to stalk the souls of the innocent from dusk till morning. Some of Dampster's threatening messages must have had some impact on me, at least for a while.

But looking back on it now, I can't help but wonder if some of that terror wasn't tainted, even then, with a certain fascination, and even with an eagerness, that forced me to think on such matters even while those very thoughts terrified me. If not, why did the stories of spooks, demons, and masters of magic occupy my mind so constantly during those early years?

The other children had their share of such night horrors, from what they spoke of them, but I don't think any of them felt the same kind of almost overwhelming fascination with the possible monsters of the night as myself. If they did, they never spoke of it even in the childish games and fantasy playing we engaged in among ourselves.

Of course with the kind of threatening atmosphere Dampster and the other adults had created in the village, it wasn't especially safe to show such an interest. Even though we were using the prejudices of the priests to vilify, in our pretending, those whom we imagined to be practicing such abominable activities. I remember more than once when we children were, as a group, playing at being witch hunters fighting the various pretend-monsters our imagined prey were sending at us, being interrupted by one adult or another with the warning that we 'ought not' to be doing such things even in play.

With such overt and implied threats against us, we seldom engaged in that kind of game, and as I recall, virtually none of us talked about magic and the practitioners of magic even in private among ourselves.

Obviously, I only know what the others said to me, or what they said in my presence, and perhaps I wasn't privy to all of the secrets the children of the village shared among themselves. Even when my parents were alive, I was of a slightly lower class than most of the others, since my father's occupation as a simple hired farmhand was one of the least respected jobs in that village at that time. When both of my parents were among those who were drowned in the flash floods when I was perhaps six or seven years of age, I became one of the few orphans in the community. I then became so lowly in the eyes of the others that they barely acknowledged my existence except to ridicule me or occasionally beat me up, when they had nothing better to do.

Not that I was completely out on the street as an orphan. While it may be that the loss of my parents had much to do with my eventual willingness to leave the village and go traveling with Malcolm, I must say, in all fairness, that when my parents died my aunt Leora and her husband Blagdon, who was the local tanner, immediately took me in with no sign of hesitation. Indeed, it was with all appearance of enthusiasm, though they had five sons and two daughters of their own already, and were one of the larger families of the community.

Tanners were a bit higher on the social scale than farmhands, so I may have gained slightly from that. Of course since I was only an adopted son, if even that much, not much of that increased prestige rubbed off on me. Not to mention the simple fact that the entire household stank horribly from the chemicals and animal products Uncle Blagdon used in his business, and the odor I constantly carried about with myself as a shroud couldn't possibly have helped my popularity.

I don't really recall feeling any special loss due to my more or less outcast position, however, except for the unfortunate times when the other children of the village chose to use me as the butt of their personal aggressions. In fact I had always much preferred going off by myself into the woods anyway, even before my parents drowned, and afterward I felt so very little attachment to anyone in the town that I was much more comfortable spending as much time as possible alone.

In the village most professions were a matter of simple inheritance, so that the butcher's sons became the next generation of butchers, the miller's sons took over the mill at the death of their father, and so forth. This was sometimes supplemented with the traditional system of apprenticeship, where excess children of one family were almost literally sold to childless families to become unpaid servants and, ultimately, to take over the profession of their adoptive parents in adulthood. Those unfortunate children who couldn't be placed anywhere else usually, ultimately joined the priesthood in one position or another, usually in a servile position.

Inevitably, then, almost from the moment I became an orphan I was shopped out to one childless man to another. But none of them wanted me and, frankly, I wanted nothing to do with any of them or with any of their professions, either.

I remember Uncle Blagdon very nearly had me signed up with the local tailor, a mild-tempered if somewhat dull old man who had lost his wife when still a young man and had never remarried. When I had been brought in for the first serious interview with the man. Of course I had known him all of my life, and I suppose he might have noticed me from time to time as one of the children of the town, even if he had never paid me any particular attention. I was so surly and rude to the poor fellow that he had, shortly afterward, broken off all negotiations with my uncle.

To Blagdon's credit, he never said anything or gave any sign that my behavior might have been foolish or unacceptable. I do remember, at perhaps about that time, hearing a softly spoken conversation between Leora and Blagdon, my aunt speaking with obvious tears in her voice and open distress at my prospects, or the lack of them, but Blagdon had simply laughed and had assured her that I was simply going through a 'phase', probably as the result of having lost my parents and missing them. I did, horribly, though I doubt if that was the true root of my bad behavior with the tailor. He promised her that he would find a place for me before my fifteenth birthday, even if he had to apprentice me to the priests.

Well, that conversation was reassuring in a way, of course, since it let me know that my uncle and aunt really did care about me and were trying their best to plan for my future. However I had, by that time, decided that I would rather be floating dead in a muddy river than be a priest, and I remember feeling a literal chill run through my body as I heard my uncle suggest that as a possibility. I thought of the hunched, bony, withered, prematurely aged priest Dampster, with his sour expression and his thin, tight face, and I swore my own little oath that I would never allow myself to be turned into such a miserable specimen of humanity.

Logically, then, I should have made a greater effort to cooperate with my uncle's efforts to find a suitable apprenticeship for me. Perhaps I was, in fact, reacting with irrational behavior to the loss of my parents, because from that time forward I became even more wild and irresponsible than before. I started spending more and more time wandering in the woods, skipping attendance at the local schoolroom so often that the teacher, a youngish, tall and thin priest named Sherwood, went protesting to my uncle and aunt. They in turn reacted by giving me one firm lecture after another, though I must admit, in a village filled with corporal punishment, Blagdon never raised a hand against me, nor did Leora ever even suggest it to him.

After that I did make some effort to improve my conduct, more from a love of my adoptive parents than from any concern about my future. I tried to attend school more regularly, but I had fallen so far behind the others of my age group in our studies that it was difficult for me to catch up. Sherwood apparently felt that he had done as much as duty required, made no special effort to help me. After a few weeks I went right back to skipping school for days in a row, spending my time instead walking and exploring in the thick, almost uncharted forests surrounding the village on every side.

In that activity I was largely alone, since the people of the village, for the most part, shunned the forests and remained safely within the boundaries of their own fields and pastures, Even, if at all possible, wholly inside their own homes and stores within the village itself, for we were not a people who enjoyed the great outdoors or the wonders of nature.

Actually, many of the children of the village dropped out of school at one age or another before graduating, and many of them never went to school at all, since there was no real legal or traditional requirement that they do so. Generally those who were anybody at all had gone to school at least long enough to learn how to read, since that was considered the minimum basic requirement for any kind of social respectability. There was some pressure on the more prosperous families to attend school religiously until coming to full adulthood, at about age sixteen or seventeen, but those who dropped out of school at an earlier age were hardly ostracized or even especially looked down upon for it. I was by then in my early teens, so when I finally drifted completely out of school and stopped attending altogether it was hardly out of the ordinary, or it wouldn't have been if I had been apprenticed and so had some particular future to look forward to.

As it was, of course, I had no prospects at all, and since even the priesthood had very few respectable positions that didn't require a rather prolonged education I had, by leaving school, very nearly cut off all but the lowest possible alternatives for myself. Of course I had already told myself that I had no intention of becoming a priest anyway, but if I were, in fact, to do so, I would at least had wanted some position in their ranks that would have given me a suitable lifestyle, and without an extended education the only levels of the priesthood that would be open to me were those orders that were, quite frankly, given to the simple-minded and the mentally or physically deficient who were taken into the priesthood more or less as an act of charity, since otherwise they would have had no place else to go.

The jobs such unfortunates were given were menial in the extreme. Jobs such as cleaning latrines, laundering the robes of their fellow priests, scrubbing floors or cleaning the stables. While I was hardly ignorant, or even unschooled as compared to many others, I had, by dropping out of school when I had very nearly reduced myself that sort of lowly state as my only real possibility for any kind of employment.

Such servile employment, if I chose to remain within the community, seemed my only possibility of earning a livelihood. I admit, I hadn't really thought through my future. I was, at that time, more or less just reacting to circumstances rather than carrying out any sort of rational plan. I did have a vague awareness that there was, after all, a whole world outside of the confines of our narrow, little village. From time to time I had indulged in daydreams of journeying out to discover the world. Such fantastic always including, of course, since I was still just a child, dreams of accomplishing something extraordinary and then returning, rich and famous, to rub the noses of the other children in my success.

But despite such fantasies of travel, my more and more frequent trips into the forest were kept to a safe, comfortable walking distance from the village. It reached the point that I wouldn't go back for weeks at a time, even at the approach of winter with its never-ending cold rains and barren landscapes. I had long since learned how to live off the land, not only eating the more obvious wild fruits and vegetables but also finding edible roots and mushrooms that others might be familiar with but seldom ate owning to their bitter or disagreeable taste. Even in winter, I learned, there were roots to be dug, for those one who knew where to look. I had developed an almost uncanny knack for watching the wild birds and animals harvesting a variety of dried seedpods which swung from the ends of dead, brown grass stalks and bushes, or poked above the snows. Thus I had, even during the infrequent heavy, snowfalls, learned from the wild creatures, the skill of survival.

I had constructed a shelter that was little more than a snug lean-to against the side of a steep bank in a gully surrounded by pine trees. Though the climate was usually mild enough, even in the dead of winter, that I could sleep outdoors with no more than a minimum of protection to keep myself comfortable and safe. My clothes had became so ragged with the passage of time, that I had probably came to look little better than an animal myself . One day, after I had survived through an especially long snowfall with no difficulties whatsoever, and even in considerable comfort, being snuggled down in my lean-to, watching the small fire I had kept burning at the entrance, crackling and snapping cheerfully on the cold, icy-snowy ground, it occurred to me that I had truly reached a state of complete self-sufficiency. I would never have to go back the village again, if I didn't want to.

I remember that winter afternoon with sharp clarity because of that realization and the incredible sense of freedom, security, and satisfaction it gave me. Suddenly I knew that I didn't have to worry about pleasing some ill-tempered man to become an apprentice. My survival was in my own hands and not at the discretion of others. I literally could make it on my own, and I didn't need anyone else at all. The long years I had spent since the death of my parents worrying about my future and what would become of me, came suddenly to an end, and I knew that I didn't have to be afraid of the future any more.

Of course looking back on it now, I realize that that attitude was a bit naive, and that my life would have descended, in time, to little better than an animal's bare daily struggle for survival had I continued to live all by myself in the forest. But right then the realization that I really could take care of myself without needing to please others was an enormous liberation to me. It was then, I think that I stepped over the line into real manhood. It was probably no coincidence that it was only a few days afterward that I first met up with Malcolm.