That day, after we ate, we joined Chiron for his chores. It was easy,
pleasurable work: collecting berries, catching fish for dinner, setting quail
snares. The beginning of our studies, if it is possible to call them that. For
Chiron liked to teach, not in set lessons, but in opportunities. When the
goats that wandered the ridges took ill, we learned how to mix purgatives
for their bad stomachs, and when they were well again, how to make a
poultice that repelled their ticks. When I fell down a ravine, fracturing my
arm and tearing open my knee, we learned how to set splints, clean wounds,
and what herbs to give against infection.
On a hunting trip, after we had accidentally flushed a corncrake from its
nest, he taught us how to move silently and how to read the scuffles of
tracks. And when we had found the animal, the best way to aim a bow or
sling so that death was quick.
If we were thirsty and had no waterskin, he would teach us about the
plants whose roots carried beads of moisture. When a mountain-ash fell, we
learned carpentry, splitting off the bark, sanding and shaping the wood that
was left. I made an axe handle, and Achilles the shaft of a spear; Chiron
said that soon we would learn to forge the blades for such things.
Every evening and every morning we helped with meals, churning the
thick goat’s milk for yogurt and cheese, gutting fish. It was work we had
never been allowed to do before, as princes, and we fell upon it eagerly.
Following Chiron’s instructions, we watched in amazement as butter
formed before our eyes, at the way pheasant eggs sizzled and solidified on
fire-warmed rocks.

Chapter 9