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was shutout all trade routes and ports. Soon, Lind would have to negotiate.
    By the time he got out of the district containing the Library he was hungry and the sun was low in the west. He stopped by a roadside merchant who had a stall selling food. He just followed everyone else and ordered something that seemed popular, thinking, “ well, if it's poisoned then I'll have company in the hospital ,” only later bothering to wonder if Bethor had such a thing as a hospital. It looked like meat wrapped in a pale cloth that was, on examination, a kind of bread. Anyway it tasted pretty good. Different, but surprisingly good.

    Now, with a new appreciation of the city, wherever he looked he saw the slaves. It wasn't like the poor, or the people of Lind who were never rich. There was a look of dejection that made him shake inside, he thought at first that what he was seeing was fear but he knew pretty soon that it was frustrated anger, as much in himself as the others. He was surrounded by the Bethor dialect, an accent so strong as to be almost a different language with its own meanings for familiar words. The more he heard it the stranger he felt.  
    He sought refuge in a small park by the water looking out on the bay. He tried to calm himself leaning against a waist high weathered gray stone seawall, the sound of waves lapping the rock like lifeless clapping. He felt as if he was going to panic. Breathing the clean salt air deeply to calm himself. It all went back to when he was a kid. No doubt about it.

    He had forgotten it all, pushed it out of the way, making a new life by denying the old. Now immersed in this all too familiar culture and accent it came back in a flood. There were tears in his eyes and he struggled to know why.
    He remembered he had been playing with Aleis and Tomi, his older sister and brother. They had all just had a great morning with their older cousin Ayo before she left on one of her trips. The children idolized her and thought of her as so grown up even though she was just out of her teens. She went on long trips with her father to mysterious places; he wasn't a fisherman like Mikel's father and Mikel didn't know what that meant; to Mikel being a fisherman was everything — and exploring, always exploring, or thinking, or making things. It was the exploring and thinking that saved him yet again. Ayo had left and they decided to play a game, Mikel had thought of some new rules, there were many places amongst the rocks to hide, it was his turn. He gave them cryptic clues where he would hide, then they would turn, hide their faces and count up to twenty. All of his family could count, his mother had insisted on teaching him much of the 'old knowing'. She said that the Wizards knew of the knowing and had special magic and could do things like the stories she sometimes told him. They were to be respected and feared and maybe one day her children could be like the Wizards, and meet them face to face, though it was said that if they looked at you straight then you would die or at the least lose your soul. Others said that the Wizards moved about us invisible, observing and acting without our understanding.
      While Tomi and Aleis were counting he darted over the rocks, barefoot and agile, impervious to the jagged edges clothed in faded brown rough-knit. He hid in a crevice, covering himself in very smelly kelp. It was near a rock shaped like a pelican. The clue was 'big hard bird'. He was sure they'd get it quickly and wouldn't just look everywhere at random. He could hear them talking, working it out. He could also hear little crawlies scuttling in the dried kelp. He had to hold his nerve.
    He heard lots of seagulls. He hoped they weren't going to give him away. He must have uncovered some morsels for them but the sounds weren't that close. Then he knew that it wasn't seagulls he could hear. They were screams. People screaming. He got scared and stayed still. The screams stopped. He still hid. But he had