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sold to a shaman, who would have trained him as his servant and acolyte. Having run away, he could not return,
except to meet grisly tribal “justice.” He had stolen a shaman’s property (Francis’ own person), and while
thievery was an honorable profession among the Utah, getting caught was a capital crime when the thief’s victim
was the tribal warlock. Nor would he have cared to lapse back into the relatively primitive life of an illiterate
shepherd people, after his schooling at the abbey.
But what else? The continent was lightly settled. He thought of the wall-map in the abbey’s library, and of
the sparse distribution of the crosshatched areas, which were regions?aif not of civilization?athen of civil order,
where some form of lawful sovereignty, transcending the tribal, held sway. The rest of the continent was
populated,buy wow gold, very thinly, by the people of the forest and the plain, who were, for the most part, not savages, but
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simple clanfolk loosely organized into small communities here and there, who lived by hunting, gathering, and
primitive agriculture, whose birth rate was barely high enough (discounting monster-births and sports) to sustain
the population. The principal industries of the continent, excepting a few seacoast regions, were hunting,
farming, fighting,buy aion kinah, and witchcraft?athe last being the most promising “industry” for any youth with a choice of
careers and having in mind as primary ends, maximum wealth and prestige.
The schooling which Francis had been given at the abbey prepared him for nothing which was of practical
value in a dark, ignorant, and workaday world,buy runescape gold, where literacy was nonexistent and a literate youth, therefore,
seemed of no worth to a community unless he could also farm, fight, hunt or show some special talent for inter-
tribal theft, or for the divining of water and workable metal. Even in the scattered domains where a form of civil
order existed, the fact of Francis’ literacy would help him not at all, if he must lead a life apart from the Church.
It was true that petty barons sometimes employed a scribe or two, but such cases were rare enough to be
negligible, and were as often filled by monks as by monastery-schooled laymen.
The only demand for scribes and secretaries was created by the Church herself, whose tenuous hierarchic
web was stretched across the continent (and occasionally to far-distant shores, although the diocesans abroad
were virtually autonomous rulers, subject to the Holy See in theory but seldom in practice, being cut off from
New Rome less by schism than by oceans not often crossed) and could be held together only by a
communication network. The Church had become, quite coincidentally and without meaning to be, the only
means whereby news was transmitted from place to place across the continent. If plague came to the northeast,runescape gold,
the southwest would soon hear of it, as a coincidental effect of tales told and retold by messengers of the Church,
coming and going from New Rome.
If the nomadic infiltration in the far northwest threatened a Christian diocese, an encyclical letter might soon
be read from pulpits far to the south and east, warning of the threat and extending the apostolic benediction to
“men of any station, so long as they be skilled at arms, who, having the means to make the journey, may be
piously disposed to do so, in order to swear fealty to Our beloved son, N., lawful ruler of that place, for such a
period of time as may seem necessary for the maintenance of standing armies there for defense of Christians
against the gathering heathen horde, whose ruthless savagery is known to many and who, to Our deepest grief,