Valentine nodded toward Shanamir. "I think this boy is tired of raising mounts in Falkynkip, and may want to travel more widely. I ask that you offer him a place in your troupe as well—"

"Valentine!" the boy cried.

" — as groom, or valet, or even a juggler if he has the art," Valentine went on, "and that if he is willing to go with us, you I accept him along with me. Will you do that?"

Zalzan Kavol was silent a moment, as if in calculation, and there was a barely audible growling sound from somewhere deep within his shaggy form. At length he said, "Have! you any interest in joining us, boy?"

"Have I? Have I?"

"I feared as much," said the Skandar morosely. "Then it is done. We hire the both of you at thirteen crowns a week with room and board. Done?"

"Done," said Valentine.

"Done!" cried Shanamir.

Zalzan Kavol knocked back the last of the fireshower wine. "Sleet, Carabella, take this stranger to the courtyard and begin making a juggler out of him. You come with me boy. I want you to have a look at our mounts."

THEY WENT OUTSIDE. Carabella darted off to the sleeping quarters to fetch equipment. Watching her run, Valentine took pleasure in her graceful movements, imagining the play of supple muscles beneath her garments. Sleet plucked blue white berries from one of the courtyard vines and popped them into his mouth.

"What are they?" Valentine asked.

Sleet tossed him one. "Thokkas. In Narabal, where I was born, a thokka vine will sprout in the morning and be as high as a house by afternoon. Of course the soil bursts with life in Narabal, and the rain falls every dawn. Another?"

"Please."

With a deft quick wrist-flip Sleet chucked a berry over. It was the smallest of gestures, but effective. Sleet was an economical man, bird-light, without an ounce of excess flesh, his gestures precise, his voice dry and controlled. "Chew the seeds," he advised Valentine. "They promote virility." He managed a thin laugh.

Carabella returned, bearing a great many colored rubber balls that she juggled briskly as she crossed the yard. When she reached Valentine and Sleet she flipped one of the balls to Valentine and three to Sleet, without breaking stride. Three she retained.

"Not knives?" Valentine asked.

"Knives are showy things. Today we deal in fundamentals," Sleet said. "We deal in the philosophy of the art. Knives would be a distraction."

"Philosophy?"

"Do you think juggling’s a mere trick?" the little man asked, sounding wounded. "An amusement for the gapers? A means of picking up a crown or two at a provincial carnival? It is all those things, yes, but first it is a way of life, a friend, a creed, a species of worship."

"And a kind of poetry," said Carabella.

Sleet nodded. "Yes, that too. And a mathematics. It teaches calmness, control, balance, a sense of the placement of things and the underlying structure of motion. There is silent music to it. Above all there is discipline. Do I sound pretentious?"

"He means to sound pretentious," Carabella said. There was mischief in her eyes. "But everything he says is true. Are you ready to begin?"

Valentine nodded.

Sleet said, "Make yourself calm. Cleanse your mind of all needless thought and calculation. Travel to the center of your being and hold yourself there."

Valentine planted his feet flat on the ground, took three deep breaths, relaxed his shoulders so that he could not feel his dangling arms, and waited.

"I think," said Carabella, "that this man lives most of the time at the center of his being. Or else that he is without a center and so can never be far from it."

"Are you ready?" Sleet asked.

"Ready."

"We will teach you basics, one small thing at a time. Juggling is a series of small discrete motions done in quick sequence, that give the appearance of constant flow and simultaneity. Simultaneity is an illusion, friend, when you are juggling and even when you are not. All events happen one at a time." Sleet smiled coldly. He seemed to be speaking i from ten thousand miles away. "Close your eyes, Valentine. Orientation in space and time is essential. Think of where you are and where you stand in relation to the world."

Valentine pictured Majipoor, mighty ball hanging in space, half of it or more than half engulfed by the Great Sea. He saw himself standing rooted at Zimroel’s edge with the sea behind him and a continent unrolling before him, and the Inner Sea punctuated by the Isle of Sleep, and Alhanroel beyond, rising on its nether side to the great swollen bulge of Castle Mount, and the sun overhead, yellow with a bronze-green tint, sending blistering rays down on dusty Suvrael and into the tropics, and wanning everything else, and the moons somewhere on the far side of things, and the stars farther out, and the other worlds, the worlds from which the Skandars came and the Hjorts and the Liimen and all the rest, even the world from which his own folk had emigrated, Old Earth, fourteen thousand years ago, a small blue world absurdly tiny when compared to Majipoor, far away, half forgotten in some other corner of the universe, and he journeyed back down across the stars to this world, this continent, this city, this inn, this courtyard, this small plot of moist yielding soil in which his boots were rooted, and told Sleet he was ready.

Sleet and Carabella stood with arms hanging straight, elbows at their sides, and brought their forearms up to a level position, cupped hands outstretched, one ball in the right hand. Valentine imitated them. Sleet said, "Pretend that a tray of precious gems rests on your hands. If you move your shoulders or elbows, or raise or lower your hands, the gems will spill. Eh? The secret of juggling is to move your body as little as possible. Things move; you control them; you remain still." The ball that Sleet held traveled suddenly from his right hand to the left, though there had not been a flicker of motion in his body. Carabella’s ball did the same. Valentine, imitating, threw the ball from hand to hand, conscious of effort and movement.

Carabella said, "You use too much wrist and much too much elbow. Let the cup of your hand open suddenly. Let the fingers stretch apart. You are releasing a trapped bird — so! The hand opens, the bird flies upward."

"No wrist at all?" Valentine asked.

"Little, and conceal what you use. The thrust comes from the palm of your hand. So."

Valentine tried it. The shortest of upward movements of the forearm, the quickest of snaps with the wrist; propulsion from the center of his hand and from the center of his being. The ball flew to his cupped left hand.

"Yes," said Sleet. "Again."

Again. Again. Again. For fifteen minutes the three of them popped balls from one hand to the other. They made him send the ball in a neat unvarying arc in front of his face, holding it in a plane with his hands, and they would not permit him to reach upward or outward for a catch; hands waited, ball traveled. After a time he was doing it automatically. Shanamir emerged from the stables and stared, bemused, at the single-minded tossing; then he wandered away. Valentine did not halt. This hardly seemed juggling, this rigid one-ball toss, but it was the event of the moment and he gave himself up to it entirely.

He realized eventually that Sleet and Carabella had stopped throwing, that he alone was proceeding, like a machine. "Here," said Sleet, and flipped him a thokka-berry fresh from the vine. Valentine caught it between ball-tosses and held it as if thinking he might be asked to juggle with it, but no, Sleet pantomimed that he was to eat it. His reward, his incentive.

Carabella now put a second ball in his left hand and a third next to the original one in his right. "Your hands are big," she said. "This will be easy for you. Watch me, then do as I do."