Orietta never knew about Crinomu's trial and sentence. It was a matter of indifference to the Council and he chose to spare her the knowledge knowing that to share it would only cause his lover needless distress. As far as Orietta was concerned her pregnancy against all the rules he had carefully explained was due to a happy mistake in the growing of his body. He told her that the seers had decided to accept the consequences after the fact, though they had since ordered his sterilisation to prevent the conception of a second child. She had no reason or desire to question this story. Three months passed and towards the end of the summer Orietta gave birth to a healthy baby boy in a relatively trouble free delivery. According to the custom of the Rider tribes, less than a month later she took the baby out into the open air of a pre dawn morning. She rode Cassia a short way into the cool early autumn darkness with the boy strapped in a papoose and wrapped up tightly for warmth. Crinomu accompanied mother and child on Paramal, bearing a lantern. They stopped on a low rise before the dome of Kalonia was out of sight and all gathered together in the glow of the lantern. Then as the sun rose, Orietta lifted the boy into the brighter light bursting over the horizon. 

"Let your name be Asanka," she declaimed formally, "in honour of a good man who could have been your father and who died to save your mother. Though you will live here with the seers, I make a promise now that I shall teach you all the ways of the Riders, so that the spirit of your namesake Asanka and his people, and my people too, will dwell within you all your life!"

Years passed. For the most part they were happy ones for Orietta, her young son Asanka and for Crinomu. The seers of Kalonia protected and nurtured the family and in time many came to view them fondly and to care for them. Yet outside the lands of this Enclave and unknown to most of those within it, storm clouds were slowly gathering which would one day change their world forever. Asanka thrived and grew fast and strong, benefiting both from the genes of his mother and from the hybrid amalgam of fathers which Crinomu had blended in his unorthodox conception. From Orietta the boy learned the lore of the Riders and how to care for horses. From Crinomu he learned how to climb trees, play football and recognise the basic functions of the various monitoring stations scattered all around the Kalonian plateau. He was a bright child; inquisitive and eager for new experiences if a little lonely sometimes and given to an occasional dreaming moodiness which could partly be explained by the lack of other children of his own age to play with and partly as a reflection of the nature and powers of the seers who were his fathers.

Asanka did not want for teachers. Each of the seers contributed to his education, communicating an enthusiasm for their favourite subjects. From Malorye, Asanka learned how the Embassy to the Substrate was fed on a varied diet of fruit and vegetables. He learned the pleasures and pitfalls of gardening, the slow needs of plants and the many wondrous kinds of useful and beautiful species that provided medicines and ornamentation as well as simple sustenance.

Cwendor and Tenereck, master builder and engineer, gave Asanka a grounding in mathematics, physics and chemistry to a level far beyond anything the Riders now remembered. Embelin taught him a little politics; the perspective of the Enclaves on the Rider communities they secretly watched and looked after. Even Gyrun gave lessons to Asanka, mainly on the subject of the rules of the Vow of Earth but also (and of more interest to the boy) on astronomy, pointing out the tracks of the Guardian's ancient silent orbital platforms, explaining the phases and the weather of the moon, how to identify the planets and how to navigate by the stars. On the surface it seemed that the interpreter had accepted the ruling of Hirrilow at the trial of Crinomu. Yet he had not. Through covert channels Gyrun managed to establish contact with sympathetic agents in the Conclave, bypassing the Curse of Kalonia. At some time during these years the interpreter of Kalonia made a fatal decision to betray his leader and his Enclave. A significant faction within the Conclave listened to his poisoned words. They devised a plan and they began to act.

"This thing you see before you is called a book," Hirrilow explained to Asanka. "It contains symbols which represent thought. When you understand what those symbols mean it is called reading and when you can create them it is called writing. A collection of books is known as a library. This is my library, here, high in my private rooms at the top of the dome of Kalonia. I keep books here because I wish to preserve some of the old knowledge which is not stored within the vurtiverse. It is useful to me. But reading and writing are forbidden for all humans outside the Enclaves. That is one of the central and most important principles of the Vow Of Earth."

"Why?"

Hirrilow sighed. "Because the Guardians and the Galactic Compact believed that before all other causes it was reading and writing which had ultimately given rise to a Great Sin of which they were mortally afraid. They would do anything to avoid that sin again and to forget that it had happened. The Guardians wanted forgiveness above all else. The Vow Of Earth promised that there would be a Season of Innocence and so it has proved. The price of the Season of Innocence is the Great Forgetting; that humans no longer learn to read or write lest they be slaves to an evil History. It was History that led them into sin and History cannot live without reading and writing and books. So reading and writing and books must be forbidden." 

"Is that true?" Asanka asked. 

"I don't know if it is true," Hirrilow said. "I have doubts. Even if the Great Forgetting is right, all books are not History books and the redemption of Earth has been bought at a high price. But since you are now a citizen of Kalonia the rules which apply to the Riders do not apply to you. I intend to teach you to read and to write if you want to learn. But do not tell your mother because she would not understand. The Riders fear reading and writing in an instinctive way. And do not tell Gyrun because he would not approve. He does not know of my library." 

Asanka looked at the book with a strange hunger for it was beautiful, mysterious and dangerously seductive. "I would like to learn to read", he answered.

When Asanka was ten years old Cassia gave birth to a black colt sired by Paramal. The two horses who had accompanied Orietta to the Station of Seers were still young as their kind measured the generations, for selective breeding and advanced genetic manipulation from long before the Great Forgetting had extended their lifetimes far beyond the span of their ancient ancestors at a rate natural selection could not have achieved unaided. Then too they were more sensitive to their Riders; more intelligent and more intensely loyal. With these attributes, though, came reduced fertility, albeit extended over many more years and it was too seldom that they gave birth to offspring. Orietta was delighted, for she had longed for a horse to which her son could be life partnered according to the traditions of the Rider foal bonding ceremony but had begun to doubt if Cassia and Paramal would provide one. Asanka too, was very happy with the new responsibilities his mother gave him for caring for the colt. It was a badge of maturity and he was proud of the energetic young foal which promised to be as fast as Cassia and as strong as Paramal. He christened the foal Lyr, named after the adventurous younger brother of one of the original Rider clan leaders whose traditional stories his mother had been telling him recently. Even before the bonding ceremony, Lyr and Asanka were inseparable.