All this is not to say that any child may simply ran riot within the Community; far from it, but providing you are not seen as exploiting your privileged position with too ruthless a degree of opportunism and do not directly challenge adult authority, it is possible to live so well as a child at High Easter Offerance that when an adult tells you these are the best years of your life, you can almost believe them.

I sat on the rusted wreck of an old truck, its russet body lying perforated and submerged by grasses and weeds, surrounded by gently swaying young pine trees a couple of miles west of the farm.  I was sitting on the old lorry's roof, gazing out over the brown, glinting back of the gently flowing river.  On the far bank, beyond the weeds and nettles, a herd of Friesians cropped the green quilt of the field, moving slowly across my field of vision from left to right, images of unthinking contentment engrossed in their methodical absorption.

I had seen Grandma Yolanda back to her car, still making reassuring noises and gently refusing her offers of further help.  She hugged and kissed me and told me that she would be staying in Stirling that night, to be nearby in case I needed her.  I assured her I wouldn't and told her to do whatever she had been going to do.  She insisted this had been her plan all along, and that she would drive the few miles into the town, check in and then phone to leave the name of the hotel with the Woodbeans.  I had not the heart to refuse her, so agreed that this was a good and helpful idea.  She left with only a few tears.  I waved her away and then returned to the farm.

I went up to my room in the farmhouse.  It is a small room with a single dormer window and sloping ceilings.  It contained a hammock, a small wooden desk and chair, one chest of drawers with a paraffin lamp on it, and an old wardrobe sitting - slightly lopsidedly on the old, uneven floorboards - in one corner.  Aside from these things, there were a few clothes (very few, as those being sent from Bath hadn't turned up yet) and one or two small souvenirs of my modest travels.  That was more or less it.

How little I had to show for my life, looked at from this perspective, I thought.  And yet how rich I had always felt it was!  All my life, all my worth and being were invested in the rest of the Community, in the people and the lands and the buildings and the continuance of our life here.  That was what and where you had to look to find the measure of me; not at these few paltry personal comforts.

It was a while, thinking about all this, before I realised that I hadn't got my kit-bag back; it had been left over in the mansion house.  Well, there was nothing in it I needed immediately.  I changed into a coarse white cotton shirt with a collar and cuffs that had seen better days and donned my one other jacket, an old tweed thing with worn leather elbow patches.  It had probably been a fisherman's; when it had been brought back from the charity shop in Stirling for me there was a small fishing fly lodged deep in the corner of one pocket.  I kept the leather trousers on; I only possessed the two pairs I'd taken with me on my journey and they were both - with luck - still en route from the hotel in Bath.  I re-straightened the brim of my travelling hat and hung it up behind the wardrobe door.  Then I went for a walk and ended up sitting on the roof of the old truck, a few miles up the river bank.

I suppose you could label what passed there as meditation, but that might be to dignify it over much.  Really I was just letting everything that had happened recently wash through me and from me, imagining that the river I gazed at was the stream of events I had been submerged in for the last nine days, and it was all now flowing away, leaving no more than a thin deposit of memory behind like a skin of river mud.

I wanted to feel washed clean, absolved of whatever I had been accused of, before I went back to the farm and my Grandfather.

I could not understand what had happened.  I had held the tiny zhlonjiz jar in my hand for the first time in the house of Gertie Fossil; I knew I had not stolen it.  I had read the note that the vial had come wrapped in, I could recall exactly the feel of its paper between my fingers, see the writing on it - enough like Salvador's for it certainly not to be in any way suspicious - and almost smell it.

I had thought the unction's inclusion in my kit-bag a gesture that was both practical and sweet; it had never occurred to me that it might be a trick.

I tried to think why it had been done, and by whom.  I had to face the fact that there might be poisoned thoughts behind the smiling faces of my fellows in our Order.  I was the privileged one, after all; brought to my exalted prominence by a simple accident of birth.  Certainly I had the Gift of Healing to recommend me to my fellow faithfuls' favour, but that has always seemed extra, something that never sat entirely square with our Faith in its purest form.  Part of our creed promoted the idea that those born on the 29th of February became different and better because they were led to realise how much this mattered and symbolised, rather than emerged already semi-divine from the womb (otherwise how does one account for the fact that those born on that date in the past have not been especially gifted or wise?).  In a sense, it is just luck that determines who is born a Leapyearian, even though there is a hint in the Orthography that God has a fingertip on the scales if not a hand in the whole business.  So might not one - or even some - of my fellows feel aggrieved at my rank and suspicious of my uncanny power, convinced in their own minds that they were both more deserving, and more pure?  In theory they ought to feel glad for me, support me and - if not actually worship me - honour and venerate me, and accept that God would be unlikely to have let somebody utterly lacking in worth be born into my position or receive my gift, but I cannot deceive myself that in such matters theory always carries the day in the depths of the human soul, or that our followers are somehow immune from irrationality, jealousy and even hate.

I found it hard even to imagine that my Grandfather himself could be behind this; perhaps only the memory of that sudden, shocking slap to my face made it remotely thinkable.  Could Salvador himself feel envious of me?  It hardly made sense; his whole life - since his rebirth on the storm-scoured Harrisian beach that night - had led towards the exalted state that first his son Christopher and now I occupied and would, perhaps, pass on to my offspring (not that it had to be me; a Luskentyrian Leapyearian is a Luskentyrian Leapyearian, after all, but we had made it a direct, in-family line so far and such seeming coincidences tend to develop a momentum and a tradition - even a theology - of their own), but who was to say how rational he was being, as he came to appreciate the imminence of his own death?

Allan was another man with cause to resent me; under a different system, all the Community and Order might fall to him on Grandfather's death (though how did one take account of Brigit and Rhea and Calli and Astar, and even uncle Mo?  After all, neither of Salvador's original two marriages had been sanctioned by the state or established church).  But what could he stand to gain?  Nothing could alter the fact of my birth-date - the event had been observed by half the women of the Order - or shake what was one of the central tenets of our Faith; what were we if we did not believe in the interstitial, out-of-the-way nature of blessedness, exemplified by that one day in one thousand four hundred and sixty-one?  Allan already controlled much of the day-to-day running of the Order; he had more power than I could imagine wanting for myself and we had never really disagreed over the way we saw the Order going when the sad time came that meant my accession.  To attack me was to attack the Order itself and the very Faith through which Allan drew his influence, threatening everything.