The First Life of Tanan Read Online Free Page A

village on Komisan. They set up schools in each town, trained the first healers, performed marriages, and maintained libraries. In villages too small to have a government presence, they often acted as arbiter when there was a dispute.
    •        •        •
    The year before Tanan came to Komisan, there was a census.  Because Port Billen was too small to have a permanent government presence, Soama took the census in Port Billen.  By the time the next census was taken, Sweelin had replaced Soama as the Abbot at Port Billen.  Sweelin, who did not care to trade in the gossip of the village, had no idea that Tanan had been born a Lataki.  When he completed the census report, Tanan was listed as a new addition to the family.  The official story was that Tanan had been adopted from a single mother in the town of Istra, and so that’s what Sweelin wrote down on the report.
    When the census reports were sent to Panna, the government representative who reviewed the Port Billen census was a man named Essek, who happened to have been promoted to his position after spending thirty years as one of only two government officials in Istra.  Essek had no recollection of an Istran child being taken to Port Billen.  Unlike Sweelin, Essek was very much involved in the gossip of his town and he was certain he would have remembered a baby being born to a single mother and then being taken to a village on the other side of the island.  And why, Essek wondered, would the child be taken in by a single man?  It didn’t make sense to him, and Essek wasn’t one to let something like this slip past without reporting it, which he immediately did.
    Census irregularities were few, and Tanan’s case was investigated along with a handful of others.  Most  of the investigations turned out to be simple clerical errors.  In Tanan’s case, no record could be found of the single mother in Istra.  Over the course of six months, the case was elevated through the bureaucracy and eventually found its way to Nim, the King’s aide.  Nim, in turn, passed the report on to King Dannap.

CHAPTER SIX
    Jelak had been the constable in Port Billen for longer than most of the people in the village had been alive.  Fortunately, Port Billen was such a quiet village that Jelak, who had seen his eightieth birthday come and go, was able to spend a great deal of his time sitting on his favorite bench near the docks.  The weather in Port Billen was nice most of the time, and the central location of Jelak’s bench let him keep an eye on the docks and the small town square, which was sort of a community park that adjoined the village’s modest seafront. 
    The square was ringed with shops, the Rusty Hook tavern, and Lindelin’s clinic.  A single cobblestone street began at the docks, ran through the town square, and doglegged its way up the side of the bluff that the village was built on.  At the top of the bluff there were four houses, the Port Billen school, and the Abbey.  Behind the Abbey was the town’s cemetery.  Behind that, was forest.
    The Constable’s office was just up the hill from the square at the first bend.  It was a single room building with Jelak’s desk on one side, and an iron barred holding cell on the other.  Jelak went to the Constable’s office every morning to sweep the floor, polish the desk, and occasionally oil the hinges on the holding cell door.  Once the  office was cleaned, Jelak would close it up and spend the rest of his day patrolling the town.
    He always had lunch at the Rusty Hook tavern, most often with his friend Lindelin, and sometimes with other folks who invited him to join them.
    After having his lunch, Jelak would stop by the Apothecary and see if Anin had any prescriptions that he could deliver on his afternoon walk up to the Abbey and back.  The rest of the time he could be found sitting on his bench in the town square.
    •        •        •
    Jelak was sitting on that