Joseph Knecht—Eldest Rain Master Turu

Joseph Knecht and the elder Rainmaker Turu are joined first by a boy’s determined admiration and then by a demanding apprenticeship that makes Knecht his successor. Their relationship transmits not a written doctrine but a practiced knowledge of nature, ritual, and mortality; Turu’s prophecy about his own death and return through Knecht’s future son gives that instruction a generational and cosmic frame.

From admiration to pursuit

As a boy, Knecht lived among the listeners who gathered to hear the village’s inherited stories and spells. He adored the Rainmaker, admiring him more than anyone beyond the village’s two elder women who guarded its lore. Turu was difficult to approach, so Knecht found a way near him through Ada, Turu’s daughter: he often went to the isolated hut to fetch her, listened beside her to the stories, and took her home. Knecht’s care for Ada was not yet romantic; he was still a child, and the connection chiefly gave him access to the father he revered.

Turu understood what the boy’s repeated presence meant. Knecht had been following and observing him for a year or longer, and Turu recognized his longing to learn rainmaking. The elder was neither oblivious nor merely irritable, though some villagers thought him peculiar or sullen. He knew that the boy’s attachment might shape both Knecht’s future and his own: his earlier apprentices had married into distant villages, and if he took another, this one would be trained to succeed him. Turu judged Knecht gifted, noting his piercing yet dreamy gaze, quiet reserve, alertness, and attentiveness to sounds and smells. But recognition did not mean immediate acceptance. He believed an apprentice had to attach himself to the master and endure the whole approach; if the boy could be frightened off, Turu reasoned, he would not be a great loss.

Tests and apprenticeship

Turu made Knecht earn proximity. When the Rainmaker went alone into woods, swamp, or heath to set traps, follow tracks, dig roots, or gather seeds, Knecht sometimes shadowed him silently for hours. Turu might pretend not to notice, growl at him to leave, or, on other occasions, beckon him to stay and give him work. He assigned practical tasks, showed him plants, advised him, and set tests. Even these small acts of instruction came with special tricks, secrets, and formulas that had to be kept strictly private.

When Knecht was older, Turu finally brought him from the youth house into his own hut. That public change in standing made him no longer simply one boy among others: he was the Rainmaker’s apprentice and, if he proved capable, the designated next Rainmaker. Turu had yielded to Knecht’s persistent courtship, and the distrust and constraint between them fell away, though reverence and obedience remained. From then on, Turu’s aim was to make him a worthy successor.

Their teaching was almost entirely practical. Turu used few words and offered no system of concepts, written lessons, figures, or formal methods. Instead he trained Knecht’s senses, slowly exposing him to a dense inheritance of observations, instincts, habits of inquiry, and experience with the natural world. The young apprentice had to grasp and test much of it directly rather than learn it as abstract doctrine. At its heart was the moon: its phases and effects, and the tradition that the souls of the dead dwelt in it before being sent into new births.

The moonlit prophecy

One night, Turu woke Knecht two hours after midnight and took him into the forested hills to watch the last rising of a vanishing crescent. They waited on a rock in deep darkness; Knecht, cold and short of sleep, watched the thin moon appear exactly where and in the shape Turu had predicted. The Rainmaker counted the days until it would wax again and identified that change as the time to sow buckwheat. The scene made the lesson tangible: observation of the sky joined seasonal knowledge to the possibility of foreseeing what came next.

Turu then told Knecht that when he died his spirit would fly into the moon. By the time that happened, Knecht would be a man in need of a wife; Ada would be his wife, and when she bore a son, Turu’s spirit would return from the moon and inhabit the child. Knecht was to name the boy Turu. The prophecy joined instruction to kinship and succession: Ada, the apprentice’s future family, the Rainmaker’s death, and the continuation of his name all entered the same account of cyclical return.

Knecht received the words in astonishment and silence. Seeing the predicted crescent appear, he felt himself at once a spectator and a participant in an order that included celestial motion, human life, and death. The experience gave him an early sense that the world’s repetitions and connections might be intelligible: the Rainmaker’s teaching was not only a craft but a way to perceive human fate as part of a larger pattern.

Succession and inheritance

Turu’s prophecy became a social arrangement. Ada grew up alongside Knecht in the hut, and when Turu judged the time right, he gave her to his disciple as a wife. Knecht became the Rainmaker’s assistant; Turu presented him to the village Mother as his son-in-law and successor, then permitted him to carry out official functions in his place. As age drew Turu into solitude and meditation, he gradually left his duties to Knecht. The transfer was therefore both intimate and institutional: the apprentice became family, deputy, and the village’s working Rainmaker before the old master died.

When Turu was found dead, crouched over small pots of magical brew on the hearth, with his white hair singed by the fire, Knecht had long been familiar to the village as its Rainmaker. He demanded an impressive funeral from the village council and burned a heap of precious medicinal herbs and roots over his teacher’s grave. The act honored Turu while marking Knecht’s full assumption of the role. In time, several of Knecht’s children crowded Ada’s hut, including a son named Turu; according to the inherited belief, the old Rainmaker had returned from his death-flight to the moon in the child.

What Knecht carries forward

Knecht’s life followed a course resembling Turu’s. Some of his fear became piety and thought, while some youthful aspirations faded as he grew older in his work and in his care for Ada and their children. He kept his strongest passion for the moon and its influence on seasons and weather, studying these matters persistently until his knowledge reached and ultimately surpassed his master’s. Their bond thus did not require Knecht to remain a copy of Turu: succession meant receiving the tradition, practicing it, and extending its understanding.

The relationship also shaped Knecht’s attitude toward death. Because lunar waxing and waning were associated both with seasonal change and with human birth and death, his devotion to the moon helped him form a reverent, purified stance toward mortality. In maturity he was less subject to fear of death than other people. Turu had passed on more than the office of Rainmaker: through apprenticeship, ritual, prophecy, family, and example, he gave Knecht a way to place fear within an intelligible order and to meet death with less dread.