"Of course!" she says. "And I'm Wiramig."

He nods, then coughs some more. 

She puts him into bed and later brings him some soup. "My wife made it, she's a cook," she says.

"Tell her thank you for me?" he asks. 

"Of course!" smiles Wiramig.

"Can I borrow books?"

"You really shouldn't do anything as intellectually lively as reading right after hitting your head."

"Okay."

She closes all the curtains so it will be nice and dim in the room and leaves him be.

He waits until she's been gone for several minutes before slipping out of bed and exploring the room. Are there any books in here? 

This room is not where she keeps most of her books but there is an almanac someone set down and forgot that he can find.

That'll do for puzzling out the script. He takes it back to the bed and starts flipping through for images he can connect to the words around them. 

They don't write in an alphabet; characters seem to stand for whole words, and modifications to the characters adjust things like tense and plurality, so no progress can be made at sounding anything out. There are charts in the almanac predicting the movements of rounds and suns over the next "span" (a handy conversion table indicates that a centispan is 354 wakes or 8496 hours and a span is 100 centispans). There are pictures of plants and descriptions of their growing habits, dates of various festivals, and a small atlas of the surfaces of key rounds in and near this polity.

A phonetic alphabet would be much more convenient but he'll make do. 

He stays up all night making as much progress as he can with the script, using magic to take care of most of the effects of missing a night's sleep, and certainly all that the doctor can find. 

The doctor pronounces him in good health come morning and says he's free to go; there are some sails in town if he'd like to try to sign on with one of them to use his presumable sail-crewing skills.

"What happens if I do that and then it turns out I was badly made enough that I don't have any?"

"I'd recommend getting on one taking a short trip, to New Riverround or Woodsail."

"What are those rounds like?"

"Woodsail's got a lot of logging on it, it's been maybe half cut by now but they're talking about planting more trees instead of doing shorter lived crops on the rest of it since it will be in good trading distance for a few decispans yet. It has one good sized town on it and some little villages like the ones here on Springround. New Riverround is mostly city."

He nods. "Okay. I'll try that." 

"And then you're no worse off if it turns out you can't crew - do you have any guesses at backup things you might be able to do or do you think you were made without?"

"Uh--I think I can sew?"

"There you go! Maybe you'll find a way to contribute by sewing."

"Okay," he says agreeably. "I'd hate to be useless because I was badly made."

"Badly made people can adjust! You don't have to stay exactly how you were made forever. But it's possible you'd have to move farther away."