Chapter Thirty Three - Library

It began to snow. This far north autumn was nearly squeezed out between the harvest and the winter. They had been in the cave a week, Pazu had cleared the forest in a mile radius of almost everything edible. And much of the firewood. He thought she was fit to travel. Two days ago she'd said she was but he refused to move unless she was completely well. Now, he thought they needed to be moving, if they didn't go now, the snow might get worse and then things could get bad.

"When you said you wanted to learn everything, you didn't know what you were saying."
"I expect that's true, but I want to be part of the world you're in, know what you know. I want to hear the songs and poems and stories, learn the language, the history."
"And what if, one day you pass that on to someone else and they turn bad and try to do what Muska did?"

pass that on to someone else? children? my children? our children?

"I'll teach them so they won't want to do that. If I see even a hint of Muska in them, I'll stop teaching that and try to teach them some humility and responsibility."
"You might not know. People keep things hidden."
"I can't go through life doing nothing, Sheeta, in case the consequences are bad."
"Let me show you then. Come on. Bring your bag."

He expected her to take him out of the cave and into the forest but she didn't. She held out her hand, which he took and she turned and led him deeper into the cave. He'd gone in a few yards when they'd first arrived, just checking in case anything with big teeth already lived here but he'd found nothing and turned back. The cave floor sloped down to the right at the same angle all the way back, and it didn't seem to get any narrower. It was pitch black.

"Light your lamp."

He did so. They were at a place where the cave narrowed, a kind of natural arch. There were a few tree roots coming through the roof here but otherwise it was blank black rock, no light here for plants to live.

"Careful, watch your step."

She went down ahead of him and he placed his foot down too. Not a slope but a step. He lifted his lamp high and what he saw knocked the breath from his body. They were at the top of a flight of steps, a long flight descending into blackness. The rock walls were smooth and there were faint markings on them, lines and curves and shapes carved there.

"Sheeta what is this? Did cavemen do this?"

She turned back to face him.

"I think you know already what this is."

They continued on, down and down. The steps ended and the corridor continued. To right and left of them archways opened into the black. Sheeta seemed to know where she was going. She was nodding, counting doorways. She stopped.

"Here."
"How do you know about this place?"
"I came here when I was younger. A boy in the village discovered it. He came back from his pead-lth-u'or and told us he'd found it."
"His what?"
"It's a journey all boys take when they reach a certain age, younger than you. They go away for a year alone, traveling, fending for themselves. When they return they are considered men. One of the boys in the village came back and told us he'd found something amazing. A group of us went with him, he brought us here."

A new thought came into his head.

"You know where we are. How far are we from your home?"
"Not far, a week, if we travel quickly. But here, I want to show you something."

She led him through a doorway. Inside he could see nothing. The light from his lamp didn't reach the walls or ceiling, it made a circle of yellow brightness beyond which there was a hazy nothing. The floor seemed to be worn stone slabs, it was all they could see.

"Turn out your lamp."

He did so and the blackness was absolute. He had seen black like this often down the mines when his candle had gone out so he wasn't afraid, but it never failed to impress him, how black, how completely black, it was under the earth. Even on the darkest night without a moon and with cloud so that there were no stars, there was still light. Here, if you held your hand two inches from your face you couldn't see it. And silence too, complete quiet. A man could go mad in a place like this.

"Lirhum."(1)

Blue light filled the place, gentle, flowing, softly alive. She had said a word that had illuminated the stone, made it glow. Holding it by its cord, she lifted her arm and the blue glow filled the room. He looked up. His mind couldn't grasp what he was seeing. They were in a space so huge it felt like they were outside. A space this big couldn't exist under the earth. The biggest cavern Uncle Pom had shown him would fit into this hall a hundred times over. It wasn't just high but wide and long as well. All he could think of was the huge tree room on Laputa, it was a space like that but instead of a tree, here there was something else.

In Slag Ravine there was a public library. It was in a small brick building at the back of the school room and Mr. Wendle, the school master looked after it. There were not many people in the Ravine who read books, there was little time for idle reading if you were miner or a train driver. But when he had the opportunity Pazu liked to go there. There were a few books on flying, mostly fictional boys adventures and one on flying machines with wonderful pictures in it. The room had shelves around the walls and two rows of bookcase-like shelves down the centre.

The room he was in now reminded him of the Ravine library, but only in spirit. In size it was like comparing a single flower to the forest outside. Shelves were everywhere, vast long rows of them. Higher than a man could reach, much higher, which made him wonder who reached up there. Above him, set out from the walls all around the room was a wide balcony and on that more shelves, and above that another balcony, with yet more. He could see no stairways, no way to reach these upper galleries. You'd have to fly to get there. The whole place sloped like a sinking ship and things seemed to have fallen from the shelves and slid down the slope, to the side of the room away from them. But many of the shelves were still full. Of books. Or things that looked like books.

He stood, his jaw hanging open. He marveled.

"Which is it? The Head or the Heart? Lahoromne or Lapendraes?"
"I don't know. I don't know if anyone does. I don't even know who else knows this is here. I suppose somebody must, it's not hard to find. And I don't know if this was one of the four palace islands or an ordinary one, but this looks like an important lot of books doesn't it?"
"Have you looked at any of them?"
"Yes, when we came before. I couldn't read any of it."
"Is it dead? Any robots?"
"Yes, I think it's dead. When we came before we went down one of the other corridors and found a chamber with lots of robots in it, all piled up in heaps. Broken."
"I wonder where the crystal is?"
"It's not here, or if it is, it's destroyed."
"How do you know?"
"My stone has spells for finding things. In the same way its beam led to Laputa it can be told to look for other crystals. When I was here before, I tried, and it didn't react. The crystal which once made this island fly is dead."
"How big is this place?"
"No idea. It might just be this hill, behind the cliff. But it could be huge, it could be the whole forest. I don't know how much of it is buried underground."

They walked along the ends of the rows of shelves. Pazu looked at the shelving and couldn't decide what it was made of. It wasn't timber, which would have rotted away long ago. And it wasn't metal, there was no rust and when he tapped his knuckles against it the sound was wrong. The thing it most reminded him of was pottery, hard and smooth like Okami's best china plates. It didn't seem to have discoloured or worn or rusted or rotted. He was perplexed. They went down between the rows of shelves, the towering walls reaching up above them like two cliffs. They walked for a minute until they came across a sloping pile of things completely blocking the aisle. When he tapped them with his boot they clattered. They were flat, like boards and looked like books but they weren't. He picked one up. It had a clear cover like glass and yet it wasn't glass, that much was obvious. Glass covers would have shattered when they fell from the shelves. He shook the thing and the clear cover hinged open exactly like a book, and also, like a book, it had pages. But these weren't paper. Again, paper would have disintegrated to dust long ago. He turned a page. The material was thin as paper and flexible yet smooth and glossy. He creased the page and it sprung back, the crease vanished. He made a fist and crumpled the page up. On releasing it, it sprung back smooth and perfect. Flipping some pages he came to the writing. He'd seen this before, a cuneiform angular script that had been on the grave on Laputa, all angles, vee-shapes and slanted strokes.

"I don't suppose you can read this?"
"No, Paetsu, and none of the other children could either. We took one home with us but were too afraid to show it to their parents. As I was an orphan they let me keep it in my house where no adults would find it."
"We need a dictionary I suppose, a translation. But finding one seems impossible in all this."
"Well, when I said none of us could read them, that was a lie. I found one that I understood."
"What did it say?"
"It was a dictionary I think. It had the old writing in and against those words it had Oistrakh-Auera but written in the alphabet of your tongue. That I could read. I hid it Paetsu, I didn't want the others to see it."
"Why?"
"I said it before, it's best that the past is forgotten, so the same mistakes are not repeated."
"I can't agree with you."
"I know. That's another piece of evidence for you being Phom's descendant. You have his spirit in you as well. The spirit of adventure and flying. The spirit of putting aside only what we did wrong and holding onto what was good about the flying peoples. I know where the dictionary is. Come."

He picked up three or four more of the glass volumes at random and stuffed them in his bag. She led him back to the end of the shelves by the doorway. Then, carefully checking they were in line with the doorway she went the other way along the shelf rows. She got to the tenth one and reached down to the bottom shelf on the right hand side, the very first book. She pulled it out and held it up. It was a thick volume. Pazu took it and flipped through its pages. Page after page of cuneiform writing and beside it words in the alphabet he knew but which he didn't understand. He went to the back of the book and there found the layout reversed. His alphabet followed by the cuneiform script. He flipped hurriedly through to a word he knew. He came to the letter k and then kae. He stopped. Beside the entry was a mark of two V shapes laying on their sides, points together something like a flattened X. It looked, he thought, like two faces touching, kissing. Kaesu, to kiss, written in the cuneiform script of old Oistrakh-Auera.

He looked up at her, his heart full of something amazing, amazing possibilities. He looked again up at the room, shelf upon shelf, millions of books. He'd need to invent a flying machine to reach the top shelves, something like a flaptor would do it.

"Thank you. Thank you for trusting me."
"You saved my life. Maybe with this you can save the future."
"We need to be on our way Sheeta, before the weather gets worse. But I'll come back here. Some day I'll spend time looking. Come to the cave, set up a camp and stay for a while. I want to be able to read this. Take away the important books. Translate them to my language. And if I can, save the future. From idiots like Muska."

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23 – 25 March 2007

(1) Lirhum: light.

For author notes about Chapter Thirty Three, please see my forum (click on my pen name)