by Paula Guran
“How gallant,” she said, her words dry as those ancient petals. “And at my age, how can I refuse so fine an offer? I cannot. I only wish to defer it.”
“So do they all,” he responded. “But this is the appointed time.”
She ignored his summons, moving with a smooth, elegant carriage to the portrait above the mantel. She aped the judge’s somber look to the last droop of jowl and beetling of brow as she thundered, “Where is the blasted girl? Will these women never learn to be on time!’ She rested her free hand on the cool marble as she gazed up into the judge’s painted scowl. “How long did you wait for me in the lobby of our hotel, Father, before you realized I had flown?” She looked back at her caller. “If I found the courage to keep him waiting, I have little to fear from baiting Death.”
The stranger coughed discreetly into a black-gloved hand. “I am afraid that I really must insist you come with me now.”
“Why should I come to you when you would not come to me?” Her eyes blazed blacker than the raven’s feathers, blacker than the curl of downy hair encased in gold and crystal at the neck of her high-collared gown. “I called you and you would not come. Why? Couldn’t you hear me? Was the rain falling too hard on the tiny box, or was the echo from the hole they’d dug for him too loud? I doubt it. They never dig the holes too deep in Potter’s Field. Or was it the rumbling of the carriage wheels that drowned out my voice when dear Cousin Althea came to fetch me home again? Ah, no, I think perhaps it might have been impossible to hear my cries to you above the fuss she raised because she was so overjoyed to have ‘found’ me at last.”
She slammed the book down on the mantel. “Of course it was impossible for her to have found me earlier, when all she had was my address on any of a dozen letters; letters I sent her pleading for money, for medicine, for the slightest hint of compassion. . . . ” She sank down suddenly on the hearthstone, frightening the raven to flight.
He knelt beside her and took her in his arms. Her tears were strong reality against his form of smoke and whispers.
“You have waited so long,” she murmured, her breath in his ear warm and alive. “Can’t you wait a little longer?”
“How much longer?” He smelled the lavender water that she used after her bath and felt the weary softness of her old woman’s skin, her old woman’s hair.
“Only until I finish reading.” She laid her hands on his shoulders and nodded toward the desk where the buff-covered book still lay.
“Is that all you ask? Not days, not months, only until—?”
“That is all.” Her hands clasped his. “Please.”
He consented, only half comprehending what he had granted her. All she had said was true: His was the discretion that had assumed there was no truth behind a woman’s pleas. So many of them cried out Let me die! who thought better of it later. Only when he was compelled to meet them below the railing of a bridge or with the apothecary bottle still in hand was he assured of their sincerity, and Miss Louisa Foster had not sought either of those paths after her cousin Althea fetched her home. Hysterical and She’ll get over it tapped him on the shoulder, leering. He did have memories.
Still dressed for dancing, he helped her to her feet. She returned to her place in the green leather chair and took up the buff-covered book again. “To think I don’t need spectacles at my age. Isn’t it wonderful?” she said to him. And then: “You must promise not to frighten them.”
He nodded obediently, although he had not the faintest idea of what she meant. He recreated himself as a lady of her own age and bearing, a tangle of dark tatting in her hands, a woolly black lapdog at her feet, the image of the poor relative whose bit of bread and hearthfire is earned with silence and invisibility.
The coach clock on the mantelpiece struck midnight.
The French doors creaked as a little hand shyly pushed them open. A dark head peered around the edge of the door. Mother? the wind sighed.
She did not look up from the open book as the child blew across the carpet and settled into her shadow. The small head rested itself against her knees and thin, milky fingers that should have been pink and plump and scented with powder instead of mold reached up to close around her hand.
Read to me.
“Why, Danny, I am surprised at you,” she said softly. “You know we can’t begin without your friends.”
The wind blew more phantoms through the open doors, gusts and wracks and tumbling clouds of children. They swept into the darkened library, whirling in eddies like the bright autumn leaves outside, catching in snug corners, in favorite chairs before the breath of their advent died away and left them all sitting in attentive order around Miss Louisa Foster’s chair.
The stranger felt a tiny hand creep into hers, a hand whose damp clasp she had last disengaged as gently as she could from the breast of the young, despairing mother fated to survive the plunge the child did not. It was not the stranger’s place to ask what became of her charges after she called for them. The child tugged insistently at her hand, then clambered up into her lap uninvited. She settled her head against the lady’s shawled shoulder with a contented sigh, having found someone she knew. Her feet were bare and her golden hair smelled of factory smoke and river water.
“Now, shall we begin?” Miss Foster asked, beaming over the edge of the open book. Smiles answered her. “I think that if you are all very good, tonight we shall be finished with Tom Sawyer’s adventures, and then—” Her voice caught, but she had been raised with what Judge Foster liked to call “breeding.” She carried on. “—and then you shall rest.”
She raised her eyes to the patient caller in the other chair. “You see how it is? Someone has to do this for them now. They were lost too young for anyone to share the stories with them—the old fairy tales, and Mother Goose, and Kim, and the legends of King Arthur, and The Count of Monte Cristo, and—and—oh! How can children be sent to sleep without stories? So I try.”
“When—?” The lady with the lapdog wet her lips, so suddenly dry. “When did they first come to you?” The child leaning against her shoulder shifted, then pounced on the tangled tatting in her lap and sat happily creating a nest of Gordian knots as complex and as simple as the world.
“They came soon after I made over this room to be the town’s library, after Father was dead. I scoured the shelves of his law books and filled them with all the tales of wonder and adventure and mischief and laughter they could hold. I was seated right here one midnight, reading aloud to myself from Asher’s book of poetry, when the first one came.” She leaned forward and fondly ruffled the hair of the little boy whose pinched face was still streaked with coal dust. “I never guessed until then that it was possible to hunger for something you have never known.”
Then she bent and scooped up the child who held so tightly to her skirts. She set him on her lap and pressed his head to the high-necked, extremely proper sleekness of her dress front. The little ghost’s black hair curled around the brooch that held his single strayed curl.
“One night, he was here with the rest. Come all the way from New York City, can you imagine that? And the roads so cold.” Her lips brushed the white forehead. “So cold.” She set him down again among the rest and gave the stranger a smile of forced brightness. “I’ve found that children sleep more peaceably after a story, haven’t you?” Before her caller could reply, she added, “Please forgive me, but I don’t like to keep them waiting.”
Miss Foster began to read the last of Tom Sawyer’s adventures. The oil lamp smoothed away the marks of fever and hunger and more violent death from the faces of the children who listened. As she read, the words slipped beneath the skin, brought a glow of delight to ravening eyes. In her own chair. Miss Foster’s caller became conscious of a strange power filling the room. The ghosts were casting off their ghosts, old bleaknesses and sorrows, lingering memories of pain and dread. All that remained were the children, and the wonder.
At last, Miss Foster closed the book. “The End,” she annou
nced, still from behind the stiffness of her smile. The children looked at her expectantly. “That was the end, children,” she said gently. “I’m afraid that’s all.” The small ghosts’ eyes dimmed by ones and twos they drifted reluctantly from the lamplight, back toward the moonlit cold.
“Wait.”
The stranger stood, still holding the little girl to his chest. He was dressed as a road-worn peddler, with his goods on his back and a keen black hound at his heels. He dropped his dusty rucksack on the rosewood desk and plunged his arm inside. “Here’s Huckleberry Finn,” he said. “You’ll have to read them that after they’ve heard Tom Sawyer.” He dug more books from the depths of the bag, piling each on each. “Oh, and The Three Musketeers. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Little Lord Fauntleroy . . . well, it takes all kinds. And David Copperfield, Treasure Island, Anne of Green Gables, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Sarah Crewe—” He stared at the tower of books he had erected and gave a long, low whistle. “I reckon you’ll have the wit to find more.”
She seized his wrist, her voice urgent as she asked, “Is this a trick? Another joke that Father’s own personal god wants to play on me?”
“No trick,” he said. “I shall come back, I promise you that, Miss Louisa. I’ll come back because I must, and you know I must.”
She touched the mourning brooch at her throat. “When?”
“When I promised.” His eyes met hers. “When you’ve finished reading.”
He placed the girl-child in her lap, then lifted up her own lost son; together they were no more burden than the empty air. Her arms instinctively crept around to embrace them both and he placed an open book in her hands to seal the circle. “Or when you will.”
“I don’t—” she began.
“Read.”
He shouldered his rucksack and whistled up his hound. The ghostly throng of children gazed at him as he passed through their midst to the French doors. Outside there was still smoke and apples on the air, and a thousand tales yet to be told. He paused on the threshold and turned to see her still sitting there in the lamplight, staring at him.
“Give them their stories, Louisa,” he said, his face now aged by winds and rains and summer days uncountable. “Give them back their dreams.”
“Once—” She faltered. The children drew in nearer, faces lifted like flowers to the rain. “Once upon a time . . . ”
He watched as the words took them all beyond his reach, and he willingly let them go. He bowed his head beneath the moon’s silver scythe blade and took a new road, the black dog trotting beside him all the way.
In Libres
Elizabeth Bear
“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
—Jorge Luis Borges
Euclavia glared down at the sweaty slip of paper crumpled in her left fist. She had managed to shut the door of her tutor’s office quietly behind her, managed to walk with soft steps all the way down the hall to the outside door, managed to pass through those great oaken portals (carven as they were with allegorical scenes in relief, involving trees and fauns and one very confused-looking centaur) softly and without force. She paused at the top of the granite steps, panting lightly with the effort of keeping her temper, and whispered under her breath, “One more source, Professor Harvey? One more source to read for my already-finished thesis? One more fucking source?”
She stared across the green lawns and pale gravel paths of the university campus, allowing the soft breeze to lift her hair. Morning light limned the roof tiles and rendered green leaves translucent. She forced her breathing to slow, her hand to unclench.
A centaur, much less confused-looking than the one disporting itself with the allegorical fauns, trotted up to the base of the steps. Sunlight—also shimmering on the appaloosa blanket across his shoulders—sparked red highlights off his glossy brown-black skin. He didn’t have to crane his head to look up at her, though she stood at the top of the steps to the Biomancy building, as he was the height of a tall man atop a tall horse.
His name was Bucephalus.
“Hey, Eu,” Bucephalus said. “What’s wrong?”
The paper rustled as her fist clenched again. “I’ve got to go to the library.”
If his face hadn’t been the color of an antique cherrywood escritoire, she imagined he might have blanched.
“The library?”
She held the slip of paper out to him. He took it, read it while his mobile eyebrows performed arabesques and oddities, and then said, aloud, “A Treatise on Adulterations of Food, and Culinary Poisons Exhibiting the Fraudulent Sophistications of Bread, Beer, Wine, Spirituous Liquors, Tea, Coffee, Cream, Confectionery, Vinegar, Mustard, Pepper, Cheese, Olive Oil, Pickles, and Other Articles Employed in Domestic Economy. By Frederick Accum.”
“I need to read a rare book.”
“I gathered.” His eyebrows said, but this?!
“There’s apparently,” she sighed, “a chapter on poisonous mushrooms. And since my thesis deals with the use of psychoactive plants in thaumaturgy . . . ”
Euclavia decided that she needed pastry to take the edge off her irritation. Centaurs were pretty much always hungry, having two stomachs to fill, so the companions set off down the path to the buttery.
Bucephalus’s horsey tail flicked unhappily. His hoof clomped as he stamped. “That’s just the worst. I thought the whole thing was written!”
“It is,” she said. “Professor Harvey wants additional cites, and he thinks I need to rework my mushroom chapter based on some information in this particular text.”
His eyebrows were dubious. “Which is in the Special Collections.”
“Of course,” she said. She paused. He gave her a nervous sideways glance and sidled away. She was pitiless. “I want you to come with me.”
“Aw, Eu,” he said.
“Hey,” she said. “Who’d been helping you with your arcanology lab procedure and grading every week since last semester?”
He stopped short. He tossed his head. He snorted. He folded his arms, glared at her, and when she glared right back he shook out his mane and sighed like a gusty storm.
She didn’t drop her gaze. She said, “How dangerous can it be?”
His eyebrows scowled thunderously. “You’re an awful person.”
“You’re all-but-dissertation. And you’ve been ABD for how long now?”
He didn’t look at her.
She said, “How much thesis do you have left to write?”
That stopped him. “You’ll help me finish.”
“How much is left?”
“I’m stuck,” he said. And then, after a few moments, “Two chapters. Maybe. Just the conclusion really. And the bibliography.”
Desperation crushed her better judgment. “I’ll help you finish,” she agreed, regretting it already.
He glared at her, tail flicking. But, “All right,” he said.
Euclavia felt a twinge in her better nature, knowing that on some level she’d taken advantage of her predator stare to bully the herd animal. She stepped on her softer emotions ruthlessly. Pity never made a sorcerer.
“When do you want to go?” he asked. From the way he was studying the light touching the minarets of an ornate lecture hall on the edge of campus, she knew he was hoping he’d be able to come up with a prior engagement.
They had a study date that evening.
“After lunch,” she said. “Today.”
“Eu—”
“Soonest begun,” she said. “Is first ended. Let’s just get this over with before we lose our nerve completely, shall we? Besides. Maybe Dr. Theophilus will be impressed by your initiative. We will totally find a book in the Special Collections on your topic, too. We’ll check with the reference librarians on the way in.”
“I don’t believe I’m letting you talk me into this.”
“The word you want is browbeat, old friend. Come on, let’s go eat before all the good stuff is gone.”
Euclavia was still chewing on an end
of bread when they left the buttery the better part of an hour later. That was a short meal, by centaur standards (two stomachs, one inadequate human mouth to fill them with), and Bucephalus had done his best to draw it out for another hour. But Euclavia (again) had been pitiless.
Even inside her head, the phrase was starting to take on the sonorous quality of a refrain.
Bucephalus ignored her as they walked into the afternoon light, preferring to pointedly argue literature with Joseph, a bull-headed classmate who chewed his cud and contemplated the quadrangle with deceptively mild bovine eyes. They paused in the lavender shade of an ancient, bowering jacaranda tree. Euclavia waited with slowly diminishing grace, rocking from foot to foot, while they continued the conversation.
The shadows had moved a half-inch, and the centaur was saying, “Honestly, as far as poets of anguished masculinity go, I prefer Conrad to Hemingway, but they’re both operating from a very narrow construction—” when Euclavia thumped him lightly on the shoulder with the side of her hand and said, “I hate to interrupt, Bue, but if we’re going to do this while there’s still some daylight to work with, we ought to get a wiggle on.”
Bucephalus glared at her, but it was the right threat. Darkness would be worse, for both of them.
“What are you up to?” Joseph asked, and for a moment Euclavia almost hoped he’d decide to join them.
But—“The Library,” Bucephalus announced, as if he were informing Joseph of a death. “Eu needs a book. Says her advisor.”
Joseph shuddered. “You’re braver creatures than I. Do you have the list of supplies?”
Bucephalus said, “It’s in the student handbook.”
“Right.” Joseph whipped a rucksack off his enormous, humped shoulder—Euclavia hadn’t even seen it up there—and dug around in it with one horny hand. He stared off into space with a concentrated expression—or as close as a bull’s muzzle could get, while still absently cud-chewing—and then came up with a ball of string and a grin.
“Here.” He placed it ceremoniously in Bucephalus’s hand. “You might just need this.”