by Simon Morden
The guard glanced up involuntarily, and Thaler spotted the open first-storey window he was looking at.
“He’s in a meeting.”
“Of course he’s in a meeting. Anything else would be a complete dereliction of duty, given the shambles we currently have. Now, are you going to let me in, or am I going to have to shout my report up to him?” Thaler ostentatiously licked his index finger and opened the heavy ledger.
Defeated, the guard stood aside, and the librarian carried on up the stone steps and through the door.
The entrance hall was suitably impressive: tall, wide, with a double staircase at the far end, lined in oak and punctuated by the symbols of Juvavum’s guilds. It would have been even more impressive if he’d found everyone hard at work rather than huddling together in twos and threes like frightened children.
These were the civic leaders of the town. Thaler found their behaviour shameful, and rather than look at them for a moment longer, he parted them to either side like the Jew Moses had parted the Red Sea and swept through the middle, all the way to the stairs, making sure that every step was purposeful and dignified.
Boots would have been better than library slippers. He seemed to be making a habit of that.
He turned the corner of the staircase, and caught a whiff of fear and foreboding. He recognised it for what it was: a contagion that could spread like the plague. Thaler’s mouth formed a thin line, and he carried on up the stairs to do battle with the mayor.
Messinger was bent over a desk placed in front of the window, looking at a set of accounts with a gaggle of assistants and councillors. They argued to and fro, groaning and growling as appropriate, but never reaching a conclusion.
Thaler used his elbows to push his way to the front, and slammed his ledger down, narrowly missing the mayor’s fingers.
“Mr Thaler, what is the meaning of this?”
“Well, Master Messinger, if you don’t know, I can’t imagine that you could possibly object to being interrupted.” The mayor spluttered, and Thaler banged the Great Seal on top of the ledger. “The Norns appear to have decreed that authority rests with those who actually bother to turn up.”
Messinger took a moment to recover. He looked at the seal, at the book, then at Thaler. “Mr Thaler, we are very busy.”
“Busy doing nothing,” said Thaler. “Now, what plans do you have for restoring the water supply?”
The librarian wasn’t the tallest of men, but Messinger seemed to be related to dwarves. Perhaps he was. It wasn’t unknown.
“We’ve already discussed the problems with the water. Really, Mr Thaler…”
“I didn’t ask whether you had discussed them. I expect the whole town’s discussed them. I asked what plans you have for getting things working again.”
“Plans? Have you seen what’s happening out there?” Messinger pointed a sharp finger out of the window, incidentally levelling his finger right at the ominous silhouette of the White Tower.
“I’ve certainly seen it, and I seriously doubt you’ve left the Town Hall since this emergency started.” Thaler wouldn’t let himself get distracted. “So, yes. Plans. I have two. How many do you have?”
One of Messinger’s sycophants affected a laugh that died a natural death when the assembled men realised that Thaler was quite serious.
“Where is the master librarian, Mr Thaler?” asked Messinger.
“Incapacitated. Under-librarian Grozer is critically injured, and we are attempting to affect a cure ourselves in the absence of the Order. Under-librarian Thomm is missing, and has been since before the crisis. I and the other librarians have kept the library safe, no thanks to you, and now I come here to offer what appears to be some badly needed assistance. I am a servant of the library, and the library is the servant of the prince, Mayor. If you want him to return and find the council running and squawking like ready-for-the-pot chickens, so be it. He will not find the library like that. Do you have any proposals for dealing with this current situation, or should I seek both help and wisdom elsewhere?” Thaler straightened his back and folded his arms.
“Out,” said the mayor. But when Thaler stuck his chin out and planted his feet anew, he explained his instruction. “Not you, Under-librarian. The rest of you, you useless, fawning, simpering, purblind idiots.”
Consternation spread through the room, and Messinger span on his heel to confront his coterie.
“Out, you arseholes, you shitsacks, out!” He stamped and balled his fists and roared with a volume that belied his stature.
One by one, they left, shocked, wordless, until it was just the mayor and Thaler.
“Close. The. Door.” A hand snaked back in and pulled the door tight shut. Messinger fell arse-first into a chair. “Gods, what a mess.”
Thaler, surprised by the turn of events, looked around the mayor’s chambers. They were richly furnished: the finest carpentry, the best tapestries, exquisite metalwork, and a cabinet of curios and gifts from across Europe. Very different from his own cell in the library complex. His gaze eventually alighted on a silver jug.
“Drink?”
“Gods, yes.” The mayor put his head in his hands.
Thaler poured them both a generous measure of wine, and assumed he could sit down. He pushed the goblet in front of Messinger and sipped at his own. Very easy on the palate.
“Things are not as grim as they seem, Mayor.”
“They’re not? The lights our craftsmen use to work in the hours of darkness have gone out. We cannot produce goods. Ploughs will not cut the sod. We cannot grow food. The barges can travel downstream, but not back up. The wagons refuse to roll. Trade – trade we can tax – is ruined. Our drinking water has stopped flowing.” The mayor snatched at his wine and sank half of it.
“I do appreciate that all these problems have landed on your desk, not mine, Master Messinger. We can still grow food, make things and send them to market: it might just be more difficult.” Thaler’s wine was too good to drink quickly, so he sipped at it again. “Has the Order offered any explanation for the hiatus in magical activity?”
Messinger shook his head. “No. No one’s heard from them. And yes, I have asked around.”
“Ah,” said Thaler, raising his index finger, “but has anyone gone and asked the Order directly?”
“Are you mad? They’d as soon turn you inside out than bother talking with the likes of us.” The mayor spluttered and swilled the remaining half of his wine before looking around for more. “No one needs to see your insides.”
“I intend to go up Goat Mountain anyway, and I want you to come with me.”
“Gods, man.” The mayor leant forward into Thaler’s face to make his point even more direct. “They’ll kill you in ways you can’t even begin to imagine. Possibly more than once.”
“Rubbish. If they could resurrect people, they’d have done it to the prince’s first wife. I don’t think that’s the only limit to their powers, either.” Thaler leant back in his chair which was, like the wine, really very fine. “I don’t think they can do anything any more.”
The mayor blinked rapidly, and finally said: “What?”
Thaler raised his goblet and inspected the workmanship. “Nothing like this up at the library, Master Messinger. We’re very much a beer-and-bread sort of crowd.”
Messinger bit at his lip, his jaw trembling. “I will send a crate of my best wine to the library if you explain what in Midgard you are talking about.”
“Excellent. A deal.” The librarian sat upright and put his cup down, the better to wave his hands around. “Now, it strikes me that we mere mortals have been left in a quandary: do we sit around and wait for the Order to ride out of their tower and recast all the spells that have suddenly and mysteriously failed all at once, at the very same moment – which means we have to do nothing except appear suitably grateful and hand over even more of our hard-earned cash – or is this a permanent and irreversible occurrence which the hexmasters were powerless to prevent and are
just as powerless to, er, reverse?”
“And you propose to go and ask them?”
“Yes,” said Thaler.
“Despite the long-held convention that setting foot on Goat Mountain is punishable by death?”
“Yes.”
The mayor considered matters for a moment, before getting up to collect the pitcher of wine himself and pour both of them another brimful each. “You are mad.”
“At first sight, yes, my intention does appear a little foolish, but hear me out.” Thaler slurped the top of his wine off without removing it from the table. “We don’t know what to do without that information. If I have to reopen the library with no magical lights, I need to make other provisions – spending the next fifty years, or however long I live, blundering around in the dark and not being able to read a word indoors seems to me a fool’s errand. You don’t know what alternative arrangements you need to make regarding the passage of trade: if we have to revert to horse-drawn carts as the Romans did, or some of the barbarians do now, we’re going to need many more horses. I’m not an expert in horse husbandry, but I’m led to believe that the process is not instantaneous.”
“But what has that got to do …?”
Thaler held up his hand. “Please, Mr Messinger. What we do now, this day and the days following, will affect everything that happens hereafter. If we sit around on our ample backsides, waiting for the Order to come and rescue us, and they don’t, we will have a situation far more serious than the one we face now. There is nothing for it. Someone will have to go up to the tower and find out. If they don’t return, I suppose that is an answer of sorts.”
Messinger guzzled at his wine again. “Yes, I understand that. Have you considered the third option?”
“A third?” Thaler looked pensive.
“That the Order have done this deliberately, and they want to watch us fail.”
“It’s possible. I’ve very good reasons for believing that I’m right, though.”
“And …” – said Messinger. He looked at the dribble of red left in the bottom of his goblet, and decide it was better inside him than not – “…you’re willing to risk your life on that?”
“Yes, Mayor Messinger. I am.” Thaler needed a clear head. No more vintage for him. He picked up the seal and toyed with it a moment before putting it back down on the ledger. “If I don’t come back, I’ll be grateful if you could return these to the library.”
Thaler stood up, straightened his robes, and walked to the door. He paused.
“Aren’t you going to wish me luck?” he asked.
“Fuck it,” said Messinger. He drank the rest of Thaler’s wine, and got unsteadily to his feet. “Come on, then. Before I change my mind.”
27
Sophia didn’t cover her hair because she wasn’t married, but she wasn’t certain that she would have done so even if she were. Her hair was long and dark and only slightly curly, which meant that she could plait it into all kinds of interesting weaves such as the German girls wore, but that were forbidden to Jewish girls.
Well, not forbidden as such. It was frowned on, and Sophia had been frowned on a lot as a child. Her mother, when she was alive, had been desperate for her to fit in, because Sophia was such an odd daughter, more interested in her father’s books than her mother’s cooking.
She’d said – often, to anyone willing to listen – that husbands went to those girls who showed they kept a good house, not to those who could bisect a line or recite the opening stanzas of The Iliad. It turned out that Sophia’s mother was right.
Being Aaron Morgenstern’s daughter didn’t help: he was a bad influence on her, indulging her when he should have been disciplining her. She was the bane of the local matchmakers, headstrong and contrary. She was, in short, a disgrace to her family.
She kept a good house all the same. Even though her father had given away, or lent, or something or other, all her oil lights and almost all of her candle lanterns to Mr Thaler’s librarians, their windows had remained lit last night, and there had still been enough light to cook and sew and read.
Sophia called up the stairs. “Father, I’m going to see if the market has anything left.”
“No, you’re not. You’re going out to be nosey and to get the latest gossip,” came the faint reply. “No good will come of it.”
“I’ll tell you everything when I get back.” She threw a shawl over her shoulders and unlatched the door. Her immediate neighbours, left, right and opposite, were gathered around the Rosenbaums’ front step.
“Good morning, Mr Rosenbaum, Mr Schicter, Mr Eidelberg.” She gave a little curtsey and remembered to reach back around her own door for the basket hanging there.
“Good morning, Sophia,” said Rosenbaum. “Tell me again when I’m going to get my lamps back?”
“I don’t know, Mr Rosenbaum. I’m sure the library will only need them for a short while.” She pulled the door shut and looked down at the ground, then thought she didn’t really need to do that, so she looked up and smiled. “I’ll go and ask for you.”
Rosenbaum wasn’t used to any woman other than his wife smiling at him, and even that was rarely. “It wouldn’t be proper for a Jewess,” he said.
“You go and ask them, then.” The rules about what she should do were more rules about what she couldn’t do and, by the prophets, the list was already long enough without the Beth Din adding to them monthly. “If you think it’s not proper for me to do so.”
“A good Jew cannot set foot inside that place, Sophia. You know that.”
“Perhaps you can stand outside and shout, then. Really.” She stamped her foot. “I don’t know why you bother talking to me, Mr Rosenbaum, if all you’re going to do is find new ways to show me how much of a sinner I am.”
She shouldn’t rise to the bait, but she rarely resisted the temptation. Rosenbaum folded his arms across his chest and looked content, his thin beard wagging. Even though she was only just younger than he was – than all three of the men, in fact, and he’d been suggested as a possible match for her – she had to call him Mr Rosenbaum now he was married.
And she, unmarried, was still just Sophia.
She didn’t have any answer to their sniping. It made her sad, and not a little bitter. So she left to the sound of their laughter and headed up Jews’ Alley to the market in Scale Place. As she passed each door, she named the people who lived there – not all Jews dwelt in Jews’ Alley, but everyone who lived in Jews’ Alley was a Jew. She knew them all, and they knew her.
That used to be a blessing, but she’d started to see it differently. She didn’t hate any of them. She didn’t even find much to dislike about most of them. Everything, though, was all crammed in on this one narrow street with its high houses and thin walls, and it was very claustrophobic.
Books opened the world to her in a way life could never do.
The market was busy. It was busy with non-Jews, which was unusual, and some of them were poking at the kishke and the gelfilte fish with undisguised curiosity. Others were trying to buy hamantaschen without recognising their significance, and having to have the whole of Purim patiently explained to them. She didn’t really need anything else, as she’d already done the shopping first thing; the disaster that had befallen the Germans had only partially affected them.
The water – that was the main thing. A Jewish household placed a bucket under the waterspout, and the women dipped from the bucket. As with her father’s off-hand use of the barges to transport his books, they could claim they were getting their water from the bucket, not from the magically pumped spout.
Water for washing, for purification, for cooking. It was a concern. Perhaps it would come on again soon. Apart from this, though, Jewish boys pushed their handcarts through the streets, and sold vegetables brought to Juvavum from Jewish villages by donkey, just as they always had.
Sophia wandered around, trying to overhear what her German neighbours were saying, but in the end gave up and carried her empty ba
sket down to the quayside.
She was surprised by the number of militiamen present, as she hadn’t seen any in the upper part of the town, and even more surprised to find Mr Thaler in the company of the mayor, being marched towards the bridge by a company of spear-brandishing soldiers. They came towards her, the unmistakable shape of Thaler hurrying along the best he could, his black robe flapping behind him, and the mayor looking decidedly bilious, but more or less in step with the librarian.
She hurried too, apologising to those she bumped into as she trotted along towards the bridge approaches. “Mr Thaler,” she called, “is everything all right?”
He didn’t ignore her, but neither did he stop. “Good morning, Miss Morgenstern. Tell your father I will be along later to thank him for the lanterns.”
“We’ll be in the synagogue later, Mr Thaler. It’s the …” – but she wasn’t sure that Thaler would know what a Megillah reading was, let alone when it should be. “We won’t be at home.”
“No matter,” he said. He drew level with her, and he smiled tightly in her direction. “Another time. Tomorrow.” He seemed very determined, and she realised that he wasn’t under arrest, but actually in charge.
Which, for an under-librarian, was a startlingly abrupt promotion.
“Mr Thaler, what’s going on?”
Now Thaler had to look over his shoulder to talk to her. “That, Miss Morgenstern, is exactly what we’re going to find out.”
On they strode, though striding didn’t quite describe either Thaler’s rolling gait or the mayor’s furious little steps. Those townsfolk who were on the bridge moved aside to let them pass, and, on nothing more than a whim, Sophia decided that she wanted to see where they were going.
That wasn’t quite true: at some point, she’d have to atone for all those small lies that she knowingly told herself to justify her actions. She knew where they were going – to Goat Mountain and the novices’ house, which was the only legitimate point of contact between the Order of the White Robe and everybody else. She knew why they were going – to ask about the fountains, the lights and the barges. She also knew that the Jews would be the last to be told the answers, as they were last to be told about anything that happened in Juvavum.