Gertie Milk and the Keeper of Lost Things

by Simon Van Booy

  When they got close to the city, the road widened and became crowded with people pushing in all directions. The air was very hot and heavy with the smoke of incense. Vendors displayed baskets of ground-up spices, shimmering rolls of fabric, and even live snakes that Kolt said people were buying to keep rats out of their grain storage. Some baskets were strapped to donkeys or camels, and some were carried on heads. Everything was dusty and almost too bright to look at.

  “If we find ourselves here after dark, we’ll most likely see the famous lighthouse with flames shooting out of the top! There’s a library too with hundreds of thousands of hand-written books, and don’t get me started on the shopping.”

  Gertie was more interested in the people. “What if someone speaks to us?” she asked, suddenly nervous. “I don’t know Greek or Egyptian or anything!”

  “Fortunately, you speak Skuldarkian beautifully,” Kolt assured her. “The Skuldarkian language changes to match the place, so it’s understood by everyone throughout time and allows us to understand everyone else.”

  “So I can speak every language?”

  “With the exception of a few encrypted magical languages—Swamp Mouth for instance, the spirit-dialect of Fern Valley, and Olde Skuldarkish—absolutely any language in the world.”

  Suddenly a crazed mule appeared from an alley and bolted toward Gertie with a cargo of freshly ground turmeric on its back. Gertie felt someone lift her up, and the animal stampeded past with its owner in pursuit, sandals flapping.

  “Another lucky escape!” Kolt said, putting her down gently. “Turmeric stains are impossible to get out. But c’mon, it’s almost noon, which is when the B.D.B.U. says this stick must be returned.”

  “Or what will happen?”

  “I don’t know exactly, actually. Things might get a bit sticky?”

  Gertie followed Kolt past more market stalls, where there were all kinds of things to eat, from Alexandrian venus clams to dates, elephant-snout fish, pomegranates, wine-fattened snails, even vials of pink powder—medicine ground up from sea-urchin shells.

  “The house is supposed to be on the other side of this market,” Kolt said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Didn’t you read the glowing words in the B.D.B.U.?”

  Gertie flushed with embarrassment. “Er, I was looking at the lights,” she said. “What if we can’t find the owner?”

  “I don’t know, because I usually manage to locate the person—though not always.”

  Gertie wondered if she’d ever be as good a Keeper as Kolt seemed to be.

  “Sometimes, I’m afraid, well, er, I’ve had to, well, leave an item in a mailbox, or on the person-I-couldn’t-find’s pillow—or in the case of a very important medieval diamond, in a sultan’s satin slipper, as he was busy getting captured by an invading army.”

  Gertie was about to suggest that the B.D.B.U. group objects by place and time, so that multiple items could be returned on a single trip. But before she could get the words out, Kolt was pounding on a heavy door.

  “We’re here!” he said. “Hello? Hello? We’ve got your stick! Open up!”

  When the door opened, a short hairy man wearing what looked to Gertie like a blue and white dress stood before them barefoot.

  “No visitors! No visitors!” the man said, and began closing the door.

  “But, we have—” Kolt protested.

  “No visitors!”

  The door slammed in their faces.

  17

  The Earth Is in Their Hands

  “WHAT SHOULD WE DO NOW?” Gertie asked.

  Kolt handed her the stick. “Time to branch out! I’ll knock, and when he opens it, throw the stick in! Then we’ll both run away.”

  “Is that what we’re supposed to do?”

  “The B.D.B.U. said to return the object to this location before noon on this day, but it didn’t say we have to make friends with hairy people.”

  Kolt pounded on the door, and within a few moments they heard feet slapping a marble floor, and the door opened. The hairy man was about to shout something horrible when he noticed what Gertie was clutching.

  “The stick! Master! Come quickly! The stick! The stick!”

  “The stick?” called a voice in the distance. “The stick?”

  Kolt glanced at Gertie. “Oh, I hate this sort of thing,” he said. “I wonder if they’re going to think we’re thieves.”

  “What if they imprison us?” Gertie asked, trying to give the stick back to Kolt. But he stepped away.

  “I don’t want it!” he cried. “Children are much easier to forgive than grown-ups.”

  Then the owner of the stick appeared. He was middle-aged with a long dark-skinned face, graying hair, and beard. He was wearing a cloak similar to Kolt’s, and sandals with straps that tied up around his ankles.

  “Oh my child!” he said. “You’ve found it!”

  “Yes, here it is!” Gertie said. “Fresh from the desert.”

  “Where in the desert?” the hairy man asked suspiciously. “I’ve been looking for Master Eratosthenes’s stick for days.”

  “Eratosthenes?” Kolt muttered, nudging Gertie. “He’s a famous mathematician!”

  “I found it on the sand,” Gertie said, folding her arms. “In the sun.”

  “Yes, of course you did.” Eratosthenes nodded. “Now I remember! That’s where I left it. But how did you know it was mine?”

  “Oh,” Gertie coughed, “I’m so thirsty! Got any juice?”

  “Yes!” Kolt agreed, hacking away. “Me too! My throat is cracking!”

  “How rude I’ve been,” Eratosthenes cried. “Please, come in for refreshments.”

  “But master, it’s almost noon,” said the hairy man.

  “Then look after our guests, while I go and get the string.” At this, Eratosthenes shuffled off, waving the stick above his head.

  “Is it me, or are they a bit funny?” Gertie whispered as they followed the hairy man into the luxurious Alexandrian villa.

  Kolt nodded. “Very peculiar. Be on your guard.”

  Soon they found themselves in a marble courtyard with high stone walls that blocked out noise from the busy alleyways surrounding the grand house. Wide round pillars held up the stone block ceiling, and in the center of the courtyard was a square pool of clear water with green plants growing at the edges. The roof over the pool was open to the blue sky, and the noon sun poured in.

  In one corner of the room was a golden harp on a stand, and across the courtyard, in shady areas, several peacocks dragged long shimmering trains of feathers.

  Gertie and Kolt were invited to sit on comfortable beds with red cushions as the hairy man ladled fresh well water from an amphora into drinking cups. Then he brought a terra-cotta bowl of juicy grapes, a brick of hard cheese that Kolt said was made from camels’ milk, and a dish with pitted olives mixed with oil, vinegar, cumin, coriander, rue, and mint.

  “Eat now!” the hairy man barked. “Drink now!”

  Kolt’s eyes bulged at all the food. “With pleasure!”

  “I thought you said to be on our guard?” Gertie reminded him, pulling some of the irresistible-looking cheese from the brick with her fingers. It had a chalky flavor with a lingering sweetness at the end.

  Then Eratosthenes reappeared holding the stick and a piece of string. He rushed to the center of the house where the sun was warming the tiles around the pool of water. A peacock was fanning its feathers in the hot rays, and Eratosthenes shooed it away. Then he held his stick up, and with the other hand arranged the piece of string on the tiles. But then the stick fell into the water.

  “That man is completely bonkers,” Kolt said. “I know he’s supposed to be a genius, head of the Alexandrian library, teacher, poet, even an athlete—but how can a breakthrough in science be achieved with a stick and a piece of wobb
ly string?”

  Then Eratosthenes started to panic.

  “Girl!” he cried, turning to Gertie. “Can you help me, please—there isn’t much time!”

  “I can help you, master!” shouted the hairy man.

  “No, it must be the child! She found the branch, it must be her.”

  Gertie jumped up and hurried past the furious-looking servant to the center of the house. It was burning hot in the midday sun, but Eratosthenes was determined to complete his experiment and asked Gertie to hold the stick steady in one place. Then he stared up into the blazing sunshine.

  “You can go blind like that!” Kolt pointed out, his mouth full of spiced olives.

  “Master, it is now precisely noon!” cried the hairy man.

  Gertie watched as Eratosthenes carefully measured the stick’s shadow with the string.

  “7.2! 7.2!” Eratosthenes cried, jumping up. “You can let the stick go now, Gertie, we’ve done it—the angle of the stick’s shadow is 7.2 degrees. And there’s 360 degrees in a circle, and 7.2 goes into 360 exactly 50 times!”

  “Which is good?” asked Gertie.

  “My child, it’s amazing, because right when we measured the shadow the stick made at noon, I know that 500 miles away in Syene, the sun was shining into a well, illuminating only the water, not the sides of the well, but just the water, so that there was no shadow. So if the world is 360 degrees, as any circle is, and the distance between my house and the well in Syene is 500 miles, then 7.2 times 50 equals 360 degrees, and 500 miles times 50 equals 25,000 miles, which must be the circumference of the world, in other words, the distance around the Earth from here,” he said, pointing down at his left slipper, “to here!” he went on, pointing at the right.

  Gertie wandered back over to Kolt and snapped a grape from the bunch. “That’s nice,” she said. “So you’ll always know where your slippers are.”

  “Yes! Exactly, they can never be more than 25,000 miles away from each other.”

  Then he started dancing around.

  “Praise the skies! May libations pour! It has been achieved!” he cried, waving the stick and the piece of string in the air. “We’ve worked out how big the Earth is with a stick, string, and light.”

  “I stand corrected,” Kolt said. “He’s brilliant after all. I don’t know where my slippers are, half the time.”

  18

  Back to the Time Camels

  SOON IT WAS TIME TO GO.

  “Well, I’m happy for you, Eratosthenes,” Kolt said. “Seems like you’ve done something wonderful, but now that you’ve got your stick friend and your lucky string and are having fun with them, I think we’ll be heading off back to the Time Ca—”

  “Camel!” Gertie interrupted. “Time to get to our camel!”

  “Yes, exactly.” Kolt nodded. “Our time camels.”

  “But I’ve done it!” Eratosthenes insisted. “Thanks to you, I’ve accomplished the impossible, don’t you see?”

  He swept Kolt and Gertie into a hug and then launched into a mostly incoherent ramble, throwing his hands in the air and waving his stick around with so much excitement, the hairy man got whipped in the eye.

  Gertie pretended to drop a grape, so no one could see her laughing.

  “How lovely . . .” Kolt said, standing up. “How marvelous! String and shadows, what a brilliant game. I’m so happy for you, but we really must be going. Our camels need their camel food, and our tents have most likely blown away!”

  Eratosthenes begged them to stay longer, but Kolt insisted and indicated to Gertie with his eyes that they should start moving toward the door.

  “Take care of that eye!” Kolt called out to the hairy man, who was sitting down with a piece of camel cheese held over it.

  « • • • »

  Once outside, they walked away quickly down a cool, dark alley. Kolt seemed pleased.

  “Well, that went rather well! You were excellent, Gertie, a proper Keeper if I ever saw one, well done, good thinking!”

  “I’m not sure I understand how giving that man his pet stick is helping to save the human race.”

  “He needed that stick to measure how far around the Earth is, its circumference.”

  “But couldn’t he have just used another stick?”

  “The B.D.B.U. is never wrong about these things—and for reasons unknown to you or me, it was at that exact time under those exact conditions, with that plain-looking Persea branch that the mathematician was to conduct his experiment.”

  “For the good of humankind?”

  “If the world can be sized, then it can be mapped and explored, and people can meet and swap ideas, and then new inventions can come, and people can grow and prosper.”

  “Who was that hairy man who answered the door?”

  “The one who got whipped in the eye?” Kolt asked.

  Gertie nodded. “I thought he was Eratosthenes’s son, until he called him master.”

  “He was most likely a slave, Gertie. I’m sad to say this, but it was common practice in the ancient world for people to keep slaves.”

  “So the hairy man couldn’t just leave if he wanted to?”

  “No, slaves were bought and sold at markets. Let’s hope Eratosthenes was a kind master.”

  “He shouldn’t have been a master to begin with!”

  “I agree with you,” Kolt said. “But it takes a very special kind of genius to see the crimes that hide from us in plain sight.”

  Before leaving the city, Kolt stopped to pick up “essentials” they could eat on the way home, including a jar of honey with a distinctive smoky flavor, “though one has to be careful,” he warned her, “not to end up with ancient honey from Corsica, which is poisonous.”

  Gertie was so full from the camels’ milk cheese and olives that she couldn’t even think of food, but she watched Kolt barter at the different market stalls, listening and looking for anything camel-like that might jog her memory of the word she’d heard herself say.

  Despite the punishing heat, Gertie wished they could have stayed longer so that she might meet some children her age and find out if the Alexandrian nights were cool and pleasant to walk around in under the bright moon.

  She wanted to learn what sort of games they played, what they dreamed about, things they had learned from living in the desert, and what they liked to drink and eat. Gertie sensed that, most of all, she wanted to make a friend.

  “There’s nothing like Alexandrian olives,” Kolt remarked, as a shriveled woman (not unlike an olive herself) filled a cloth sack. “But this must still feel very strange for you.”

  It was beyond strange. Gertie wondered if her memory would ever come back, or if the only knowledge she would ever have of who she was would be from when she became a Keeper. Perhaps if she understood more, it might jog her old memory in some way.

  “So returning things helps people learn, so they can live more and more peacefully together?”

  “That’s the basic idea, Gertie—education is a positive, guiding force in the world.”

  “I guess that makes sense, but then why are there so many wars? What if people use knowledge to control others?”

  Kolt sighed. “That’s along the lines of what the Losers believe. They think humans are not responsible enough to use knowledge wisely. But we Keepers believe the opposite, that with enough knowledge and education, people will eventually develop the wisdom they need for the good of all—don’t forget our motto, It could always be worse!”

  “But what does that mean?”

  “That no matter what’s going on—you must always keep hope alive in your heart.”

  “Who are these Losers anyway? Have you ever seen one?”

  “Misguided misfits in my opinion,” Kolt said hotly. “Their leader’s name is Cava Calla Thrax. He was once a clever Roman Caesar disgusted by the bru
tal Roman way of life, who actually set out to do good. . . .”

  “What happened?”

  “His ideas got twisted and he became quite ruthless. By trying to rid the world of darkness, he brought more into it. Then in his sixty-fourth year of life he completely disappeared, leaving only his books behind.”

  “He wrote books?”

  “Yes, he was a scholar like Eratosthenes. The Losers formed about three thousand years later. They started as a group of bitter scientists obsessed with the work of Cava Calla Thrax, who had predicted that too much knowledge would be the downfall of human life, and that we should live in ignorance as neophobics—people who are afraid of anything new.”

  “But scientists? Don’t they look for new things?”

  “In theory, yes—but those that founded the Losers were consumed with anger.”

  “Why?”

  “They had spent their entire working lives in an artificial intelligence lab trying to create a computer that would know everything.”

  “But they couldn’t finish it?”

  “Oh they finished it—but all it could do was make hot chocolate.”

  Gertie licked her lips. “And that’s a bad thing?”

  “The whole project became a joke. The scientists were the laughingstock of the world. Even the name of their computer, Vispoth, entered common usage as a word to describe something outrageously expensive and completely useless.”

  “Vispoth! That’s the Losers’ totally insane supercomputer!”

  “Right, Gertie, so then the scientists stole it from the lab, went into hiding, and reprogrammed its memory with the complete works of Cava Calla Thrax, hoping it would tell them how to rid the world of knowledge and create widespread neophobia.”

  “Fear of new things.”

  “Exactly.”

  Gertie felt she was starting to understand.

  “But that’s not the worst bit. . . . One of the first things it spat out from its insane computer brain was that there was a 98.9 percent probability that beings from another dimension were aiding humanity by returning lost objects to the world.”