The Left-Handed Booksellers of London

by Garth Nix

  “It’s my dynamic personality,” said Merlin. “The left-handed do more of our visible work, as it were, since we’re the field agents. And there’s training, too. But like Viv, at least half the time I work in the bookshops. Generally moving things around, I hate to say. No one seems prepared to let me deal with customers, despite the fact that I would undoubtedly double sales.”

  “You had a tryout,” said Vivien. “You doubled the amount of time spent talking to attractive customers without selling them anything.”

  “I sold that copy of The Ashley Book of Knots no one else could sell,” protested Merlin. “A fifty-quid hardcover!”

  “Selling a single fifty-pound book in two weeks is far less use than selling two or three hundred two- or three-pound books in the same period,” replied Vivien. “And I heard you didn’t manage to sell anything when they tried you out front here, and given the bibliophiles who frequent the place, that’s quite a non-achievement.”

  “All the customers were old,” said Merlin. “And Eric or Alison always took the good ones.”

  “The prosecution rests,” said Vivien.

  “Maybe they can put me in special orders,” said Merlin. “That would be better than the stockroom.”

  “You would get cross checking Books in Print and destroy the microfiche reader,” said Vivien. “Which is why it’s a right-handed job.”

  “Are all your staff, um, special-handed booksellers?” asked Susan. They were back at ground level now, but they kept going. The stair became darker, as there were no lights, only the spill from those higher up.

  “Not all, but most,” said Vivien. “Wait a tick.”

  They stopped, two levels below the ground, though the stair continued down. Vivien ran her hand along the wall, found an industrial-sized light switch, and rotated it to the on position. A faint light flickered above them, barely bright enough to show the faded letters painted in stark white on a rusting steel door: “Air Raid Shelter, Cap. 39 persons.”

  It also lit up a wooden fruit crate on the floor. Vivien knelt and rummaged in the box, removing three candle stubs melted onto chipped china saucers. She handed one each to Merlin and Susan.

  “Hold it out,” she instructed Susan, and blew on it, with a faint whistle. A spark left her mouth and the candle flared into life and almost went out again as Susan dropped and caught it in one motion. She held it steady and the flame strengthened.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know you could do that.”

  “It’s easy here,” said Vivien. She lit her own candle with another pursed-lips exhalation, and then Merlin’s. “There’s a lot of mythic power, more and more as we get closer to the old temple. And Grandmother.”

  “And other things,” said Merlin.

  “What other things?” asked Susan. She found herself whispering, though she wasn’t sure why.

  “Oh, don’t worry,” he answered. “Grandmother keeps them in order. Not far now.”

  It grew colder as they descended, and the walls were no longer plaster or worked stone but rough-hewn, pale gray rock, with rivulets of water winding their way down and drips coming from the ceiling. After what seemed to Susan rather farther than it should have been to go down only two floors, they reached a large cavern, most of it impossible to see in the candlelight, save for the massive marble gateway on the other side, the stones pale in the darkness and the open gateway seeming to be even darker than the edges of the cavern. The marble was carved with what Susan thought were battle scenes, but it was hard to tell.

  “We mustn’t take more than three steps beyond the gate,” whispered Vivien. She moved up close to Susan on her right side, and Merlin shuffled in from the left. “Stay in line. Don’t move ahead of us.”

  They moved together through the gate, candles flickering, and stopped. Susan had no sense of what they’d entered. She could see nothing beyond the narrow pool of light around them, and their footsteps had echoed on the imperfectly smoothed stone, as if they were in some much larger cavern or chamber. It was much colder again, and her breath fogged out, making her notice that she was breathing too quickly. She forced herself to hold a breath in, and exhaled very slowly, counting to six. She didn’t want Merlin or Vivien to think she was afraid, even though she was.

  “Gods,” muttered Merlin. “It is Nebrophonus.”

  A huge, gaunt, ice-white wolfhound came slowly stalking out of the darkness ahead, stiff-legged and growling.

  “Don’t move,” whispered Vivien. She shifted even closer to Susan, their shoulders touching, as Merlin slid his right hand around her elbow.

  The wolfhound edged closer, sniffing, lifting his huge, shaggy head, lip curled to show massive teeth.

  He didn’t look like a ghost, or a spiritual remnant, or whatever Vivien had said. He looked very real. Susan had been entirely accurate about being good with dogs; they nearly always obeyed her. But part of being good with dogs was knowing when to leave the clearly dangerous ones alone.

  “We brought a friend, Grandmother,” called out Vivien. “A friend with a gift for you. It’s me, Vivien, and my brother, Merlin.”

  “Antigone’s children,” added Merlin. “Daughter of the fourth Henry, and him the son of Theresa, the one nicknamed Mintie, and her the daughter of Serena.”

  “And Serena the daughter of Claude, the second of his name, and him the son of Sophia and her the daughter of the fifth Guinevere, the first to use the name St. Jacques, in the true line all back to the beginning,” added Vivien.

  There was a whistle in the darkness. Nebrophonus turned his head and then ever so slowly, like an ocean liner turning, curved away in front of them, retreating once more into the dark from whence he came.

  A moment later, a woman appeared in front of the apprehensive trio. A short, businesslike old woman in an unadorned pale gray high-waisted dress, a snow-white fichu pinned at the neck, a faded blue bonnet over her silver hair, and one white glove, on her right hand. She had deep-set dark eyes that were immediately troubling. She looked to Susan very much like a well-known slightly mad old man in Bath, who wandered the streets dressed as Jane Austen whenever he could escape from his family.

  Vivien and Merlin curtsied, dragging Susan down with them.

  “Vivien and Merlin, is it,” said the woman. It wasn’t a question. Her voice was soft and scratchy, and weirdly menacing. “Come to visit their old granny. But you want something . . . you always do. . . .”

  Vivien didn’t answer that. She shuffled half a pace forward and spoke brightly.

  “This is our friend Susan Arkshaw, Grandmother. She has a present for you.”

  Merlin gave Susan a little push and let go of her elbow.

  Susan took an even shorter step than Vivien’s and held out the rose, instinctively lowering her head and bending her knee.

  The Grandmother took it from her, and as she did so, the glass flower became real again, though still transparent, the stem bending. Petals shivered as the old lady lifted it to her nose and inhaled deeply.

  “Ah,” she said wistfully. “It’s been long and long since I smelled the scent of a rose. I make you welcome, Susan Arkshaw.”

  Susan felt more than heard Vivien’s sigh of relief, which was cut off as the Grandmother lowered the rose and peered over the top of the flower, her eyes bright with mischief.

  “But it has no color. It should be red, my dears. Red is the color for roses. Roses and blood. The left-handed one, Merlin. You’ve a knife or two upon you, dear. Use it.”

  Susan glanced at Merlin, who was looking aside a little. At Nebrophonus, who had reappeared and was staring back at him, his jaws roughly at groin height and only a foot away.

  “Susan has the guest-right of the St. Jacques,” said Vivien. She spoke confidently, but her right hand was trembling in its glove. “Bread and water . . . well, tea and biscuits, freely given.”

  The Grandmother laughed, a kind of choking, coughing laugh. Susan resisted the urge to turn and run. The wolfhound would be on her back str
aight away if she did, and Merlin and Vivien hadn’t said anything, or given a sign to flee.

  “Oh, you silly children,” said the Grandmother. “I only need a few drops. You want to know who Susan’s people are, do you not? A drop of color for the rose, a drop for me to see what’s what, a drop for Nebrophonus as a treat. That’s all.”

  “Three drops of my blood,” said Susan. “And you can tell me who my father is?”

  “Your people,” said the Grandmother. “I can’t say a name in particular.”

  “Is there a catch?” asked Susan bluntly.

  The Grandmother laughed again.

  “Sometimes it is better not to know such things,” she said. “That’s all.”

  “Vivien?”

  “It should be okay,” whispered Vivien, bending her head near Susan. “We do give blood ourselves sometimes . . . it makes Grandmother more connected to the New World, more able to speak and so on. The older ones in particular.”

  “They’re incomprehensible otherwise, the really ancient ones,” whispered Merlin, leaning in close to Susan’s other ear. “Weird dialects of Latin and so on. Worst relatives you could have.”

  “I heard that,” said the Grandmother. “I won’t brook at punishing disrespect, young Merlin.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am,” said Merlin hurriedly. For once, he sounded like he meant it.

  “I haven’t got all day,” said the Grandmother. “Or rather, this rose has no more than the day, and I’d like to enjoy it fully. What’s it to be?”

  “You may have the three drops, ma’am,” said Susan. Some innate caution and memory of fairy tales made her add, “But no more, and in return you will tell me who my people are, and that is all there will be between us.”

  She held out her hand, palm uppermost, and extended her forefinger. A thin, very sharply pointed blade appeared in Merlin’s left hand, as if from nowhere. He held Susan’s wrist lightly with his right hand, and with a sudden stab, pricked her finger. A drop of blood welled up and hovered there.

  “First blood to Nebrophonus,” said the Grandmother. She gestured, and the wolfhound approached and with his great sandpapery tongue lashed Susan’s finger, taking the drop of blood. As he turned away, his tail wagged slightly in satisfaction.

  More blood welled to the surface. The Grandmother extended the rose, touching a petal to the next shivering droplet. The blood ran into the flower, spreading through the petals, which bloomed a glorious red, but even the stalk took on color, too, a darker shade that was a kind of green-black.

  The Grandmother raised the flower and sniffed it again, her piercing dark eyes momentarily hooded, a smile passing across her thin-boned face like a glimpse of some small, colorful bird darting between dark and brooding trees.

  “And one for me, to tell your bloodline,” said the Grandmother. Susan started as the old woman took her hand, because the old lady was no insubstantial ghost. Her flesh was solid, and colder even than the room.

  The Grandmother raised Susan’s hand to her mouth and in a matter-of-fact way, like tasting a spoonful of soup, licked off the blood. She dabbed her mouth with the back of her hand and frowned.

  “Oh,” she said. “It’s old, old . . . too old for me. . . .”

  She turned around on the spot and suddenly was a different old woman, this one taller and quite majestic in a jewel-encrusted burgundy gown over a black kirtle, all typical of the fifteenth century, her hair under a bifurcated veil that fell down her shoulders to left and right. She wore a doeskin glove on her right hand, with a massive emerald ring over the glove, on her third finger.

  Nebrophonus was gone, too, replaced by a much smaller, Scottish terrier type of dog, lying on a cushion, who gave the visitors an uninterested glance and yawned mightily.

  “Nay, it is older than I, Nan,” she said gently, and turned as if in a courtly dance, one hand raised to an invisible partner.

  Now there was a true ancient, a woman bent over a blackthorn stick, in simple homespun, with colored ribbons at neck and cuffs and a leather gauntlet on her left hand. Her dog was at her side, some long extinct or absorbed breed, yellow in color, with broad, floppy ears and curly hair and a self-satisfied, none-too-bright expression.

  This grandmother spoke in Latin, inclined her head, and turned about as well.

  Susan glanced at Vivien with a questioning look, rapidly turning back as she saw Vivien staring at the next Grandmother.

  This one’s face was hidden beneath the hood of a white robe that was vaguely reminiscent of a Roman toga, and both her hands were in gloves, mulberry-colored gloves set with fragments of tesserae, so they sparkled in the candlelight. She sat on an oaken tree stump that hadn’t been there a moment before, and the dog at her feet was another wolfhound, very much like Nebrophonus, but a rich chestnut brown rather than white.

  She spoke a few words in Latin, stopped, and pushed back her hood. She was not so old as the others, perhaps fifty, her hair pale not from age but from always; she was a strawberry blonde. She smiled, seemingly more friendly than the other grandmothers, and continued in strangely accented English, the emphasis within each sentence not where it would be expected.

  “This will be easier for you, no?”

  “Yes, thank you,” said Susan.

  The Grandmother licked her lips.

  “Old indeed,” she said. “No less than the blood of the Old Ones, the Ancient Sovereigns, the Oath-Makers, the Vassal-Takers, the line of the High Kings and the High Queens. Diluted with mortal essence. Yet still potent, most potent. Be careful, my children, for if this one comes into the power of her sire, she could bind even such as you, with salt and iron and blood enough.”

  With that, Grandmother, dog, and stump were gone, and all three candles blew out with a rush of wind, leaving the trio entirely in the dark.

  Chapter Nine

  Once I was young, as you saw me then

  A bright fire, no moment’s spark

  Bright as the sun, but that was when

  It was early morn, as said the lark

  “SO, WHAT DID THAT ALL MEAN?” ASKED SUSAN AS SHE WAS USHERED into Audrey’s taxi, with both Vivien and Merlin joining her in the back. She noted the blackthorn stick had been returned to its position above the sun visors, and Audrey winked at her in welcome. “And I thought we were going to have lunch in your staffroom?”

  “We’ll get something somewhere,” said Vivien, who had hurried them up from the subterranean regions and out through the bookshop proper, pushing Susan past Eric and another bookseller, a woman, who had both attempted to make conversation. “They always have terrible sandwiches here. Anchovy paste, that sort of thing.”

  “Awful,” said Merlin. “Look, I need to get changed; why don’t we stop by my place and have something sent up. I think I can stand the doings this once.”

  “Have something sent up? The doings?”

  “Merlin lives in a hotel,” said Vivien. “We own it, but it’s room only, any meals are strictly charged. Northumberland House; it’s near the Old Bookshop, and very necessary for the young left-handed, who are almost without exception domestically useless—”

  “Oi!” exclaimed Audrey.

  “I said almost without exception, you being one of them,” replied Vivien. “Besides, you never lived there, did you?”

  “Not to mention, not all that young,” whispered Merlin to Susan.

  “Always lived with my ma on Grove Road, reckon I always will,” said Audrey, ignoring Merlin’s barb. “Except for Wooten, of course, and when I was up at Durham.”

  “The university? And what’s Wootton—is that from the Tolkien story, ‘Smith of Wootton Major’?” asked Susan. “I thought you were all one big extended family, living in a haunted house or something—but you all have different accents. . . .”

  “Go on, Viv, explain; you’re the right-handed one,” said Audrey, accelerating madly to exploit a momentary opportunity to insert the cab into the continuous artery of traffic pulsing along Park Lane. “Yeah, I
did two years of history at Durham, dropped out to join a band; I’m a drummer, see? Northumberland House, is it? I hope there’s no trouble with the lions in Trafalgar Square.”

  “What!” exclaimed Susan, leaping forward, almost thrusting her head through the hatch, causing Audrey to brake and the cab close behind to swing around them with a blare of the horn, narrowly missing their rear bumper. “The lions? The statues?”

  “A joke,” said Audrey, the cab clicking as she accelerated to get back in the flow. “What with those urchins having a go at you and all. The lions don’t walk in daytime, and never in May.”

  “But they do walk sometimes?” asked Susan, sitting back as Audrey swung the cab off Park Lane and into the lane by the rather ugly 1960s London Hilton, to cut through to Piccadilly and avoid the traffic choking to a halt as it fed into the Hyde Park Corner roundabout. “It’s only . . . my mother . . . she always made us visit Trafalgar Square, and she’d lean against a lion and tell stories . . . what I thought was make-believe, fun for a little girl, about the lions coming awake.”

  “The statues don’t actually animate or move,” said Merlin. “The things we call the lions were there long before the statues, or the square, or the city. They don’t really look like lions. But they’re fierce, and hunt in prides, and roar. And they like raw meat. Not fun for anyone. But they sleep deeply, and do not rouse of their own accord.”

  “I think Mum must have known something about the Old World—”

  “To answer your question about us being one big extended family,” interrupted Vivien quickly. “We are more of a dispersed clan. We all have one non-bookseller parent, you see. It’s rather like being an extreme Catholic, because when you marry in, you have to agree to the children being raised a particular way. Which means going to school at Wooten Hall—spelled with one t and an e, not like the Tolkien story, but I reckon he must have got wind of it somehow. Fantasy writers, they’re the bane of our existence! Wooten Hall is in Gloucestershire; we board there from age seven. That’s why we have different accents; they’re all pretty much fixed by the time you’re seven, and of course, we’d go home in the holidays and reinforce it. Though some people, and I name no names . . . cough . . . Audrey . . . like to ham their natural ones up a bit more.”