Senlin Ascends (The Books of Babel Book 1)

by Josiah Bancroft

  Edith was too stunned by Ceph’s news to notice Senlin’s feeble consolation.

  Despite his confidence that the Registrar would offer a speedy response to their protest, night came without an answer.

  The cage, which had seemed so exposed before, now seemed strangely private. The stars appeared like frost on a window. The moon rose, thin as a strap. They ate the hard rolls and shared the flask of water, their quiet seeming to amplify the clamor of the Market below. The sounds of flutes and fiddles and drums swelled from around numerous campfires. The songs overlapped like the field music of crickets.

  The evening chill made them huddle together for warmth. Edith folded the excess of her skirts over their laps. The realization that she might be branded had stifled her previous talkativeness. As the hour grew later, Senlin felt his wellspring of optimism, of denial, begin to fail. His mind churned over the details of what Ceph had said. He couldn’t make sense of it, and it grated at him. He wondered what was behind all of the Parlor’s arbitrary rules.

  “This obsession with fires, doesn’t it seem strange to you?” he said, finally breaking the silence. “They don’t insist that we wash the dishes or sweep the floors. We only have to stoke the fires. There must be some practical reason. Perhaps it mobilizes the air or warms the plumbing…”

  “It’s always been part of the script.” Edith said, shifting her shoulder against his. “No matter what the play is about, the fires have to be kept up. I always remembered before.”

  “You had other things on your mind,” Senlin said.

  “You didn’t forget the fires.”

  “Only out of habit. Whenever my wife lost track of me at a pub or a party, all she had to do was follow the chimney. I gravitate to fires. People leave you alone if you’re stirring a fire.”

  “When you get out of here you should find a chimney to stand near.” Her tone suggested it was a joke, but feeling Senlin wince beside her, she said, “I’m sure she’s fine.”

  “Coming here was my idea,” he said. “I wanted to see the Tower. I brought us here. Why was I so determined to bring her here?”

  “What’s that old saying? Like water to a drain, we are drawn to the Tower,” she said in a laughably formal voice. “Not what you expected, huh?”

  “I liked it better in books. Have you ever been further up, in the Baths or, what comes after that? New Babel?”

  “This is as far as I’ve gone.” She picked at the tattered tulle of her skirts. “As far as I’ll go.”

  “Come on,” he said, patting her hand. Even to him it seemed a condescending gesture. He stopped patting, and squeezed her hand gently instead. “We’re not staying here. You’ve got to go back home and lose your husband, and I’ve got to go on ahead and find my wife.”

  Marya ran her hand over the keys and along the lip of the music rack, up to the freshly polished top board of the upright piano. She turned to Senlin with an expression of amazement.

  “How did you…”

  Senlin pulled out the piano bench for her and bumped into his hat rack. The rack shivered but didn’t fall. The piano was tightly wedged inside the little living room of his cottage. “I had it shipped in from Bromburry last week. It’s a little old, I’m afraid. I bought it from your old conservatory. They were making room for new pianos.”

  “A piano, Tom. You’re giving me a piano!” She sat down and tested the keys, still in a daze.

  “I know most men bring a ring when they propose,” he shrugged. “But I thought if you were ever to live here and be happy, you would need a piano more.”

  She glanced about the room, realizing that it had changed. “But where is your sofa?”

  “You’re sitting on it.” He hooked his leg around the bench and sat down beside her. It swayed a little beneath them, and they both grabbed hold of the keyboard in case the old bench collapsed.

  When it didn’t, they laughed and she said, “It’s a very comfortable sofa.”

  Senlin cleared his throat and furrowed his brow. “Marya, I… I have a difficult time expressing certain… genuinely held feelings. I…” he swallowed and shook his head. This was not how he wanted the speech to go. She waited patiently, and he gathered his thoughts. “You’ve made it impossible for me to read a book in peace. When you’re not here, I just gaze at the words until they tumble off the page into a puddle in my lap. Instead of reading, I sit there and review the hours of the day I spent in your company, and I am more charmed by that story than anything the author has scribbled down. I have never been lonely in my life, but you have made me lonely. When you are gone, I am a moping ruin. I thought I understood the world fairly well. But you have made it all mysterious again. And it’s unnerving and frightening and wonderful, and I want it to continue. I want all your mysteries. And if I could, I would give you a hundred pianos. I would…”

  She stopped him with a gentle hand on his shoulder. She rose, her hand moving to his cheek. He tried to stand and fell back onto the keyboard with a discordant bang of notes. She kissed him, shifting the bench with the side of her leg. He attempted to lift himself from the keyboard, but again she pushed him back with the force of a kiss and again he banged upon the keys.

  The villagers who walked past the headmaster’s cottage that evening wondered where he had gotten a piano and why he insisted on playing it so poorly and so loudly for so long.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “Most life in the ocean lives in the shallows. And so it is with those living on the land.”

  - Everyman’s Guide to the Tower of Babel, I. IIV

  He woke to a frigid gust of wind. The coop rattled softly; the wire links rang like a tambourine. The sky was a deep indigo, and the starlight painted the Tower the color of a glacier. The night was as brutally cold as the day had been hot. Morning was still hours away.

  His arm had gone to sleep, and when he tried to shift it, he realized that Edith and he were in a tangled embrace. Her cheek pressed against his chest; his arms were around her. Her black, heavy hair blew about his chin and neck. Guiltily, he began to draw back.

  Either she hadn’t been asleep or was jolted awake by his movement because she quickly said, “Please, don’t. I’m freezing.” Her voice was muffled. Her breath warmed his chest.

  He stopped and she closed the gap he had opened. He could feel the full length of her body shivering against him. He rearranged the broadest part of his coat over her shoulders as best he could. “It’ll be morning in a couple of hours. Try to get back to sleep.”

  For him, sleep did not return. He lay in the purple dark, thinking. He couldn’t reconcile his idea of the Tower with his experience, and it gnawed at him. He had misled his students when he’d praised the Tower so effusively, that much was certain. He would have to complicate his lesson come the fall and the new school year. He would still teach the Tower’s technological advances and its vague historical accounts, but he would no longer exaggerate its character.

  Something changed in people when they stood in the Tower’s shadow. It sapped their humanity. It heightened their ambition. He couldn’t imagine why anyone would return to the Parlor after being expelled. Why return for further torment? He didn’t understand it. Was life really so grim in the Market? Was everyone so terribly dissatisfied with themselves that they could think of nothing better to do with their life than to spend it in pretend? He thought of Pining, the poor affable sap. He’d been so effusive about the wonders of the Parlor. In the moments before he was killed, he seemed so confident and satisfied and happy. But why pretend to love to a woman? Why woo an actor? It didn’t make any sense.

  “I imagine people would pay hundreds of shekels for a room with a balcony like this,” Edith said, interrupting his brooding. “Do you think we could fit a sofa in here?” He smiled at the idea.

  “I have a question which you certainly aren’t obligated to answer, but it’s something that has been bothering me, so I feel compelled to ask…”

  “Don’t make a speech, Tom. Just ask your qu
estion,” she cut him off, though not harshly.

  He drew a breath. “Why did you come back to the Parlor so many times?”

  She laughed and turned her face away from his chest. “I’ve been asking myself the same thing. I haven’t a good excuse. There’s just something nice, something comforting about being in the middle of somebody else’s story. It’s really clarifying, in a weird way, and it feels important.” She heard Senlin sniff at this, a stunted little laugh, and she poked him in the ribs. “Don’t laugh. I know it sounds stupid, but I look at my own life and all I see is ambivalence and confusion. Nothing dramatic happens, at least not suddenly. In real life, nothing happens quickly. Everything just erodes. And it’s confusing and frustrating and dull. God, can it be dull. But then you have the Parlor, and everything has a point. Yes, it’s simple. Yes, it’s stupid. But there is a plot. A week ago, I would’ve given anything for a life with a plot. Now, I say, bring on the dullness. Give me chores and almanacs and nine hours of dreamless, exhausted sleep. Bring on the dullness!”

  Senlin considered all of this. “I suppose it makes sense. But I prefer the story you told me about your past to the trite play we escaped. I think your life sounds interesting.”

  “Then I must have exaggerated.” They paused to harden themselves against another snapping wind. He gritted his teeth and clinched his eyes shut until it passed. After it calmed again, Edith spoke again, her voice abruptly lower. “I know you’re in the middle of your own mess.” She turned and spoke again into his chest. “I hope you find your wife. I really do. I think you will. If you can survive this, everything else has to be easy,” she said, and had to stop to clear her throat, and he realized that she was trying to keep from crying. “But I have a favor to ask. I know I don’t have any right to ask, and you don’t have any responsibility to say yes…”

  “Don’t make a speech,” he said, trying to calm her and keep her from breaking down. “Just ask the question.”

  “Don’t leave me ‘til it’s over. I can get through it. I just need a little moral support.”

  Hearing the dread in her voice, he said he would, of course he would. But, he was quick to add, it wouldn’t come to that. The Registrar would relent.

  When Ceph’s insufferable smile reappeared in the hatch portal the next morning, he repeated the previous verdict. Edith would be expelled. She could never come back. Ceph, having studiously avoided any mention of branding or bodily harm, referred now to the “ostracization process” that Edith would undergo. He made it sound like the most congenial thing in the world, and he assured them there was nothing more that could be done. The alternatives and appeals had been exhausted.

  Senlin, having stewed on the subject all night, had prepared a fuming rebuttal. “Have you been entirely stripped of your conscience?” he asked. “Don’t hide behind duty and institution. Act like a human being! Don’t behave as if this brutality is defensible just because an arbitrary policy and a bullying bureaucrat stand behind it. You do not need an appeal to confirm what you know. It is wrong to maim a person for failing to stoke a fire. You have a conscience, native to yourself, which is screaming through the bars of your very ribs: let her go.” There was an unfamiliar heat to his voice, and he found at the end that he was trembling with rage.

  Ceph flagged his handkerchief over his face as if to swat away a gnat. “Here, here. A fine speech.”

  Senlin was taken aback by this strange response. The clerk had sounded genuine, if not a little bored. “Thank you.”

  “But in the final analysis, it’s not a matter of conscience, really; it’s a matter of constancy,” Ceph said in a pedantic tone, and before Senlin could argue, he continued, “If the law is malleable, Mr. Senlin, if it bends and conforms to man, then man will become resolute in his flaws. The law exists to give shape to man’s ideals. When you think about it, doesn’t mercy serve the wicked at the expense of the law?”

  Senlin was ready to reach through the hatch and choke the smug clerk even as Ceph fondled the curls of his mustache, but Edith intervened, pulling Senlin from the portal.

  “I’ll go. I just want to go,” she said.

  “No!” Senlin said, tugging her back from the window. “Why are you giving in?”

  “Because they can keep us here forever, and I can’t stay here. Do you want to die like this? I don’t. I want to die some day in the far future working my land with my feet on the ground. And you… you need to find a fireplace to stand by.” She said the last with a sad, resolute smile.

  He swallowed a second argument. As much as he loathed giving in to this injustice, he could not argue with her request. He had promised to be a moral support. The obligation had already begun.

  “Really, the ostracization process is quite humane,” Ceph said with a tone that suggested much was being made of little. “For some it’s even revelatory.”

  Senlin had to clinch his jaw to keep from blurting a rebuke.

  The verdict accepted, they were allowed into the hall again. Their backs ached and their legs quaked beneath them. They stretched and shook the blood back into their legs. He felt like a man who had crawled ashore from a stormy sea. For the second time in the past day, he felt the disbelieving gratitude of a survivor.

  Ceph led them to the hospital ward they’d passed through the day before. A dozen white-suited attendants patrolled the tile. The attendants weaved slowly, vigilantly through the grid of curtained stalls. Pistols hung at their hips under the hems of their coats. It occurred to him that if the two of them tried to run, they would not get far.

  The empty beds they passed took on a more sinister light. Sobs and moans, which the tiled room amplified and duplicated mercilessly, sounded everywhere about them. And then Senlin abruptly understood. This wasn’t a hospital at all. This was not where one came to be healed. This was where the unfortunate exiles were branded or had their eyes plucked out. This was where ensnared tourists were “ostracized.” It was a white-tiled torture chamber.

  Through a gap in the curtains of one cell, Senlin briefly caught sight of a scene that was so intense it stunted the passage of time. He saw a man being held upright in bed by two attendants. Concealing the man’s whole head was one of the valved copper cylinders he had seen on their first pass through the ward. The valve stood in the center of the man’s unseen face like an absurd nose. A nurse was leaned over him, turning the valve in short strained jerks. Spasms wracked the man’s arms and legs, testing the strength of the two attendants holding him down. Despite his obvious agony, not a single sound escaped the sealed helmet. The man writhed in silence. They were torturing him. The nurses seemed to have no qualms about it.

  Senlin supposed that the barbaric device was what they used to remove a person’s eye. The thought filled him with disgust.

  A cotton gown lay on the empty, tightly made bed where Ceph halted. A long curtain hung on a rod encircling the bed. Ceph directed Edith to ready herself for the nurse who would be around shortly. He called Senlin onward, babbling again about the beautiful peacocks that roosted all about the Baths. But Senlin remained planted beside the curtain after Edith closed it. He could see her shadow shift behind the drape.

  “I’m going to wait with her,” Senlin said.

  “There really is no need. She will be…”

  “I’m going to wait.” He repeated more firmly.

  Ceph looked genuinely puzzled. He seemed about to argue, then thought better of it. He gave a belabored shrug and removed himself some paces to scribble on a steno pad.

  A short matronly woman in a cardinal-red apron and nurse’s cap approached, pushing a white enameled cart ahead of her. A lidded iron crock rattled atop the cart. The long handle of a brand protruded from a notch in the lid.

  Ignoring Senlin, the nurse peeked behind the curtain before casting it open. Edith lay under the sheet in the simple white gown that had been provided. Her tattered and stained costume lay folded at the foot of the bed. A moment before, Senlin’s blood had been boiling, but the sight
of her swaddled in white sheets was unexpectedly calming. Surely, none of this was real.

  The nurse nattered happily about how pretty Edith was and how nice her outfit looked, even while she set about arranging Edith’s right arm, straightening it, palm up, on the bed. Edith stretched her free arm toward Senlin. He knelt by the head of the bed, taking her hand. The nurse offered her a rolled cloth to bite down on, suggesting that it helped to diffuse the pain, but Edith jerked her chin away without response.

  The nurse opened the iron crock with a thick leather mitt. Among the red coals, the circular brand glowed, large as a man’s pocket watch. The sight made Senlin’s stomach pitch.

  When he looked back to Edith, she was staring at him intently. Her dark hair lay fanned over the pillow; her tan and freckled collarbone glowed with sweat. “Don’t hang around too long. You’ve got somewhere to be,” she said and shifted her grip from his hand to his forearm.

  Sliding on a blacksmith’s leather glove, which reached to her elbow, the nurse said, “I have to hold the iron flush for the count of three. It’s very important that you don’t move, dear. If it doesn’t look right, we have to do it again.” Edith didn’t look away from Senlin to acknowledge the nurse. Her mouth was thin and bloodless.

  “To the count of three,” the nurse repeated. When the brand touched her skin, Edith’s veins leapt in her neck and her eyes gaped and her fingernails bore into Senlin’s arm and her cheeks darkened and the terrible but familiar scent of burning flesh filled the air and the nurse in a bell-clear voice said, “One.”

  When he last saw her, Edith was lying unconscious while the nurse wrapped her arm with gauze. Her blacking out had been a small mercy. She never cried out, and he sensed in her silence her defiance. The matron had resumed her unwanted pleasantries, despite Edith’s unresponsiveness. Senlin had argued that he would stay until she had awakened, but Ceph insisted that if he lingered any longer he would have to reopen the review of Senlin’s case.