The building's wooden door was shut, and Catania wondered how to deal with it. She saw a wooden latch with a cord, but supposed she first ought to warn the people inside that she was there.
On the Range, this had been done by whistling or calling at the hide, so she said, "I'm here."
No one came out to greet her, so she called louder. "I'm here!"
Catania heard someone laughing, and looked back. It was the Gold-bracelets at the other end of the bridge. Laughing, he imitated hitting the door with the knuckles of his hand.
Catania did that, though it hurt. Then did it again.
The latch moved. The door swung open, squeaking on metal fasteners. A little fat man, wearing a gold necklace over his green robe, stood there looking angry.
"You don't have to break it!" he said. And Catania realized he meant the wooden door. She had hit it too hard.
"I'm sorry."
He put his finger to his lips. "Speak quietly; this is a library. Why are you here?"
"Mary said I could come and see it."
"Well... all right." The little man seemed annoyed. "Come in and see it—but don't touch anything." He was very pale, fat as a baby, and the only Garden person Catania had seen who wore no green paint.
Catania followed him inside, onto a wood floor as polished and clean as the copyplace had been. But this room was bigger—it was wide, and as long as a knife could be thrown and be sure to stick.
There were wood benches down the middle, all as smooth and shining as the floor. Big square holes had been cut into the building's sides, so daylight came in.... Two Garden men were sitting on the benches with copybooks in their laps. They were reading to themselves in silence, instead of reading to other people— which seemed selfish to Catania.
The room was bright with sunshine, and smelled of paper. Copybooks were stacked flat along wide shelves up and down and along the building's sides between the square light-holes. Windows. Catania looked through one. These are windows.
All the copybooks were made as they'd been made on the Range—which must, Catania thought, be the civilized way. They lay in thick flat folios, the long pages bound together along their top edges. Those edges folded over twice, for strength. They were bound with smooth small cord sewn through and through, then tied off in a tasseled knot.
The little fat man stood watching her, likely in case she tried to touch something.
"My name is Doctor Catania Olsen. What's yours?"
"Peter," he said. "I'm called Necklace Peter."
"How many copybooks do you keep here?"
"We have six-hundred and forty-three." He pursed his lips. "The 'three' are your medicals. Now, we have them, too."
"Six-hundred and forty-three.... That's many more than we had."
"We have W. Farber, M. Chouteau, Robert Frost, L. Timmons, Raymond Chandler—"
"Raymond Chandler? Are you sure that's right. Not Aymond?"
"Aymond isn't a name. Never was."
"But Peter, we had a very old four-times-recopied. Author: Aymond Chandler."
"Then it was copied wrong four times. 'Aymond' is not a name! ... We have him, and we have other ancient authors. We have William Carson; we have Hamilton Basso; we have Terrence Eastman; we have John O'Hara; we have Louise Chang; we have Max Niles; we have Arthur R. G. Solmssen and Michele Henri-don. And we have many more than that."
"I would like to hold one."
Necklace Peter looked at her. "Your hands are dirty." Then he said, "Oh... all right," and walked back to the wooden door. There was a trade-pot on the floor in the corner; a white woven cloth was folded beside it. "Come here, and get those hands a little clean."
Catania went obediently to wash. It occurred to her that Necklace Peter had no neck, so his name sounded doubly apt. There was certainly no Warm-time word more perfect than 'apt.'
She sat on a bench away from the two silent readers, and Peter brought a copybook and laid it open across her lap.
"Ever read him? Apparently he was named for the cold, as it came down."
"No."
"Very, very old book."
"We didn't have him." Catania turned the pages, admiring the copying. It was a book of poems, beautifully done in perfect square little printing with rich black ink. Copied with steel-nib pens, no question. "But we had wonderful things, and also very old."
"What?—Be careful turning the pages."
"I know how to handle a copybook."
"Well... just be careful." Necklace Peter sat beside her on the bench and watched her hands. It made Catania nervous.
"We had the Websters, of course, and the Bible-book, and we had Beach Red—"
"About?"
"Fighting with loud powder-guns in very warm weather."
"Not interesting," the little man said. "Did you have Paul Dirac? It would be about the Physics."
"No."
"Did you have a book on the nearly-thinkers—the little machines that were clever?"
"The computes. No, but many mentions."
"Did you have an encyclopedia?"
Catania laughed. "If we had had one of those, even the tribesmen would have come and served us like our dogs, though they don't care for copybooks. Do you have one?"
"No," Necklace Peter said. "But someone has one somewhere. ..."
"We had Or the White Whale."
"Oh, I doubt it, not the whole book."
"Yes, we did. We had the whole book from walking down to the salty sea until the ship sinks in it. It made pages two hands thick."
"... The ship sinks?"
"Yes." Sitting so close to Necklace Peter, Catania could smell him. He smelled like a baked potato. "—It sinks, and Rachel comes looking for her lost children."
Peter was quiet for a time, seemed to be thinking of the Pequod sinking. "And that whole book is gone now?"
"Gone," Catania said, and the small word seemed too heavy to hold, referred to too great a loss. "—My friends, and the children, and all our copybooks." The sunshine and quiet in the library, the beautiful printing and smell of paper seemed to press down upon Catania. She began to weep.
"Gone," the little man said, and looked very sad.
The two other Garden men glanced up from their silent reading, and Catania turned her head aside so no tears would fall to stain 'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.'
I have been to Gardens' library. It is high in a tree, and they have six-hundred and forty-three copybooks, now including my medicals. Words, and the smell of ink and paper, made me cry.
Necklace (Neckless) Peter has loaned us two copybooks— one we used to have, and the men so much enjoyed. The other has this passage in it, a passage the little man thought I'd like. And I do like it, but sadly.
... the times we come among strangers, to be astonished by their differences from those we loved;
the change of line, colors various, the different air that from room to room proclaims our oddness here, far from what we knew.
Are future's flowers the same to see, or songs we sing with these new people the notes we heard before? I think not. Even children's voices sound here in slightly different tune than those of the little ones who chanted through our house before the change....
This was from The Wine of Days, by Megan Reilly.
Megan Reilly is many hundreds of years gone—I'm not sure if Megan was a man's name, or a woman's. But a Reilly long dead still murmurs in my ear. Could even Mountain Jesus do a greater thing?
FROM THE JOURNAL OF DOCTOR CATANIA OLSEN
CHAPTER 13
North, on the range that had been Trapper Range and now was not, five chiefs walked along the cliff's ledge in evening, scuffing a light spring snow, to call on Richard Much and mention what he already knew—that the boy and fifty-two warriors he'd sent south would never return.
This was known because almost three Warm-time weeks had passed without word, because Charlie Chewapa had dreamed his son was dead, and because others had dreamed their fathers, husbands, or sons wer
e dead.
No one had had a good-news dream. The women were cutting their arms.
Richard Much came out of his cave house, and listened to the chiefs. He thought a while, then said, "Important people make important mistakes—and learn important lessons from them."
Then he went back into his house, and left the chiefs standing with no invitation to supper.
* * *
For days, the Trappers had lain at ease, eating, sleeping, tending their wounds and their dogs. The men had fucked some of the Garden girls who came to the camp.—The best of these girls were Cross-eye Jane, Francine Kemp, Nuncie Lewis, and Ruth Bissel. Ruth Bissel, very short and wide, was tough for a Garden girl, and had hit Rod Sorbane with a rock after a misunderstanding.
Mary's daughter, May, had come too, but made love with no one. Torrey seemed to dislike her, and walked away every time she came.
The Garden people smiled at the Trappers, now, smiled at Catania when she passed them on her way to climb to the library. Mary had been nice, and said she could go when she wished. The Gold-bracelets guarding the library, who'd helped her on the ladder, was called Frank Catlin. He seemed always glad to see her.
This was the best time for the Trappers since the Cree came down—the best time Catania had had with Jack. She noticed more and more small things about him; she looked for little oddnesses recurring, was pleased when she found them, and held them to her as ... charming. Newton's fine word.
Catania knelt at the creek and looked at her reflection in the water every morning, as if her scar might have gone away, peeled out of her face by Mountain Jesus as she slept. If, as she knelt there, she covered her face's right side with her hand, then the left side seemed pretty. So, when she was with Jack, Catania began
to take care that the left side of her face was turned to him....
One evening, when she had done that, sitting by the fire, he had stood and come around to sit on her scarred side, then leaned over to kiss where the dog had bitten her.
There was no question that he cared for her, but he never said so. And she thought, from certain silences, he must have lost someone dear to him in that distant war on the ice, in Map-Michigan.
Still, these first after-battle days were the best days since the Crees came to the Range.
On the fourth best-days evening, when Catania, Lucy, and Martha Monroe were cooking a goat stew, there was a quarrel between Micah Olsen and Tall-David Richardson over a Garden girl. Jack watched them but didn't interfere.
Jim Olsen came between them and made Micah sheath his knife.
It occurred to Catania, tasting the stew, then putting more Gardens pepper into the kettle, that days so easy might be bad for men tuned to trouble. So, after they'd eaten, and with Mary One-eye come to visit with Carlson Gold-bracelets and the little librarian, Catania sat cross-legged by the fire to read from the copybook Necklace Peter had lent them. It was one they'd had a copy of on the Range, Hunting on the Continent of Africa.
The men loved this book. She read them a favorite passage:
C. stopped the Dodge and stood up to glass the ridge. He stood with his elbows braced on the top of the windscreen and looked through the glasses a long time. 'There's our old gentleman,' he said, finally. 'Making for the thorn at a rate of knots.'
I looked, but without the glasses there was nothing to see but sun-scorched grass and scrub brush, and the hills rising up beyond, miles away. The hills were golden brown as hemp rope, and they trembled when you looked at them through the heated air.
'We'll just drive over a little closer,' C. said. And we did that, and he drove over every bush and pit and warthog burrow until he finally said, 'Righty-oh!' and put on the brakes. Driving was the only thing C. did without thinking about it.
Then he climbed out his side, and I climbed out my side, and the boys jumped off the back with the rifles.
'Walk from here,' C. said. 'We'll take the rifles now, and just go and have a dekko in that thorn.'
C.'s getting so very British was the only way you had of telling that something just the least bit, just the slightest bit sticky might be coming up. Another way of telling was that the boys, who were both Wakamba and therefore absolutely brave, handed us our big guns very nicely, and then got back up into the truck.
'Now I'll just be over here to your left and a few steps back,' C. said, and we started to walk the long way up the slope of a wide low ridge, where the thorn grew like a rolling straw-colored sea cresting along a beach. My Red Setter boots made soft crumbling noises in the sun-dried soil.
It was a hot afternoon for such a long walk. There was plenty of time to consider how pleasant camp would be about now, with old Ali filling the canvas bathtub and grinning his sweet cannibal grin full of lovely filed teeth. Cold francolin, and of course the first bottle of Tuskers with that. Yes, all that would be very pleasant, about now.
After a long time walking, C. said, 'Look there.' We were deep into the thorn, and he was pointing off to the right, to a kisi bush standing a little isolated from the others.
'Where?' I said, and then I saw it. It was a long shadow of darker brown, lying under the bush in the narrow shade. This long shadow had a tail that was curling gently this way and that.
'I see him,' I said. And as if he had been waiting for some acknowledgement, the old simba grunted and heaved himself up, coughed to clear his throat, and came at us in one wonderful leap that became a driving bounding run, straight at us and terribly fast.
He was kicking up puffs of brown dust behind him as he came, and making a soft chuff-chuffing sound, like the little mine trains that climb the grades of the Sierra in the north of Spain, but he was coming faster than such trains run.
I smacked him with the left barrel at just under fifty yards and the .460 solid took him a little low and the old man switched ends and spun over like a car in a crash. Then he rolled to his feet and came on again, still making that gentle chuffing noise and coming very close now, so the noble lion eyes were like amber fog lights shining through the dust.
I took what time I could, and the right-barrel's bullet hit him just under the chin, killed him and dropped him fiat. He was very close, then, and I could see the amber eyes slowly shut as if I and my busy-ness and intrusion and noise making had bored him beyond bearing, and he'd decided to go to sleep and to hell with me.
Dead, he was smaller, just slightly, as all the dead ones are, and his hide was scarred along a shoulder where some younger male had ripped him, driving him out of the pride to be alone. He looked very heraldic, very peaceful now, with the bright bitter smell of cordite drifting over him like memorial incense.
'That second, was a pretty shot,' C. said. He didn't mention the first.
The Trappers all whistled with pleasure when Catania finished. She had read it so quickly and quietly it all made sense. Even not knowing what a francolin was, or a Dodge, exactly—some sort of traveling machine—a person seemed to know what those things were while she was reading, as if everything was understood. The Trappers whistled, and Mary and the two Garden men clapped their hands together to make spanking noises.
The reading had struck Jack Monroe sharply, which surprised him. He had heard nothing from Hunting on the Continent of Africa for more than six years—had heard nothing read from any copybook, since the Map-Missouri men didn't read books, and the Ojibway considered them unhealthy.
Now he was remembering twice: the copybook hunt, and the Old Range and its men and women, before he was sent away. They had come to him—Sam and the others—as he'd listened. It made him uneasy, so he tried to think only of the hunting in the story.
The bow would be wrong for that lion. For that swift beast, a man would need friends and lances, same as for a snow tiger. Or one of the Warm-time guns the story hunter used.—And no reason, Catania would say, that people now couldn't find the way to make gun-shoot powder, couldn't find the way to make two-barrel guns. It was only people, after all, who'd done all those things, guns and Dodges, before b
ecoming unlucky with Weather.
"No reason," Jack said aloud, smiling as he saw Catania cross the camp and kneel to speak to Susan Monroe. Then she came back past the fire and spoke to Martha Sorbane.
Mary One-eye, and several other women, stood and went to Susan. The Trapper men and Garden men stayed where they were.
Susan lay on a hide behind Torrey's sled, buckskin trousers unlaced and stained dark at the crotch. Her eyes were squeezed shut, and she was holding a leather strap so hard her knuckles were white.
Catania opened her medical pack and took out a leather bottle of vodka. She rinsed and scrubbed her hands, then dried them on a piece of white boiled cloth.
Lucy Edwards knelt and took off Susan's moccasins, then gently tugged her trousers down and off, so Catania's hands would stay clean.
Cooing and comforting while she did, Catania slid her hand to the girl's vulva, then eased her fingers in to feel the cervix. Its little mouth was pouting open.
She put both hands on Susan's belly, and waited. In a while a contraction came, pulsing.
"Wonderful, Trade-honey," Catania said? "Sam's baby is coming tonight."
"Do you want our doctor?" Garden Mary was standing watching.
"I don't think so," Catania said. "This baby wants to come out."
Mary One-eye sat on Torrey's sled, and the other women settled on hides to wait. Joan Richardson brought branches and a burning brand to make a fire.... The men had drifted away.
The evening was so warm—warm as a summer week on the Range—that Susan needed no cover. She lay naked on the hide, except for her deerskin shirt, her knees up and spread wide. Lay with her eyes closed, the shadows of Joan's fire moving on her skin.
By full nightfall, baby-giving had seized her.
Catania had washed and rinsed her hands again, and tested the girl's warmth and wetness. Susan was panting like a dog lying in harness after a long run. Her dark eyes were open wide.
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