‘Was I really that small, Em?’ he asked his companion one evening in the early autumn of another of those interminable years.
‘What exactly are we talking about here, pet?’ she asked, absently washing her ears.
‘I was convinced that I was the greatest thief in the world, but along toward the end there, I wasn’t really much more than a common highwayman hitting people on the head so that I could steal their clothes.’
‘That comes fairly close, yes. What’s your point?’
‘I could have done more with my life, couldn’t I?’
‘That’s why we’re here, pet,’ she told him. ‘Whether you like it or not, you are going to do more with it. I’m going to see to that.’ She looked directly at him, her green eyes a mystery. ‘I think it’s time for you to learn how to use the power of the Book.’
‘What do you mean, “use”?’
‘You can make things happen with the Book. Where did you think your supper comes from every night?’
‘That’s your job, Em. It wouldn’t be polite for me to stick my nose into that area, would it?’
‘Polite or not, you are going to learn, Althalus. Certain words from the Book carry the sense of doing things – words like “chop” or “dig” or “cut”. You can do those things with the Book instead of with your back if you know how to use it. Right at first, you’ll need to be touching the Book when you do those things. After some practice, though, that won’t be necessary. The idea of the Book will serve the same purpose.’
‘The Book’s always going to be here, isn’t it?’
‘That’s the whole point, dear. The Book has to stay here. It wouldn’t be safe to take it out into the world, and you have things you have to do out there.’
‘Oh? What kind of things?’
‘Little things – saving the world, keeping the stars up in the sky where they belong, making sure that time keeps moving – things like that.’
‘Are you trying to be funny, Em?’
‘No, not really. We’ll get to those things later, though. Let’s try the easy ones first. Take off your shoe and throw it over by the bed. Then tell it to come back.’
‘I don’t think it’ll listen to me, Emmy.’
‘It will if you use the right word. All you have to do is put your hand on the Book, look at the shoe, and say “gwem”. It’s like calling a puppy’
‘That’s an awfully old-fashioned word, Emmy.’
‘Of course it is. It’s one of the first words. The language of the Book is the mother of your language. Your language grew out of it. Just try it, pet. We can talk about the changes of language some other time.’
He dubiously pulled off his shoe and tossed it over by the bed. Then he laid his hand on the Book and said ‘gwem’ rather half-heartedly.
Nothing happened.
‘So much for that as an idea,’ he muttered.
‘Command, Althie,’ Emerald said in a weary tone. ‘Do you think a puppy would listen if you said it that way?’
‘Gwem!’ he sharply commanded his shoe.
He didn’t really expect it, so he wasn’t ready to fend the shoe off, and it hit him squarely in the face.
‘It’s a good thing we didn’t start with your spear,’ Emmy noted. ‘It’s usually best to hold your hands out when you do that, Althalus. Let the shoe know where you want it to come to.’
‘It actually works!’ he exclaimed in astonishment.
‘Of course it does. Didn’t you believe me?’
‘Well – sort of, I guess. I didn’t think it’d happen quite that fast, though. I kind of expected the shoe to come slithering across the floor. I didn’t know it was going to fly.’
‘You said it just a little too firmly, pet. The tone of voice is very important when you do things this way. The louder and more sharply you say it, the faster it happens.’
‘I’ll remember that. Getting kicked in the face with my own shoe definitely got my attention. Why didn’t you warn me about that?’
‘Because you don’t listen, Althie. It’s just a waste of breath to warn you about things. Now try it again.’
Althalus put miles on that shoe over the next several weeks, and he gradually grew more proficient at altering the tone of his voice. He also discovered that different words would make the shoe do other things. ‘Dheu’ would make it rise up off the floor and simply stand in front of him on nothing but air. ‘Dhreu’ would lower it to the floor again.
He was practising on that one day in late summer when an impish kind of notion came to him. He looked over at Emerald, who was sitting on the bed carefully washing her ears. He focused his attention on her, set his hand on the Book, and said ‘Dheu.’
Emerald immediately rose up in the air until she was sitting on nothing at all at about the same level as his head. She continued to scrub at her ears as if nothing had happened. Then she looked at him, and her green eyes seemed very cold and hard. Then she said ‘Bhlag!’ quite sharply.
The blow took Althalus squarely on the point of the chin, and it sent him rolling across the floor. It seemed to have come out of nowhere at all, and it had rattled him all the way down to his toes.
‘We don’t do that to each other, do we?’ Emerald said in an almost pleasant tone of voice. ‘Now put me down.’
His eyes wouldn’t seem to focus. He covered one of them with his hand so that he could see her and said ‘Dhreu’ in an apologetic sort of way.
Emerald settled slowly back to the bed. ‘That’s much better,’ she said. ‘Are you going to get up, or did you plan to lie there on the floor for a while?’ Then she went back to washing her ears.
He more or less gathered at that point that there were rules and that it wasn’t wise to break them. He also realized that Emerald had just demonstrated the next step. She hadn’t been anywhere near the Book when she’d knocked him across the room.
He continued to practice with his shoe. He was more familiar with it than with his other possessions, and it didn’t have any sharp edges, as some of the others had. Just to see if he could do it, he’d put a pair of wings on it, and it went flapping around the room blundering into things. It occurred to him that a flying shoe would have been a sensation in Nabjor’s camp or Gosti Big Belly’s hall. That had been a long time ago, though. He idly roamed back through his memory, trying to attach some number to the years he’d spent here in the House, but the number kept evading him for some reason.
‘How long have I been here, Em?’ he asked his companion.
‘Quite some time. Why do you ask?’
‘Just curious, I suppose. I can barely remember a time when I wasn’t here.’
‘Time doesn’t really mean anything here in this House, pet. You’re here to learn, and some of the things in the Book are very difficult. It took your mind a very long time to fully grasp them. When we came to one of those, I’d usually let your eyes sleep while your mind worked. It was a lot quieter that way. Your arguments were with the Book, not with me.’
‘Let me see if I understand this. Are you saying that there’s been times when I went to sleep and didn’t wake up for a week or more?’
She gave him one of those infuriatingly superior looks.
‘A month?’ he asked incredulously.
‘Keep going,’ she suggested.
