Brave Story - Miyuki Miyabe [235]
“According to our map, this should be the floor,” Wataru said, catching his breath. They had come up ten or eleven flights of stairs. There were fewer people and the hallway was empty. It was quiet.
“I think it’s here, at the end of this hall,” he said, pointing, when the door in front of them opened. A female starseer wearing a red shirt came hurrying out. Her arms, of course, were filled with books.
“Is Dr. Baksan in?” Wataru asked loudly. The woman shuffled past them, mumbling some formula to herself, and went down the stairs without even looking in his direction.
“Guess we’ll have to go see for ourselves,” Wataru said, stepping up to the door and knocking.
“Unnecessary!” a loud voice called from inside. It was a man’s voice, filled with a strange high-pitched tension. The three looked at each other.
“Maybe he’s saying that it’s okay to go in without knocking?” Meena suggested.
Wataru slowly thrust his head into the room to see a veritable mountain of books and scrolls. And not just one mountain—he counted at least five separate stacks. Two walls of the room were actually large windows. The room was filled with sunlight, so bright Wataru had to squint.
“Is Dr. Baksan in?”
A cloud of dust rose from between two of the piles of books toward the back of the room.
“Unnecessary!” the voice said again.
“Um, we’ve come here to see Dr. Baksan.”
More dust rose. “Then come over here! I’m not there, that’s for sure.”
So it was Dr. Baksan. Wataru stepped inside the room. “Excuse me, but where are you, sir?”
“Here!” came the voice, accompanied by another cloud of dust, this time in a slightly different place than before. The three split up and began moving between the piles of books, looking for the source of the voice.
He seemed to be nowhere. Kee Keema craned his neck. “I don’t see him.”
“Excuse me, but where are you, sir?”
“I said I’m here!” shouted a voice from Wataru’s feet. He sounded angry.
“Here?”
Someone was tugging on the laces of Wataru’s boot. Wataru glanced down and yelped. By reflex, he jumped back, colliding with a nearby stack of books.
“Oy! Watch out!”
The sound of the books tipping over was followed immediately by a scream from Kee Keema. He was quickly buried beneath a mound of books.
Chapter 30
The Lecture
“Such rudeness!” Dr. Baksan scowled, raising a tiny fist and driving it against Wataru’s shin. “You could take all the gold, all the crystals, all the jewels the Goddess ever made and you still wouldn’t be able to buy the books in this room! Do you understand? Watch where you’re stepping!”
Wataru moved quickly to an empty spot on the floor, and knelt. Only when he had done this was he finally at eye level with Dr. Baksan.
Baksan, he discovered, was a very, very short person. He only came up to Wataru’s waist. He was wearing a tube-sleeved shirt of rich purple cloth, inlaid with many strands of gold thread, and the cylindrical hat on his head was embroidered with that familiar star pattern.
He was also very, very old. Bushy white hair reached down to his shoulders and his eyebrows were so long and wispy the ends reached down to his chest. The whiskers on his chin curled downward, reaching to the tips of his fingers. Indeed, apart from the pink nose jutting out from the center of his face, everything else was covered in white hair.
“Dr. Baksan?” Wataru asked.
The tiny scholar raised his fist again, his face beet red. “The only one with that title in this room, I daresay! You waste my time with your questions—no, you waste the very air itself!” This last comment was punctuated with a sharp jab to Wataru’s leg.
“What are you doing down there, Wataru?” Kee Keema asked from behind him. He had just finished extricating himself from a mound of books.
“You there! Big waterkin!” Dr. Baksan cried, leaping into the air. “Don’t touch that pile of books, or so help me…”
At last,