The Bookman - Lavie Tidhar [17]
The question again, flung at him like a hook on a fishing line. Ready to reel him in.
And Orphan, caught, said, "Tell me how."
He walked away from Guy's Hospital through the maze of Southwark's streets. "Not here," Irene Adler had said. She had glanced about her, and Orphan, following the direction of her eyes, saw they were focused on an ancient-looking bible that rested by his bedside. "Here." She handed him a piece of paper. Orphan opened it, read an address and a time.
"Get well," Irene Adler said, and then she was gone, closing the door softly behind her.
It had taken Orphan two more days before the doctor released him. The waves of darkness came and went, grief washing over him, Lucy's burning image waking him in the night with screams that echoed only inside his head.
Yet overlaying the grief was Irene Adler's question. Would you bring her back? she had asked – and the question, with its implication, its insane promise, had consumed Orphan until he could think of little else.
He did examine the bible that rested by his bedside. It was an old volume, printed the previous century, rebound in contemporary cloth. Grubby and worn, it had the look of a bible that had rested, over the decades, in the hands of more than one dying patient. It was a King James bible, of the translation sanctioned, for his own mysterious reasons, by that greatest of all Lizard Kings, yet it was not published by the King's printer: it was an illegal publication. Orphan turned the book in his hands, intrigued. The publisher's name was given as Thomas Guy. Orphan seemed to remember, vaguely, that the founder of the hospital had indeed begun his career in the printing and selling of illegal bibles. That must be, therefore, one of them, he thought. But why had Irene Adler looked to it before falling quiet? What was it about the book (if that was indeed what had concerned her) to prevent her from speaking further? It was just a book.
Restless, alone with his dark thoughts in his room, Orphan began paging through Thomas Guy's bible. First he shook the book, edges down, but nothing had fallen from within its pages. Next he thumbed through the book, seeking to see where it would open: it should, he knew, come to the place that had been most used. And so it did, and the old bible opened in his lap onto the eighth chapter of the first book of Samuel. It was the part where the elders of Israel come to Samuel, an old man now, and ask him to make them a king. Orphan read Samuel's reply to the elders, and felt a strange apprehension reach out to wrap cold fingers around his chest, as if the ancient, anonymous writer of the text was addressing him, replying to an unanswered question.
And he said, This will be the manner of the King that shall reign over you: He will take your sons, and appoint them for himself, for his chariots, and to be his horsemen; and some shall run before his chariots. And he will appoint him captains over thousands, and captains over fifties; and will set them to ear his ground, and to reap his harvest, and to make his instruments of war, and instruments of his chariots. And he will take your daughters to be confectionaries, and to be cooks, and to be bakers.
And he will take your fields, and your vineyards, and your oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them to his servants.
And he will take the tenth of your seed, and of your vineyards, and give to his officers, and to his servants.
And he will take your menservants, and your maidservants, and your goodliest young men, and your asses, and put them to his work.
He will take the tenth of your sheep: and