The Bookman - Lavie Tidhar [2]
"Whales are worth listening to," Gilgamesh said mildly, though his eyes twinkled. "Pray, continue."
Orphan did so. "Fresh fly supply for the Queen was halted temporarily on Tuesday due to suspicion of a contaminated source – most of her public appearances have been cancelled for the next week. The Byron simulacrum gave a poetry recital at the Royal Society…" He turned the page over. "Oh, and rumours the Bookman is back in town."
Beside him, Gilgamesh had gone very still. "Says who?" he asked quietly.
"An unnamed source at the Metropolitan Police," Orphan said. "Why?"
Gilgamesh shook his head. "No one knows where the Bookman will strike. Not unless he chooses to make it known, for reasons of his own."
"I'm not sure I understand you," Orphan said patiently. "Why would he do that?"
"As a warning, perhaps," Gilgamesh said, "to his next victim."
"The Bookman's only a myth," Orphan said. Beside him, Gilgamesh slowly smiled.
"A myth," he said. "Oh, Orphan. This is the time of myths. They are woven into the present like silk strands from the past, like a wire mesh from the future, creating an interlacing pattern, a grand design, a repeating motif. Don't dismiss myth, boy. And never, ever, dismiss the Bookman." And he touched his fingers to his blind eyes, and covered his face with his hands. Orphan knew he would speak no more that night.
That was how Orphan left him, there on the water's edge: an old man, hunched into an unmoving figure, like a pensive statue. Orphan never again saw him in life.
Who was Orphan and how had he come to inhabit that great city, the Capital of the Everlasting Empire, the seat of the royal family, the ancestral home of Les Lézards? His father was a Vespuccian sailor, his mother an enigma: both were dead, and had been so for many years. His skin was copper-red, his eyes green like the sea. He had spent his early life on the docks, running errands between the feet of sailors, a minute employee of the East India Company. His knowledge of languages was haphazard if wide, his education colourful and colloquial, his circle of friends and acquaintances far-ranging, if odd.
He learned poetry in the gutter, and from the public readings given by the great men and women of the age; in pubs and dockyards, in halls of learning and in the streets at dawn – and once, from a sword-wielding girl from France, who appeared mysteriously on the deck of a ship Orphan was helping to load with cargo bound for China, and recounted to him, in glorious, beautiful verse, a vision of God (he had never forgotten her) – and he learned it from the books in the public library, until words spun in his head all day and all night, and he agonised at writing them down on paper, his hand bleeding as the pen scratched against the surface of the page.
Who was Orphan? A poet, certainly; a young man, that too. He had aspirations for greatness, and had once met, by chance, the ancient Wordsworth, as the great man was leaving a coffee house in Soho and the fiveyear-old Orphan was squatting in the street outside, talking to his friend, the beggar Lame Menachem. The great man had smiled at him then, and – perhaps mistaking him for a beggar himself – handed him a coin, a half-crown showing the profile of the mad old Lizard King, George III, which Orphan had kept ever since for good luck.
At present, Orphan was engaged, himself, in a "work of composition of the highest order": he was busy crafting a long poem, a cycle of poems in fact, about life in this great city. He was moderately proud of his efforts, though he felt the poem, somehow, lacked substance. But he was young, and could not worry himself too long; and, having seen his old friend Gilgamesh, the wanderer, and ascertained his (relative) well-being, he proceeded with a light heart to his primary destination of the evening, which was the newly rebuilt Rose Theatre in Southwark.
Orphan walked along the river; in the distance the constant song of whales