The Bookman - Lavie Tidhar [89]
"Et terrestre centrum attinges," Orphan muttered. "Quod feci, Arne Saknussemm."
"What?" Elizabeth said.
"And you will attain the centre of the earth," Orphan muttered. "I have done this, Arne Saknussemm."
"You said your name was Orphan," Elizabeth said.
"It's from a book," Orphan said.
The girl pulled back, then made a sign with her hand, the same one she had used before, but said nothing. She stared up at Orphan with an unreadable expression on her face. What was wrong with books? he wondered. Surely this girl – half-savage as she no doubt was – could read and write? What was there to be afraid of?
And then he thought, the Bookman, and suddenly felt his skin grow cold. Did the girl have a reason beyond superstition to be afraid? Were books, for her, something innately dangerous, if not outright forbidden?
"It's just something I heard," he said. "From a friend of mine. His name was Jules."
The girl didn't answer him, but turned her back and began following the contour of the tunnel. Orphan shrugged and followed her.
They walked a while in silence. The tunnel ended at a junction of three, and Elizabeth chose the left one and he followed. The tunnel snaked around, the ground sloping gradually, the dim lights coming alive as they passed, then fading behind them. Where are we going? he thought, but didn't ask out loud. The island had confused him from the moment he landed, casting him in a spell of bewilderment, its mysteries too numerous for him to digest all at once. He rubbed the spot where the mechanical insect had stung him. Was he tested and somehow approved? It occurred to him he had not seen any more of the insects, nor had he been bitten. But he was an invader, an alien entity to the island. Why, then, was he not stopped sooner?
Around them, the tunnel gradually expanded, the lights growing brighter and the air turning hot and humid. The rock under his feet gradually turned to rich, moist earth. Orphan felt sweat again and tried to avoid smelling himself. His priorities were clear, and they included, rather than the destruction of that monstrous cannon in the crater, the more modest goals of a shower, and food, and a long uninterrupted sleep. Were he ever to become a head of state, he thought, he would enshrine that in a constitution: food and sleep and soap for all. Even Marx, he felt, could not argue with that.
For a moment he wondered how his friends back home were doing: whether Karl and Mrs Beeton and Nevil Maskelyne still conspired at revolution, now that Jack was gone and so was the bookshop. He found that he missed them, though dimly, as if he had known them long ago, and in another time. He wondered if he would ever see them again.
Then the tunnel's ceiling disappeared over his head and he realised that he was standing now in a small cavern, and that he could hear human voices in the distance, and smell – oh, he could smell! – food cooking, and the all-encompassing aroma of frying garlic.
The lights on the ceiling, he saw, were of the kind he had last seen – he winced as he thought about it – under Payne's, in the Bookman's eerie lair. But here there was no lake, but rather a strange forest that grew before him, and it took him a moment to comprehend what he was seeing: for it was not trees that grew from the warm, wet ground, but mushrooms.
He thought again about Verne's story – had he somehow come here after all? For the knowledge of this place – couched in fiction and implausibility, perhaps, but true all the same – must have come from somewhere. Or did he learn of it second hand, and let his imagination roam free within it?
The mushrooms – the fungi – were easily as tall as a man, and easily as fat, Orphan thought with a smile, as Jules Verne. Their colours changed, from pure chalk white to varying degrees of grey, to rings of yellows and earth-brown. Were they natural, he wondered, or were they, somehow, a product of that ancient explosion that