He didn’t get any supper that night, but he sort of felt that it might have been worth it. He now had a way to respond when she started acting superior. One ‘Emmy’ would immediately erase the haughty look on her face and reduce her to near-inarticulate fury. Althalus carefully tucked that one up his sleeve for future use.
They declared peace on each other the next day, and life returned to normal. She fed him a near-banquet that evening. He understood that it was a peace-making gesture, so he complimented her after about every other bite.
Then, after they’d gone to bed, she washed his face for quite some time. ‘Did you really mean what you said yesterday?’ she purred.
‘Which particular thing I said were you thinking of?’ he asked.
Her ears went back immediately. ‘You said you loved me. Did you mean it?’
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘that. Of course I meant it. You shouldn’t even have to ask.’
‘Don’t you lie to me.’
‘Would I do that?’
‘Of course you would. You’re the greatest liar in the whole world.’
‘Why, thank you, dear.’
‘Don’t make me cross, Althalus,’ she warned. ‘I’ve got all four paws wrapped around your head right now, so be very nice to me – unless you’d like to have your face on the back of your head instead of the front.’
‘I’ll be good,’ he promised.
‘Say it again, then.’
‘Say what, dear?’
‘You know what!’
‘All right, little kitten, I love you. Does that make you feel better?’
She rubbed her face against his and started to purr.
The seasons turned, as seasons always do, although the summers were short and the winters long up here on the roof of the world, and after they’d gone around several times, the past seemed to recede until it was only a dim memory. In time, the days plodded by unnoticed as Althalus struggled with the Book. He began to spend more and more of his time staring up at the glowing dome overhead as he pondered the strange things the Book had revealed.
‘What is your problem?’ Emerald demanded irritably once when Althalus sat at the table with the Book lying almost unnoticed on the polished surface in front of him. ‘You’re not even pretending to be reading.’
Althalus laid his hand on the Book. ‘It just said something I don’t understand,’ he replied. ‘I’m trying to work it out.’
She sighed. ‘Tell me what it is,’ she said in a resigned tone. ‘I’ll explain it to you. You still won’t understand, but I’ll explain anyway’
‘You can be very offensive, did you know that?’
‘Of course. I’m doing it on purpose – but you still love me, don’t you?’
‘Oh – I guess so.’
‘You guess so?’
He laughed. ‘Woke you up, didn’t I?’
She laid back her ears and hissed at him.
‘Be nice,’ he said, putting out his hand and scratching her ears. Then he looked back at the troublesome line. ‘If I’m reading this right, it says that all the things Deiwos has made are of the same value in his eyes. Does that mean that a man isn’t any more important than a bug or a grain of sand?’
‘Not exactly,’ she replied. ‘What it really means is that Deiwos doesn’t think of the separate parts of what he’s made. It’s the whole thing that’s important. A man’s only a small part of the whole thing, and he’s not really here for very long. A man’s born, lives out his life, and dies in so short a time that the mountains and stars don’t even notice him as he goes by.’
‘That’s a gloomy thought. We don’t really mean anything, do we? Deiwos won’t even miss us after the last one of us dies, will he?’
‘Oh, he probably will. There were things that used to be alive, but they aren’t any more, and Deiwos still remembers them.’
‘Why did he let them die out, then?’
‘Because they’d done everything they were supposed to do. They’d completed what they’d been put here to attend to, so Deiwos let them go. Then too, if everything that had ever lived were still here, there wouldn’t be any room for new things.’
‘Sooner or later, that’ll happen to men as well, won’t it?’
‘That’s not entirely certain, Althalus. Other creatures take the world as they find it, but man changes things.’
‘And Deiwos guides us in those changes?’
‘Why would he do that? Deiwos doesn’t tinker, pet. He sets things in motion and then moves on. All the mistakes you make are entirely yours. Don’t blame Deiwos for them.’
Althalus reached out and ruffled her fur.
‘I wish you wouldn’t do that,’ she said. ‘It takes forever to get it all straight again.’
‘It gives you something to do between naps, Emmy,’ he told her, and then he went back to the Book.
The past receded even more in his memory as the Book claimed Althalus. By now he could read it through from end to end, and he’d done that so often that he could recite long passages from memory. The more it sank into his memory, the more it altered his perception of the world. Things that had seemed very important before he’d come here to the House at the End of the World were no longer relevant.
‘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