‘No, not really. We’ll get to those things later, though. Let’s try the easy ones first. Take off your shoe and throw it over by the bed. Then tell it to come back.’
‘I don’t think it’ll listen to me, Emmy.’
‘It will if you use the right word. All you have to do is put your hand on the Book, look at the shoe, and say “gwem”. It’s like calling a puppy’
‘That’s an awfully old-fashioned word, Emmy.’
‘Of course it is. It’s one of the first words. The language of the Book is the mother of your language. Your language grew out of it. Just try it, pet. We can talk about the changes of language some other time.’
He dubiously pulled off his shoe and tossed it over by the bed. Then he laid his hand on the Book and said ‘gwem’ rather half-heartedly.
Nothing happened.
‘So much for that as an idea,’ he muttered.
‘Command, Althie,’ Emerald said in a weary tone. ‘Do you think a puppy would listen if you said it that way?’
‘Gwem!’ he sharply commanded his shoe.
He didn’t really expect it, so he wasn’t ready to fend the shoe off, and it hit him squarely in the face.
‘It’s a good thing we didn’t start with your spear,’ Emmy noted. ‘It’s usually best to hold your hands out when you do that, Althalus. Let the shoe know where you want it to come to.’
‘It actually works!’ he exclaimed in astonishment.
‘Of course it does. Didn’t you believe me?’
‘Well – sort of, I guess. I didn’t think it’d happen quite that fast, though. I kind of expected the shoe to come slithering across the floor. I didn’t know it was going to fly.’
‘You said it just a little too firmly, pet. The tone of voice is very important when you do things this way. The louder and more sharply you say it, the faster it happens.’
‘I’ll remember that. Getting kicked in the face with my own shoe definitely got my attention. Why didn’t you warn me about that?’
‘Because you don’t listen, Althie. It’s just a waste of breath to warn you about things. Now try it again.’
Althalus put miles on that shoe over the next several weeks, and he gradually grew more proficient at altering the tone of his voice. He also discovered that different words would make the shoe do other things. ‘Dheu’ would make it rise up off the floor and simply stand in front of him on nothing but air. ‘Dhreu’ would lower it to the floor again.
He was practising on that one day in late summer when an impish kind of notion came to him. He looked over at Emerald, who was sitting on the bed carefully washing her ears. He focused his attention on her, set his hand on the Book, and said ‘Dheu.’
Emerald immediately rose up in the air until she was sitting on nothing at all at about the same level as his head. She continued to scrub at her ears as if nothing had happened. Then she looked at him, and her green eyes seemed very cold and hard. Then she said ‘Bhlag!’ quite sharply.
The blow took Althalus squarely on the point of the chin, and it sent him rolling across the floor. It seemed to have come out of nowhere at all, and it had rattled him all the way down to his toes.
‘We don’t do that to each other, do we?’ Emerald said in an almost pleasant tone of voice. ‘Now put me down.’
His eyes wouldn’t seem to focus. He covered one of them with his hand so that he could see her and said ‘Dhreu’ in an apologetic sort of way.
Emerald settled slowly back to the bed. ‘That’s much better,’ she said. ‘Are you going to get up, or did you plan to lie there on the floor for a while?’ Then she went back to washing her ears.
He more or less gathered at that point that there were rules and that it wasn’t wise to break them. He also realized that Emerald had just demonstrated the next step. She hadn’t been anywhere near the Book when she’d knocked him across the room.
He continued to practice with his shoe. He was more familiar with it than with his other possessions, and it didn’t have any sharp edges, as some of the others had. Just to see if he could do it, he’d put a pair of wings on it, and it went flapping around the room blundering into things. It occurred to him that a flying shoe would have been a sensation in Nabjor’s camp or Gosti Big Belly’s hall. That had been a long time ago, though. He idly roamed back through his memory, trying to attach some number to the years he’d spent here in the House, but the number kept evading him for some reason.
‘How long have I been here, Em?’ he asked his companion.
‘Quite some time. Why do you ask?’
‘Just curious, I suppose. I can barely remember a time when I wasn’t here.’
‘Time doesn’t really mean anything here in this House, pet. You’re here to learn, and some of the things in the Book are very difficult. It took your mind a very long time to fully grasp them. When we came to one of those, I’d usually let your eyes sleep while your mind worked. It was a lot quieter that way. Your arguments were with the Book, not with me.’
‘Let me see if I understand this. Are you saying that there’s been times when I went to sleep and didn’t wake up for a week or more?’
She gave him one of those infuriatingly superior looks.
‘A month?’ he asked incredulously.
‘Keep going,’ she suggested.
‘You’ve put me to sleep for years on end?’ he almost screamed at her.
‘Sleep’s very good for you, dear. The nice thing about those particular naps is that you don’t snore.’
‘How long, Emmy? How long have I been penned up in here with you?’
‘Long enough for us to get to know each other.’ Then she heaved one of those long-suffering sighs. ‘You must learn to listen when I tell you something, Althalus. You’ve been here in this House long enough to learn how to read the Book. That didn’t really take too long, though. It was learning to understand the Book that took you so much time. You haven’t quite finished that yet, but you’re coming along.’
‘That means that I’m very, very old, doesn’t it?’ He reached up, took hold of a lock of his hair and pulled it down so that he could see it. ‘I can’t be that old,’ he scoffed. ‘My hair hasn’t even turned white yet’
‘Why would it do that?’
‘I don’t know. It just does. When a man gets old, his hair turns white.’
‘That’s the whole point, Althalus. You haven’t grown old. Nothing changes in this House. You’re still the same age as you were when you first came here.’
‘What about you? Are you still the same age you were as well?’
‘Didn’t I just say that?’
‘If I remember right, you told me once that you haven’t always been here.’
‘Not always, no. I was somewhere else a long time ago, but then I came to wait for you.’ She glanced back over her shoulder at the mountain peaks looming out beyond the south window. ‘Those weren’t there when I first came,’ she added.
‘I thought mountains lasted forever.’
‘Nothing lasts forever, Althalus – except me, of course.’
‘The world must have been very different back in the days before those mountains,’ he mused. ‘Where did people live back then?’
‘They didn’t. There weren’t any people