The Bookseller's Boy

Sima weaving his way through legs of men and horses, treading carefully on the fat mud clay that is drying out slowly in the pleasant afternoon and wrapping the whole fair in a steamy mud fug of carried voices and the comfort odours of food and smoke.

As he moves he frets. It is a curious trade, the bookseller’s, required to travel to find custom and yet with such troublesome wares that each trip requires a careful determination of the marketplace. What will sell and what won’t, what to buy and what not. Preparation is everything and it is a rash bookman that undertakes a trip to market without at least one sale planned for. But these are not Sima’s concerns. He is apprentice only and his concerns are more practical: how to protect the books from the wet air, which of the fine smelling hot food stalls he will visit with hard earned shillings when the evening comes and how, this last a constant query, can he ever be free of his master, the bookseller Gowther.

When Sima comes to Gowther now, he finds himself with a new concern. Gowther slumbers in the folding metal chair, behind the trestles and the great piles of books, where they lay about whole and broken, bright and dull. He is still wrapped in his long travelling coat, wound about with a woollen scarf, three pairs of spectacles hang around a neck unshaven and bristling white, supporting this round red face, older than the years it has seen and bound around from jaw to crown with a gaudy cloth of the old world run with more colours than Sima has names for. Should he wake his master and relay the message, or wait for him to wake himself and then tell what he knows? Either way there will be trouble for him and decides before long that action is superior to inaction.

He shakes his master gently awake, dodges Gowther’s first reflex blow at him and tells what he knows without delay.

`Chedderwith will not buy the mathematics volumes.’

It is bad news, but Sima calculates that there is a chance that he can redirect Gowther’s anger and avoid further blows. Gowther huffs and puffs himself to full wakening and struggles to his feet. He is a big man and getting bigger, steadying himself on the edge of the trestle, but careful not to tip it into the mud.

Scoundrel!' cries Gowther as if in pain, focussing weak eyes into the mist and then turning back to Sima, What excuse did he have boy? Whoreson! He all but promised to take them!’

Sir, begging your pardon sir, Chedderwith says the scholars have no more need of them. Chedderwith told me to say that The bottom has fallen from the mathematical volumes market.’’

Gowther’s face is red already, but in the moments following Sima’s quotation it becomes a fierce scarlet. Sima has five new words today from Gant who is Chedderwith’s apprentice and fonder of words than the books that contain them: phatic, recondite, cenacle, apoplexy, gracile. Despite his fear as to the direction Gowther’s rage will take he is pleased to find so ready an application for one of Gant’s words. Gowther is in a state of apoplexy for some moments before he thumps his fist down on one of the thick volumes under discussion. It is called `Calculus and Analytic Geometry, 7th Edition’.

`The Dead rot his soul! Beetle-eared scoundrel! Have I dragged these tomes half the length of the land to sell them for kindling?’ rages Gowther

Sima resists his impulse to point out that, in fact, it is he who has dragged them half the length of the land. They are tomes indeed – the current recipient of Gowther’s fist is not Sima but a volume of over twelve hundred pages. And Sima has studied these volumes of the Dead many times and made neither head nor tail of them. He knows what numbers are of course, and how to use them. Keeps the account book straight when Gowther drinks too much and loses his reckoning. But these volumes pay little attention to numbers, they are filled with letters and symbols and diagrams of curves and lines and Sima understands not one page of it. He traded mathematic words with Gant: secant, parabola, integral, orthogonal, nonlinear. Gant did not like them. They were words without meaning, or with meaning only for the Dead, or the scholars. But the scholars were no longer buying such books. Did it mean that they had understood all that the books had to tell them, or did it mean that they, like Sima, had ceased to be interested in this most recondite language of the Dead?

Colder now that he is no longer moving, Sima shivers inside the front space of the canvas tent, working on the bundle of journals the costerman sold to him, Sima using his discretion, Gowther sneering but allowing the transaction as any shortfall will be corrected with Sima’s wages. The stack is fragile and mouldering, smells acrid and leaves an unclean feeling on the tips of his fingers, but Sima loves this bit of his work best of all There is always something of interest in such bundles and many is the thick ear he has received from Gowther when he has been discovered with the stack only half unwound and him buried in some concern of the old world. He cuts the taught string with his little pocketknife, the one given to him by his father when he was indentured all those years ago. The string has pulled very tight over the years and splits with a twang and a little shower of dust and mould spores. The outside of the stack seems filthy and ruined by the years, but as Sima lifts the first journal his heart jumps to see how clean and bright the protected print still looks.

Ad Weekly. The Nation’s Favourite Free Classified Newspaper. Sima has seen many like these. They are usually of little interest to anyone and so of little value, but the date on this interests him – 12 April 2024. The thing cannot have been printed very long before the Great Dying. Sima knows that no one can say exactly how long it is since the Great Dying. The scholars still argue the date of the Dyings and the Chaos with no result and no purpose, but they argue fiercely nonetheless. The booksellers say that the year called 2024 by the old world is the year of the Great Dying and argue thus – books were made in 2024 but no books were made in 2025. Not one. Whether that time was one hundred years ago or one hundred and fifty, no one knows. After the Chaos and the Lesser Dying, track of the calendar is lost and it is many years before the Oxford scholars decreed one day that it is 21 June 2092 and that this is how days will now be reckoned and so get used to it.

Monthly Motor Mart. June 2024. New Hybrid Trade Values. Ford’s New Flagship. Over 3000 Vehicles For Sale. Lists and catalogues. Dull. Somebody somewhere will pay something for them, but again the date calls out to Sima from hard on the other side of the Chaos. This journal, made in a world of millions – Gant says hundreds of millions – where electrical power sang in the towers and the roads were filled with tacsis, where calculus and analytic geometry 7th edition was read and understood and where absolutely everything made sense.

Woman’s Own. June 2024. Get into shape with our fab summer diet. More true life stories. Bird Flu – How you can protect your family. Sima turns the pages, printed cleanly and full of colours, pictures of food looking better than any food he has ever seen, fat tomatoes glistening with dew, a huge joint of beef tied and cut and pink in the middle, women dressed in tight fitting clothes make him blush and move on quickly.

The paper of the next thing in the stack looks rough, like a proper journal, but printed with a coloured picture and not words, which is unusual. The picture is upside down. He tries to make it out. There are yellow machines with wheels.

Digging machines

Digging.

He turns his head to read the tiny letters of the photo caption better.

Council workers and army medical units digging mass graves on Hampstead Heath. Photograph: Keith Ransome.

Lifts the newspaper carefully, turns it the right way up, makes more of the photograph now, at the fold he can see the skyline of the city. Recognises the great towers there, it is London and he moves his head in space – works out where the picture must have been taken from. Very carefully, wincing as fragile pieces splinter from the fold he stretches the page out to its full length – sees the whole image for what it is, recognises the name of the journal, reads the single word plastered across the page above the fold in letters three inches high, fixes his eyes on the date there and forgets to breathe.

The Times.

29 May 2024.

Plague.

And lays it carefully on the thick weave of the rug, using both hands to turn the front page, remembers to breathe once more and reads. Yes. This is what he thinks it is and each word makes it more so. First a list in large print:

Hundreds dead in epidemic outbreak.

Hospitals stretched to breaking point.

Emergency powers invoked

Transport restrictions imposed

And then reads.

By noon there had been seventeen notifications of the unknown disease from four of the capital’s hospitals.

And reads.

It is not known whether the new restrictions will allow print copies of this newspaper to be distributed in the usual manner. A continuously updated electronic edition is available at …

And reads.

Reports from Paris, Barcelona and Turin indicate that similar outbreaks are occurring across Europe.

And reads.

… seems to occur very quickly and the mode of transmission is not yet known. Doctor Townsend also stated that all of the notified cases had died within twelve hours of the first symptoms becoming apparent. He urged …

It is the first day of the Great Dying. In black and white – magenta, cyan and yellow. An account of the days and the hours that separated the living from the Dead. He has never seen such a thing – never heard of it. His brain struggles between horrible fascination with the thing itself and baseless calculations as to its value. He hears Gowther stirring on the cot bed next door and tears himself from the past and comes once more into the present.

Quickly. Carefully. He folds the marvellous thing up again, rolls it and wraps it in oilcloth, ties it with straps, hides it in his bundle and returns to the stack, only half looking at the remaining journals as he processes them. More catalogues, more lists. All dates close to the one that burns now in his brain, the one that he alone knows – 29 May 2024. Sorts the pile automatically into Yes' and No’, tells the newly roused Gowther that they are mostly worthless, but have curiosity value, being, as they are, from the Last Year. His master grunts, nods, takes money from the cashbox and goes out to find drink.

So Sima plans.

It is not a cenacle in which Sima finds the scholars, but it is a room for feasting and drinking and is hidden inside a grand tent where the scholars are using it to the full. All down from Oxford, everywhere is down from Oxford, enjoying what the fair has to offer. This one, the Bishop Stortford equinox fair, in recent years has a name for itself as better than most for books and brings the students in droves.

Rufus, by girth and the dozen or more empty spectacle frames that hang upon his breast, the greatest of the scholars here and – it seems to Sima – the deepest in his cups.

`What care we for the daily humdrums of the old world?’ he cackles and those of his acolytes nearest cheer and drink in assent, but Sima sees scholars beyond the lamplight, look away as if they cannot watch.

`Curiosity value if nothing more.’

I will buy it boy. Five shillings,' calls a scholar from the shadow side. Sima thinks him joking but his face is serious, not unkind. So Sima's dreams of wealth and freedom from Gowther tumble like the towers of the city. How can he doubt the scholars? And yet in their drunkenness and their mockery there is something not right, something that, at last boils from him and shouts forth How is it that the scholars of Oxford no longer read volumes of mathematics or news of the dying?’

He cannot believe he has spoken thus, and neither, it seems can the scholars as their noise dies and they turn to him.

There is silence for a time and then Rufus hissing, `What are the Dead if not dead? What do they have to tell us about living boy? Will we spend lifetimes learning their mathematics for all it could not save them? Or will we learn life anew with songs and with wine?’ And there is an answer from the scholars. A riotous roar that says yes to Rufus, and there are hands laid upon him and upon the thing he had thought a treasure and for a moment he fears that it will be torn and broken and him with it. A vanishing trick. Some illusion. A flash of trickster gaudy and he is outside of the tent again walking away, steered by the strong grip of gracile fingers at his elbow, the carousing scholars in uproar behind him.

Sima finds that he is crying for the first time in five years. The first time since he was apprenticed and left his father’s house. At first he does not know why the tears come but then a quiet voice tells him, `You sought more than money from them and they could not give it to you.’

And looks up, through tears and sees words first above him that say `Wessex Constabulary’, written white on black on trickster gaudy and above that a face looking kindly upon him.

`The scholars have lost their way. You see it and they do not,’ the voice says.

Sima nods and blinks back his tears.

`I cannot buy your treasure, but I will trade for it.’

Remembers his money sense and rekindles his hopes, `What can you trade trickster?’

And to his amazement the trickster has something better than all the wealth of the scholars to trade.

`Drumlin they call me, for that is my name.’

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