tower.
Each picture in the room beyond contained a book. Sometimes they were many, or prominent; some I had to study for some time before I saw the corner of a binding thrusting from the pocket of a woman's skirt or realized that some strangely wrought spool held words spun like thread.
The steps were narrow and steep and without railings; they twisted as they descended, so that I had not gone down more than thirty before the light of the room above was nearly cut off. At last I was forced to put my hands before me and feel my way for fear I would break my head on the door. My questing fingers never encountered it. Instead the steps ended (and I nearly fell in stepping off a step that was not there), and I was left to grope across an uneven floor in total darkness.
“Who's there?” a voice called. It was a strangely resonant one, like the sound of a bell tolled inside a cave.
The Master of the Curators
“Who's there?” echoed in the dark. As boldly as I could, I said, “Someone with a message.”
“Let me hear it then.”
My eyes were growing used to the dark at last, and I could just make out a dim and very lofty shape moving among dark, ragged shapes that were taller still.
“It is a letter, sieur,” I answered. “Are you Master Ultan the curator?”
“None other.” He was standing before me now. What I had at first thought was a whitish garment now appeared to be a beard reaching nearly to his waist. I was as tall already as many men who are called so, but he was a head and a half taller than I, a true exultant.
“Then here you are, sieur,” I said, and held out the letter. He did not take it. “Whose apprentice are you?” Again I seemed to hear bronze, and quite suddenly I felt that he and I were dead, and that the darkness surrounding us was grave soil pressing in about our eyes, grave soil through which the bell called us to worship at whatever shrines may exist below ground. The livid woman I had seen dragged from her grave rose before me so vividly that I seemed to see her face in the almost luminous whiteness of the figure who spoke. “Whose apprentice?” he asked again.
“No one's. That is, I am an apprentice of our guild. Master Gurloes sent me, sieur. Master Palaemon teaches us apprentices, mostly.”
“But not grammar.” Very slowly the tall man's hand groped toward the letter.
“Oh yes, grammar too.” I felt like a child talking to this man, who had already been old when I was born. “Master Palaemon says we must be able to read and write and calculate, because when we are masters in our time, we'll have to send letters and receive the instructions of the courts, and keep records and accounts.”
“Like this,” the dim figure before me intoned. “Letters such as this.”
“Yes, sieur. Just so.”
“And what does this say?”
“I don't know. It's sealed, sieur.”
“If I open it —” (I heard the brittle wax snap under the pressure of his fingers) “— will you read it to me?”
“It's dark in here, sieur,” I said doubtfully.
“Then we'll have to have Cyby. Excuse me.” In the gloom I could barely see him turn away and raise his hands to form a trumpet. “Cy-by! Cy-by!” The name rang through the dark corridors I sensed all about me as the iron tongue struck the echoing bronze on one side, then the other.
There was an answering call from far off. For some time we waited in silence. At last I saw light down a narrow alley bordered (as it seemed) by precipitous walls of uneven stone. It came nearer — a five-branched candlestick carried by a stocky, very erect man of forty or so with a flat, pale face. The bearded man beside me said, “There you are at last, Cyby. Have you brought a light?”
“Yes, Master. Who is this?”
“A messenger with a letter.” In a more ceremonious tone, Master Ultan said to me, “This is my own apprentice, Cyby. We have a guild too, we curators, of whom the librarians are a division. I am the only master librarian here, and it is our custom to assign our apprentices to our senior members. Cyby has been mine for some years now.”
I told Cyby that I was honored to meet him, and asked, somewhat timidly, what the feast day of the curators was — a question that must have been suggested by the thought that a great many of them must have gone by without Cyby's being elevated to journeyman.
“It is now passed,” Master Ultan said. He looked toward me as he spoke, and in the candlelight I could see that his eyes were the color of watered milk. “In early spring. It is a beautiful day. The trees put out their new leaves then, in most years.”
There were no trees in the Grand Court, but I nodded; then, realizing he could not see me, I said, “Yes, beautiful with soft breezes.”
“Precisely. You are a young man after my own heart.” He put his hand on my shoulder — I could not help noticing that his fingers were dark with dust.
“Cyby, too, is a young man after my heart. He will be chief librarian here when I am gone. We have a procession, you know, we curators. Down Iubar Street. He walks beside me then, the two of us robed in gray. What is the tinct of your own guild?”
“Fuligin,” I told him. “The color that is darker than black.”
“There are trees — sycamores and oaks, rock maples and duck-foot trees said to be the oldest on Urth. The trees spread their shade on either side of Iubar Street, and there are more on the esplanades down the center.
