Sam dug a bottle of wine from the place he had hidden it and sat down in his own room to drink it and play with his books until he got sleepy or felt better, one. Playing with his books generally improved his mood.
He had taken up the craft of bookbinding a few years before he became Topman, and he kept it up, despite the many claims on his attention and the assumptions of others that he would not be able to continue with the hobby.
“You won’t have time for your books anymore,” his mother had sympathized after he had been selected Topman. “What a pity. Oh, I do like them, Sammy. They smell so good.” Which, indeed, they did, being rare leathers and woods, whatever he could lay hands on at the artisans’ market at CM. The pages were generated by Archives, of course, though Sam had taken some pains in determining the size of them, and the type style and the spacing and arrangement of paragraphs. He had selected the pictures also, deciding for each book whether it was to be illustrated in the style of woodcuts or of engravings or of paintings, or even with something that looked like photographic images, any of which Archives could produce as easily as it could spew plain print. Each book had one or more of the stories he had found in the Archives—he had done Theseus’s story first—each one modified and augmented by Sam, written and rewritten until it suited him, until it was properly heroic. When they were printed, he enclosed them in hard, well-made covers with fancy endpapers handmade by a woman in one of the other settlements, and with titles embossed in gold. When Sam finished a volume, it looked very much like the ones the Archives showed him, the ones the museums kept in vacuum containers, their millenia-old names going back even to Manhome.
“They smell so good,” Maire had said, never thinking of reading what was inside. She had never read an old-style book. Outside the universities or the great libraries, few people had. If you wanted to know what was in some old volume, it was so much easier to ask the stage to summarize for you, or do a commentary, or even dramatize it, if you were in the mood for that.
“Why do you take all this time?” Sal had asked, holding the children back from the shelves, lest they pull one of the things out onto the floor and ruin it. Sam, however, had reached for his favorite volume and had sat down with one child in the lap and one over each shoulder as he showed them the pictures, fascinated them with the story of the hero of ancient Manhome time whose father had left him a sword and a pair of shoes buried under a heavy stone. And then, when he found his father at last, he was sent away to fight the wicked Minotaur.
“Why would the King do that?” breathed Sam’s oldest nephew. “The boy just got there.”
“What’s a father?” asked the next oldest.
“Like a progy,” Sam had replied, slightly annoyed. “And the King knew his son wanted to be a hero, so he sent him to do something heroic.” The Archives hadn’t really said that, but Sam thought that’s the way it should have been, and Theseus had not contradicted him.
“I could have been safe in Athens,” Theseus had told him. “But mere safety wouldn’t have been worthy of me. So I volunteered to go to Minos. I went to face the Minotaur with a song in my heart. At least, so my face said.” He turned up his lips and became a mask, beaming with confidence and courage.
“I know,” Sam had breathed. “You had to face danger and death without flinching to be worthy of the King.”
Sal’s comment was, “The hero and his father did get together at the end of the story, I suppose?” She said it with a certain wry emphasis, which Sam ignored. “That’s the point of the story, isn’t it?”
“I suppose,” said Sam, remembering that the story hadn’t ended all that happily. The hero’s father had died, at the end, because of something the hero did, or didn’t do. But then, that was destiny, working itself out. He had been destined to die all along.
Sam also read the children the story of Heopthy Jorn, who promised his father he would care for the kingdom, whose older brother imprisoned him as a sacrifice for the horrible Chagrun, which was eating the people, and how he escaped and came back to win the kingdom as his own and father many sons.
“There’s a lot of fathering in those legends,” Sal commented, disapprovingly. “A lot of fathering, a lot of kinging, a lot of death and violence, and very little uncleing and ordinary kindly living. We are a matrilineal society, Sam, and there’s good reason for that.” Sal wholly approved of the society the way it was, but then she’d been too young to remember anything else.
“Some of the legends do say uncles,” Sam had admitted, a little wearily, wondering momentarily why he bothered to show Sal anything at all. She was so unrelentingly … female! Tricky, as Theseus said. Not at all understanding.
“The children could punch up Archives and get the same thing,” Sal had persisted, still curious as to why Sam did these things. She had always wondered why Sam did the things he did.
Sam had not bothered to set her straight. They couldn’t punch up Archives and get any such thing. They could get an account of the hero, sure enough, comparing him with a hundred other similar tales and telling what he symbolized, and what the monsters meant, and what the
