Arcanum Part 53

No one else was in the library, and it was perfectly still. The great scaffolding had risen up from the floor and attached itself to the galleries, spreading out like the branches of an oak, reaching the apex of the dome. Ropes and buckets hung suspended from the framework, ready for the day's work of chipping away plaster and opening out the oculus.

They'd started the previous evening, and in concert with their brethren outside, had made a small hole in the very top of the dome. Thaler could look up, and where no natural light had penetrated for a thousand years, a thin beam of pale blue shone through and washed against the inside.

Mirrors, thought Thaler. We can't control the sun, but we can predict its movements. We can intercept the light and reflect it to where we want it most.

The beam brightened as the sun came out. Motes of dust danced in the shaft of light, and something attracted the librarian's attention: a picture painted onto the pale plasterwork, of clouds and sky and distant mountains.

Upside down.

Despite everything, he started to climb. The scaffolding was substantial, perfectly secure. There were even ladders between the platforms, tied on with stout cord to stop them moving. The first level wasn't so bad. The foot of the ladder was on the floor, its top against the planking. He could crawl onto that, on his hands and knees. The next one was more difficult, in that the ladder started in the centre of the frame, and ended dangling over the abyss. He'd have to turn around at the top to get to the next safe s.p.a.ce.

He hung on to one of the uprights. The clouds in the picture were moving. Moving, as if they were real clouds. He cursed himself for his timidity, and climbed the ladder to the third level. He was sweating and breathing fast by the time he made it. The labourers made it look so easy, hanging off the edge with only a single foot to support their weight and a casual hand to steady themselves, throwing tools to each other and catching them without worry.

He was only as far as the first gallery, and there were plenty more to go. The tower seemed to be narrowing, so as well as having to manoeuvre backwards onto each platform, he had to swing himself out to even start the next climb.

Above him, always above him, the clouds blew by.

Finally, he was level with the image. It wasn't just a picture of the sky. It was the sky, projected all around him most obvious where it was best illuminated, but in fact running in a band faint in places around the whole circ.u.mference of the dome. He ignored his sweat-slick palms and his drum-beat heart for a moment, and realised he could spot the towers of the fortress on one wall, and the spine of the White Tower on another.

The sun went in, and the picture faded, though it was still just visible. When the sun came out again, the brightness flashed and the images grew in clarity. He could see outside, inside.

It wasn't a painting. It wasn't even a magical painting. Somehow, the opening of the roof had made this phenomenon possible. A bird flew past, and he could track its flight around the dome, and away. Things were distorted: angles weren't true and straight lines appeared curved. That wasn't the point though.

"How is this possible?" he asked the deserted building. Not quite deserted, as it turned out.

"Who's up there?" called a voice.

"Master Thaler. Who's down there?"

"Mr Wess, sir. I came to open up."

Thaler risked leaning over the edge of the platform, and called down. "That can wait a little while longer. How are you with heights?"

Wess was much better with them than Thaler. He climbed like a squirrel, and his vigorous action made the whole structure shake. Thaler was dry-mouthed all over again by the time the under-librarian reached him. It was really a very long way up, and Wess seemed unconcerned about hanging off inconsequential handholds on his way.

In the end, Thaler had to close his eyes and hold on tightly until the scaffolding stopped rattling. There was one last solid thump as the man joined him, and then Thaler risked opening his eyes again.

"Look at the wall and tell me what you see."

Wess leant forward and out to get a better look. When he started to tilt his head sideways, Thaler knew that he wasn't just imagining things.

"That's astonishing." Wess stretched over and waved his hand in front of the wall, watching as his shadow blocked out some of the scene. Another cloud drifted over the face of the sun, and the image dimmed. "Oh."

"Wait just a moment," said Thaler, "and please be careful."

The ribbon of cloud pa.s.sed by, and the panorama was restored.

"How ...?"

"I don't know."

"But..."

"I know. It must have something to do with the light coming in through the small hole, and then ..." Thaler was mystified. "It's not magic."

"It looks like magic, Master Thaler."

"That's the one thing it can't be, Mr Wess. Do we have any works in the library on the property of light and the nature of the eye?"

"We have Euclid and Ptolemy, among others. But, Master Thaler, doesn't light come from the eye? At least, that's what Empedocles said, and Plato agreed." Wess tried again to make shadows on the wall.

"I'm becoming increasingly disenchanted with the Greeks' theories," said Thaler: "they appear to be so very often wrong. For one thing, if our eyes did indeed emit light, then where does darkness come from? It seems self-evident that light comes from objects that make light, and rays springing forth from our own eyes are an unnecessary complication. In fact," he continued, "we seem to have been wallowing in ignorance for far too long."

Wess stopped making shapes and turned towards Thaler. In doing so, he now had his back to the unguarded edge, and appeared oblivious to the danger. "We're educated men, Master Thaler. Ignorant is the one thing we're not."

"I and please do hold onto something, Mr Wess am as guilty as the next man. I read Aristotle, Euclid and Plato, and clearly I take note of what they say. But some of their conjectures are contradictory, in that they describe the nature of things in different ways, and they cannot all be true. We haven't actually thought about these things for ourselves."

Wess was troubled by the whole idea, and Thaler hardly less so.

"What do you suggest we do then?"

"I'm at a loss. I mean, who am I to challenge the greatest geometers of any age? How would I do it? And yet, what they say about light coming from the back of the eye and illuminating the objects so that we can see them? Over here we can see the Bell Tower of the White Fortress, yet our eyes aren't even looking at it just an image of it on the wall of the library."

Wess rubbed his hand over his chin. "Master Thaler, there has to be an explanation."

"Of course. But how to arrive at one? That, my good man, is the question." Thaler momentarily looked down, and wished that he hadn't. "Open up the library. We have work to do today."

"Are you going to be all right?" asked Wess, his gaze straying to Thaler's death-grip on one of the uprights.

"Oh, I'm fine. No help needed. None. Not at all." He nodded emphatically. "Off you go. I'll just stay here and study the phenomena a little while longer. Yes."

"As long as you're sure, Master Thaler." Wess sat on the edge of the platform above the ladder and lowered his feet until they made contact. "See you at the bottom."

He was as vigorous climbing down as he'd been climbing up, and the structure vibrated with his footsteps. Thaler felt a curious weightless sensation in both his legs and the pit of his stomach, as if he were already falling, but he wasn't really going anywhere. And that was the problem. The workmen would be wanting their scaffolding back shortly, and an overweight librarian perched at the top like an eagle's chick who refused to leave the nest was an impediment that they'd probably rather do without.

"Master Thaler?" called Wess. "Mistress Morgenstern is here. She has books."

"Good morning, Master Thaler." Sophia paused. "What in heaven's name are you doing up there?"

"I'm investigating a ... a thing," he called back.

"Well, stop it at once and come down. I've got the books Father bought from Thomm and they need to go back into the catalogue."

There was nothing for it. He could be lowered from the roof like a sack of flour at a mill, and suffer endless ridicule and shame, or he could climb down by himself. It was perfectly safe: Wess had proved that. As long as he kept a hold of something at all times, it would be absolutely no trouble at all. Child's play, even.

He started, and quickly found there really was no subst.i.tute for looking down and seeing where he was going. Closing his eyes was no good at all. The only thing that got him through the whole stuttering, terrifying descent, was the thought that he was now the master librarian, and that he needed to show some backbone.

If he'd sweated on the way up, he was saturated by the time he reached solid ground again. His whole body was trembling, and he had to resist the overwhelming urge to sink to his knees and kiss the stone flags.

He looked between his feet, and saw shapes and whorls embedded there. Some of them looked like snails, some like creatures he'd never seen except frozen in the smoothed, sawn rock. How did that happen? How did living animals end up trapped in something so permanent?

"Master Thaler?" Sophia's hand was on his shoulder. "Have some water, please. You look terrible."

He grimaced and tried to straighten up. "I a.s.sure you, Mistress, I am in rude health."

"You can a.s.sure me all you like." She motioned to Wess for a chair. "I'm inclined to believe the evidence of my eyes."

"Which, it appears, do not radiate light as the Greeks suggested."

"Didn't Euclid disagree with Plato?" Sophia forced him down into the chair. "Though it was all forms with him."

"Oh, I think they were probably both wrong." He took the cup of water from her and drained it. Beer would have been nicer; the water tasted a little odd. "Almost everything we know is wrong."

"Almost?"

"Trying to work out which parts are true is going to be a lifetime's work." Thaler handed the cup back, smacking his lips. He tested the ground under his feet. It neither shook nor rattled. Perhaps he should only undertake climbing again as a last resort. "You said something about books?"

"First, Master Thaler, the sefer?"

He had enough energy left to raise an eyebrow. "You're not still going on about those, are you?"

She pointed to the long table where she'd placed a pile of folios. "I'll even write the letter of authorisation for you. Frederik, this is important. If you want Jewish men to help you in here, you're going to have to give them up."

Thaler sighed. "Very well." He dragged himself upright and walked the few feet to the table, where he sat down again. Sophia gathered ink, pen and parchment, and started to scratch out German words.

He watched her for a while she had a good penstroke and wrote more evenly and cleanly than many a librarian and then turned his attention to the returned books.

Speaking of Plato, there was a copy of The Republic among them: he heaved it down in front of him and checked it for damage. He turned the pages carefully, then looked down the spine. There was a fine copy, also, of the Commentaries on the Gallic War. Both books together would have been the start of a good private library, Greek and Latin. Of course, his library had several copies of both, and Thaler began to see a pattern: Thomm had only taken books that were duplicated. The master librarian's att.i.tude to his former colleague softened just a little.

"Ah, Mr Thomm. If only you could have kept it in your breeks."

"Sorry, Master Thaler?" murmured Sophia, not looking up.

"Nothing. Nothing at all." He reached for the third book, a much smaller volume, almost duodecimo in size. Looking first at the cover, he then opened it to peer at the t.i.tle page.

She must have felt him stiffen. "What?"

"This book. Where did it come from?"

She glanced over. "That's the one my father received instead of On the Balance. He clearly doesn't want anything to do with it, so I brought it to you."

Thaler slid it across to her. "Can you read it?"

She put down her pen and held the page closer to the lantern. "It's in Persian. It says, ah, Balance of Wisdom. Yes, that's right. Not On the Balance at all. There, it might have even been an honest mistake." She ran her finger right to left across the curved lines and uprights. "Abu Ali al-Hasan ibn al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham. That's the author. You seem very interested in a book you can't read."

"The frontispiece," said Thaler, "look at the picture. There is a man, presumably this al-Haytham, at the top of a tower. Can you see what he's doing?"

She leant in very close. "He's dropping things. Spheres. You can see some of them on the ground at the bottom."

Thaler pointed to dotted lines proceeding from the man's hands. "And these objects here are those same spheres in flight. They get progressively further apart. Is that what happens?"

Sophia looked up at the gallery from which Thaler had thrown the lunch-pails off the edge. "It might be."

He took the book back and turned several pages until there was a diagram. It seemed to be of a large ball of fire surrounded by concentric circles, to which single smaller circles were attached.

"And what's this?"

"I can't tell without reading it."

"Or this?" The same ball of fire was juxtaposed with stars, but, without being able to read the text, he didn't know what it meant.

"Frederik, calm down. I'm not that good at Persian, but my father is an expert. When he gets here, he can read some to you. But remember, this isn't what you're supposed to be doing: you should be cataloguing, working out what we have, separating them into subjects." She pried the book out of his hand. "Where would you put this?"

"I don't know." He was angry, with her, with this long-dead al-Haytham, with himself for having spent his entire life believing the explanations of Greek philosophers. "Astronomy?"

"Then put it in the catalogue. Shelve it with the other astronomy books. That's where it'll be when you need it." Sophia picked up her pen again, but only after moving the Persian book to her far side, out of Thaler's reach.

While they'd been talking arguing the library had filled up with people. Workmen were laying siege to the lowest ladder on the tower, and librarians were carrying piles of books in their arms, both away from and towards the table, loading and unloading barrows with quiet efficiency. Around the table itself, the more senior librarians had taken their seats, and the cataloguing had already begun.

Up above, out on the roof and out of sight, skilled hands a.s.saulted the cover of the oculus. All of a sudden, what had been a tiny hole became a fist-sized s.p.a.ce, which in turn widened out rapidly.

Light, natural light, poured in like a flood.

Everyone stopped and looked up, including Thaler. The effect was startling, eye-watering. A bright oval struck the side of the dome, and partially illuminated everything. The lanterns they were using looked dimmer, and the library larger and more solid.

Sophia smiled. "Vayomer elohim yehi or."

Thaler didn't ask for a translation, because he was already thinking again about the mirrors they'd need to put up.

Big mirrors.

54.

The first thing Buber saw when he opened the door in the morning was the boy's face wearing an expression of pugnacious desperation. He almost closed the door again in the hope that it would go away, but no, f.u.c.k it. Why should he?

He was hungry, and needed something to eat. The horse was catered for; there was probably only so much bulky animal feed that the townspeople could carry with them, and they'd rightly surmised there'd be gra.s.s lower down the valley. Human food? Not so much.