“I’m going to buy this woman,” Bili decided. “I can afford her. The Selder Academy doesn’t cost all that much.”
“You can’t just buy some woman here in the public street!” said Julian. “Not sight unseen, for heaven’s sake!”
Julian untied the mouth of his scholar’s bag and rustled through the dense jumble within it—his watercress, spinach, scarf, pipe, scissors, string, keys, wax tablet, and magnifying glass. He pulled out one ancient silver dime.
Julian crouched beside the cowering woman and placed the time-worn coin into her blistered hand. “Here,” he said, “this coin is for you. Now, stay still, for I’m going to examine you. I won’t hurt you. Stick out your tongue.”
She gripped the coin feverishly, but she understood not one word.
“Stick out your tongue,” commanded Julian, suiting action to words.
He examined her teeth with the magnifying glass.
Then he plucked back the slanted folds of her eyelids. He touched both her ears—pierced, but no jewels left there, not anymore. He thumped at her chest until she coughed. He smelled her breath. He closely examined her hands and feet.
“She’s well over forty years old,” he said. “She’s lost three teeth, she’s starving, and she’s been walking barefoot for a month. These two youngsters are not her children. I dare say a woman of her years had children once, but these are not them. This brute here with the leather belt, which he used on her legs … He’s not her husband. She was a lady once. A civilized woman. Before whatever happened, happened.”
“How much should I pay for her?” said Bili.
“I have no idea. This is no regular auction. The Godfather is a decent man, he prohibited all that slave-auction mischief years ago. You’d better ask your father how much he thinks a house-servant like her is worth. Not very much, I’d be guessing.”
“I’m not buying her for my house,” said Bili. “I’m buying her for your house.”
A moment passed.
“Bili—,” Julian said severely, “have I taught you nothing with my lectures, or from the example of my life? I devote myself to sustainable simplicity! Our ancestors never had slaves! Or rather, yes they did, strictly speaking—but they rid themselves of that vice, and built machines instead. We all know how that ugly habit turned out! Why would I burden myself with her?”
Bili smiled sheepishly. “Because she is so much like a pet bird?”
“She is rather like a bird,” Julian admitted. “More like a bird than a woman. Because she is starving, poor thing.”
“Maestro, please accept this woman into your house. Please. People talk about you all the time, they gossip about you. You don’t mind that, because you are a philosopher. But maestro, they talk about me! They gossip about me, because I follow you everywhere, and I adore you! I’d rather kneel at your feet than drill with the men-at-arms! Can’t you do me this one favor, and accept a gift from me? You know I have no other gifts. I have no other gifts that even interest you.”
After Mellow Julian accepted Bili’s gift, Bili became even more of the obnoxious class pet. Bili insisted on being addressed by his antique pseudonym Dandy William Idaho, and sashayed around Selder in a ludicrous antique costume he had faked up, involving “blue jeans.” Bili asked impertinent, look-at-me questions during the lectures. He hammed it up after class in amateur theatricals.
However, Bili also applied himself to his language studies. Bili had suddenly come to understand that Old Proper English was the language of the world. Old Proper English was the language of laws, rituals, boundary treaties, water rights, finance arrangements, and marriage dowries. The language of civilization.
That was why a wise and caring Godfather took good care to see that his secretaries wrote an elegant and refined Old Proper English. A scribe with such abilities could risk some personal eccentricities.
Julian named his new servant House Sparrow Oregon. Enquiries around the court made it clear that she was likely from Oregon. War and plague—they were commonly the same event—had expelled many of her kind from their distant homeland.
Deprived of food and shelter, they had dwindled quickly in the cruelties of the weather.
Sometimes, when spared by the storms, refugees found the old grassy highways, and traveled incredible distances. Vagrants came from the West Coast, and savages from the East Coast. Pirates came from the North Coast, where there had once been nothing but ice. The South was a vast baking desert that nobody dared to explore.
Once a teenage boy named Juli had left a village in Nebraska. Julian had suffered the frightening, dangerous trip to Selder, because the people in Selder still knew about the old things. And they did know them—some of them. They knew that the world was round, and that it went around the sun. They knew that the universe was thirteen thousand, seven hundreds of millions of years old. They knew that men were descended from apes, although apes were probably mythical.
They had also built the only city in the known world that was not patched-up from the scraps of a fallen city. Created at the sunset of a more enlightened age, Selder was a thousand years old. Yet it was the only city that had grown during the long dark ages.
The court of the Godfather was a place of sustainable order. The council-of-forty, the Men in Red, were its educated, literate officials. They held the authority to record facts of state. They knew what was meet and proper to write, and what was of advantage to teach, and what should be censored. They had taught Julian, and he had worked for them. He had come to know everything about what they did with language. He was no longer overly fond of what they did.
House Sparrow Oregon had no language that Julian understood. To test her, Julian inscribed the classic letters of antiquity into his wax tablet: THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG. PACK MY BOX WITH FIVE DOZEN LIQUOR JUGS.
In response, Sparrow timidly made a few little scrapes with the stylus. Crooked little symbols, with tops and bottoms. They were very odd, but she knew only ten of them. Sparrow was nobody’s scholar.
Julian was patient. Every child who ever entered a school was a small barbarian. To beat them, to shout at them, to point out their obvious shortcomings … what did that ever avail? What new students needed were clear and simple rules.
This aging, frightened, wounded woman was heartsick. She had lost all roles, all rules, and all meaning. She was terrified of almost everything in Selder, including him.
So: it was about a small demonstration, and then a patient silence: the wait for her response. So that Sparrow’s dark eyes lost their cast of horror and bewilderment. So that she observed the world, no longer mutely gazing on it.
So: This is the water. Here, drink it from this cup. It’s good, isn’t it? Yes, fresh water is good! The good life is all about simple things like clear water.
Now, this is our bucket in which we bring the water home. Come with me, to observe this. There is nothing to fear in this street. Yes, come along. They respect me, they will not harm you.
You see this? Every stranger living in Selder must learn this right away. This is our most basic civic duty, performed by every able-bodied adult, from the Godfather himself to the girl of twelve. These waterworks look complex and frightening, but you can see how I do this myself. This is a water-lever. It holds that great leather bucket at one end, and this stone weight here at our end.
We dip the great bucket so as to lift the dirty water, so that it slowly flows in many locks and channels, high back up the hillside. We recycle all the water of this city. We never spill it, or lose its rich, fertile, and rather malodorous nutrients. We can spill our own blood in full measure here, but we will never break our water cycle. This is why we have sustained ourselves.