The Accidental Keyhand Page 13

  Savi’s lips twitched. “Touché.”

  Dorrie gaped at him. “Cyrano de Bergerac was a real person?”

  “Still is,” Savi replied, removing an imaginary hat from his head and sweeping it before her in a mock bow. “Hercule-Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac at your service.”

  A mad elation flushed away Dorrie’s recent humiliation. Cyrano de Bergerac, the legendary swordsman, was a real person. A real person who was going to teach her how to use a sword! As he disappeared through the door, he brushed by Millie. In complete silence, Millie’s jaw began to work itself around in small circles of ever-increasing speed. Her pale face bloomed pink, which gave way to the speckled light red of a peach and then finally to the deep, angry red of a raw piece of beef.

  CHAPTER 12

  THE ARCHIVIST

  “Ebba!” Dorrie whispered, shaking her in the next morning’s early light. “Ebba.” The burned-down remains of three candles stood on the table at the end of Ebba’s bed. An enormous book filled with drawings of mongooses lay open beside her. Ebba yawned and slowly opened her eyes. “I just heard a big bell ring eight times,” said Dorrie. “Does that mean eight o’clock? Aren’t we supposed to—”

  Ebba scrambled out of bed as though she’d been electrocuted. “Yes!”

  Dorrie pulled on her new green dress, still confounded by Mathilde’s news that women in Petrarch’s Library always learned how to wield Renaissance-era blades while wearing dresses. Mathilde had shrugged. “Because that’s what women wear out in the Renaissance wherens, and you have to blend in. You can’t just stop and change into doublet and hose when you sense a sword fight brewing.”

  After nearly upending Marcus’s bed to get him out of it, Ebba and Dorrie scurried with him to the Commons, where they stopped, panting, knowing they’d need to head in different directions. For the first time, Dorrie took a long look at Marcus’s outfit. He wore a pair of close-fitting suede pants whose bottoms disappeared into boots that began a washed-out red at their tops and changed to black halfway down. A short, brown suede jacket, darker than the pants, was double-buttoned snugly across Marcus’s middle, and an enormous collar encircled his neck. The generous cuffs of a white shirt stuck just far enough beyond the ends of the jacket’s sleeves to be admired.

  Marcus gave her a double thumbs-up. “Totally rock ‘n’ roll, right?”

  Dorrie had to admit that on Marcus, the clothes, which had to be from at least the last century, looked somehow like the latest thing.

  She arrived at the Gymnasium breathless, her chest heaving, just as Savi appeared through another door, hair hanging loose around his face and a satchel over his shoulder. As he led her along the Gymnasium wall, Dorrie wondered with great excitement what weapon he would start her on. He stopped at a closet. “Here,” he said, handing her a bundle of stinking, thickly padded canvas vests, a washboard, and a hunk of slimy-looking soap. Mystified, Dorrie followed him out to one end of the courtyard where they’d spoken the day before. He stopped at a stone-encircled well.

  “You can wash them here,” said Savi.

  Dorrie looked from the well to the pads in her arms. “Oh, I don’t mind wearing them dirty.”

  “You misunderstand, mademoiselle,” said Savi, perching himself on a nearby bench. “The main point here is to strengthen your muscles, but the Gymnasium mistress might as well derive some benefit from your efforts.”

  Leaving her to haul up the water by herself, Savi pulled out an inkwell, a quill, and paper from a satchel. Disappointed, Dorrie dumped the vests on the ground and did what she could with them, wishing mightily for a scrub brush or, better yet, a washing machine. She risked a quick glance at Savi. Was this a test? Was he seeing if she could be patient or thorough or uncomplaining?

  She tried to focus on being all these things in turn. He seemed utterly distracted and was not paying the least bit of attention to her. Every once in a while he would sigh violently and scribble furiously with his quill. She glanced at him again. Maybe he was writing out some sword-fighting instructions.

  If so, they were very detailed ones. For the next three hours, Dorrie scrubbed and Savi scribbled. When a distant bell tolled noon, Savi finally seemed to come back from wherever he’d been. He gathered his things, packed them back in his satchel, and stretched. “All done with those?”

  “Just about,” Dorrie said, the last vest dripping in her hands. He pointed to a clothesline.

  “Then au revoir, mademoiselle. Just hang those up to dry, and I’ll see you tomorrow at eight o’clock. We will practice the art and science of sanding fighting sticks.”

  ***

  Though each new day afforded Dorrie the chance to make new discoveries about Petrarch’s Library, none were about the sword. A week passed, not in an exciting fever of cutting and thrusting and fancy footwork, but in a sweaty, frustrating blur of cleaning helmets, moving armload after armload of books from a new Ghost Library into the Reference Room for Callamachus to catalog, and running endless errands for Savi. The errands always seemed to involve running at great speed up and down stairways, or jumping on and off bicycles, or clambering up and down the steep, rocky path to the harbor where the water master’s boats bobbed.

  “If Tiffany wants to settle things with sponges or scrub brushes, I’m all set,” Dorrie sighed to Ebba as she enviously watched her friend take aim at a chimney top with her slingshot. Ebba carried the slingshot with her everywhere. Dorrie had watched her send pebbles flying at pillars and tree knots and once, to Mistress Lovelace’s annoyance, at a bell hanging above the spot where the lybrarian sat reading out on the Commons.

  Meanwhile, at Marcus’s request, Egeria had begun to intersperse her lectures on the edible parts of daylilies and nasturtiums with lessons in the basics of ax-throwing. Jealously, Dorrie watched Marcus hurl his ax into the blindingly pink-striped walls of a forlorn Ghost Library that was unpleasant to spend any time in and had been given over to throwers of the ax for their practice needs. The room held only a tea table, two inhospitable chairs, and a tiny china cabinet full of cracked saucers, broken teacups, and seventeen shabby, well-thumbed volumes that Ursula dismissed with a sniff as novels of the lurid variety. This turned out not to be entirely true.

  One day, Dorrie and Ebba came to the little Ghost Library to pick Marcus up on their way to go swimming. They found him sitting against a wall in the otherwise empty room, his ax wedged between his bent legs, the blade embedded in a book that lay open on his knees.

  “You know who totally needs Lybrariad intervention?” he said, looking up, his eyes full of indignant fire. “Timotheus of Miletus.”

  “Okay…” said Dorrie.

  “He was just an ancient dude trying to play the music he wanted to play, experimenting with some new rhythms, and wow, you’d think he’d been eating babies for breakfast.” Marcus wrenched the book off the ax, and the heavy weapon clattered to the ground. “They outlawed his music and locked him up for months just because some philosopher said his music got people too excited.”

  “You could tell Mistress Wu about him,” said Ebba, sounding doubtful that Timotheus would qualify as an imperiled subject. “She can see if the Lybrariad wants to put him on the mission list.”

  While Ebba could summon little interest in anything to do with music, Dorrie had found that her friend had a burning passion for turning bits and pieces of metal and wood into useful things. Like Dorrie’s father, Ebba loved contrivances. She had apprenticed herself to Hamsa, the director of the field-tech workshop who oversaw the design and construction of all the special equipment used by lybrarians and keyhands on their missions.

  Once when Dorrie had visited the workshop, she’d watched Hamsa and Ebba spend an hour digging like happy moles through a bin of potentiometers and a half hour arguing about the relative merits of various kinds of compound cranks. Finally, Dorrie had abandoned them, too bored to stay, even for a good friend’s compa
ny.

  Every day, Dorrie and Ebba checked the traps they’d set for Moe, who had yet to be glimpsed, though the traps were often emptied of food. When Ebba and Marcus were busy, and Savi had no work for her, Dorrie roller-skated through the endless halls and corridors of Petrarch’s Library.

  In the chambers farther away from the bustling Commons, Dorrie turned pages of illuminated manuscripts chained to stone walls, pulled dusty printed books off of shelves—one of which turned out to be full of bawdy limericks dictated by Catherine the Great—and heaved big clay tablets from one pile to another. Dorrie reveled in the fact that no one rained horrified objections upon her head when she unrolled papyrus scrolls that would have lived in museum cases at home.

  Millie continued to treat Dorrie and Marcus with as much unfriendliness as possible, though Izel filled Dorrie with more mistrust. One crowded evening in the den, Ebba and Dorrie sat on a sofa near the fireplace, finishing off one of Mathilde’s freshly read-out baked potatoes, when Dorrie saw Izel pause in her embroidery and gaze at Dorrie’s hand. Dorrie glanced at it herself. The thumbnail was now almost entirely black. Izel gave Dorrie one of her flickering smiles and went back to her stitching.

  Dorrie picked up Socrates: A Life from the back of the couch and went back to trying to figure out why he’d made his fellow Athenians so mad. After a few minutes, Izel spoke, addressing no one in particular. “Is it true that back in the old days, the Founders all had black fingernails or something?”

  Dorrie flushed as the apprentices glanced at Izel and at each other, some looking vaguely interested, others perplexed.

  “Fingertips,” said Sven, without looking up from the tangle of silk fishing line in his lap. “From the ink they used to write with, I guess.”

  Izel exchanged a look with Millie. “I could have sworn it was fingernails.”

  Dorrie felt a sudden urge to change the subject. Noticing that Izel wore a band of metal set with a blue-green stone just below her shoulder, just like one she’d seen on Ebba’s arm many times. Dorrie pointed to it. “What’s with the armbands?”

  “All apprentices wear them,” snapped Millie. “It’s a tradition.”

  “…You morons!” added Marcus, from where he sat at a table examining his chin for facial hair in a small mirror. “Why does it always sound like you meant to tack ‘you morons’ on to everything you say to Dorrie and me?”

  A few people tittered. Millie glared at Marcus for a brief moment and then busied herself again with repairing the buckle on her baldric.

  Dorrie tried for friendliness. “Who makes them?”

  Millie stopped fussing with the buckle and gave Dorrie a hard look. “Why would you want to know?”

  “…You moron,” Marcus tacked on helpfully.

  Millie gave him a venomous glance. “So you can run off and have one made?”

  Dorrie felt a hot blush redden her face. “No, I—”

  “Millie! That’s so rude,” broke in Ebba.

  Millie jumped up and threw her baldric down. “Well, so are they! Pushing in here and trying to jump to the front of the line! Keyhands are supposed to be chosen from the most skilled of the lybrarians.”

  “We didn’t do it on purpose,” said Dorrie.

  Millie glowered at Dorrie. “If Savi was going to take on an apprentice, it should have been me. I’ve had my name on his list for a year!”

  Dorrie blinked at Millie, glad somehow to think that Millie’s main problem with her was that Dorrie had become Savi’s very temporary, sort-of apprentice. “If it makes you feel better,” said Dorrie, hoping for harmony, “I haven’t even touched a sword yet.”

  Millie only stared at Dorrie as though willing her to explode into flames and stalked into her bedroom, slamming the door behind her.

  Millie’s hostility turned Dorrie’s mind back to the torn History of Histories page, which still lay rolled up under a sweatshirt in Dorrie’s bag. Right after their meeting with Hypatia, Dorrie had resolved to come up with a new plan to return it to its proper place in the Reference Room, but with Marcus utterly engrossed in pretending to care about plants, and Dorrie busy running errands for Savi, a week had gone by and no plan had been made, let alone executed. But then something happened that made the need to return the History of Histories page impossible to ignore.

  One morning at breakfast, the Archivist appeared, his hair only slightly less of a wild haystack than it had been the night he had flung oranges at Dorrie and Marcus. His creased, stubbly face looked pale and full of suffering, as head bent low, he served himself a bowl of porridge and took it to a small, unoccupied table in the Sharpened Quill’s corner.

  “Now he looks cracked and miserable,” said Mathilde, with some guilt.

  Sven glanced around before speaking in a low voice. “Remember when I said Callamachus had me looking for a page torn out of a book? Well, it was a page from one of the History of Histories books.”

  Saul’s eyes widened. “That’s not good.”

  Dorrie went still and carefully avoided looking at Marcus.

  Sven poured a great cascade of syrup onto his pancakes. “Yeah, and it looks like the Archivist did it. Callamachus found him sleeping in the History of Histories cabinet right before he discovered the page was missing. He’d been on his annual orange-reading binge. Now the Archivist can’t remember what he did with it. They’re both pretty upset.”

  Dorrie felt a pang of shame.

  “Callamachus says if they can’t find it soon, he’s going to have to rat out the Archivist to Francesco. He’ll probably take his key away and insist on a new younger archivist.”

  Their conversation was interrupted by the tinkling sound of lybrarians hitting pitchers and mugs and glasses lightly with silverware, which Dorrie now knew signaled the beginning of morning announcements. Those with eyeglasses and monocles on chains swung them through the air where their lenses caught and threw the light from the windows. Talking ebbed away and then ceased altogether.

  While Mistress Wu made a breathless speech against heedlessness in the Library, citing many recent cases of overturned furniture and bicycles, Dorrie took another long look at the Archivist—remembering his sad, tuneless singing—and then sought out Marcus’s eyes to say silently, “We have to return that page!”

  As Marcus nodded ever so slightly, a lybrarian in a blue velvet waistcoat stood. He wore a silk scarf around his neck and an elaborate white wig with curls on the sides of his head and the rest of the hair tied back with a blue ribbon. Pockmarks covered his swarthy, wrinkled face. “It’s not too soon to be thinking about the Midsummer Lybrarians’ Conference and Festival, which takes place in just a few short weeks. The lybrarian training department is in charge of entertainment, and I will be directing a drama in the Greek style for the occasion. I invite all to audition.” He winked boldly at a middle-aged women in a wimple and sat down.

  “Who’s that?” whispered Dorrie to Mathilde, as another lybrarian began to make an announcement about a shortage of towels in the bathrooms.

  “Master Casanova,” hissed Mathilde. “He teaches stealth and deception.”

  “He always writes a Greek tragedy for the festival,” Saul explained. “With the chorus and the weird masks, the musicians, the whole deal.”

  Kenzo checked to make sure the lybrarians weren’t listening. “Nobody wants to be in them.”

  “Why not?” said Marcus, as loud voices argued about the towels.

  “He writes them himself,” said Mathilde. “And they’re well…awful. They’re supposed to be tragedies, but you can’t watch them or act in them without developing irrepressible hysterics.”

  Just then, Millie arrived at the apprentice table, looking thoroughly put out. She was dragging Ebba along by one arm, with Izel trailing behind.

  “Ebba!” cried Dorrie softly.

  “Hi, Dorrie,” Ebba said, beaming at Kenzo. Dorrie watched
Ebba, speechless, as her friend carefully placed her plate on the empty air beside the table and let go. It landed with a crash on the bench. Mathilde had to dive to save the sausages and peas from bouncing away.

  Mistress Wu, in the middle of making an announcement about a missing glockenspiel, cleared her throat.

  “That didn’t land on the table, did it?” whispered Ebba. She felt for the edge of the bench.

  Dorrie stared at her, confused. “Ebba, what’s wrong?”

  “Temporary blindness,” said Ebba cheerfully enough as she climbed carefully over the bench, almost knocking over a water pitcher. “Ursula said it should only last a few hours or so.”

  Millie slapped her own plate down farther up the table. “She was trying to show that mangy Sardinian pika rat thing how to eat.”

  Ebba felt for her fork. “You don’t have to make it sound so ridiculous. She’s not well.”

  Millie rolled her eyes. “I don’t know why the keyhands waste their time bringing you these stupid animals, anyway. So they go extinct. This isn’t Noah’s ark.”

  With great dignity, Ebba spoke to a spot where no one was sitting. “It turns out that leafy spurge is a bit toxic to humans.”

  Mistress Wu had gone on to another topic. “The apprentice field trip to thirteenth-century Korea is today. Apprentices should assemble at the Pyongyang, 1220 CE archway at one-thirty p.m. Please don’t keep Haneul waiting. If you haven’t already checked out appropriate attire, please see Mistress Lovelace at the circulation desk.”

  Saul elbowed Marcus. “You don’t want to forget that. Try to go into a Spoke Library in clothes that didn’t come from that time, and they’ll just dissolve.”

  Dorrie and Marcus exchanged glances. Well, that explained the disappearing bathrobes.

  As the apprentices began hastily grabbing their satchels and plates and vacating the table in a noisy scrum, Dorrie caught Marcus’s eye again, grateful that with the apprentices out of the way for a few hours, it would be easier to talk up in the attics.