The Absolute Book

by Elizabeth Knox

When Taryn Cornick’s sister was killed, she was carrying a book.

Once they were finally alone, Alan took Taryn’s face between his hands and looked into her eyes. ‘You’re so sad, Taryn, and haunted, and out of step with others.’ Even Taryn could see this was true. She was always studying the world, not rapt or curious, but patient and dutiful, as if the world was something she’d paid good money to see. She was studying it now too—in the shape of Alan’s tender, troubled face. She was listening to the whisper of his smooth palm on the skin of her jaw, as he gazed at her and said, ‘Who are you, Taryn?’

Taryn knew a lot of people whom she thought of as intellectual snobs. What they were, in fact, were people incapable of relinquishing their sovereign sense that their identity was tied up with what they understood and enjoyed. And they liked to stay sure of themselves, so they never read or watched anything outside what they already approved as good or enjoyable for them. These were the people who, when Taryn told them what book Bea had been carrying, sometimes said, ‘Oh, I couldn’t finish that.’ To which she’d reply, ‘Neither could Beatrice.’

she also felt the Muleskinner was less interested in enjoying her attention than figuring out what he could do for her.

She suddenly understood that he liked to stalk people more than animals because people had the habits of people, and he supposed that if he watched the right quarry closely, he might come to know what kind of animal he was.

‘Let us think for a moment about Hulagu Khan. His sack of Baghdad’s libraries wasn’t just a gesture of hatred against Islamic culture and Syrian scholarship. He also destroyed the city’s bridges. Hulagu understood the relationship between knowledge and communication, communication and commerce, commerce and power. It is as if he took Baghdad and knocked the teeth out of its head. Not just the teeth that bite, but the teeth that facilitate eating and speech. He crippled the city. Hulagu took treasure and slaves, but he wasn’t a covetous conqueror; he didn’t want to stay and enjoy anything. He just wanted to beat the city down and make sure it stayed down.’

Lightning flashed. Taryn looked out the window and saw only building windows and the parabola of lamps along the rail line and overpass. The lightning came again, a discharge not in the sky over the city but inside her head. A blue-white flash. And with it came the voice. The eerie, merry voice. ‘Show me the box!’ it cried, and coruscated, ‘Show me the thing that didn’t burn!’

Battle said to himself, to the empty room: ‘The new Torah will issue from me. The new Torah is the aspect of the Torah which is above, which is the aspect of the Tree of Life in actuality. And this is above our Torah, which is garbed in the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.’ His tone of voice was more that of someone telling a joke than intoning a sermon.

‘I was following the one who was lying in wait for you. The one who shot me.’ Berger jumped on this. ‘Who was he? The man who shot us?’ ‘We prefer to use “one”. It’s more accurate. Also, it annoys them, because it’s the singular, and they are legion.’ ‘Who is “we”?’ Berger was in full, nervy interrogatory mode. ‘It’s not really “we” when I say it.’ ‘You’re being rather obstructive in your answers.’ The injured man laughed.

‘That I looked up,’ Jacob said. ‘It’s from Danish mythology. A Valravn is a bewitched man transformed into a hero by a sacrifice.’ ‘Traditionally of a child’s heart,’ Shift said. He was watching Taryn with keen attention. Her ears started ringing. ‘A child’s heart?’ she repeated. Then, ‘A child’s life?’ She put her hands over her face. That was what had happened. Webber had died, and what would have been her and Alan’s child never reached her womb, but grew in her fallopian tube until the tube ruptured. A tiny curled creature, its heart only a shadow. And the knight, the ‘bewitched man’, was the Muleskinner.

‘But how can anyone see my dropping off the map as criminal?’ Taryn said. ‘It’s just a mystery, Jacob.’ ‘A mystery with corpses and trespasses is a crime, Taryn.’

‘As far as I can tell, they are only passing through the Sidh on their way here. Which is very odd. Up until now they’ve been content to come here only in spirit, to do the usual things: possess people, rap on tables, cover things in slime and shame. Now suddenly they’re trespassing in their bodily forms. I’ve tried to corner one and ask it questions, like, “What the hell is Hell doing?” Bodies I can corner. I followed one to a library in Aix-en-Provence, where it was lying in wait for Taryn. Which didn’t make sense because she already had a demon passenger. And so did the librarian she was on her way to meet.’

‘People love the idea that there are things that matter which last and last, and outlast banks, businesses, and governments. Of course we wish the world was like that.’

‘People won’t talk to me,’ Shift said. ‘They meet me without trust. Without appetite. Even when they’re not wary they’re never interested, as if to consider me would somehow rob them of consequence.’

‘I want a demon to boast to me, because I’m knowledgeable but ineffectual. I need the sidhe to feel bold enough to let on what their plans are for me.’ ‘So you’ve made sure you still have the iron sickness?’ Shift nodded. ‘That’s stupid,’ Jacob said. ‘I wasn’t aware that not disappointing you was an option, so I’m afraid I haven’t taken any steps to avoid it.’ Jacob got off the bed. ‘Just don’t fail Taryn.’ Shift smiled. ‘I suppose that’s one way of talking to me.’

When I was little my mother had to coax me back out of the marsh—its water and air—with her love, and with berries dipped in honey, and with stories. I wanted her touch, her smell, her voice, her view of things more than I wanted to live in scales or fur or feathers. I had her long enough and loved her well enough to learn to be human and remain human.’

What’s so good, Taryn thought, about a world touched so lightly by people? She had always enjoyed cities, Paris and Berlin, Vancouver and Hong Kong. She loved living in London, though lately she’d felt disturbed by the ghostliness of Marble Arch and its surrounds at night, no lights on in the apartments, all of them owned but few of them occupied, while in the daytime the homeless—many of them refugees—washed their clothes in the fountains and slept beside them on the grass as they dried. And, even for her, enough money seemed to mean more money all the time. There was always something new to pay for the privilege of existence and participation in her city. If her father hadn’t paid for the hospital, she’d be very careful with money now. It was two months until her next royalty cheque.

In the months before Carol’s wedding, Carol and Taryn had talked about their futures at length over good bistro lunches in restaurants near Carol’s place of work. They’d sat at a window table to take stock of their lives. Taryn could still see her friend, champagne flute held high while, on the other side of the glass, cavalcades of lunchtime shoppers went by with their boutique bags. ‘I’ve found someone I love and trust enough to marry,’ Carol said. ‘Your book is a success. Look at us, finally on our way.’ Now, bedded down under the black and blazing skies of the Sidh, Taryn thought, Why is happiness so self-congratulatory? Because surely that had been happiness.

‘What is Hell’s price for one sidhe life?’ ‘Five human souls each hundred years.’

‘Can you give me numbers?’ Taryn asked, as if she were a reporter at a press conference trying to wring facts out of the spokesperson on the podium. It was her way of managing her horror. ‘The sidhe number in only thousands. A little over twenty thousand, I think. But that still means a hundred thousand humans souls paid out at each Tithe.’

‘That’s why Neve was so helpful about his wishes for me and the other women. It wasn’t because she was thinking of the Tithe. It had just been and gone and the sidhe like to enjoy the lightness of some long decades before it looms again. No, it was because Neve is always tender to Shift when he comes back. His mother was her sister. Neve treats him harshly sometimes, but these cold-hearted people do love their kin.’

Ten minutes later a loose-bellied beige cat came and plopped itself down on Taryn’s doorstep in the sunlight and stayed there, blinking and purring, as if Taryn had caught and reeled it in on a thread of love she didn’t even know was dangling from her tightly knitted adult soul. As if it had followed its nose to find the girl who had always rushed off to see her grandmother’s cats as soon as her father’s car rolled up at the door of Princes Gate.

After a time the old man left the rail and made himself comfortable on the cushions. Taryn joined him and poured the tea—nettle for him, ginger and honey for her—and he began to tell the story she was tasked to learn. She wished she could take notes. Taryn had the habits of a good researcher. She always did her reading, thought through what she’d read, then went back to read again, and only then took notes. Her initial reading was always for the shape of the story. Notes were for the facts: places, dates, persons. In this case the Welsh border, somewhere near the Monnow, in the fourth century CE. Personages: a captain of the king’s guards, a witch, an archer, a monk, a number of soldiers, an unhappy king, and a boy called Shift—who couldn’t stomach red meat or grain and who, much to Taryn’s surprise, was dead and in his grave at the beginning of the story.

On the second leg of her journey, Taryn sat in the dimmed airliner cabin, scrolling back and forth through the scant notes she’d taken on the tale she’d been so ceremoniously given the keeping of—the story of a woman who seemed only able to ask of her life which king it would be best to serve.

Perhaps, in a world too full of people, she was the one too many.

The orphan child of a virgin, required by a tormented king as a sacrifice to stabilise the foundations of a tower.

The witch changed herself into a horse to get to the river in time to use its water to make a shield for herself and Kernow’s men. Kernow had been puzzled that the horse the witch had changed into was a colt, not a filly or mare. So that meant Adhan was the one under the iris-covered grave mound. Her son had dressed in her clothes and used her name. He had presented himself as dead. The boy. The little god of the marshlands.

Taryn thought of the photograph doing the rounds on Facebook, of a starving polar bear balanced on a pillar of melting sea ice, like a statue on a plinth, a memorial to itself. She thought of Shift, who might know the names of the gods of all the rivers, or at least all those in the south of England and Wales. Then she thought of a scene in Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, a film she loved, where a river deity arrives at the heroine’s bathhouse. Shuffling and reeking, it floods the tub and scrubbed timber rooms with oily mud, broken bicycles, and supermarket trolleys. All the rotten flotsam that coats the shores of rivers everywhere. Did rivers still have gods, hidden deep in their silt, like frogs hibernating in a dried lakebed?

Taryn had been ten the summer that Battle made Beatrice miserable with his naked admiration. Battle started out as a blight on their holiday; then he became extravagantly crazy. He hurt Beatrice and himself, then vanished from their lives. Battle’s breakdown was never discussed or explained. But as far as the child Taryn could see, male desire was dangerous—as it sometimes was in cop shows. Nine years later, Webber followed Bea, ran her down, and bundled her into the car boot in which she died. After that Taryn had difficulty seeing any male interest that was directed her way as appealing. Carol’s husband’s admiration of Carol was sweet, and other men with crushes on her friends were inoffensive. But no one was to look at her that way. Or lay a hand on her, or try to squire her. Those she’d bewitched, like Alan or the Muleskinner, she had to turn herself off to do so. Turn off the dread and suspicion, fury and hatred, and with those emotions herself, and her own desire.

Taryn told her audience about Hulagu Khan—and talked about the predations of one faith against another, and books as a casualty of that. She talked about the deliberate or collateral destruction of libraries in preindustrial conflicts, dwelling on what happened to the library on Iona after the failure of William Wallace’s rebellion. She spoke of the two noble libraries bought for forty shillings during the reign of Henry VIII and used as toilet paper—and duly inventoried as a supply that lasted ten years. She told of the libraries of Buda and Pest burned by Suleiman the Magnificent. As an example of collateral destruction she mentioned the library destroyed by Thomas Fairfax’s army during the English Civil War. (And flushed, remembering how the Firestarter had passed through that calamity unscathed.) She acknowledged the ruin of the libraries of Strasbourg, Louvain, the Molsheim Charterhouse in Paris. ‘And many more,’ she said. ‘And many more.’

She gave bare numbers for the casualties of aerial bombing in World War Two—books, with a correlation to buildings and human lives. Beauvais, forty-two thousand books; Tours, two hundred thousand; Douai, one hundred and ten thousand; Chartres, twenty-three thousand books and two thousand manuscripts—some of those, only carbonised by heat, had been preserved and, thanks to modern methods, would one day be transcribed again. Italy, two million books, thirty-nine thousand manuscripts. Great Britain during the Blitz, twenty million books. Germany, ten million in public collections, and the rest, twenty-seven cities’ worth of books.

Lastly, so that the subject could be managed, Taryn’s chair asked her to speak about Nazi book burnings. ‘First there was a list of books containing “inaccurate information”—or, if you will, “fake news”.’ Laughter.

‘These were banned,’ she said. ‘If a book is deemed a bad character and sent packing, it cannot, like a homeless person, go walking the roads looking for succour or pity. You don’t have to feed books, but, whereas a hungry person can survive a night out in wet weather, a book will not. An unhoused book is doomed.’

Why do we sometimes decide that the things our ancestors have made, and kept, and cared for are suddenly too many mouths to feed, or of bad character and a menace to society? Why, for instance, is it unremarkable that we have warehouses full of garden furniture and running shoes and bails of bubble wrap, while public libraries are “rationalising their collections” to make space? Why does that happen? Well, one thing I think is that it’s related to the defunding of the humanities in our universities, a refusal of one of the great conditions of history: that today cannot know what tomorrow will need. It’s always better to keep books. In the same way that it’s better not to pollute waterways and cover arable land with asphalt.’

A book for the general reader on an esoteric subject has to argue for its own interestingness by being interesting. And never argue for its own importance, which a work of scholarship may do. I consider the balancing act of “being accessible” a discipline rather than a limitation. What I hope is that I’m inviting people to think about libraries and what they mean to us. To think about what’s kept, what’s lost, what’s destroyed. My book has to be welcoming, like a public library, rather than an archival collection.’

‘An idea strong in our culture is that information should be available and transparent. So is the opposite idea—that the Secret Services, or whoever, are concealing vital things from us, yet at the same time poking their noses into all our business. But if you mean whether the availability of precious materials online will make us forget the back room, the vault—yes, I think it will. There is a school of thought that claims that, because of the internet, we are awash in uncurated information, and that has made us lose our appetite and judgement. I’m not sure that’s true. But I do think we forget what’s not there. Which is a tautology. I mean, we forget what isn’t on the internet. We even neglect the idea of what’s not there. Or we acknowledge what’s been destroyed, while not trying quite as hard as we might to find what’s lost or misfiled.’

‘Ah,’ she said. ‘I made myself visible, did I? My new self. My mature, erudite, intellectual self. Was that the provocation?’

Odin asked for wisdom,” said the second raven. “A god who wanted to be wise more than he wanted his full presence in the world of men, or in his heaven of heroes. It was eating Odin’s eye, which changed that loneliest of birds into two birds, sisters; one raven to see and understand, and one to remember the fullness of the world lost to perfect vision, and that world’s value, which is the value of that which was once enough.”

‘Men think the quality of being a hero belongs to them, like something they’ve purchased. When, in fact, any heroic action belongs to its moment, the short moment or the long. You’re a man of modern times. A man who knows the price of things, material and immaterial, so you believe you have a purchase on your moment. But no one has a purchase on their moment. That is a fact for which we can be thankful. Unlucky are those whose moment pursues them, as Taryn Cornick’s moment pursued her.

‘Jacob Berger, son of Carl Berger, car detailer of Sandwell, you have come a long way in life, and this is the furthest you’ve come. You turned your back on the heaven of heroes but have found your way to the stair to Mimir’s Well. I was meaning to tell you about it, but it seems instead we’ve taken each other there. What better place than this to tell you this story? The story I’ve kept for Shift.’ She began. ‘When Shift found his way up these stairs to Mimir’s Well, the Norn Mimir wasn’t there. But Odin was. And we were.

‘What I gathered was this. That his grandmother was a Gatemaker of the sidhe. I had believed them all gone. The boy could be a bird, a badger, a fox—and probably a dragon if he’d detained them long enough to learn one, and had the ability to encompass that knowledge. The boy was an instinctual shapeshifter, which meant he only wore the boy shape because his kin were sidhe and human and he’d loved their faces and held their hands. Sustained contact was the only way he might have learned to be a dragon. Dragons don’t belong in any of the worlds, Earth or the Sidh, the hells, the heavens, the uncertain others. They are made from stuff no other living thing is made of—microbes to redwoods, amoeba to whales. Nothing is like a dragon. There are only a handful of them; they come from who knows where and, having come, keep themselves to themselves. They are never met with, which is just as well, since even a god might only match but not master one. But this child had hung in the water beside dragons and caressed them.

He tried to say that no one had a fate, not the man in the street, the world leader, the CEO of the tech company trying to solve the problem of a cost-efficient solar battery; not the young man wearing a bomb vest who believes that someone on Earth might know what God wants. There was no fate. There was what people tell others and those others believe. There was conspiracy and propaganda and inspiration, not fate. Fate was only someone else’s idea of how the world worked, a story people inherit, a lie they’re told. If he’d learned anything, Jacob thought, he’d learned that. That there was no thing that should be, that must be, even the world.

‘The Firestarter is Shift’s mother’s work,’ Taryn said.

‘Do you remember what my demon was shouting before you turned into a dragon and carried us off?’ Shift tilted his head. A gesture of birdlike attention. ‘“Hell is the homeland,”’ she quoted, and watched him think. She saw the spark catch, and his eyes go the green of a mythical first springtime. ‘It’s not Hell that wants the Firestarter,’ she said. ‘It’s the demons.’ ‘But why?’ ‘You said they have masters. Fallen angels, I presume. I imagine you and I are on the same page about how Hell is organised. According to the stories.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘The fallen angels arrived in Hell when they were thrown out of Heaven?’ ‘That’s right.’ ‘They took over.’ ‘A small number of angels is stronger than a great number of demons. They’re like the men with the guns. Except no one can take their guns.’ ‘Okay,’ Taryn said. ‘Then “Hell is the homeland” is the rallying cry of an independence movement.’

Most of the good in the world is remedial. It’s fixing things and caring for people. Taking care.’

‘The Torah is the word of God. A Torah above the Torah would be the language of God.’

Everyone at her fire ate and drank and got a little inebriated. They sang for a bit, and then tried to get Taryn to tell them, in her poor French, how the world fared. Was it possible yet to be poor and live decently? Were young men still sent to die in wars made by old men? Were the meek still waiting to inherit the Earth, as Scripture promised, though generations of them were already under the ground, and a grave wasn’t an inheritance? Not really, Taryn said of the first. Yes, of course, of the second. And of the third, no. It’s not like that. They made us believe we’re weaklings if we can’t do everything for ourselves by ourselves. We all say, ‘So, I’ve failed,’ when mostly we’ve been failed. They made us afraid of one another, but of themselves they say, ‘There is no “they.”’

The people around the fire all looked at her sadly and nodded sagely. She stared at their human faces, painted by the firelight, and thought how those they loved and served would eventually sell them into perpetual misery. She wanted to tell them to run away. What were they going to say of themselves when their souls were marched through Hell’s Gate and their bodies were buried no doubt with flowers and music and fine ceremony? Were they going to say, ‘So, I’ve failed. Such and such a lady or gentleman no longer loves me, and has laid me by’? Taryn understood that her existence was only of use or not of use to her society. She was a consumer contributing to economic growth, which was an unquestioned good. To exist, she must spend her life spending. But these people were going to be sold to buy more time for time-rich, heartless people. They were going to be literally damned by association, never mind the original state of their souls. Heaven would not intervene as it did in Yeats’s Countess Cathleen, because, for a start, none of these people was a countess. They were the numberless others of history, counted only by the Tithe. They were marks in a ledger. Taryn wanted to say, ‘I’m a consumer and a client, and you’re property. We have value, but it has nothing to do with who we are.’ But she didn’t say that. Because what good would it do when a true understanding of what was in store for them couldn’t save them from any of it?

No idea was beyond him. Except for the idea beyond any ten-year-old—that his mother will leave him, and he’ll be alone. He was a boy who would always be able to feed himself, but he was already the loneliest being his mother had ever known.

Taryn said, ‘I don’t know you from a hole in the ground. So while I’m grateful for the hospitality of your . . . hole in the ground, I have no reason to explain to you Shift’s and my history, or my reservations about his plans. Or anything.’