The City of Dreaming Books (42 page)

I
subsequently showed the manuscript to several other Booklings with very similar results. They were all fascinated by it, but none of them had any idea who the author could be. Many wanted to learn the text by heart because - being less overtaxed by their authors than Al, for instance - they were interested in absorbing other literature as well.

I began to like the Booklings in the same way as I liked my own kind in Lindworm Castle. I may even have liked them a little better because of the touching way in which they made me the focus of their existence. They sought my company because they regarded me as a genuine author, or even as someone far more interesting: an author in the making. Being acquainted with plenty of accomplished writers, they saw in me an opportunity to help to mould an artist’s character and exert a personal influence on his development. I had suddenly acquired hundreds of little one-eyed authorial godfathers, all unselfishly devoted to my welfare. Like my former teacher, Dancelot One, they tirelessly offered me advice about my future work - advice as varied as the Booklings themselves:

Even though I hadn’t really become a Bookling, I’d at least become an apprentice Bookling. I was subjected to an incessant barrage of well-meant advice and technical tips. Although I tried to make a note of them all, I retained only the most obvious. It often happened that two pieces of advice were mutually contradictory, and I frequently became the centre of an altercation between two or more Booklings who exchanged volleys of quotations like arrows.

I had become the gnomes’ new
raison d’être
, a living, breathing vindication of all their activities, especially their cult of learning texts by heart. I was their chance to unload all that was pent up inside them. In me, so they believed, their texts would finally fall on fertile soil, destined one day to yield a bumper crop in the shape of novels, poems and anything else I committed to paper. I imbued the Booklings’ anonymous existence with a meaning for which they may always have yearned.

A typical day in the Booklings’ domain went roughly like this. In the morning, when I emerged, yawning, from my sleeping quarters, a Bookling would promptly latch on to me and put my brain into gear with a few inspiring lines of verse: ‘
Grey dawn, dost thou portend my final breath? The trombophones will soon announce my death
. . .’

At breakfast, which I now prepared myself, several of the little Cyclopses would keep me company, reading in turn from their letters: ‘
My dear Gofid Letterkerl, many thanks for the dedicated copy of
Zanilla and the Murch.
How daring of you to make a Murch the protagonist of a tragic novel! I was greatly moved, especially by the passage where your lovesick hero murches for days on end before throwing himself into Demon’s Gulch. Your bold initiative will probably launch a whole genre of Zamonian literature teeming with Murches - in fact, I myself am already toying with the idea of writing a Murch novel. With renewed thanks and best regards, Ertrob Limus.
’

After breakfast I usually went off to the Leather Grotto, where I liked to clamber around on the book machine, pick out a book or two and browse for a bit. I was usually joined by Al, who spent a lot of time in the machine’s vicinity because he had made it his job to fathom its secrets. He believed he had detected certain patterns in its movements and was now tinkering with an extremely complicated mathematical table designed to elucidate every last mystery in the catacombs.

As soon as I left the Leather Grotto I would again be pounced on by several Booklings who accompanied me on my walks through the tunnels and showered me with erudite essays or aphorisms. These they declaimed with a self-important air as they strutted along beside, behind or ahead of me. We must have been a strange sight, rather like a family of ducks that communicated, not by quacking at each other, but by loudly reciting maxims and bons mots:

I also enjoyed watching the Booklings at work in their book hospital. This taught me a bit about the manufacture and restoration of books, as well as printing and the chemical processing of a wide range of papers. Most of the books fortunate enough to be admitted to the hospital emerged from it looking as good as new. The one-eyed gnomes knew all the tricks of the trade when it came to repairing damaged paper or leather, and even when stumped they reprinted and rebound their patients more handsomely and sumptuously than before.

My afternoons were devoted to fiction. Hornac de Bloaze, Asdrel Chickens and other Booklings with a rich repertoire of narrative prose recited their novels to me. A single step would transport me from Zamonian Baroque to modern times. If I heaved a sigh, a dozen worried Booklings would tug at my cloak and enquire how I was. I had never before been treated with such solicitude.

In the evenings we met in the Leather Grotto to exchange ideas. Seated round the fireplaces there, the Booklings chatted and laughed, recited and argued about literature. This was where they relaxed after their daily exertions. They showed me rare books, maps of the catacombs and finds from the Chamber of Marvels, told me all about forgotten authors I’d never heard of and recounted horrific anecdotes about the Bookhunters in the same way as the Bookhunters recounted horrific anecdotes about them.

Usually exhausted by the end of the day, I would flop down on my couch and fall asleep at once. And dream. Of books, naturally.

‘
D
id I actually eat a book?’ I asked Al one day when we were once more standing on the book machine together, watching the shelves glide past. ‘Under hypnosis that time, I mean?’

‘You turned up your nose at the cover,’ Al replied with a grin. ‘But real bookworms do that too. You had the right idea, biologically speaking.’

This finally solved a question that had been preying on my mind for quite a while. Another one occurred to me: ‘Where do Booklings come from?’

Al hesitated. ‘We don’t exactly know. We surmise that we develop inside books like chickens in eggs - in very old, brittle volumes of indecipherable runes slumbering deep down in the catacombs. Sooner or later a book of that kind cracks open like an egg and a Bookling as small as a salamander hatches out. Then it finds its way to the Leather Grotto. By instinct, probably.’

‘Is that really so?’

‘A few new Booklings turn up in the Leather Grotto every year. Either that, or we discover them somewhere nearby. They’re still tiny, little bigger than a thumb, unable to speak and without a memory. Then we give them some books to eat - we read automatically, you know, it’s probably innate - and they learn to talk in no time. That’s why the Bookling community continues to grow. Very slowly, but grow it does. Hey, watch: that shelf is just about to slide back and disappear into the machine, like to bet?’

A moment later the rusty machine’s entrails emitted a series of loud clicks and the shelf behaved precisely as Al had predicted. He grinned contentedly and made a mysterious mark on his mathematical table.

‘But you could have come from somewhere else, couldn’t you?’ I said. ‘You don’t know for sure.’

‘True, we may also have sprung from the stinking rubbish in Unholm or the laboratories of evil and demented Bookemists, but hatching out of old books is the story we like best.’

By now I had learnt not to dispute the pseudo-scientific theories with which Al explained all manner of things, nor did I cast doubt on his outmoded belief in the Orm, it only involved me in endless arguments. Besides, I myself found the idea that Booklings hatched out of books very appealing, so I left it at that.

I had stopped keeping a tally of the days I’d spent among the Booklings. Mathematics had never been my strong point and there weren’t any days down there, let alone clocks. I don’t think I’m boasting, dear readers, when I say that I’d learnt quite a lot in the interim. The very fact that I listened to the Booklings with unflagging attention had greatly expanded my vocabulary, and I was now acquainted with vast numbers of novels and short stories, poems and stage plays, essays and letters. I could spout aphorisms until everyone round me dozed off, and my familiarity with descriptions of landscapes was so extensive that I could have equipped a whole continent with them. Characters, plots, cliffhangers, twists in the tail, gradual build-ups, dramatic climaxes - the Booklings had imparted more literary material and techniques than I could have acquired by reading for a lifetime. They were all stored away in my brain like the props of a well-equipped theatre. I now knew how good dialogue should sound, how to lend the opening pages of a book a momentum that would instantly carry the reader along, and how a novel of epic dimensions could systematically send its thousand characters to their inexorable doom. I had heard so many poems that I sometimes unwittingly spoke in rhyme and my vocabulary was at least as extensive as Aleisha Wimpersleake’s.

The Booklings were no literary snobs, fortunately. Far from confining themselves to the classics, they also memorised a lot of so-called light fiction. One of them knew the entire
Prince Sangfroid
series by heart, another had learnt all my favourite
Count Elfensenf
novels and could recite them to order. I was now familiar with every cheap literary device, every banal cliché, every escapist flight of fancy that ought, in my opinion, to form part of every author’s repertoire. The Booklings had provided me with all I needed to become a decent writer. The only trouble was, I still hadn’t committed a single sentence to paper.

I may have conveyed the impression that life with the Booklings was a bed of roses, but alas, it wasn’t quite as idyllic as that. Fond though I was of the little Cyclopses, many of them were more than capable of getting on my nerves. It was a regrettable fact that I didn’t share the literary tastes of each and every one, and that some of the Booklings had devoted themselves to authors I found positively insufferable. I tried to avoid those individuals whenever possible. The more tactful among them accepted this and troubled me no further, but there were a few insensitive specimens who mercilessly strove to foist their stuff on me and those cussed little fellows sometimes made my life a misery.

Foremost among them was Dolerich Hirnfiedler, who had never got over the fact that I’d unmasked him on the strength of a single exclamation (‘O!’). He had been taunted by his fellow Booklings ever since, and a number of ‘O!’ jokes were circulating in the Leather Grotto. To pay me back he dogged my footsteps with a persistence comparable only to that which Rongkong Koma had displayed when hunting Colophonius Regenschein. One day I rounded a bend in a tunnel, all unsuspecting, to find Dolerich barring my path. His single eye blazed as he addressed me in a hoarse bellow: