“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
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
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
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.
