My hat occupied a top shelf of the cabinet, still damp with sweat. That was encouraging; I hadn’t been out of my senses more than a day or two or it would be dry. I’d been in that state before, once when a bullet grazed my scalp and a few times when the horse under me decided I didn’t belong and pitched me headfirst into the American frontier. It was always like reading a book with pages torn out, and a relief to know it wasn’t missing anything beyond a couple of chapters.
The thought of old head injuries reminded me to check my scalp. My temples were throbbing, but that could have been part of the fever. I fingered the tender spot carefully, felt woven cloth, and around it bare skin. Someone had shaved a tonsure some two and a half inches square and patched it with gauze.
I couldn’t picture any of Childress’ half-animals performing that operation, or bothering to consider it. The image of poor Joseph, traitor or not, crucified in the back of a wagon was as vivid as when I’d first seen it. If the major had added physician to his long list of skilled occupations, he was a da Vinci for the nineteenth century.
I slid a hand inside my pocket and closed it around the Gatling round, purely for security. I still didn’t know what to do with it, but it was the only secret I had left.
Approaching the rectangle of light I hesitated, then groped for a handle. It was a knob, engraved bronze or brass from the feel. It would be locked, naturally. Naturally I paused again when it turned without resistance and a latch slid free with the slight friction of metal scraping metal.
Caution be damned. I’d been carried up the mountain for a purpose, and if it was important I stay in that room the door wouldn’t have been left open. I swung it wide and entered a library.
It was rigged out like the shelves in a ship, with wooden lips attached to keep the books from falling. Were earthquakes common at that altitude? The shelves were pine; tiny cones of sawdust had been left by termites, but the books themselves were in good condition, although they showed traces of use. The titles were printed on cloth and stiff paper and stamped in gold leaf into leather old and shabby and oiled and glistening: The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, Selected Poems of Robert Browning, odd numbers of the Encyclopedia Britannica, Frankenstein, a shelf of Dickens, The Anatomy of Melancholy, bound copies of The Lancet, Principles of Steam, Alice in Wonderland, Clausewitz, The Oregon Trail. I didn’t linger over the ones in German, French, Latin, and some hen-scratches that were either Hebrew or Greek, but I’d heard of Nietzche somewhere and knew Julius Caesar had had something to say about how Gaul was divided. There were many more, hundreds more, on adjoining shelves all around the room, but they were lost in gloom. It was a hodge-podge of science, history, fiction, philosophy, and poetry, arranged in no order I could apply, either by author or subject, as if they’d been flung randomly into place after consulting, like oranges squeezed dry.
It wasn’t just show. I’d visited the libraries of wealthy self-made men and seen their immaculate sets, the spines uncreased and bought by the yard to impress visitors not observant enough to note the fact they’d arrived unopened from the dealers and stayed that way. Waiting—which is what you spend most of your time doing where important people are involved—I’d taken down dozens of them to kill time, only to find most of the pages uncut. Plainly these books had been opened and shut scores of times, their spines thumb-blurred and the bindings loose. Someone had underscored whole passages of Shakespeare in iron-gall ink. The reader had marked his place in Act IV, Scene II of Richard III with a Confederate two-dollar bill. I snapped shut the hefty volume—all tragedies—and slid it back into its slot, not before a tarantula scampered out and vaulted up to the top shelf.
The hour was later than I thought; or earlier. A gap in the heavy curtains covering one of a pair of tall windows let in the tarnished light of either dawn or dusk. I walked up to it, spread the heavy green panels, and looked at a crescent of brilliant orange stuck to the edge of a shadowy mountain. I guessed we were in the middle of the range, and having no other means of sensing direction couldn’t determine whether I was looking east or west. I waited. It seemed to me the sun was moving up rather than down. When a yellow ray sprang free I knew it was the former. Dawn comes late in the mountains. That made the time nearer six o’clock than five. I was alone, but wouldn’t be for long. In the Sierra Madre, no one sleeps in.
The window was unbarred, but as the land fell straight down from the foundation for several hundred dizzying feet, no bars were necessary. It was a large room, three times as long as it was deep, like the inside of a train station, and must have taken up the entire back half of the house; if it was the house I’d seen when our caravan stopped. A rug of Indian design covered the pine floor to within a foot of the walls, with a thunderbird spreading its square wings in silver-gray on a background of red and black. The wool looked as soft as the one I’d walked on barefoot in the bedroom. Paintings in massive gilt frames leaned out on wires from the walls between bookshelves: Portraits with brass nameplates of Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, and Robert E. Lee, Virginians all; the Monitor and the Merrimack chucking smoke and fire at each other at Hampton Roads.
Across from the battle scene, a replica of the Conquistador map I’d seen in the Judge’s chambers hung uncovered by glass in a snakewood frame. No, I thought, when I stood close: It was no replica, but an original, drawn on either parchment or the skin of some unborn animal, signed in copperplate by a Spaniard whose name I couldn’t pronounce. Ancient silverfish had munched the corners round.
A ton of what were no doubt native elk antlers swung from the ten-foot ceiling on a heavy chain, tangled inextricably, cold tallow candles skewered on their points. Between the windows stood a cherrywood desk supported by carved gryphons, on it an amethyst-shaded banker’s lamp, a green baize blotter, a Bible the size of a Missouri River ferry, cigars in a bell jar, a blobby bronze inkstand, and a tired grapefruit with a bristle of horsehair pens stuck in it like arrows in Custer’s corpse. A quilted leather chair with a hickory frame mounted on a swivel stood at attention behind the desk.
The walls not hidden behind books were rush-covered, the material probably harvested from ponds and marshes, laid out to dry, tea-stained, and woven on looms. Everything in the room, except the books and a great glass globe cradled in maple, seemed to have been fashioned from local resources. It seemed familiar, yet remote, like something I’d read in a book. I was illiterate compared to the man who used that room, but when you’ve spent much of your life snowed in, you’re no stranger to reading. I just couldn’t remember which book. It hadn’t ended well for the hero.
A fire burned—in that climate—behind mica inserts in an enameled parlor stove. If it had been kindled for my benefit, the connecting door should have been open.
I smelled good tobacco. I’ve never gotten the habit, but I knew the aroma of the cigars Judge Blackthorne had brought in by boat and train from Havana, and the air here smelled even more refined.
“I grow it myself,” said a voice behind me. “Just a small patch, for my pipe; I can’t spare any more because of the amount of land the cane needs to flourish. The curing is done by one of those revenants you’ve met. It’s ideal work for creatures without wits. Their capacity for undistracted concentration is remarkable.”
I turned to look at the man who’d entered through a side door. He was bald, as I’d predicted he’d be, based on his receding hairline in an old tintype; but I’d been wrong about his going native. A man like Oscar Childress, I saw instantly, would expect nature to go his way rather than the other way around.