To question the Book was very simple. You just took it out of the box and laid it on the table, and held the question in your mind as you opened it. There was no ritual or ceremony, but it was important to be respectful, both to the question and to the Book, and to have a clear and open mind. Some questions were more significant than others, and with those ones – we always knew if they were big questions – we would prepare ourselves with meditation and fasting. But questions of that kind were rare.
You knew the answer at once when you saw it. Sometimes it was on the first page you opened, but sometimes you had to leaf through page after page before you found it. It’s hard to describe how you knew: it was as if the words shone out of the page, although they never actually looked any different from the words around them. And when you found the answer, there was no guarantee that anyone would understand it, at least at first. Most often the answer became clear in time, but sometimes it didn’t. Sometimes, my grandmother used to say, people just ask the wrong question.
Whenever I opened the Book, whether for a question or just to read it, I felt a faint tingle in the tips of my fingers. And no matter how many times I did it, I felt a flutter of excitement in my stomach. The Book always had the same black and red lettering and the same thick, fragrant paper, but the words were always different. I don’t know how often I read it through from cover and cover and then returned to the beginning, to start again with an entirely different Book.
Inside the Book, as my grandmother often told me, was written everything that had been, everything that was and everything that was to come. And all these things changed all the time.
When I looked into the Book for my own interest and pleasure, it usually told me stories. I found in the Book some of the stories that Grandmother told us, and I knew that she had discovered them here too. When my duties were done, I would spend hours in the room with the Book, devouring its endless treasury. Some stories were funny, some were tragic, some were frightening and some I didn’t understand at all; but I thought all of them were beautiful.
The Book didn’t only contain stories. My mother most often found poems. Grandmother usually got recipes (some very good ones, she said). There could be instructions on how to build a cupboard or how to gut a fish, or a table of the phases of the moon, or the names of the major constellations in five different languages, or there could be lists of the properties of precious stones or herbs or sacred trees, or a description of the habits of animals I had never heard of, or a history of a realm that had fallen a thousand years ago in a land thousands of miles away, or a lexicon of a forgotten language.
Sometimes, although not very often, there were pictures – intricate drawings like the one I saw the first time I looked at the Book with my mother. Grandmother told me that once she had opened the Book to find that every page was blank, but that had never happened to me. I often wondered what question the Book refused to answer, but of course, she couldn’t say.
The day after Kular told us about the cotton fields, I asked the Book a serious question. I was afraid in a way I hadn’t been before. There had always been things to fear – accident, famine, drought, disease – but they were part of the texture of life as I knew it. The things Kular spoke of came from a world I didn’t understand. I remembered my grandmother’s face after she had asked the Book her own questions. I didn’t dare ask her what she had read there. Since my mother had died, Grandmother seemed shrunken. She was still kindly most of the time, and she did her duties as the head woman of the house, but for the first time I understood that she was old.
I fasted all day and then, in the middle of the afternoon when the house was quiet, I washed myself and oiled my hair and braided it, and I went into the room and took the Book out of its box and placed it with special care on the table. I stared at it for a long time before I opened it. I took a deep breath and asked my question: What did the Tarnish cotton fields bode for us? And then I opened the Book.
The answer was only one word. It was all alone on the page, in red letters that seemed to blaze out of the paper.
Change.