The Librarian dozed in the warm afternoon sunshine, slumped on the steps in front of the library main door. Trapped between hands and lap, limp in the stillness, lay the looseleaf pages from Baron Malcolm’s account of the battle at Coolden. The weapons harness supported his back comfortably against the warm steps, and his head rested against the Darksword’s handle over his right shoulder, populating his faint dreams with steel and blood and fire and honest fury.
Behind him the cool emptiness of the library’s open front hall, before him the relative quiet of the The Small Square. A handful of young locals sprawled around the fountain talking animatedly and earnestly, a large cheerfully noisy party sat in the cafe chairs on the far side, the shop owners stood or leaned under their awnings exchanging occasional soft words, and behind it all the muted rumble of the much noisier Market Square on the other side of the Trading House.
A faint hailstorm of many brisk shod hooves occasionally emerged through the rise and fall of that background rumble, gradually becoming clearer until they penetrated the Librarian’s dreams. He peered through one reluctant heavy-lidded eye at the unchanged square, the sunshine still too bright, the students at the fountain still too brightly dressed, and glanced away down at the top page. He sighed, sat up, the weapons harness unsticking from the top of his sweaty back, and hunched over the treatise. He turned it over – it had been written by the Baron in his sweat-soaked deathbed, before giving in to the mortal stomach wound he’d taken on that famous last desperate suicidal charge. There’d been no fresh paper, and he’d used spaces around his favourite travelling book, ‘The Etrusian Elephant’, a rather abstract philosophical work on self-awareness:
If the nature of thought is spiritual, and we consider our senses of touch and sight and taste and sound to be external to our thoughts, and suppliers to them, then we cannot know that what we perceive is real. We know these senses can be subverted and changed by strong drugs, by exhaustion, by great passions as lust. At any one time, we have only our imperfect memories to compare our experience with previous feelings, and our memories too may be tampered with. It may even be that some demon has fully subverted both feelings and memory, in the manner of the Argian Djinn, placing us in a perceived world that does not -
The sharp uneven rattle of horseshoes on cobbles suddenly emerged clear from the background and the Librarian looked up to see half a dozen blue-uniformed and silver-polished cavalry canter into the square. He rubbed his cheek where the sword pommel had imprinted itself on his skin, reluctantly glad of the chance to procrastinate. The cavalry noisily approached the steps. Closer it was plain they were tired and worn, the uniforms carrying old stains, but without the dust and patina of travel on the dry surrounding roads; they must have cleaned up. All were bare headed, light haired and fair skinned, and all young and lean and muscular, bar the leading grey-bearded and stocky rider. They were looking at him, at the library.
The Librarian stood up and a knee popped as he flexed his stiff limbs.
Customers.
