A man is judged by the books he keeps. What has he learned from the people who went before him? A man who has many books is a good scholar. A man who has a library is surely enriched with wisdom. What can be said of a man with no books? He is nothing. He is a fool.
-Sayings of Mazukai, Scroll 2
Sang Lamdak, Xheng Yu Xi
Cadas poked at his supper with a grimace. The Lars family made a colossal pot of sour fish stew with fresh vegetables, herbs, and a tart maroon fruit whose name he forgot. His family raved about these Xhengyon dishes more and more as they assimilated into the local culture. Not Cadas. He thought it smelled—it was nothing like what he was used to eating back in Myrenthos, or even in Qarda.
He was rarely hungry anymore anyway.
“Cadas, what’s wrong?” asked his sister Thyse. They all held their steaming bowls in their hands, dipping Myrenthian-style flatbreads into the stew.
Cadas let his stew grow cold on the squat wooden floor table between them. He didn’t answer his sister. He stared at the crack in the fifth brick to the right of the corner of the cellar and shook his leg in silence.
“Cadas,” said his mother. “You know it’s rude not to answer your sister. Why are you in such a foul mood again?” Still he didn’t answer. His mother set down her soup and picked up his, lifting the broth-sodden flatbread to his lips. “Eat, Cadas. We all worked hard on this meal.”
“No,” he sighed. It took all his spare mental effort to squeeze out a reply to his mother. He knew that if he didn’t, she would keep pestering him until he reached his boiling point. For some reason, the people around him were afraid of silence, of being alone with their own thoughts—for him, it was all he ever wanted.
“No?” She scoffed. “How very rude. What’s gotten into you?” He stayed silent. “Cadas, I am talking to you! Speak when spoken to—how many times do I have to tell you that? What’s got you so upset?”
He gritted his teeth. So often, his family members scolded him for not understanding other people’s emotions. Wasn’t the cause of his emotion obvious to them? It was his mother’s fault, after all. “The Compendium,” he mumbled.
“Ah-ah!” his mother blurted out, holding up a finger. “That’s enough of that. We won’t speak of that anymore tonight, understand? Eat.” Now she lifted the bowl closer to his nose so he could smell the putrid sea and the pungent fruit. She pressed the flatbread against his lips, just like she used to do when force-feeding him as a small child.
He had no patience for her today. He slapped the bread out of her hand. Outraged, she lifted the bowl to his lips, and he smacked that out of her hand, too, so that the stew splattered across the wall next to him and the bowl clattered to the cellar floor upside down.
“Cadas Lars!” his mother shrieked. “Fine. You want to act so uncivilized? Ungrateful?” She grabbed him by the ear and dragged him toward the cellar closet. “This is where we go when we can’t act civilized!” She shoved him into the cramped closet and he let her.
“You’re the one who burned my book,” he shot back at her, proud of his clever tongue in the moment. “Eloheed.”
One instant he felt a surge of confidence for his witty comeback. The next, he saw stars, the cellar outside the closet listing slightly to the right. His cheek stung. His ears were ringing. He tasted blood—must have bit down on his tongue.
“Mother!” Ikraos chided her gently. “You shouldn’t...” But that was all his brother said of the matter.
By the time his vision cleared, the closet was closed and locked from the outside. This was his fifth such punishment since his mother burned his life’s work in the middle of the night, and each time it happened to him, it bothered him less. He ceased to feel much of anything these days—good or bad.
Life had no purpose without the Compendium. To make matters worse, not only was he forbidden from writing, but his mother had confiscated all the books he owned and sold them off or gave them away. He had no access to the written word anymore outside of Xhengyon recipes or labels written on wooden crates of ingredients.
Now he was beginning to understand why Myrenthos wept when the Eloheed conquered the land. All those lopsided mounds of books put to the torch. Everyone given copies of the Testament of Kahlo Hadrizeen to read instead, when they must have found their old books much more familiar, much more gratifying to read.
The Lars family had witnessed it all firsthand. Why, then, did no one understand how he was feeling? The book he’d spent years writing, the one that he’d started all the way back at home in Myrenthos, their real home—it was gone forever. A part of him had burned away in that same bowl, a part he’d never get back ever again.
His future burned with it.
***
“Good work, Cadas,” said his mother. He couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic or not. He studied her face, seeing that she was smiling—smiling with her eyes, too, a subtle detail he’d learned to pick up on that meant the smile was genuine. “You’ve been doing much better lately. Well done, finishing all your chores.”
He shrugged when she ruffled his hair. “Okay,” was all he said.
Days had passed since his last imprisonment in the closet, long enough to smooth over the tension in his family, but recent enough that the sting of his mother’s hand across his face was still fresh in his mind. She was placated as long as he did what he was told.
He didn’t care so much when she deprived him of food and water; that was doubly true when his only food was something he didn’t like to eat. He didn’t even care a great deal when she hit him, although he would have preferred she didn’t. What bothered him was the smallness of the closet—specifically, how sore and stiff he felt after spending a night there in the cold dark.
That was his only motivation to behave anymore.
He had nothing good to look forward to, with all his books gone. His mother never rewarded him with anything other than the occasional sweet Myrenthian pastry like the kind he used to eat in his childhood. But when he did as she and the others said, it simplified his life.
And if this didn’t get him back in his mother’s good graces, at least it was a start.
That was the only hope Cadas had left. If he went enough days without misbehaving or making his mother yell, then maybe she could be persuaded to let him have a book again. He would start with just one. He would let her set rules and boundaries around its use so that she wouldn’t be suspicious of it spoiling his behavior again.
In time, maybe she’d let him have two or three. And with enough time after that, maybe she’d let him buy more parchment and ink. Start to write again. He could one day rebuild the Compendium from scratch if he started soon enough. Until then, he was miserable and at the mercy of his circumstances.
But all those developments were far off on the horizon, if they ever even came at all. Maybe his books had become like dead bodies now. Maybe his curiosity to open them and learn their secrets was so strong that he could not be trusted with them anymore. If he had no hope to rewrite the Compendium, then what did he have?
Nothing.
He hated Xheng Yu Xi. He hated the world beyond Myrenthos. He hated knowing that he would probably never return to his homeland. He hated Sang Lamdak and the smelly restaurant and the cold cellar mostly devoid of bugs that they called home.
He wasn’t sure if he hated his family. Sometimes he felt like he’d grown to hate his mother. What he felt for them was more akin to indifference, if he understood the distinction between the two emotions. He didn’t want bad things to happen to them. But his family was a different breed—they thought differently, talked differently. Their priorities were completely different. He had nothing in common with them but a hair color and a family name.
He didn’t hate them. He simply didn’t care if he ever saw them again. Not after the way they treated him.
Maybe they’d be happier with him gone, too.
He sat with his siblings in the cellar, washing and scrubbing potatoes and loading them into a separate crate. It was one of the rare times his family didn’t insist on filling the air with their babbling. It was actually peaceful, sitting with them this way in total silence, no sound but water sloshing gently and the hard bristles brushing the lumpy potatoes.
“Lars family!” the matron of the restaurant called from upstairs. “Meeting!”
And then it was over.
Cadas, his brother Ikraos, his sister Thyse, his mother, and his two cousins gathered in the kitchen with Hiricho and his parents. The morning was cool, the early sun spilling in narrow shafts between the buildings of Sang Lamdak. Cadas moved his body without thinking. His body was in the kitchen, but his mind wasn’t entirely there.
“Truthfully, I never thought this day would come,” said Hiricho’s mother. She stood with her arms folded, but a smile crept up the corners of her lips. “The Lars family has made great strides recently. With their progress, they’ve more than surpassed the work that Hiricho does for the restaurant.”
“Does that mean I get to go?” Hiricho asked. His eyes and his smile were wide with excitement.
“I don’t like it,” said his father. “This restaurant has been in your mother’s family for three generations. We always thought you would inherit it and carry on the tradition.” He relented with a half-smile. “But your great-grandmother broke her family’s tradition to open this restaurant. Maybe you’ll do something great by going off on your own, too.”
“The ship leaves in two days. Are you sure I can go?”
“On one condition,” his mother answered sternly. “You visit us for the festivals every now and then. Is that clear?”
“Clear! Yes, clear!”
Her eyes were damp, but she continued smiling. Cadas noted the incongruity of two emotions on her face at once. “Well?” she said finally. “I think you had better start packing!”
“I’ll get started right away!”
His mother called to him as he ran upstairs to the lodging on the second floor. “Just come visit us when you run out of books to read at your prestigious university!"
“Oh, that’ll be a while! They have libraries bigger than the restaurant! I think I could read every day for the rest of my life and never get through them all!”
Cadas’s ears perked up. For the first time in recent memory, he was excited about something.
But he’d have to be careful. Very careful. And very clever.
Stolen novel; please report.
***
That night came and went. Cadas hardly slept, he was so eager for what he was about to do. He shared a hurried breakfast with his family in the back of the kitchen, where they often ate in the mornings, and his brother and cousins took turns elbowing each other in the ribs and snickering. They shot him dirty looks when he lurked at the edge of the group.
“You going to say something?” Ikraos asked him. “Talk! You just stand there with your unblinking eyes like a fly or a lizard.”
“Lizards blink,” Cadas corrected him. His brother threw a banana peel at him, which landed slimily on the floor.
“Behave!” their mother snapped. She stuffed the last corner of a flatbread into her mouth and dusted off her hands. “Cadas, don’t antagonize your brother.”
He wasn’t sure what that word meant. Antagonize. He didn’t think he was doing anything wrong. Then again, he rarely knew when he was.
“I just have a few more supplies to get for the entrance examination,” Hiricho explained to his own mother as he helped wipe down the long tables and benches with a damp rag. “I’ll need my own quill, ink, and parchment. Five bai should cover it all.”
His mother fished in her apron and handed him five Xhengyon coins. “And you need six bai for the trip?”
“Eight—two for the carriage to port, six for the ferry.”
“Orokoda,” his mother cursed in Xhengyon. “This university demands so many coins from you before you even arrive!”
“If you think that’s a lot, wait until you see the lecturers’ fees!”
Eight bai, Cadas thought. The copper coin with the tree embossed on the front and the Xhengyon character on the back.
“Today’s our first day without our mentor,” said Thyse. “I hope we can still keep up the good work.”
Their mother shook her head. “Not hope. We will. We’re not going to lose this place where we’ve worked so hard to be! Now then, let’s get started. Get the water boiling and start chopping vegetables. I need a volunteer to buy ingredients for this next moon. We’ll need tea leaves, herbs, spices, some fish for today’s—”
“I’ll do it,” Cadas blurted out.
She looked at him with squinted eyes and an arched eyebrow. “You... Cadas? Are you sure?”
He nodded. “Let me help.” His cousins and siblings had already started their work in the kitchen; he was the only one without something to do in the moment. “Please.”
“You don’t normally volunteer so readily like this.” She eyed him silently at first, then nodded. “All right. Let me make you a list. Fetch me the sack of coins from the cellar.”
Cadas did as he was told, and when he returned, his mother doled out five silver xhen coins distinguished by their markings of a hilly landscape on both sides. Then she handed him a hastily scrawled list on a scrap of old parchment. With that, he was off.
Five xhen, he thought. How many bai are in one xhen?
He walked three blocks to the central market of Sang Lamdak, the bustling hub of the island-wide city. There, merchants hawked fresh produce, hanging cuts of meat of all kinds—he spied chicken feet, oxtails, small plucked birds, ground meat stuffed in intestinal casings, whole skinned lambs and goats, and more colorful varieties of fish than he’d ever seen in the market in Myrenthos. There were also male spice merchants who wore Myrenthian shoulder tunics; they stood out from the crowd of native Xhengyon people.
Cadas realized that he, too, must have stuck out as a Myrenthian himself. That made his next task all the more precarious.
“How much for one fin?” he asked a fish merchant in his now flawless Xhengyon.
“Four bai,” the man answered, gutting a fish with a knife into a small bucket.
“I have one xhen,” Cadas answered.
The merchant lifted his head as if to think for a moment, then shook it. “No. I can’t accept that.”
“But one xhen is worth much more than a bai!”
“You want to pay a whole xhen for one fin?” The merchant tilted his head at Cadas like he’d said something foolish. “Go find a money changer, spicer. Come back with four bai or don’t come back to my stand!”
Cadas wandered off to the center of the market. A new idea had taken root in his mind. When he ventured out of the restaurant this day, he’d planned on stealing ingredients and pocketing the coins in secret. He realized that it would be safer to pocket a few extra coins through the process of buying all the ingredients—then he would only need to fib to his mother, rather than lie, cheat, and steal from all the vendors.
It was a much better plan.
He found a long wooden table where money changers took foreign coins or coins of large monetary value and swapped them for bai or xhen. His five small silver xhen became fifty weighty copper bai. Then he set out to buy all the ingredients on his mother’s list—tea leaves, seven different herbs, a dozen Myrenthian spices, the rare fish fin she needed for a soup, pink and white fish filets, pig’s feet, and a bag of salt.
When he brought the heavy crate of ingredients back to the restaurant, he hid eight bai in his pocket, which he stuffed with a rag so they wouldn’t jingle. “That’s all the coins that are left?” his mother said when he returned the rest of the spare money. “These fickle vendors are always changing their prices...” She said nothing more of it after that, and then Cadas knew that the first part of his plan was a success.
He was about to leave Sang Lamdak behind forever.
***
That last night, Cadas didn’t sleep at all. By the sounds of floorboards creaking in the floors above, neither did Hiricho. They both had a big day ahead of them. We’re going to the university together, Cadas thought. But while Hiricho could walk right out the door without a care, Cadas would have to find a way to leave in secret.
It was early in the morning when he slipped out, when most of the city was still dreaming. A stray cat scampered from one alley into another. Somewhere, a cricket chirped until he drew near, stopped, then resumed again after he’d passed it. He walked a block down the street and ducked into an alley. Then he waited. He waited a long time.
But he knew that if he wanted something this badly, it was worth the wait.
The sun came up. With the sun came vendors trudging up the street toward the market with tall packs on their backs. Oxen drew carts of people and wares. Restaurateurs dumped out buckets of water in the alleys and unfolded the fabric awnings of their establishments. The city came alive again with the sound of commerce.
“Sure you don’t want to stay and say goodbye to him?” The voice came from the direction of the restaurant. It was Hiricho’s mother, who held Hiricho back by the wrist. “You were his only friend here.”
“I’m sorry,” said Hiricho. “I have to go. The ferry won’t wait for me!”
“All right.” She yanked him close and kissed the top of his head, hugging him so tightly that his arms contorted at his sides. “Go. Before I change my mind. Be safe and write to us!”
Meanwhile, the Lars family wandered out of the restaurant with her. “He couldn’t have gone far,” said Cadas’s mother. “We can spare a couple of us. The rest of you will have to pick up the slack for a while.”
“You think we went to the market again?” Ikraos asked.
“He hates the crowds. He would never go there without being sent. He probably wandered off to the woods around the outskirts of the island. He’s always after those crawling vermin. Ikraos and Thyse, you two go looking for him. We’ll take care of the restaurant while you’re gone. Go! Hurry!”
Cadas watched his siblings split up and march in different directions, both of them away from him. He didn’t expect his family to care much for finding him. Why would they? Seeing them set out to find him, to bring him home, pulled his resolve in different directions.
Do I turn back? Cadas wondered. Or do I keep to my plan?
When he saw the assuredness in Hiricho’s gait as he walked up the gently sloping hill toward the center of the city, he made up his mind.
He followed the young Xhengyon man in secret. When Hiricho sped up, so did he; when Hiricho slowed down, Cadas kept a safe distance accordingly. It was a short walk to the center of Sang Lamdak, where Hiricho approached a red and green painted carriage drawn by a pair of white horses. He handed the carriage driver two bai and boarded the transport by two wooden steps.
Cadas approached the carriage driver and handed over his own fare. The Xhengyon driver gave him the kind of glance he was used to receiving as a foreigner in Xheng Yu Xi, but then pocketed his money and gestured for him to board. He climbed into the wooden box. There were two other passengers seated on the front bench who stared straight ahead in silence, while Hiricho sat in the back by himself.
Hiricho jumped out of his wooden bench seat. “Cadas?” he gasped. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m following you to the ferry that will take you to the university,” Cadas answered plainly.
“No, no, you can’t be here!” Hiricho stood up and tried to push Cadas out of the vehicle, but then the driver barked an order, and soon the carriage was in motion, so Cadas pulled the door shut behind him. “You have to go back to the restaurant. Your family is looking for you! What were you thinking?”
“I was thinking that I would go to the university like you.”
Hiricho collapsed onto his bench seat, burying his face in his hands. The passengers in the front row both glanced back at them, first one and then the other, but said nothing. “I can’t believe this,” he mumbled. “Why didn’t you talk to me about this first?”
Cadas shrugged. “I thought you wouldn’t be happy about me coming with you. I was right.” He sat on the bench seat next to his friend.
“So you decided to stow away on this carriage and follow me to the mainland university? So, what—you think you can just go to the university on a whim? That’s your plan?”
“I’m not a stowaway. I paid money.”
Hiricho sighed deeply. “You have no idea what you’ve done, do you?”
“I left home to study at the university. Just like you did.”
At this, the Xhengyon youth shook his head, wagging an accusatory finger at him. “No. You’re just running away from your problems! What I did is I left home so that my talents wouldn’t be wasted in that restaurant, so I could get away from a family who didn’t understand me, and to broaden my horizons!”
Cadas ordinarily hated most conversations, especially ones with such a prolonged back and forth. He tolerated this one because he was doing something important. “I’m doing the same thing you are. Why can’t I leave home to read books? What’s so wrong about me?”
Hiricho pinched the bridge of his nose with a furrowed brow. Finally, he relented, saying, “All right. Fine. Point taken. But you still don’t realize the consequences of the way you went about this. If they find out you ran away, they’ll make us both come back—I won’t be allowed to stay at the university, and your whole family will be kicked out! You may have ruined this entire opportunity for me!”
“All I want to do is go to the library at the university.” He was worried that Hiricho really would expose him and send him home to that place—his past imprisonment in the closet would pale in comparison to what was waiting for him when he returned. “I’ll be polite to everyone I meet. I won’t talk to anyone unless they talk to me first. I won’t embarrass you like I embarrass my family. You don’t even have to talk to me ever again once we get there!” His mind raced to find the most polite Xhengyon words he knew. “Please. Thank you. Please?”
“Cadas.” He sounded disappointed. “That’s not what I mean. You’re my friend. But you did something dishonest, and you’re jeopardizing something I’ve worked hard to achieve for years. Do you understand?”
He felt a pang of guilt—first for his friend, then for his family. Even though his mother hit him and locked him in closets, she was still his mother. “I understand.”
The Xhengyon youth heaved another deep sigh, cradling his chin in his hand and tapping his cheek in deep thought. He was quiet. For a while, nothing was audible except the clopping of horse hooves, the gentle creaking and rumbling of the carriage. “All right,” Hiricho said at last. “You can come with me. But if you come with me, you have to follow my rules.”
Cadas grumbled, slapping himself once in the forehead. “Not again...” He slapped his forehead once more. He felt a bad feeling bubbling up inside him, the kind he got when he lost control and made a mess of things.
“Listen.” Hiricho’s voice was gentle and deescalating. “I’m not going to take away your books or lock you up. But if you break my rules, we’re both done for—my parents will have us both sent home to Sang Lamdak, and we’ll never get to leave. So if you know what’s good for you—for the both of us—you’ll do as I say. Understand?”
That foreboding feeling of destructive restlessness gradually subsided in him. He was quiet for a while, too. But he trusted Hiricho’s judgment in this situation and realized he would need help finding his way on the Yu mainland and at the university. He finally said, “I understand.”
They spent the rest of the carriage ride in silence, all the way to the opposite end of the island. Fear and anxiousness gave way to hope. Cadas was on his way to the books. Before long, he’d be cradling a new Compendium in his arms, ten times bigger and even better than the last one.
And this time, no one would be able to take it away.