Senlin Ascends: The Books of Babel: Book One by Josiah Bancroft

Author:Josiah Bancroft
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2018-01-16T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

The trade winds climb the Tower along a spiraling, tangled course. Ships do not rise up and down the Tower like plumbs on a line, but rather twist their way up like ivy climbing a tree. Up is not at all a straightforward direction.

—Everyman’s Guide to the Tower of Babel, I. XIII

He had not liked her. He did try to, much as any fair-minded educator worth his salt would try, but she seemed determined to be unlikable and to repel his weary patience like the mountain peak repels the exhausted mountaineer. He finally gave in to her incline and let himself roll down the hill of her unlikableness.

He inherited her from the retiring headmaster, who looked like the very picture of the Old Year, departing with a white beard that was as long as a windsock. Senlin, for his part, looked as much like the New Year personified as he ever would: cheeks still pink and a little plump, eyes polished almost to tears with optimism for the young minds of tomorrow. Mr. Regimond DeSeay, wizened headmaster of fifty-three years and some eleven hundred students, bequeathed Senlin the keys to the schoolhouse one sultry summer morning, the inauguration attended only by a pair of clover-fat rabbits hiding by the hedge.

His thoughts already flying to the grand improvements he would make to this hopelessly antiquated shrine of learning, Senlin expected some final piece of sapient advice from the gray headmaster, who seemed to be still chewing through the residue of his breakfast, though perhaps he was only warming the machinery of his jaw. DeSeay drew a shuddering breath. Senlin leaned in. DeSeay said, “That Marya Berks is a quizzical little turd. Good luck.”

Precocious was perhaps a more accurate (and certainly more generous) way of characterizing the young Miss Berks’s behavior in class. With chin cupped in her hand and elbow propped upon her desk, she seemed every inch the philosopher, an impression that was only compounded by her limpid eyes and crookedly pursed mouth. But if she was a philosopher, it was only a philosophy of the contrary.

She challenged everything he said, his logic, evidence, and authority, with such torturing persistence that Senlin was driven to punishing her on a near daily basis. First he took away her blotter and inkpot, a privilege of upperclassmen, giving her instead the slate and chalk that were the utensils of the novice. Then he assigned her the zinc pail and towel, which must, every night, skate across the blackboard, squelching all evidence of the day’s diagrams. And still she pounded him with insubordinate curiosity: Mightn’t the sun be made out of coal? Is zero really a number or is it more like an abstract letter? If we don’t know who built the Tower of Babel, could it have been built by some other species of animal that has since gone extinct—a species of ingenious beetle, perhaps?

He moved her desk to the front of the class so that the edge of it touched the

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