As he wandered the shelves he kept his books with him, reshelving them at the end of the day not by the classmarks he did not understand, but by invented mnemonics that told him this one belonged between the big red and the small blue spines, and this one at the end, beside the volume with the picture of an airship.

There was one terrible panicked moment. He picked a book from the wall, and the shapes inside, all the letters, were friends to him; but as he settled before them and began to mouth and mutter them, waiting for them to sound as words in his head, they were all gibberish. He grew frantic very quickly, fearing that he had lost what it was he had gained.

But then he realized that he had taken a book from a shelf just to one side of the Ragamoll section; that it shared the alphabet that was now his, but pieced it together into a different language. Shekel was dumbstruck at the realization that these glyphs he had conquered could do the same job for so many peoples who could not understand each other at all. He grinned as he thought about it. He was glad to share.

He opened more foreign volumes, making or trying to make the noises that the letters spelled and laughing at how strange they sounded. He looked carefully at the pictures and cross-referenced them again. Tentatively he concluded that in this language, this particular clutch of letters meant boat, and this other set moon.

Shekel moved off slowly, making his way further from the Ragamoll section, picking up random works and gaping at their impenetrable stories, moving down the long corridors of children’s books until he reached new shelving and opened a book whose script was like nothing he knew. He laughed, delighted at its strange curves.

He moved off further and found yet another alphabet. And a little way off there was another.

For hours he found intrigue and astonishment by exploring the non-Ragamoll shelves. He found in those meaningless words and illegible alphabets not only an awe at the world, but the remnants of the fetishism to which he had been subjected before, when all books had existed for him as these did now, only as mute objects with mass and dimension and color, but without content.

Though it was not quite the same. It was not the same to see these alien pages and know that they would have meaning to some foreign child, as The Courageous Egg and The History of New Crobuzon and The Wasp in a Wig now surrendered meaning to him.

He gazed at the books in Base and High Kettai and Sunglari and Lubbock and Khadohi with a kind of fascinated nostalgia for his own illiteracy, without for a fraction of a moment missing it.

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Eleven