Nothing Taken

by Borzouye, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

The order came down from the treasurer on a strip of leaf no longer than a finger: The Persian may hear the book. He may not have it. Haridatta, who had kept the king's books for thirty-one years, read it twice and put it in the box with the other orders, where it would be safe from being obeyed too literally.

He knew which book. There was only one that foreigners asked for, and only one the treasurer would have bothered to forbid. It lay in the third chest from the door, between two boards of sissoo wood that his own teacher had oiled, and it was strung on a cord through two holes, and it held, by Haridatta's last count, three hundred and eight leaves. It was a book about a lion who made friends with a bull, and two jackals who could not leave it alone.

The Persian arrived the next morning with a guard on either side of him. He was a man past forty, lean, with a physician's hands and a traveller's feet, and he bowed to the chest before he bowed to Haridatta, which Haridatta noted and could not decide whether to hold against him.

In the market it was said that this man had been sent by the king of Persia to find a herb that raised the dead. It was said that he had spent the whole of the rains in the mountains with the root-diggers, and had come down with sacks of leaves, and had rubbed them on the bodies at the burning ground, one after another, while the attendants watched. None of the bodies had got up. Then an old man at the mountain had told him that the herb was a book. So here he was, a long way from home, being searched at the gate.

"You read our letters?" Haridatta asked.

"Slowly," said the Persian. "Like a child with a stick. I would be here a year."

"Then I will read, and you will listen."

"That is what I hoped."

The guards had been told to search him going in and coming out. Going in they found a water flask and a cloth. Coming out they found the same flask, empty, and the same cloth, damp. They looked in his mouth. They looked, after the first day, a little less carefully.

---

Haridatta read from the second hour to the sixth, every day, in the bare room at the back of the treasury where the light came in through a lattice and fell on the leaves in diamonds. He read the way his teacher had taught him, verse and then prose and then verse, giving each jackal his own voice: Karataka low and cautious, Damanaka quick, with a sound in the back of the throat like a man about to laugh at you. The Persian sat cross-legged on the floor with his eyes shut.

He did not ask Haridatta to go back. That was the first thing. A man who is only listening asks you to go back, because he has lost the thread, or because a verse was pretty. This man never lost the thread. He asked other things. What does this word mean when a minister says it, and what does it mean when a jackal says it? Is this verse a proverb, that everyone knows, or is it the jackal's own? When the lion is afraid of the bull's bellowing, before he has seen him, is that told as a joke?

"It is told as a joke," said Haridatta. "And then it is not a joke."

The Persian nodded, slowly, with his eyes shut.

On the ninth day Haridatta saw his lips moving. Not with the reading; after it. Haridatta would finish a verse and turn the leaf, and in the small noise of the turning the Persian's lips would move, once through, like a man counting coins he has already counted.

Haridatta said nothing about it. He went home and ate and lay awake for some time, and thought about it more than he would have liked.

---

The treasurer sent for him at the end of the first month.

"How far?"

"The lion has made the bull his chief counsellor. The jackals are out of favour. Damanaka has begun to tell the lion that the bull means to kill him."

The treasurer did not care about the jackals. "And the Persian?"

"Listens."

"He writes nothing?"

"He has nothing to write with. Your men search him twice a day."

"I know what my men do," said the treasurer. "I asked what the Persian does."

Haridatta considered several true answers and chose the shortest. "He listens very well."

---

On the thirty-eighth day the Persian came in with a mark on the middle finger of his right hand. It was on the inside, where a reed pen rests, and it was faint, and he had scrubbed at it, so that the skin around it was pinker than the rest. Lamp-soot ink does not come out in one washing. Haridatta had known this since he was eleven years old and his teacher had beaten him for a blot.

The guards at the gate had looked in the man's mouth and under his arms. They had not looked at his fingers, because there was nothing on his fingers to take.

Haridatta looked at the mark. The Persian saw him look at it. Neither of them said anything. Haridatta unwound the cord from the boards, found his place, and began to read; and after a dozen leaves, without deciding to, he began to read more slowly, and to say the long compounds twice, as if his eyes were troubling him. They were not troubling him. He had read this book aloud to the old king in his last illness, every night for a winter, and could have read most of it with his eyes shut.

That night he lay awake again and did the sum, because a keeper of books learns to do sums whether he wants to or not. Four hours of reading. Then the walk back to the lodging in the foreigners' quarter. Then food, perhaps. Then a lamp, and whatever the man wrote on, and the hand going across it until the four hours were all set down, in letters Haridatta could not read, in a language that had never had a lion who made friends with a bull. Then sleep, if there was time. Then the gate, and the search, and the flask, and the cloth.

He thought: the man is a thief.

He thought: what has he taken? I counted the leaves this evening. There are three hundred and eight.

---

In that copy there was a verse in the bull's mouth, near the end of the first book, when he understands at last what the jackal has done to him. Haridatta's teacher had always read one word of it wrongly. The word on the leaf was sandal, the tree whose wood is sweet even to the axe; the teacher had read it serpent, which is the thing that coils in the sandal tree, and the stroke that made the difference was small and the leaf was old. He had explained the verse accordingly, very beautifully, for forty years, and Haridatta had learned it from him that way and had read it that way ever since, even after he found the stroke on the leaf. He had read it to the dying king that way. It had become his.

He came to the verse on the fifty-second day, and read serpent, and went on.

The Persian opened his eyes.

"Read it again."

It was the first time he had asked. Haridatta read it again: serpent.

The Persian leaned forward and looked at the leaf. He could not read it well, he had said; like a child with a stick. But he could see a letter. He put his finger near the word, not touching it, and looked up.

"My teacher read it so," Haridatta said.

"And the leaf?"

"The leaf says sandal."

The Persian sat back. He was quiet long enough for a diamond of light to cross from one board to the other.

"Which will I carry?" he said.

It was the only time either of them came near to saying aloud what was being done in that room. Haridatta had kept the leaves for thirty-one years, and counted them every evening, and had no answer ready. Somewhere to the west there would be a book with no leaves of this one in it, written at night with a sore hand, and in it the bull would say serpent or sandal according to what an old man in a back room said this morning. Nobody there would ever see the leaf.

"Both," Haridatta said. "Write that the leaf says one thing and an old man read it another. Let them choose."

The Persian looked at him for a long moment. Then he shut his eyes, and his lips moved twice.

---

The lion killed the bull on the sixtieth day. Haridatta read it plainly and did not do the voices. The Persian sat with his head bowed for some time afterwards, as men do at a death, though he knew perfectly well that the bull was made of words and had been dead a great many times before.

There were four more books after that one, shorter, and they went faster, because the Persian had learned how the book liked to move: a story, and inside it a smaller story, and inside that sometimes another, like the boxes in which merchants send pearls. On the eighty-first day Haridatta read the last verse of the last book and wound the cord three times round the boards and tied it.

The Persian stood up. His knees cracked. He was thinner than when he had come, and the skin under his eyes had gone the colour of the ink he was not allowed to bring.

"In my country," he said, "they are expecting a herb."

"What will you tell them?"

"That I found one. That it does not grow in the ground, so I could not dig it up. That it has to be carried another way." He looked at the bound boards. "I will tell my king it raises the dead. Not his body. He will be angry for a day and then he will think about it. He is a man who thinks about things."

"And if he is angry for longer?"

The Persian shrugged, as physicians shrug, who are used to outcomes they do not control. "Then I will have brought it anyway."

He did not thank Haridatta. Haridatta understood that this was a courtesy; a man may not thank you for a thing you did not do. At the door he stopped and held up his right hand, the palm towards the room, and on the inside of the middle finger the mark had gone black and permanent and hard, like a callus.

The guards searched him at the gate for the last time. They found a flask and a cloth.

---

That evening the treasurer came himself to the back room, which he had not done in all the eighty-one days.

"Well?"

Haridatta untied the cord. He laid the boards apart and turned the leaves one by one onto the floor, in their order, counting aloud, the treasurer standing over him with a lamp. It took a long time. The treasurer shifted his weight and did not go.

"Three hundred and eight," said Haridatta.

"Nothing taken."

"Nothing taken," Haridatta said, and began to gather them up again. He found the verse with the bull in it near the bottom of the pile, and before he put it back he held it to the lamp and looked for some time at the one stroke, and then he read it aloud to the empty end of the room, quietly, once each way.

THE END

---

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Kalendīs Octōbribus (1 October 2026), ā Borzūyā per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Borzouye, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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