Serpents and Stairways

Chapter 8* - Part 2

But Gabriel wasn't quite to Rubedo's liking. During the first year they knew each other, he'd call his pupil Ellie, then, deciding that it sounded too girly after all, switched to Ru for a reason known to him alone.

Ru, however, sounded more like a contraction of his own name, so it too was soon rejected. For a few months the tutor referred to the boy as Gabi, like his mom did, but then suddenly concluded that it was too intimate, as if I'm forcing myself into your family or something.

"And I'm, hand to heart, so annoyed by that daddy of yours that Destructor forbid something tied me to him even in your associations. The aether, after all, senses everything! All that incessant nagging at the servants: 'why're you idling!', 'stop loitering around the house and work!'..." Rubedo would complain, hunched over a textbook and leaving in crocheting handwriting margin notes for every offence he had taken with its writer, "No way, leave me out of this."

By then Gabriel, of course, already knew that Captain Bauer was anything but his actual father. He also had a vague idea that so did the rest of servants, and other tutors, and other children, and the priest, and Rubedo, and even Captain Bauer himself—absent for the most part of a year, the Captain would often be the last to learn the latest news, but seven years must've been enough time for a rumour to reach him, even if it was written in a letter, sealed in a bottle, and thrown into the Baltic.

Gabriel heard that the Captain had married by necessity, and as his dowry had gained the title, the estate (old and so great, a portion of the manor had forever remained closed off as unnecessary) and a right to reign over a gorgeous vessel, the pearl of the decafold fleet—"Olga".

"Don't get the wrong idea though—it doesn't matter all that much who your family is," Rubedo continued, catching himself, "you weren't upset by what I said, were you?"

"Nay."

"Uh-huh. Because, sometimes, a family does say a thing or two about a person after all! The ancestors of this textbook's venerable composer, generation after generation, must have served the great mission of bureaucratisation of poor old Volk—that is self-evident. Destructor all mighty, I'll bet his mother had nursed him inks wrought out of accountant bills! If a value appears to be a sum of many weekly-related values, by each of which a small contribution is made to the total sum, then a centred and normalised distribution... Who talks like that?"

"Herr Gauss, judging by the portrait on the page," Gabriel answered without looking, taking advantage of his tutor's discomposure to wrap up his geography assignment, "what about your family?"

"My father teaches transmutation in Istanbul. I am the youngest in the family, but I have an elder sister and a whole granary-worth of cousins... Uh-huh, I think it makes more sense now. Put away your maps and look here. Now, can you define mathematical expectation for me? Hm?"

Gabriel's expectations had only dwindled since the appearance of the first apple. People smiled less when meeting him in the street now, and water in the pitcher was almost always cold. Only his mom and the Captain remained the constants of his life, unwavering in their treatment of him. Iren still smiled for him, even if they no longer saw each other every day, and father... well...

Even back when Gabriel had been the only child in the family, the elder Mr Bauer, like many other distinguished parents of his time, wasn't an enthusiast of involved fatherhood. When the name of his elder son bubbled up in conversations, the Captain would infuse his face with a starched papier-mâché look of certain restrained disinterest—as if he was being reported the condition of a distant and not very profitable horse factory, inherited an aeon ago from a very, very, very distant uncle, acquainted solely through New Years postcards.