“Can Cora not help? She has been working on the tablets since they arrived.”
Obviously he hasn’t looked at any of her work, or he would know the answer to that. Well, I was not going to tell him that her efforts had made us both laugh. I merely said, “We’ll see,” and left it at that.
* * *
(Looking back over what I have written, I can hear Grandmama tsking at me. “You young people and your given names! You’ve hardly known one another three minutes before you’re addressing each other like the closest of friends.” Well, I’m not going to write “Miss Fitzarthur” every time I refer to Cora, and I don’t think she minds. That’s her surname—she must be the daughter of Lord Gleinleigh’s brother, since she calls him “Uncle.” I didn’t realize he had a brother, though. It’s shocking really, how little I know about the Scirling peerage, when I’m going to inherit Grandmama’s barony someday.)
FROM THE DIARY OF AUDREY CAMHERST
6 Pluvis
Blasted Scirling winters! It’s been drizzling rain all day, and while I don’t mind a wetting, the light is no good for looking at the tablets. I wonder if I could persuade Lord Gleinleigh to relocate me to Trinque-Liranz or Qurrat or someplace sunnier while I work on the text? No, I promised Lotte I would be nearby if she needs me—though what I could do to improve her Season I don’t know, given the utter disaster I made of mine.
No, I shall just have to work with the lamps, or find something else to do with myself in foul weather. I suppose I can begin my transcription of what I’ve already copied.
later
Transcription went slower than it might have, but that’s because I was teaching Cora. It’s clear that some of the errors in her translation were because she confuses the characters for ša and ma, and also gil for suk—very common beginner’s mistakes, and they explain the random tree branches and such she’d come up with.
Oh, I should not have written that. Grandpapa is always going on about how one should take each step in order: copying, then transcription, and only when that is complete, translation. (And every time he does, Grandmama makes a tart remark about his “damnable patience,” and then she tells the story of that disintegrating door in the Watchers’ Heart and how he made her draw it before he’d let anyone through to see what it had guarded.) But I am not made of such patient stuff, and I have the first part of the transcription already . . .
Everyone else is abed. It will be our little secret, diary.
Tablet I, invocation
translated by Cora Fitzarthur
Listen with your wings in the ditches and the rocks in all corners.
Through me I say how clay was made, dirt and water and ceiling and wind and grains and animals of the ground and flounders and sky, the three heart reeds and the four that were three later. Stone my words for the coming year, because mind records are the one real forever. When this clutch is recorded, we live with them, and the goodness of their treasure will keep the going generations doing things.
One was red from the sun and was shaped like many iron hands.
Two were green water and grew from being slept tall.
Three were sky blue and came smartly with their tree branches.
Four, which were male, covered black and were written down for the first time.
Four broke a single egg together, which was a thing nobody had done before.
Together they went down and up, and became darkness through light.
Tablet I, colophon
translated by Audrey Camherst
Hark, spread your wings to hear, from the canyons to the heights of stone, in every corner of the world.
Through me this clay will speak of how everything was made, the earth and the waters, the heavens and the wind, the plants and the beasts of the land and the rivers and the sky, the three peoples and the four who afterward were three. Preserve my words for the ages to come, for memory is the only true immortality. So long as these four are remembered, they will live in us, and the blessings of their deeds will remain.
The first was golden like the sun, and her hands were fitted for weapons.
The second was green as water, and planted the earth so that crops grew tall.
The third was blue like the sky, and was clever in the crafting of things.
The fourth was a brother, black of scale, and he was the first to record speech in clay.
These four were hatched from a single shell, which had never been seen before.
Together they descended and rose again, turning darkness into light.
FROM THE DIARY OF AUDREY CAMHERST
7 Pluvis
Oh, Cora is clever. She may be abysmal at translation, but she has a very tidy mind, and has discovered something I hadn’t yet noticed.
I mentioned before that when I first came into the library, the tablets were laid out in a row. I’m so accustomed to working with texts someone else has already been at, it never occurred to me to think anything was odd when I asked for the first tablet and she handed it to me without hesitation. But of course I should have wondered: how did she know that was the first one?
The answer, of course, is in the bit I’ve already translated. She might not have been able to read it very well, but she could see it was different. “That part was marked off with a horizontal line,” she said when I asked her. “None of the others have a marked-off bit, not like that. It didn’t seem logical that they would do that at the end of the series, or somewhere in the middle—not when it was in the top corner like that.”
“It’s almost like a colophon,” I said, bending over the tablet in question. “Except not at all, really. Normally a Draconean colophon will tell you all kinds of things, from a summary of the text or some key phrases to which scribe wrote it out to who commissioned it and why. This gives a bit of a summary, but the rest of that information isn’t there. Is it on the final tablet? Sometimes they put it at the end instead.”
Cora shook her head. “If it is, they didn’t mark it off.”
A quick glance at the last tablet in the sequence was enough to tell me that the final text wasn’t a colophon, either. Then I frowned, gazing down the length of the table. “Are you sure this is the last one?”
“As sure as I can be,” Cora said. “I put them in order first thing, before I tried to start translating.”
I had stumbled from one mystery into another. “How do you know they’re in order?”
Though I hadn’t gotten very far in my copying yet, I had looked each tablet over, and noted the absence of marginal notation. Which makes sense; this text is obviously a very early one, and seems to predate the idea of putting a numeral and the text’s incipit on the edge of the tablet, the better to keep documents together and in order. But without that, and without the ability to read the text, how on earth did Cora have any sense of their sequence?
She brightened when I asked her that. I think she knew she had been clever, and was justifiably proud. “Look,” she said, rushing back to the start of the row. “You see here, at the end of this tablet? And then the beginning of the next one.”
I did indeed see. The final glyph on the first tablet was the sign for “two,” and the first character on the second tablet was the sign for “one.” The second tablet ended with “three” while the third began with “two,” and so forth down the line.