by F
Shivering, she pulled his arm around her shoulders like a scarf, and told how Marcus broke off a branch and hit the creature, how it turned and went for him. "He shouted, 'Run!' And I did run."
Her face was already marked with the dry tracks of tears. Now two more trickled down, making paths through the smudges of dirt. "He saved me, but I ran away and left him," she sobbed.
"If you hadn't, you'd be dead," Pete pointed out. "And we'd better get moving. If we don't find help soon, we'll starve."
This was a new role for him, being the sensible one. She let him help her to her feet, and plodded nervelessly beside him with his arm around her waist. All that bright day they helped each other along, through sunlight and dappled shade and spring breezes that were soft and fragrant with wildflowers. Pete hated the useless beauty of the world and longed only for night and rest. When the shadows drew in at last, he and Sophie lay together and held each other close. So his fantasy came true, except that hunger had extinguished desire and all they could give each other was warmth.
In time the sun rose, the light glinted on the wavelets of the Inland Sea and the endless trek resumed. Neither kept track of how many days they walked. Finding no streams, they had to drink the brackish water of the Inland Sea, so maybe salt poisoning helped to shape their hallucinations. Once Sophie saw Marcus, saw him standing among the trees, gazing at her reproachfully, and she cried out to him, then wept anew when he vanished. Once Pete saw Tim—a Tim he'd never seen before, staring blankly with eyes as crazy as Jorgon's, consumed by a fury he'd never known in all his quiet conventional life, because in one instant everything had been taken from him—his plans and his youth and his future and everything.
But of course Tim was just another illusion. Sophie didn't see him, so Pete remained silent, and they passed the specter by.
In the end, hunger turned out to be self-limiting. As the days passed, the pain in their guts eased, then vanished altogether. They talked about it, and agreed that their stomachs must be shrinking. They had no explanation for the rebirth of desire. One night, lying together under a gibbous moon, they became lovers, though exactly how it happened Pete couldn't afterward remember. The coupling wasn't at all like those he'd achieved with Abbey and a few girls before her. More like the love he made in dreams—intense, evanescent, lacking all the limitations of the flesh, like the mating of magical birds in midair.
If it was magic, the magic must be real, for afterward they seemed to feel something of the buoyancy of flight. Like hunger, their fatigue vanished and they found themselves passing over the landscape as soundlessly as cloud shadows. And one evening, as dusk was falling for the n th time, Sophie gasped and whispered, "Oh, my God, Pete. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Lights. "
He looked toward the Inland Sea, and yes, little lights, maybe a dozen in all, twinkled through a grove of black cedars. He and Sophie clasped hands and headed toward them, rushing like the wind through the fragrant, shadowy trees and into a wet lane running between a cluster of ramshackle buildings.
"Oh, there's somebody," she cried, and yes, yes, among the cabins Pete saw one with dimly glowing windows that leaked faint sounds of revelry from within. They looked at each other and laughed and passed through a weather-stained door, not even noticing the half-obliterated sign that said PILGRIM'S REST, DOLAN, ARKANSAS.
"Dead worlds leave lots of ghosts," smiled Ranger Rick, winking at the young lady hiker and her friend. She'd been repeating folk tales some fool had told her on the Southern Belle. "That's why you get all these stuporstitions."
He'd listened to plenty of guff himself. A recent skin diver claimed that deep in the muddy currents, he'd seen a town half-buried in silt, with pale figures beckoning to him from the bell chamber of a steeple. Facts is better than bull, Rick thought, and began showing the hikers his collection. The young lady made interested noises, but her companion ( athalete, Rick judged, lots of muscles including some inside his head ) soon got bored and wandered outside.
Then, as the ranger was explaining a new acquisition—four torn backpacks, mementoes of some lost hikers—she started crying. Crying hard, sobbing out loud. He led her into the open air, and her friend jumped up from the rustic bench and helped her be seated. He put his arms around her and spoke to her soothingly in French and English. Meanwhile, the ranger hastened back inside to fetch a bottle of water.
Durn, he thought, opening the cooler. He hadn't meant to shock the lady, just warn her to be careful, because some people got lost in the woods and some of them stayed lost. Maybe the problem was these western animals coming east. They seemed disorientated, somehow, behaved in ways that astonished Rick, even though he'd worked in Yellowstone and thought he knew them.
He'd put up warning signs along the trail, and started handing out an official brochure called Living with Wildlife. Of course dangerous animals had ought to be trapped and removed, but with the Interior budget like it was, Rick considered himself lucky to get money for the signs.
He brought out the water and she drank a little. Then asked for the key to the ladies' room, and went off to do whatever women did to repair red eyes and puffy cheeks. Meanwhile, the Canuck told Rick her story.
" C'est un peu de baroque, " he said. "One of those guys disappeared on the trail last year? Well, he was an old boyfriend of Abbey's."
"Jesus God," breathed the ranger.
"When she dumped him, he went off in the woods to forget. Anyway, that's what she thinks. If she'd been nicer, if she'd let him down easy, he wouldn't have done it and he'd still be alive. You know women, everything's personal with them. She's been on my back ever since to bring her down here, so she can apologize or say good-bye or something."
He looked baffled. "You know women," he repeated, shrugging Frenchly. He might just as well have added, And I don't.
When Abbey returned, Rick walked the couple to Milepost One and saw them off. "Now, y'all keep your eyes open, awright? Read that li'l booklet I give you. Got your omnis with you? Stay in touch and stay safe. It's a rough damn world out there."
Just before they disappeared, they turned and waved, and Abbey smiled and said something Rick didn't catch. The Canuck called out, " Au 'voir. "
The ranger waved back. Nice young folks, he thought. Jesus, I wish I hadn't showed her them packs.
Then he froze.
Without even the rustle of a leaf, a male gray wolf had materialized no more than two meters away. Ignoring Rick, he stared after the couple, standing absolutely still except for the ruff of fur rising on his back. A long pink tongue came out and licked his nose and his black nostrils flared, seeking a scent. Then, in the magical way of wild animals, the wolf was gone. Just gone.
Rick let his breath out with a whoosh. The critter almost seemed to be tracking Abbey and her friend. But of course that was nonsense—he looked well-fed, and wolves unless starving were way too smart to hunt people.
"Now what in the hayull, " the ranger muttered, "could've got into him?"
* * *
The Klepsydra: A Chapter from A Faunary of Recondite Beings
By Michaela Roessner | 4647 words
Michaela Roessner's novels include The Stars Dispose, The Stars Compel, and Vanishing Point. Her first novel, Walkabout Woman, has recently been reissued as an electronic book. She reports that she has joined the faculty of Western State College of Colorado's low-residency MFA in Creative Writing program.
The Klepsydra : A Chapter from A Faunary of Recondite Beings
WORDS HIDE UNDETECTED layers within themselves, like the unseen secret folds within origami. Sometimes those layers hide clues to the world beyond the page, evidence of secret yet concrete realities. Secrets that will only reveal themselves to the word detectives (the etymologists, the philologists, the semanticists). So it was that the renowned Hibernian-Hellenic linguist Dr. Maeve Paideuein, while laboring on her intended masterwork 1 —a compendium and analysis of all Greek terminology sublimated within the English language—had reached the middle of the English "c"s when she encoun
tered the word "clepsydra." A term—obviously Greek in origin—with which she was unfamiliar. It intrigued her.
The definition of a clepsydra in English is a water clock. Developed in ancient times as the nocturnal equivalent of daylight's sundials, these devices consisted of either a tight-stoppered, clear, blown-glass globe, or a rotund lidded ceramic jar. At dusk, whoever needed to keep time throughout the night filled the clepsydra with water. A tiny hole at its base allowed the liquid to escape drop by drop. The level of water within the clock declined at a measured rate, making it possible to mark the hours on the sides of the device.
This is an obvious parallel to the sand-utilizing hourglass. Dr. Paideuein deduced that the clepsydra must have been developed in an environment bereft of sand, such as the rocky inland escarpments of her native Greece.
She was puzzled, however, by the term's linguistic composition.
The latter part of the word, "sydra," made perfect sense. It comes from the Greek hydros, for water. We see this root in such words as hydra (a small, water-dwelling polyp) and fire hydrant.
But the first part, "clep," seemed mistranslated in context of its usage. It derives from the Greek kleptein and means thief. A direct translation of clepsydra into Greek would be klepsydra, "water thief."
Water leaking from an engineered escape valve hardly qualifies as theft. Troubled by the discrepancy, Dr. Paideuein made note of the word and set it aside in a file for later examination. She did, after all, still have "d" through "z" of the English dictionary 2 to delve through.
Five years later she had reached English words starting with the letter "i" (which she'd hoped to move through swiftly) when she was recruited by the Egyptian government to take part in the excavation of the ancient city of Alexandria, 3 a project famously referred to by its administrators as The Great Endeavor.
Theocratic Christians had destroyed most of the renowned Library at Alexandria in the A.D. 400s in their zeal to stamp out "pagan" learning. But the Mouseion—the vast university and research center founded by Ptolemy I, Alexander the Great's general—was discovered intact, as were the partial remains of the site of the botanical and zoological gardens attached to the Mouseion. It was to the task of deciphering ancient texts that the Egyptian government summoned Dr. Paideuein and a host of other scholars and scientists.
The supervisor of the linguistics team 4 happened to assign Dr. Paideuein the job of the initial translation of a series of vellum parchment scrolls that were believed to be—in their sum total—a register cataloging all the various flora and fauna housed within the botanical and zoological gardens.
We know from Dr. Paideuein's notes what her assignment entailed. Her studies took place in the long, columned subterranean chamber that housed the scrolls. These parchments from the first years of the Ptolemy Dynasty had survived throughout the centuries sealed in enormous glazed ceramic vessels (similar to those traditionally used to preserve olive oil) and secured with layers of beeswax-saturated linen, capped off with a final coating of pitch from Lebanese cypresses, and bound in place with waxed hemp cords.
Conservation required that plastic sheeting cordon off each section. Engineers installed humidifiers, air regulators, and temperature gauges. Artifacts could not be allowed to desiccate and crumble or, conversely, be exposed to an excess of mold-and-fungi-attracting moisture. Technicians then used MRI technology to scan all containers to discover their contents.
Only after the chambers had been secured in this fashion, following strict protocols, were scholars and scientists allowed to examine the priceless relics.
In the case of the catalog parchments, assigned personnel took the scrolls from the storage jars and gently rehumidified them, gradually unrolling them millimeter by cautious millimeter in order to avoid cracking and breakage. Once fully unrolled, the technicians returned to photograph the scrolls' surfaces, so that no matter what the future might bring, there would always exist records of the ancient text.
It was while humidifying a parchment that Dr. Paideuein encountered the source of the word "clepsydra." Her journal from that time tells us:
I had steamed and let gravity relax open a twenty-millimeter-wide strip of the beginning of a scroll: the initial column where the names of collected plants and animals were customarily listed. I looked down the narrow band with its teasing hints of the beginnings of names—words starting with "kav" and "kaf" and "kath" and "kef" and "kip" and "kin," indicating plants and animals that somehow had something to do with fighting, or riding, or mirrors, or heat, or heads, or gardens, or danger—when my gaze fell on what looked to be "klep." A small crease in the parchment's skin cut through the middle of the ancient Greek letters, so I couldn't be sure, but it seemed likely that the listed creature or plant in some way referenced thievery. Farther down the column followed more fragments of words: "klis" and "koli" and "kori" and "kunia." Species that were closed in some fashion, or swam, or were female, or swung—perhaps from trees; perhaps from cliffs.
It took the rest of the day to uncurl a full forty millimeters of the vellum. When I examined the entire column—most of whose names were now fully revealed—I discovered the "klep" word in its entirety: klepsydra.
Then I remembered the water clock.
Dr. Paideuein spent two painstaking weeks unrolling the entire parchment. Her notes from that time indicate she worried that in her excitement she was rushing the task. But for all her efforts, once she'd translated the full text, the notations were disappointingly brief—though they did prove that the animal's name referred to water-related behavior. And that living specimens had existed in the menagerie: The Mouseion's animal caretakers had considered the Klepsydra a spider of some sort, though they seemed to have some doubts—one note also referred to it as an insect.
A footnote to the inventory entry (most of the names of animals on the list were so notated) mentioned that a record of the creature—its history and its habits—could be found in the Chief Caretaker's logs.
The sheet of vellum now stretched out, Dr. Paideuein relinquished it to the technicians who reproduced the salvaged records. She would not be allowed further access to it until they finished their work.
Dr. Paideuein used the interruption as an opportunity. She was determined to locate the Chief Caretaker's logs. So rather than proceeding on to the next scroll, she introduced herself to several of The Great Endeavor's taxonomists, all of them "gray eminences" in the field of biology. She explained that she'd been assigned to a segment of the excavation that involved their area of expertise. 5
The scientists were pleased when she offered her services. Their work entailed examining whatever small scraps of bone, shell, carapace, and hide that remained in the vacant cages and tanks of the zoological garden. In the meantime they waited as patiently as they could for the translation of the scrolls that would help them put names to the shadow-images of the species conjured up by their DNA analyses.
They showed her the drawers holding the few Chief Caretaker logs that had already been unrolled but only partially translated by scholars within other divisions, and confessed that any extra aid she could lend would be invaluable.
Dr. Paideuein donated her spare time to their project, slipping away to the biologists' unit on her breaks and in the evening after her own workday finished. She browsed through the few already translated logs (finding many errors, which she corrected), and she also initiated the transcription of many newly decanted scrolls. She watched in particular for parchments whose creatures' names began with kappa, the letter "k." In her journal, which she left with the biologists working on this level of the Mouseion, she wrote:
One night quite late, after months of this extra duty, as I pored over a description of the care of the many forms of rabbits once housed in the collection ( kuneli : rabbit— zalizmenos, ena THenTHro, alazo, aTHios, to sinefo, ta anaktora : the dizzy rabbit, the tree rabbit, the rabbit of change, the empty or vacant rabbit, the rabbit of the clouds, the palace rabbit), I realized that my lexicograp
hic mind had steered me astray. I shouldn't have started my search with kappa . It had only led me to struggle awash in rabbits. I needed to focus at the beginning, with alpha—AraHni, commonly known in English as Arachnida. For in spite of the one reference to the klepsydra as an insect ( ena zoifio ), I felt sure from the intent of the original text that I would find my objective within the spider family.
This choice sped up my quest. If the words on an already flattened scroll didn't start with any "a"s, I set it aside. If I began to process a still-rolled scroll and the first glimpse of the written margin failed to yield the letter I sought, then it went back in its jar.
Within three weeks I found the first of the "a" fauna records. Agheladha : Cattle. I kidhia, ta astra, to meli, o paghos, o THeos : funeral cattle, star cattle, honey cattle, ice cattle, the cattle of God.
Dr. Paideuein's discovery provided the biologists with the information as to where the menagerie's ungulates had been housed. Not within the zoological gardens proper, but rather in an agricultural complex located, alas, in one of the areas of ancient Alexandria now submerged under water.
Another month passed, and with it the examination of more scrolls. One afternoon—so habituated was Dr. Paideuein to seeking and not finding—she started to set aside a parchment before she realized that in her hands she held a listing of arachnids. Halfway down the scroll she found klepsydra, 6 and the answers to her mystery.
The scroll indicated that the klepsydra had indeed lent its name to and provided the inspiration for the invention of the water clock. The parchment also provided references to more extensive records, many of which have since been found in other documents within other branches of the Mouseion.
The reports all told a similar tale: Travelers making their way through rocky, arid environs (Dr. Paideuein's original guess regarding the geological, sandless circumstances had been correct) would for some reason take shelter for the night in a cave. Perhaps a storm threatened. Perhaps they fled from pursuers. The tales varied. One of the extant fragments reads: