Cassie registered surprise. Griffin had to be in his early twenties but somehow he’d managed to miss the digital bus. When it came to books, he seemed as techno-phobic as some old codger in his sixties.
By this time, they had reached the left wall of the vault. Passing the door marked Security Division, Griffin stopped in front of the one that read “Scrivener’s Office.”
He opened the door without knocking.
Cassie hung back. “Should you be going in there? I mean, what if the Scrivener whatsit catches you?”
“I’m sure he won’t mind.” Griffin sounded unconcerned. “After all, he is me.”
“You’re the Scrivener?” Cassie gasped. “What’s a Scrivener?”
Her companion chuckled. “It’s an honorary title much like the term ‘Pythia’. It refers to the person who is in charge of all the scribes.” Anticipating Cassie’s next question, he added, “We call all the record-keepers in the vault ‘scribes’. Obviously these antiquated names go back to the earliest days of the Arkana.”
“So you’re the guy in charge of the vault?” the girl asked doubtfully.
Griffin nodded. “Of the cataloguing tasks anyway. Yes, I am.”
“But aren’t you kind of young?”
“My colleagues didn’t seem to think that mattered when they elected me to this post. Though I am quite new at it,” he added. “Just over a year now. Please come in and take a seat if you would.”
The Scrivener’s office was furnished in simple elegance. Two leather wing chairs faced the Sheraton mahogany desk. The desk was flanked on either side by floor to ceiling book cases. Cassie sat down while Griffin began opening and closing drawers, evidently looking for something.
“But the Scrivener must have a ton of responsibility. Nothing personal but why would they pick you to be in charge of all of this?” she asked again.
Griffin didn’t seem offended by the question. He continued turning over the contents of his desk drawers as he spoke. “I think it may have had to do with the peculiarities of the way my mind works. I seem to have the ability to recall nearly everything I’ve ever read.”
“Oh, I’ve heard about that!” Cassie exclaimed. “They call it idiotic memory, don’t they?”
The Scrivener stopped shuffling and stared at her in perplexity for several seconds, not sure whether she was joking or not. “It’s called eidetic memory,” he finally corrected.
“Sorry,” she said sheepishly. Trying to repair the damage, she rushed to add, “So that’s a really important job you’ve got. I mean, this place must be as big as the Library of Congress and you’re the head librarian.”
“Scrivener,” he corrected. “Head Scrivener.” He resumed his search until he happened to look up and catch the expression on her face. “What is it?” he asked, concerned.
Cassie realized she was frowning in intense concentration as she tried to work out a puzzle in her head.
Griffin came to sit down in the wing chair next to hers and peered at her intently. “Are you all right?”
She laughed, embarrassed. “Sorry. My mind was off on a side trip somewhere. I was just thinking back to that calendar stick you showed me and it jogged my memory about something Maddie said the last time I was here. She told me that women were responsible for inventing clothing, agriculture, animal domestication and even writing. I thought it was just her own crazy theory but you said something like that when you were talking about women inventing time measurement. You seem awfully sure of your facts.” Her voice took on a troubled tone. “Considering how long ago all these things were invented, don’t you think you’re jumping to conclusions? I mean how can you prove that women came up with all those ideas?”
The young man gave her an impish look. “And why are you so willing to believe that men were responsible for them?”
Cassie shrugged. “I guess because that’s what we’re taught in school. Men invented everything, right?”
“I should think your brief exposure to the Arkana would at least open your mind to alternative explanations,” he objected mildly. “Look, it’s quite simple really. If you think about invention, you need to think about necessity.”
“And mothers,” the girl added wryly.
Griffin looked lost for a moment and then smiled. “Oh yes, quite. Necessity is the mother of invention. A cliched proverb but an accurate one.” His expression grew serious. “Whenever you look at an object and you speculate about who might have invented it, you need to think about who had the greatest need for it. In the case of time measurement, it’s hard to imagine a hunter requiring a precise lunar calendar to track game migration patterns. But it’s very easy to assume a woman would notice the correlation between her own reproductive functions and the phases of the moon. It certainly would have helped the female population of the tribe far more than the male.”
Cassie tilted her head to consider his argument. Finally she nodded in agreement. “I guess that makes sense. I’ll buy it. Women probably did invent calendars but what about the other stuff. I mean, isn’t it kind of a stretch to think they invented agriculture?”
“Not at all,” Griffin said solemnly. “Not when you consider that in hunter-gatherer societies, the vast majority of the daily food supply was provided by women. The estimate is somewhere between 60% and 85%.”
“What!” Cassie exclaimed. “That can’t be right. What about man the mighty hunter bringing home the bacon?”
Griffin raised an eyebrow. “Like so much else that is taught in schools, that is an overlord myth. It was the woman bringing home the beets who kept the tribe alive. Don’t misunderstand. Fresh meat was a valuable supplement to the diet but killing wild game when armed with nothing more than a sharp stick is an uncertain business. It may take a week of effort to accomplish that task. On a daily basis, the women of the tribe would go out with their digging sticks and forage for edible plants, roots, berries, nuts and seeds to sustain themselves and their children. And the process was hardly haphazard. Knowledge of plants would have been passed down from mother to daughter. There are literally hundreds of species of plants that a woman would need to recognize on sight as well as their season of ripeness. Some are edible, others hallucinogenic. Some poisonous and others curative.”
Cassie interrupted him. “But you’re talking about foraging. What’s that got to do with agriculture?”
“Absolutely everything,” Griffin said with a knowing smile. “Over a period of time, a forager would notice that a seed would germinate into a plant. Since she was already gathering wild grains for consumption, she most probably experimented with planting some of the seeds to see if they would grow. The rest, as they say, is history.”
Griffin paused a moment to let Cassie assimilate these new facts before he continued. “Now that you know how to apply the rule of necessity to any invention, you’ve no doubt understood why pottery and textiles would also have been female inventions.”
“Maybe,” Cassie said cautiously. She wasn’t at all sure she understood what he considered to be obvious. “Why don’t you explain it to me anyway.”
“Very well.” The young man complied. “A forager who travels up to ten miles a day gathering food for her family would need some way to carry the food back. An animal carcass is fairly convenient to carry whole or even cut into large pieces. Small plants are not. If she depended on nothing more than what her arms could hold, the evening meal would be disappointingly small. She would need a container of some sort to bring home substantial quantities of anything. Hence, she would have developed techniques for weaving baskets or cloth, shaping animal skins into slings or molding mud into ceramic ware. That last item, of course, implies that she also invented clay ovens and kilns.”
Cassie decided to play devil’s advocate for a while. “But maybe there were men back in camp who made all those things.”
“According to overlord myth, all the men were out striding purposefully across the savannah butchering everything in their path.” Cassie noted the m
ischievous gleam in Griffin’s eye. “Where on earth did they find the time? They must have been Renaissance men indeed if they managed to stalk and kill game before rushing back to weave baskets and clothing for their womenfolk. Perhaps they even managed to hoe a row of corn before dashing off again. Very chivalrous of them. Goodness knows what the women were doing all this time. Probably just lying around waiting for instruction. The silly cows.”
Cassie giggled at the picture he painted. “It does sound pretty ridiculous when you put it that way,” she admitted.
“That’s because it is ridiculous. Overlord historians would like to have it both ways. They want to paint a picture of man the hunter as well as man the inventor. From a practical standpoint, there aren’t enough hours in the day for him to be both. One or the other assumption has to be false. It’s far more logical to assume that human beings survived as a species because the sexes depended upon one another. They each had complementary skills and the contribution of both was respected. That balance remained intact until career warfare began to distort it about five thousand years ago. And now we live with the consequences of that imbalance.”
The smile faded from Cassie’s face. She changed the subject. “I’m with you so far but I don’t see a connection between women and domesticated animals. I mean, you said it yourself. If the men were out hunting already, wouldn’t they be the more likely sex to capture an animal that they wanted to tame?”
Griffin looked at her askance. “You can’t be serious.”
She returned a puzzled gaze.
“Try to imagine yourself as a gazelle on the savannah. A man with a pointy stick starts running at you. If you’re an intelligent gazelle in full possession of your faculties, you will take to your hooves and run like the wind. Hunting is hardly an occupation friendly to animals and domestication requires a certain exchange of benefits.”
“But what about the necessity argument?” Cassie objected. “Isn’t it a hunter who has a greater need to supply a dependable source of meat for the tribe?”
“You’re forgetting about the greatest need of all,” Griffin countered. “The need to feed a newborn infant.”
Cassie tilted her head, trying and failing to connect the dots. “Go ahead. Unpack that one for me.”
“Right. As far as we can determine, the earliest species of animal which was domesticated was the wild goat. Goat’s milk is of a similar consistency to human milk. Much more so than cow’s milk. If lactation proved difficult for a new mother, it stands to reason that she would be motivated to make the acquaintance of the nearest friendly goat—offering food and protection from predators in exchange for milk. Cows were domesticated for the same reason. Though it is possible that other species, such as the horse and dog, were domesticated by males, the process of taming animals is far more likely to have begun with the females of the tribe.”
“You have an answer for everything, don’t you,” Cassie observed. She was secretly disappointed that she hadn’t tripped him up on anything yet. He and Maddie had both made some radical claims about invention and the girl wasn’t willing to blindly believe everything they told her just yet.
“Research is my life. It’s hard not to,” Griffin admitted.
“Well, I have one more for you. What about writing? How do you connect that one to a female inventor?”
Griffin sat back in his chair with the faintest hint of smugness apparent in his smile. “And I thought you were going to ask me something difficult.”
“OK, enlighten me Mr. Librarian.”
“It’s Scrivener, if you please. Mr. Scrivener.”
She could tell he was enjoying this.
“The connection between women and writing is fairly easy to establish. For one thing, calendar sticks are a form of symbolic marking and we have already established that these were invented by women. Aside from which, we’ve also established that women were the most plausible inventors of pottery.”
Cassie’s eyes narrowed. “What’s pottery got to do with it?”
“The earliest symbolic script is found on clay pots. Until the bronze age, pottery-making was a female occupation.”
“Oh, I heard the earliest writing was on clay all right. Clay tablets in Sumeria around 3000 BCE and the writers were male.” Cassie was proud that she paid attention in history class that day.
Griffin seemed unconcerned with her objection. “Sumerian cuneiform is not, in point of fact, the earliest writing. Proto-writing goes back to about 5000 BCE though it’s likely we may uncover artifacts which will move that date even earlier. We speculate that writing was originally used for ritual purposes, on objects needed for religious rites. In fact, the symbols found on early pottery are carried through to scripts found three thousand years later in other parts of the world so we know they were something more than wiggly lines carved into a pot.”
Cassie threw up her hands. “OK, you win. You’ve convinced me.”
“You needn’t sound so disappointed about it,” Griffin protested. “I should think you would be pleased to know that the female of the species has so many illustrious inventions to her credit.”
“I suppose,” Cassie grinned. “I just hate to think that I’ve spent the last fourteen years of my life learning facts in school that aren’t true.”
While she was speaking, Griffin had gotten up and started rummaging through drawers and bookcases again. He was muttering to himself until he finally found what he was searching for. With a triumphant, “Aha! I’ve got you at last,” he dug the object out of the back of a desk drawer and returned to his seat next to Cassie. Holding up the article, he said, “Tell me what you think of this.”
Cassie gasped. In his hands, he was holding the stone ruler. “How did you get it back?”
Griffin smiled. “We didn’t. It’s just a replica that we built here but I’d like your opinion. Does it look anything like the original?”
Cassie took the ruler from him and examined it for several seconds from every angle. When she looked up, she perceived Griffin with an entirely new level of respect. “You got it exactly right. This is just like the one that was stolen. Same size, same markings. Even the same color. Everything.”
Griffin seemed pleased at her words. “I’m relieved to hear you say that. We want this to be just right.”
The girl was puzzled. “Why would it matter?”
“If you made a duplicate house key that was a fraction of an inch too big to fit the lock on your door, do you think it would work?”
“I get your point. But it sure doesn’t look like it would unlock anything.”
Griffin took the object back and considered it. “It may not unlock a physical location. It’s far more likely that it unlocks information of some kind.” He hesitated and looked away for a second. “I’m very sorry to have to ask you this, but do you think you could describe to me the encounter Sybil had with her attacker? Precisely what did they say to each other?”
Cassie’s face drained of color. “I don’t want to think about that.”
“But you must,” Griffin’s tone was urgent. “So much depends on the information only you can give us. I know how difficult this must be for you. Please try.”
The girl gave a deep sigh and shut her eyes, trying to remember. “They didn’t say much. He kept asking her where the key was. She said she didn’t know what he was talking about. They struggled, she fell and then there was shattered glass everywhere. Sybil didn’t get up.” The girl blinked several times to wipe away the memory and a few fresh tears.
“He wasn’t specific about the name of the key or the language of it?”
Cassie shook her head. “No, he just called it ‘the key.’ That’s why I didn’t connect that this stone ruler might be some kind of key when I first saw it.” She sighed. “So you don’t recognize the language of any of those doodles on it?”
“Sorry, not yet but some of the glyphs appear vaguely familiar. I know I’ve seen at least a few of these before. I’ll keep searching our record
s. Something is bound to turn up.”
Cassie felt a sense of foreboding. “I sure hope you figure it out before Cowboy does. If he didn’t mind leaving a dead body behind to get it, it can’t unlock anything good.”
Chapter 22 – Damnation Motivation
Abraham found himself standing in the middle of a rope bridge. It swayed precariously over a flaming gorge. He could feel the heat from below, roaring upward to bake his face, his clothing. He imagined he saw a face in the flames. A demon leering at him. A demon with his own features. At the opposite end of the bridge he saw the Lord staring at him. His father was there too and behind him scores of Diviners past. Abraham looked down and realized he held the stone key in his palms. He raised his hands in supplication. “Look, I have the key. See, it is here. I have done your will.”
The Lord was unmoved by his cries. He raised his staff and stamped it on the ground. It sent a tremor through the ropes that held the bridge together.
In horror, Abraham watched the ropes fray and the wooden steps begin to fly apart, to disintegrate in the blaze. He ran forward toward the other Diviners. Toward the Lord. They all frowned at him. None reached out a hand to help. He felt himself falling as the bridge dissolved in flame. He felt himself dissolving into the demon shape that came rushing up out of the fire to absorb him.
“Nooooo!” He sat bolt upright in bed, drenched in sweat. An ordinary person might have breathed a sigh of relief that it was just a bad dream. But he was the Diviner. For him, a bad dream was never as simple as that.
***
The following morning, Abraham decided to pay a long overdue visit to his son Daniel. He wanted a progress report. The evil sending of the night before had convinced him that they were running out of time. Fortunately, this was one of the rare days when his son hadn’t sequestered himself in the libraries of the Fallen. He found the young man alone in the compound study room.
The Granite Key (Arkana Mysteries) Page 11