Turning Darkness into Light

by Marie Brennan

  “Well, him and a lot of other people. It isn’t like he just looked at it one day and said, ‘By gum! I have it!’ But yes, he’s the one who translated the Cataract Stone, and theorized that the language is related to Lashon and Akhian. And then Grandmama proved him right.”

  “Have you met any Draconeans?”

  “Oh, yes, lots. I’ve even been to the Sanctuary.” I shuddered at the memory. “The people are lovely, but what they call ‘summer’ there would barely pass muster as a brisk spring day here.”

  Cora said, “I’ve never been outside of Scirland. I don’t think I would like it very much, but Uncle travels all the time. Mostly to Thiessin and Chiavora—he didn’t like Akhia.”

  All manner of uncharitable responses rose to mind at that, but I bit down on them.

  “If you don’t want me to help you,” Cora went on, “then tell me. Uncle said I should do whatever you say.”

  Like she’s some kind of servant! Or worse, a slave. “I do want your help,” I said. “But only if you want to help.”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know how I can. You saw what happened when I tried. And it made you angry, didn’t it? That I had tried to translate something.”

  The polite thing to do would have been to lie. But Cora is so straightforward that I found myself responding in kind. “Well, yes, a little. But I shouldn’t have been angry. As for translating, it usually takes years of study before anyone is ready. There are other things you can do, though—and to be honest, I’d be grateful for them. Your uncle wants this done very fast, so having someone helping out with all the side tasks would make my life a lot easier.”

  She nodded, unsurprised. “When the tablets arrived, he said they’d change everything.”

  Diary, I tell you: Lord Gleinleigh has a very high opinion of the import of his find, and I’m beginning to wonder why. He’s discovered a long narrative text, and that’s very exciting if you care much about ancient Draconean civilization; we’ve found a few poems before now, a few brief mythical tales or bits of history, but nothing approaching this scale. I’m sure it will teach us all manner of things we didn’t know about their society. But to say it will change everything? That seems unwarranted, when we don’t even know yet what it says.

  Which makes me wonder if he somehow does know. Only I can’t think how he possibly could! It’s easy enough to get the gist of a tax record at a glance, but narrative is much more difficult, and even a few minutes of study tells me this one’s a real corker. The language is so archaic, I can’t think of many people who would even know what to do with it, and the best of them couldn’t just skim it and tell you what it says, not in any detail. I told Lord Gleinleigh I could get through two tablets a month; I only hope I can keep my word. So how could he—a man who probably doesn’t even know what a determinative is—begin to predict what effect this is going to have?

  Pfah. I am putting the tail ahead of the dragon. Lord Gleinleigh just has an inflated opinion of himself, so naturally anything he finds must be stupendously important.

  I didn’t say any of this to Cora, of course. I’m not that birdwitted. I just said, “Well, we’ll see. It’s going to take long hours of work before we have any real sense of what this says.”

  I said the same thing again at supper tonight, to see if Lord Gleinleigh reacted, but he didn’t. We dined alone, without Cora; when I asked why, he replied only that “she doesn’t care to dine in company.” Then, oozing disapproval out every pore, he said, “I heard you were in the garden all afternoon.”

  He thought I was shirking! I said, “Yes, because I began copying today. I don’t know why, but I find that natural light is best for letting me see the inscription clearly—lamps just aren’t the same.”

  “Copying?” he echoed.

  He didn’t even attempt not to sound suspicious. I sighed and said, in my best diplomatic voice, “The tablets may be in good condition for the most part, but they won’t remain that way for long if I’m constantly handling them. Much better to work from a copy—an exact drawing of the signs as the scribe wrote them—and only consult the original when I think there may be an error. Once that’s done, I will transcribe the text—” I saw that I had lost him. “Write out the sounds in our alphabet,” I said. “These are necessary steps, my lord, I assure you. Ask any translator and they will tell you the same.”

  Lord Gleinleigh dismissed this with a flick of his hand. “No, no, quite right. I am not questioning your methods, Miss Camherst.” (He was . . . but I did not point that out.)

  The footman brought out the soup course. One thing I’ll say for Lord Gleinleigh; he lays on a good feast. Though with soup I’m always afraid I’ll slurp and embarrass myself. The earl addressed his own bowl very quietly, and then unbent enough to ask, “How are you getting on?”

  “Well so far. I made it a good way into copying the first tablet today.” I laughed. “Though I would have gotten further if your gardeners and footmen hadn’t constantly been interrupting to offer me a parasol. I told them that I need the direct light for my work, but they kept trying!”

  “They are only concerned for your health,” he said.

  And my complexion, I’m sure—as if that weren’t already a lost cause, by Scirling standards. But for pity’s sake, this isn’t Eriga or the Akhian desert. I don’t think the sun here could burn me if it tried all summer—much less in the middle of winter.

  Then Lord Gleinleigh cleared his throat and said, “And what of the text itself? I know you said these other steps come first, the copying and so forth, but . . .?”

  If I let him, he will press me to do this all rumble-jumble, instead of following proper standards. Well, I shan’t let him—and I have good reason why not. “It’s difficult to say. You know” (I doubt he knows anything of the sort) “that there’s a mark in the Draconean script used to separate words, in the way we use a blank space? That’s a later innovation in their writing; earlier texts don’t have it, and this is definitely an earlier text. So while I can pick out a word here and there, a great many more all blur together, so that I’m not sure whether it says zašu kīberra or zašukī berra. I’m afraid it will be quite some time before I have anything clear enough to share with you.”

  “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.

  Which is obvious when you know what to look for—but for someone like Cora, whose knowledge of the language is as rudimentary as an Anevrai schoolboy’s, spotting that is a tremendous achievement! Especially with two of them so badly damaged (may the sun burn whoever is responsible for that!). And all of them of course have text on both sides, but only mark the numerals at the beginning of the obverse and end of the reverse, with no other feature to tell you which side is which. A quick look even showed me two places where the reverse side begins with a numeral or the obverse ends with one, but simply as a normal part of the text, not as a sequencing aid. “Yes,” Cora said when I pointed those out. “They gave me a lot of difficulty for a while.”

  “I have never seen this before,” I marveled, scribbling down some hasty notes. (Never mind the translation; I suspect I could spend the rest of my life writing journal articles and monographs about other aspects of these tablets.) “None of the Draconean texts I’ve examined have used this method of ordering. And it’s so odd that there’s no colophon—they used those on just about everything that wasn’t a throwaway document, because it was the only way to sort their libraries. I mean, this is clearly a very old text, so perhaps they hadn’t developed those techniques yet. But still.”

  “How can you tell it’s old?” Cora reclaimed her notes and put them away in a leather folder. “All Draconean texts are old. But you mean it’s older still, don’t you?”

  Hunching over the row of tablets had made my back stiff; I stretched it, blessing my Utalu mother for never seeing the point of Anthiopean corsets, even before they started going out of fashion. “Because of the orthography—the way it’s written. Early texts tend to have defective double consonants, meaning that the scribe didn’t write them both; you just have to work out whether it ought to be double or single. That’s why you had ‘slept’ instead of ‘planted’ in your translation, by the way; you didn’t know that the scribe had meant a geminated M in the verb. And these tablets are so archaic that they use triconsonantal root signs, which might stand in for any one of a dozen nouns or verbs built from that root.”

  Cora looked puzzled. “How are you supposed to know which one it is?”

  I shrugged. “You guess.”

  Puzzlement turned to outright offense. My hand to the sun: I have never in my life seen someone so outraged by orthography. “Draconean is like that,” I said, as if further explanation would mollify her. “Sometimes you�
��re supposed to read a given character as its word meaning, like galbu for ‘heart.’ Sometimes you’re supposed to read it for its syllabic value instead, lal. And sometimes it’s a determinative—meaning you don’t pronounce it at all; it’s just there to tell you something about the next bit. The heart determinative means that whatever follows is a person or people, even if it doesn’t look like it. ‘Three heart reeds’ is actually ‘three peoples,’ in the sense of races or nationalities.”

  Cora’s mouth opened and shut a few times as she sputtered. Finally she said, “How does anybody read this language?”

  “With great difficulty,” I said, shrugging. “Now you know why I can’t just pick the tablets up and read them off like a menu in a Thiessois restaurant.”

  “Yes, but how did they read it? The ancient Draconeans?”

  I laughed. “The same way we do. One of the first texts Grandpapa translated in full turned out to be a letter from a young Anevrai scribe to the priest of his home village, complaining about how much he hates learning determinatives and how mercilessly his teacher beats him when he misses a geminated consonant in his reading.”

  “It’s completely irrational,” Cora said, fuming. “There must be so many ways to get the meaning wrong.”

  “Yes, but generally you realize after a while that you have got it wrong. We’d make fewer errors if we spoke the language fluently, like the ancients did, but of course we’re also having to work out the vocabulary at the same time. We’ve come a long way since the Cataract Stone, mind you—we can read quite a bit now. But it’s still slow going.”

  I don’t think I convinced her of anything, though to be honest, I’m not sure there’s anything to convince her of. Draconean writing is really quite irrational, when you get down to it. But it was the first time anyone had invented writing, anywhere in the world, and we can’t really fault them for not doing a very good job on the first try.

  And when you think about it, they did a good enough job that their texts have survived for millennia and we can still read them today—albeit with a lot of effort. I’ll be lucky if anything I do lasts a thousandth as long!