Rhiow and Urruah and Arhu paused there on the shining marble floor while Hwaith got his bearings.“Right,” he said. “The last time I was here, all the Mesoamerican stuff was one floor up. The stairs are over here –“
He led them over to the right, where a stairway came down between the lesser right-hand dome and the main one and switched back to follow the circle of the building up and around to the level over the front entrance. There they passed through an arch in the outer wall into a long hall that ran along the front of the building.
Inside it was an unbroken stretch of glass cases on the dome side, and more cases between the windows that looked down on the main entrance. To Rhiow, the sense of profound age that suddenly descended on her as she glanced around was astonishing. It’s strange, she thought, that I don’t get this feeling when we have reason to go to the museums in the City in our hometime. But possibly I’m just getting jaded about those, having seen them so often.
Or maybe it was just the difference in the kinds of things that were here, the more intimate scale of the displays— not the massive statuary of ehhif tombs and effigies, and their bulky-graceful take on the way People saw the Powers that Be, but instead a lavish collection of the things ancient ehhif in a very different part of the world had used in their day to day lives in this part of the world. There were incense burners and effigies of ehhif and beasts, and all kinds of pots and ceramic baskets and three-or four-footed drinking and eating vessels, some of them in animal shapes or looking like human heads. There was delicate jewelry of silver and turquoise and carved translucent shell, and massive pieces – necklets and gold-bound collars in carved jade and polished stone. There were rows and rows of small round-featured ehhif figures made of clay or other baked ceramics, some simply dressed and some ornately; some still painted after centuries, some worn down by time to the red-brown of theoriginal clay. And off to one side stood a great wall of glass, behind which, on many shelves, stood row after row of tablets that had once been square or rectangular or round, but were now well worn by time into less regular shapes.
“This is it!” Arhu said, sounding excited. “I can feel it. This is where the original rubbings came from – “ He started down the long wall of glass, pausing to look carefully at each group of tablets.
Urruah strolled along in tandem with him, looking over the artifacts on the other side.“I never get tired of how old all these things feel,” Hwaith said to Rhiow as the two of them brought up the rear, watching watched Arhu work his way down the line of cases. “It’s not as if ehhif have been here that much longer than People have – they haven’t, of course.” He looked around him, waving his tail gently. “Maybe it’s just that slight sense of alienness… that there’s this other species sharing the planet with us, and their lives are so complex in so many ways that we’ll never really have time to understand. You might go out on the High Road and meet other species that are physically so different, so strange. But ehhif just seem stranger far because they’re right here alongside us, and we just don’t know them…”
Then he trailed off.“I’m sorry,” Hwaith said. “That must sound awfully facile. Or shallow. You’re in close company with ehhif, you said. The situation probably looks a lot different to you…”
“Oh, no,” Rhiow said. She might feel distracted right now by her concern and unease, but Hwaith’s thought was one that had occurred to her more than once. “In fact, if you ever get really close to one,” she said, “it feels more true, not less. At least that’s been my experience.”
“I wonder what it would be like, sometimes,” Hwaith said. “To be someone’s ‘pet’, to let them build that relationship around you. It must be strange to try to balance something as vital as a Person’s independence against the emotional needs of someone from another species…”
Rhiow laughed just a little sadly, thinking of Hhuha.— For the first time in, dear Iau, it’s days now. I’ve been far too busy this last little while… “It’s nowhere near so clinical,” she said. “What does seem strange at first is to find yourself becoming friends with someone you can’t even talk to. Though if things go well, after a while it starts to seem like the most natural thing in the world…”
“Rhiow!” Arhu said. “Look down here!”
“What?” She trotted down to him, and Hwaith followed. “Is it one of the carvings with the gaps?”
“No,” Arhu said. Just briefly, his voice sounded as if he’d found something funny. Rhiow came up behind him, and alongside Urruah she peered into the case. On its bottommost shelf was a tall fired-clay tablet with some of its paint intact though it was more than five hundred years old. It featured an image in the Mayan style of something that could have been mistaken for a crocodile standing on its hind legs. But the “crocodile’s” muzzle was unusually heavy and blunt and short, and its hind legs were much heavier than any croc’s, and its front legs far too short and delicate. Inaddition, no crocodile ever had teeth like the ones drawn in this creature’s jaws: and crocs didn’t normally come patched in yellow and red. They didn’t normally have wings, either, or wear collars ornamented with little cats’ heads.
“That must have given the archaeologists and translators a fun time,” Urruah said, as amused as Arhu. “Let’s see who they think he is —” He peered at the label mounted on the floor of the enclosure. “’Atypical Feathered Serpent motif, Teotihaucan region circa 1500, with ocelocoatl features. Possibly represents the K’iche Maya deity Q’uq’umatz, Creator, Patron of Civilization and Devourer of Darkness.’”
“More like Auto’matz the Devourer of Pastrami,” Arhu muttered, smiling.
“A colleague of ours back uptime,” Rhiow said to Hwaith, who was possibly understandably looking a little bewildered. “A surprisingly senior colleague for someone so new at the job, too. He’s Arhu’s big brother.”
Hwaith gave Rhiow a look that suggested he thought he was having his tail pulled. Rhiow had to chuckle.“It’s a long story…”
“Looks like the locals knew Ith way back when,” Urruah said to Arhu. “Or rather, they know what he’s become since you and Ith started rewriting thte Great Serpent’s story…”
Arhu moved on to the next case.“Here,” he said. “Here’s one that we have a copy of.” He paused in front of a fired clay tablet that had been broken into a number of pieces and carefully mended. Some of the gaps in the rubbing were not merely places where the characters were missing, but where they’d been actively obliterated by some ehhif with a sharp object. In other spots two or three of them were missing because the tablet itself had been broken there, and the material between either pulverized or otherwise lost.
“Okay,” Arhu said, and reared up on his hind legs to pat the glass with one paw. It went misty and indistinct, responding to yet another variant of the Mason’s Word that he’d apparently had ready. Arhu reared back on his hindquarters a little, then jumped up straight through the glass and into the case. He put a paw on the tablet and started talking quietly to it in the Speech. “It must have been awful to be hurt like that, after somebody went to all that trouble to make you. And then getting all busted up! Remember how it was when you were brand new and all in one piece? I’ll help you remember – “
Every wizard has a working style, and once more Rhiow found herself appreciating Arhu’s. What he might lack in structural sophistication when constructing a spell, he more than made up for in youthful enthusiasm and a kind of raw empathy that came across as very touching. It was no wonder that the tablet responded almost immediately. The resin binder that the museum’s restorershad used to replace the worst gaps in the tablet started fading out of sight, replaced by a clay-colored light that started settling gently into the gaps like water with silt in it. The memory of clay fired a thousand years past began rebuilding itself in the actual materiaclass="underline" the tablet’s edges sharpened, the shapes of the carvings crisped all across the surface. Finally the effect began trembling in the pits and depressions where characters had been obliterated –