I froze, uncertain.
“Are you not going to ask what job I am referring to?”
I sat back down, unsure what he was playing at. “Uh, what job are you referring to?”
“There is a reason why you are in the wagon with me. And why the crates of mysterious parchments have been moved here as well.”
Comprehension was sometimes the slowest dawn of all. “The crates?”
“You have done an admirable job recording thus far, but that, as you now know, is only half your job. Translation is the other and unquestionably more vital and valuable half.” He pulled a small brass key from a belt pouch. “You are familiar with the first crate, I believe?”
I felt a surge of excitement and nodded quickly, taking the key.
“Very good. We have a day’s ride before we arrive at Henlester’s little lodge in the Forest of Deadmoss. I suggest you begin.”
Finally, a chance to do what I was trained for. “Do you want me to transcribe all of it word for word, or as many as I can work out? Or just the sections that seem germane to-”
“All. I hired you for your education and skill, not your judgment in using them. Leave the judgment to me.”
“But you’re really hoping for information about the Deserters, or early records of Memoridons, or whatever they called them before they were called Memoridons, right?”
“And anything to do with peculiar weapons or artifacts that behave like this one.” He drummed two fingers along Bloodsounder’s haft. “You will likely encounter a great deal of information that relates to none of those things. I don’t particularly care. Transcribe every bit of it you can. Let me worry about divining the meaning, yes?”
Even while I was eager to begin, I’d never considered the prospect of trying to do the translation in a wagon on the way to capture or kill (I never could be sure which) one of the highest ranking clerics in the land. “It will be difficult enough parsing things out. This is a language that isn’t even spoken anymore. At least as far as I know. So it will take time. But even more challenging doing it in a moving wagon and-”
“I don’t recall-did I say this wouldn’t be odious or arduous? If so, I grossly misspoke. But it is the task before you, and if you happen to uncover some sparkling gem of knowledge that proves useful to me, your own utility will increase tenfold. So begin translating. Now.”
And just like that, the steel and command was back. Or perhaps it was always there, a sword in a soft leather scabbard, and I’d somehow gotten distracted by the delicate tooling on the surface and forgot that a bloodied blade was inside the whole time, just waiting to be drawn and used.
“Old Anjurian” was probably a misnomer. That implied that there was some direct continuity to the contemporary Anjurian spoken and written in this southern, grassy kingdom. Whereas in fact, there was far more separating the two than overlapping or linking them.
The task was going to be time-consuming and incredibly difficult-I hadn’t had cause to translate it for years, and like any language, if you do not exercise your use of it, it grows fuzzy, distant, and foreign again.
So, as I pulled the canvas flap shut in back and fastened the tie tight, and took the key in hand, excited despite knowing I would probably wade through miles of tedium and frustration before uncovering anything remarkable, if the latter happened at all, it occurred to me that I couldn’t simply unlock the crate and start in. I had to have a system for cataloguing, tracking so as to work through it methodically and systematically.
I popped my head back through the flap at the front, earning a disgusted sigh. “I don’t want to include commentary or marginalia on the source material, but can I at least tick off my spot on the pages, or mark which ones I’ve completed?”
“You’ve never heard of piles?”
“Piles fall. Especially on a moving wagon on a rutted road that is probably worse than traveling across virgin landscape.”
I saw only his profile, so couldn’t work out his expression, but after a pause he replied, “A small mark and one only per page. Do not sully these pages, archivist. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I said, returning to my place beneath a swinging pot.
I found myself simultaneously delighted and dreading what would happen after clicking the lock open. Delighted because as exciting as it was to be doing something I was good at again, exercising some skills that had been dormant for some time, it was even more invigorating to know I was going to be exploring material that had been moldering in some vault or tomb for centuries, perhaps longer. And dread because the long spells of unpleasantness that accompany any stretch of translation were going to be trebled as I struggled to find my footing with such dusty content, and to parse out the original intention of the words, allowing for peculiar idioms, odd cultural context I wasn’t aware of, and other challenges of translating text that were going to be heightened and magnified now.
Retrieving my writing desk, I pinned the parchment to the raised lid, readied my pens, uncorked my ink, and slowly slid the small key into the lock. It popped open with a rather unimpressive and pedestrian click. And then I got started.
The first few hours were no less bumpy than the road. It had been so long since I’d seen script like this, it almost seemed like a language I had no familiarity with at all. I stumbled, and backtracked, and generally stared at the scribbled words, befuddled.
I was beginning to despair of ever making sense of the words on the page. But very slowly, with each passing mile and hour, it began to come back to me. Slowly. When we stopped at midday, I was shaking, sweaty from being confined in the stuffy wagon, frustrated, and glad when Braylar bid me lock it all up and take a small break.
Vendurro tried to initiate some conversation, but after offering only a few stilted replies, and realizing I was directing my irritation his way for no good reason, I excused myself and took a walk through an untilled field.
When we finally started forward again, I took my spot, a little more relaxed and grounded than I had been. Wine helped. Though it was closing in on vinegar.
Throughout the afternoon, things haltingly started to come easier, as I immersed myself in the source material fully without worrying overmuch about how precise of a translation it was, or how long it seemed to be taking to regain any fluency in the language. As the day wore on, I felt myself becoming engrossed. Not in the material itself, which proved to be a lay subsidy roll in the first instance (as dusty a topic as the scroll itself) and the first three codices in a twelve-part series dealing with early religious and secular Anjurian law that outlined the intersection but more often the tensions and gulfs, going into voluminous detail about defining the castes and how they ought to be represented in local courts, rights of inheritance, and other equally riveting analysis of ancient jurisprudence. But engrossed in the process itself, the puzzling it out.
When the wagon stopped abruptly, I’d almost forgotten I was actually riding in one, or that we had a very unpleasant destination before us. Until Braylar pulled the flap aside and called back, “You’ve spilled enough ink for the day, archivist. Get your wits about you.” He looked at the stains on my fingers and then my face, where I must have touched myself while penning. “You have spilled more than enough, in fact. I gave you a directive not to sully the pages. Clearly I should have told you to protect yourself from them as well.”
I nearly touched my face again where he was staring and stopped myself. “Are we at the lodge?”
“Yes, Arki. Henlester is just outside. He invited your personally to sup with him and discuss ink preferences.”
The flap fell closed again. For a moment, I couldn’t tell what felt worse-stopping when I felt as if I was finally building some momentum, or stopping because we might actually be near a site where more blood was going to stain the grass and leaves.