by Abby Roberts
in Issue 153, October 2024
Seshet tossed aside her wax-coated writing tablet almost carelessly. The pain behind her left eye was the kind of pain indicative of having stared at the same godsdamn tablet all godsdamn day. Her back was sore, too, because she’d been sitting for hours without support.
The rustle of her robe and the scuff of her sandals as she stood drew glances from other scholars, whose focus returned to their own codices, scrolls, and tablets a moment later. The sunlight falling between the walls had drawn them to the cloister like ornamental fish to breadcrumbs. Seshet collected her things—tablet, stylus, a dictionary of reconstructed Tawi, and a codex of copied Tawi inscriptions—and went in search of relief. Her colleagues didn’t look at her again.
A master chose a student. They continued their teacher’s studies and, one day, they trained a student to succeed them in turn. So the House of Learning ensured that generations of scholars built on each other’s work. How disappointing it would be, Seshet thought, if an entire lineage of master linguists dead-ended at her.
In the first few centuries after the Cataclysm, every two-bit scribe to grasp a stylus had claimed one could work wonders with the Sacred Script of Tawi, the lost empire. The ability to read and write in the Script would, supposedly, allow a person to command spirits, heal illnesses, germinate crops, and so on. Of course, this had to be nonsense, Seshet thought. Never mind that all magic had been lost in the Cataclysm, if indeed it had existed before—if one wrote a spell every time one used the Script, how would the Tawi have kept records, written letters, or done anything else requiring a mundane, non-magical writing system?
But, since comprehension of the Script had burned with Tawi, this flush of post-Cataclysm enthusiasm had launched millennia of attempts to decipher it. Only the gods knew how many masters had worked on the Script. Ten years ago, Master Darush had at last produced a partial transliteration. No one had made any progress since then.
The lack of a breakthrough reflected particularly poorly on Seshet. She had been Darush’s last student, before he’d died.
Since then, all she had to show for herself—and for his legacy—was a few treatises almost no one would read. She had transliterated a few inscriptions, proving Darush’s system held up, but most of the thousands of characters that comprised the Script remained stubbornly opaque. The work was interesting, if exhausting, and Seshet wasn’t nearly as good at it as she should be, given her scholarly lineage. Sometimes, she wondered if she would be better off doing anything other than linguistics, but she was thirty, too old to apprentice to a trade if she left the House of Learning.
Darush, if he’d been still alive, would have known what words she needed to hear. He had a way of asking questions that got her mind working again when she was stuck. After five years, the numb space in her chest had become overgrown, but she still felt his absence.
Seshet composed herself as she passed the refectory, the voices of late lunch-goers humming behind its wooden doors. She nearly ran into a parchment delivery woman, nodded weakly to a colleague who wished her good afternoon, and turned down a cool, dim hall, heading in the direction of the hospice wing, until she reached a certain door. She knocked.
“Emergency?” a muffled voice called from within.
“No, Imat, it’s me.”
“Seshet! Come in.”
A strong smell of ginger invaded Seshet’s nostrils the moment she stepped inside. The culprit was a pot of something bubbling over a brazier on the floor. Imat, a stocky woman a few years younger than Seshet, sat at a table nearby, mashing herbs with a mortar and pestle.
“Hello, Imat,” said Seshet. “Something good for headaches, if you can spare a moment.”
“Right,” said Imat. “Wait until I’m done with this. How’s the work going with the Magic Script?”
“The Sacred Script.” Seshet put her things down on Imat’s table and sat in an empty chair, grateful for its back support. “It’ll never be deciphered, or not for hundreds of years after I’m dead.”
“Oh, that well?”
Seshet made a noise of frustration.
She sat brooding as Imat put aside her work and used a metal fork to carry the steaming pot out through the door to some purpose known to healers. When Imat came back, the pot had been refilled with clean water, and she returned it to the brazier. She brushed aside strands of dried herbs hanging from her ceiling, rummaged in a cupboard, and produced a wad of wood shavings, which she deposited in the pot. “I’m making willow bark tea for you,” she said, as she sat across from Seshet. “In the meantime, you’re going to tell me why we haven’t translated this godsawful Script in four thousand years, and I’m going to act like I didn’t sleep through all of Mistress Tobol’s classes.”
“Transliterated, not translated. Transliteration means that I’m converting the Script into equivalent characters in the Northern syllabary. Translation would be rendering the meaning of the text in Usiran.”
Imat waved her hand. “You’re here to complain, not correct my deficient linguistic education. Get on with it.”
“Where do I start?” Seshet said. “There’s the fact that the Tawi language as reconstructed by historical linguists is just an approximation of the spoken language the Script represents. The fact that we only have texts and inscriptions from the colonies that survived the Cataclysm to work with. And the fact that the Script is made up of literally thousands of signs. Some of them appear in single inscriptions. Some of them show up everywhere. There’s one inscription where the signs are all birds of various kinds. It’s like rowing a boat upstream with holes in it while trying to map the river at the same time.”
Imat made a face. “Thousands of signs? I’m not a linguist, but I don’t think a language would need that many syllabic characters. We get by perfectly fine with forty-five.”
“There’s a Kaskan language with sixty-two consonants and three vowels. The speakers use a version of the Northern syllabary, like us, only with a lot of diacritics,” Seshet said. “But you’re right. Thousands is unlikely for a syllabic script like ours, in which each sign represents a consonant-vowel combination. So, people thought for a long time that the Sacred Script was ideographic, that the Tawi had used it to write ideas, not sounds.”
Imat clapped her hands. “Like how some people will draw an anatomically incorrect human heart and use it to write ‘I love you’ or ‘my beloved.’ That’s cute.”
“It would be, but that’s actually not how the Script works. When Darush transliterated a list of the names of Tawi rulers, he proved that the signs are phonetic. They do map to sounds. That allows the Script to be used to write the personal names of monarchs and, likely, pronouns, grammatical particles, and other things languages do that you can’t easily represent with pictures. His discovery was a revolution in Tawi studies.”
“Mm. Like when Meretat of Zar discovered the medicinal properties of bread mold.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
Imat used her metal fork to remove the boiling pot from the brazier again. The liquid had turned murky brown. “It’s not done. Let it steep for a bit.”
Seshet didn’t look up. She’d been fourteen when Darush had shown her his first tentative transliteration of the name of Queen Ahti—part of the project he would pursue until his death. He’d asked Seshet if she could make anything of it, as if she’d already been a master in her own right instead of a student who’d passed her introductory-level botany exam just that afternoon.
On Darush’s tablet, Ahti’s name was preceded by a sequence of three signs, not transliterated: a ram’s head, a flowering plant with three branching stems, and a mace. Seshet had asked if that bit meant ‘queen’ or ‘ruler.’ That was a reasonable guess, Darush had said.
She’d pointed to the plant sign. “That’s yarrow.” Fresh from her exam, she’d have recognized yarrow if she were asleep. “Funny thing to put in front of a monarch’s name.”
“I have no idea why it’s there,” Darush had said. “One day, you’ll tell me, yes?”
Sitting at Imat’s table, Seshet felt grief clutch at her throat. She did not want to start bawling, so she laughed ruefully. “Imat, what if I quit? Quit working on the Script, I mean.”
“For the day, or forever?”
“What good will it do Darush’s legacy if—” If it’s carried on by a dense, useless student, she didn’t say. “—If I can’t continue his work, or teach another student to do the same?”
“If you’re miserable, maybe it is best you quit,” said Imat. “Do you like your work?”
Seshet considered this.
“On good days, I like the mystery of the Script. The part of it that’s like a puzzle box I could open if I turned it a different way. The awe I feel, working on something so old, being so close and so far to people who died four millennia ago. On bad days, I know I’m hitting the same wall that’s stopped hundreds of other masters and that history is against my being the one to break through it. And I feel like a fool and a fraud.”
“Seshet, you don’t think that the Stewards of the House made you a master by mistake, do you?”
Sometimes Seshet thought they had, but that would be a childish thing to say. “No. But I’ve been doing this for so long, Imat, and I have almost nothing to show for it. I’m afraid I’ll waste my life if I keep it up.”
“Well, if you quit, who will do the work?”
“Someone else. The Script will get cracked eventually, or it won’t, in which case it’s not my problem.”
Imat smiled, a bit grimly. “Usually, when I get cases like yours, it’s a healer pushed to their limits by long shifts and too many patients they can’t help. Sometimes they need to find another vocation. Sometimes they need time away. Try the time away first?”
Seshet sighed. “I doubt I’m working anymore today regardless.”
So Seshet had her cup of willow bark tea. Its bitterness was not totally disguised by the honey Imat added, but it helped the pains in her head and back. At Imat’s urging, she followed the healer out to the herb garden with a tray of two-week-old seedlings, which she spent the rest of the afternoon carefully depositing into the potent soil. She tried to ignore the odor of manure.
Some of the immature plants were yarrow. Seshet hadn’t recognized them until Imat had told her what they were. It was a coincidence, nothing more. Yarrow was a useful medicinal herb. Seshet sniffled, telling Imat that the pollen had gotten to her.
When she finished the planting, she drew, in a patch of bare dirt near the yarrow bed, the yarrow-sign of the Script: a branching stem and cloudy head of flowers.
She’d stepped inside to put away some empty planters when Imat called for her. The sharpness in Imat’s voice made her grab the big shovel and rush outside again. It wasn’t too early in the season for snakes—
Imat stood staring at a flower bed in the far corner of the garden. She held a trowel slack in her hand and wore an expression of shock, but she wasn’t in any danger that Seshet could see.
“Gods and spirits,” said Seshet. “I was afraid there was a—Oh.”
It was the bed Seshet had planted moments ago. Then, the plants had been an inch or two tall. Now they were nearly up to Seshet’s knees and straining toward the late afternoon sun, with a pop, pop, pop that suggested leaves erupting, buds bursting, stems elongating, greedy green fingers grasping. They had reached the level of Seshet’s knees, the white parasols of their flower clusters opening as they matured. Nearly thigh-high, now—
“I—I don’t understand—How—?” Seshet gestured wildly with her free hand and the shovel. “What, in the names of all the gods and spirits, is happening?”
“It’s a bit creepy to hear them grow like that,” Imat said. She’d composed herself and taken on a professional calmness that probably served her well in the hospice wards. “Did you…do anything…that could have caused this?”
“No! What could I have done?” Seshet inspected the bed from a safe distance of several paces. She remembered putting the seedlings in their little holes, like Imat had shown her, and then she’d gone on to the next bed, which still contained immature plants. That was all she’d done. Well, no, it wasn’t—
Seshet used the end of the shovel to press back the stems of the supernaturally aggressive yarrow, revealing the branching symbol etched into the earth.
“This is a Script sign. I was fooling around, and I drew it. We don’t know exactly what it means, but it probably depicts the common yarrow or a related species,” she told Imat.
“I thought you told me your script wasn’t magic.”
“It’s not! The sign shouldn’t have made this happen. It doesn’t make sense.”
“Try it again with these plants over here. Let’s see if we can get replicable results.”
“I don’t think this is a controlled experiment.” Nonetheless, Seshet borrowed Imat’s trowel to mark the sign in a second bed of yarrow seedlings. They waited.
“I can’t tell if they’re getting bigger, or if it’s my imagination,” Seshet said, after a moment.
“No, they’re definitely growing,” Imat said. “Look at that one.”
Seshet followed the line of Imat’s pointing finger. The seedling had one pair of broad embryonic leaves, a second pair of fine, feathery adult leaves, and a bud at the center of the stem. No, the bud had split into a pair of new leaves. No, these leaves had lengthened from the central stem and were developing leaflets of their own. And the stem was several fingers’ lengths taller than it had been a moment ago. Pop, pop, pop, pop.
“Seshet. Your little sign. I think it’s a spell.”
“No! Gods and spirits, Imat, I’m a linguist. I’m not a mage!” Seshet had read somewhere that Sampa Urd had made a whole clutch of eggs hatch overnight by applying the broody-hen-sign, back in the thirty-second century. She’d dismissed that story as credulous legend-mongering. “I wrote the yarrow-sign dozens of times this morning when I was working in the cloister. No miraculous flowers burst forth. I wrote the plow-sign, woman-carrying-a-basket-sign, and red-throated-loon-sign, too, and no such marvels appeared.”
“Maybe you need the seedlings for the magic to work. Or maybe it’s something to do with intention, or desire,” Imat said. “Let’s try it with other plants.”
The yarrow-sign, they found, did not affect any other plant. Another sign Seshet recalled caused members of the mint family to gain a bit of height, but nothing as dramatic. Yet another sign, widely interpreted as depicting a garlic plant, did nothing.
“It might not be garlic after all,” Seshet said. “We haven’t securely identified all the signs.”
“Or maybe it’s just getting late,” Imat said. The evening shadows were stretching long. “Plants need sunlight to grow.”
Indoors again, Seshet bent over Imat’s washbasin, trying to remove the dirt lodged under one fingernail with another, equally filthy fingernail. Something tugged a thread in her mind. The yarrow-sign clearly had some power over the plant, but the sign must have some meaning unrelated to the medicinal herb. Seshet had seen it in too many inscriptions—such as the royal name list—where it would make no sense to discuss a plant used to staunch bleeding.
She sat back down at Imat’s table, opened her inscription codex and her dictionary, and said, “Imat, could you sit down a moment? I feel like I’m closing in on something related to the Script. It might help me to talk through it.”
“All right,” Imat said. “You know I don’t know much about linguistics.”
“You don’t have to say anything. I just want to think out loud. Thanks.” Seshet recalled the accounts she had read of Tawi magic, all written centuries after the Cataclysm and garbled in transmission. “Siraf the Venerable wrote that the signs of the Sacred Script name the spirits of things they depict and call those spirits forth. If you strip away the mysticism, that sounds like what we saw in the garden this afternoon.”
“If ‘calling the spirit’ of the yarrow causes it to sprout, then yes, that’s what we saw.”
“The difficulty with that,” Seshet said slowly, “is that it relies on the same mistaken assumption people believed for millennia: that Script signs correspond to objects or ideas, not sounds. If a sign commands the spirit of a yarrow plant, you’d think that sign means, simply, ‘yarrow.’ But that doesn’t square with Darush’s discovery that the Script is phonetic.”
“Well, then why do the signs look like plants, anyways?”
Because language is arbitrary, Seshet thought, but didn’t say. Because the meanings of sounds and signs are not inherent to them but given to them by people. Bless Imat. She had no equal in tea and sympathy, but she wasn’t a linguist.
Seshet pressed her fingers against her closed eyelids. Her headache was returning. She felt she was missing something obvious.
If she’d been talking to Darush, he wound have nodded with mock solemnity and said, Ah, so you’re telling me that each sign must be used in exactly one way?
She’d have answered, No, of course not. But there must be consistency for the writing system to be usable at all. Darush probably would have said nothing as he waited for her to dig herself deeper into the hole, or out of it.
Well, she’d have conceded, there was a fad a year or so back that had people writing in pictures as well as syllabic characters. Like Imat had mentioned earlier, people had used a heart symbol to represent the verb ‘to love,’ and things of that nature. But that wasn’t real writing, it was just fun.
Darush’s eyebrows would have risen halfway up his bald head as he asked, Wasn’t it? It sounds like writing to me. Isn’t there some high-falutin’ name for this type of language play?
“A rebus,” Seshet said aloud.
“A what now?” Imat asked.
“A symbol used for the sound it’s associated with instead of its meaning.” Seshet reached for the codex of inscriptions and turned to the page that showed the list of Tawi rulers. The same sequence of signs occurred before each name: a ram’s head, a yarrow plant, and a mace. Seshet wrote it in an unused part of her tablet.
If the yarrow-sign is a rebus, Seshet told her memory of Darush, then it can represent the sounds of the Tawi word for yarrow, even in words that have no etymological connection. So, maybe some word meaning ‘ruler’ contained a sequence that, by chance, sounded like the name of the plant. The yarrow-sign would represent this sequence of sounds in the written language.
Perhaps, he would have said. Let’s test it out.
She checked the dictionary entry for the reconstructed Tawi word for ‘yarrow,’ *meški, and pressed the syllables into the tablet, directly below the yarrow-sign.
She thumbed ahead to the entry for ‘ruler, monarch’: *gembeškilik. The word’s second and third syllables were something close to *meški—with the wrong initial consonant. An eb, not an em.
So much for that idea, Seshet told Darush’s memory.
Keep reading, the memory replied. You’re so quick to give up sometimes.
The entry included a note: Literally, ‘one who acts with authority,’ from verb *beškilik (p. 86) with nominalizing prefix *gem- (p. 192). Aras and Skandi assert in Phonological Processes of Middle Tawi (4198) that homorganic consonants were elided after nasals as early as the Middle Tawi stage. Although their hypothesis is not accepted by all specialists, Aras and Skandi reconstruct *gemeškilik.
Seshet licked her dry lips, writing ‘ge-’ and ‘-lik’ below the ram’s-head-sign and mace-sign. The tablet now read ‘ge-meški-lik.’ Ram-yarrow-mace. Three signs corresponding to three sequences of sounds, three parts of a word.
Her heart knocked against the inside of her chest. She realized she had forgotten to breathe.
“What’s that you wrote down?” Imat asked. “It’s got that sign again. No flowers came out of my table, though.”
“I think the sign by itself may be a spell,” Seshet said. “Because, written alone, the sign represents an idea after all. But when it’s written with other signs, it represents some of the sounds that form a word, like any of our syllabic characters. The sign doesn’t stand for an idea or a sound. It’s both, depending on context. This may be how the Tawi commanded the magic latent in the Script, while still using it for ordinary, non-spell purposes.”
She sat back. Her hands itched to write long into the night, but she made them rest quietly in her lap. There was an almost dreamlike quality to Imat’s well-lit room. After so many years, Seshet finally had a lead on the Script.
Good work, Darush’s memory said to her. Now get some rest.
It was dim in the cloister. The sun was not yet high enough to peer over the walls, but scholars were already trickling in to claim their favorite spots. They moved aside for Seshet when she came in. Someone gave her a little wave of the hand before squinting back at their own tablet. She plopped down two cushions, one for her back and one for her rear, and sat, leaning against a column with her codex open on her knees.
Seshet wondered how much the others knew. The night before, she and Imat had disclosed their discovery to the Stewards, with the insistence that they wanted to keep it quiet for now. Given the magnitude of potentially rediscovering Tawi magic, Seshet wanted to get in touch with a specialist on this topic before announcing her single accidental spell, but it was difficult to keep a secret from the three hundred or so people one lived with. Scholars gossiped. Perhaps some of her colleagues knew already and were tactful enough not to say so, or perhaps Seshet imagined the keenness in their glances.
The Script might hold wonders yet unknown, but her primary concern was still its decipherment. She would have to cross-reference hundreds of attested signs and sign combinations with the reconstructed Tawi vocabulary before she’d be close to publishing anything. She’d have to make prayers and sacrifices to all the gods and spirits who favored scholars, asking them to uphold Aras and Skandi’s hypothesis, or she’d have to begin all over again.
A complete decipherment would take years, even if everything went well. Yesterday, this might have discouraged her. Today, her mind and hands were restless with excitement.
And, gods and spirits, she’d forgotten how beautiful the Script was, with the iconic simplicity of its signs. People and animals and birds and fish and farm tools and weapons and musical instruments and buildings and natural features in innumerable positions and postures going on almost forever. A hoard of infinite possible meanings to unearth.
Her heart fluttered, like she was a girl again and a handsome neighbor had asked her to dance. She had a lot of work to do.
©October 2024, Abby Roberts
Abby Roberts is an assistant editor by day and a writer by night. This is her first fiction publication.
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