Chapter Fifteen #2
The Trio Winds howled as the winter weeks bled into each other.
To my disappointment, Daziel and I continued without change as well.
I’d hoped we were building toward something, but maybe I’d been mistaken, or maybe neither of us were brave enough to try.
Now, though, I was excruciatingly aware of every time our hands brushed, or our eyes held an extra beat, or our legs touched on the sofa.
I spent most of my time in the Keep, trying and failing to make any progress with Language X.
“Even if we can make sense of articles and common verbs, how are we going to figure out unique words?” Stefan said mournfully as our cohort gathered one Saturday afternoon.
The weekends were often best for working, with no other classes to distract us.
Outside, the Ver shrieked down the Lersach, unsettling in its rage, and from the windows we could see violent waves.
“They could be adjectives or weird verbs or names—there’s no way to know. ”
“Names,” Yael mused, moving her pen in circles on a scrap of paper, as though hoping ideas would spring forth. “That would be useful. If we could find, say, ‘Stefan’ in Language X, then we could pronounce those characters.”
Stefan laughed. We were at the point of exhaustion where everything seemed funny. “It should say ‘Stefan’ in there.”
“Not ‘Stefan,’ ” Gidon said suddenly. He had pulled out a bag of dates, and I was wondering if I could steal one. “But what about—the name of an ancient king? Ena-Cinnai was ruled by royalty twenty-five hundred years ago. Maybe the king’s name is there—or ‘Talum.’ ”
“Talum wasn’t founded yet,” Yael said, but absently, as though correcting a mistake through sheer force of habit rather than because she was focusing on it.
Because she was probably focusing, as I was, on the potential of this idea.
This could be a breakthrough. While we could potentially translate words based on frequency—in our language, the most common words were “the,” “be,” “to,” “of,” and “and,” with much of our work so far based on theorizing similar frequencies in Language X—we still wouldn’t know phonetics.
If we could match a name from Ena-Cinnaian to Language X, we would be able to pronounce letters.
“It doesn’t have to be a king’s name,” I said slowly. “If we could figure out any word—probably a proper noun—that’s remained unchanged all these years, we could match Language X characters to ours.”
“Are there going to be any?” Stefan asked skeptically. “Pronunciations probably shifted over two thousand years.”
“Do you have a better idea?” I asked.
Stefan shrugged. Apparently not.
For a few minutes, we racked our brains. Stefan took one of Gidon’s dates, so I did too, and we stood around, munching on them and staring at each other. I couldn’t think of a single ancient noun. Surely nouns existed. Probably.
“The tribes,” Gidon said.
Right. Of course. Old things did exist. “Place names,” I added. “I can pull a map from the library, and we can see what’s stayed unchanged.”
“The Great Beasts,” Stefan added. “Other religious stuff, probably? Shedim?”
“Good.” Yael’s pencil stilled, and she ripped off her page of doodles to leave a fresh new page. “Let’s make a list.”
~ ~ ~
“You’re distracted,” Daziel said a few hours later, probably not for the first time. “What’s going on?”
“Sorry.” I returned to slicing the pears I’d picked from the pear tree in the corner. They weren’t seasonal, but they were very sweet. “We’re trying something new. We’re coming up with words that might have stayed the same for thousands of years—ancient nouns.”
Daziel looked confused. “Ancient nouns? Like what? Why?”
I brought the pear slices over to the couch, very aware of the space between us as I sat.
“If a word was pronounced the same way millennia ago as now, we could match our version to Language X’s and extrapolate which Language X characters phonetically correspond to ours.
So we’re looking at ancient cities, stuff like that.
” I snagged a library book I’d left on the coffee table, flipping to a map of the world from three thousand years ago.
“Not tons of places have been around that long, but Aolong has, and Tzorybium. If the scrolls mention a noun we still use and match it, it could be a game changer.” I sighed.
“Of course, we’d have to be able to match them in the first place. ”
“Huh.” He leaned forward, his shoulder almost brushing mine. If I tilted slightly to the right, we would touch. “You need a word that’s…distinctive. So you can recognize it.”
I munched on the crisp pear. As I licked the juice off my fingers, I caught Daziel watching and looked away, flushing. “Exactly. But what’s distinctive?”
Daziel looked as intrigued as I’d been a few hours ago, but his brain was still fresh tonight. “You’ve made a list of unchanged proper nouns?”
“That’s what we started, yeah.”
He nodded thoughtfully. “Are any of them…different? Unique?”
“How do you mean?” I rubbed my forehead.
More than anything, I wanted to lean against Daziel’s shoulder and have him rub my head.
Why was it so hard to figure out if he liked me?
This was driving me mad. I’d thought he might, but hadn’t I obviously shown my own interest, going to his game?
If he knew I liked him, and he also liked me, why wouldn’t he do something? “My brain hurts so much.”
He took a pear slice. “Hyphenated? Like ‘Ena-Cinnai.’ ”
Leah had told me going to his game wasn’t the clear indicator I thought. I supposed I could say something, but if he rejected me we’d be trapped in these tiny rooms and it could ruin our entire friendship, and there’d be no way I could focus on the scrolls. “ ‘Ena-Cinnai’ isn’t old enough.”
“I mean something that looks different. Something you could recognize without needing to know the characters themselves. By recognizing a pattern. Something with four O’s in a row or whatever.”
A pattern. I racked my brain, willing to entertain this because it wasn’t like I had any better ideas, and I needed some distraction from my yearning to press my body against his.
I thought through the proper nouns we’d written down so far.
The tribes. Ancient royalty. A few ancient places. The Great Beasts.
Wait.
My stomach hollowed out, and my head felt light.
“Ziz,” I whispered. Two sounds but three letters—because it was two letters, one repeated. “ ‘Ziz’ is a palindrome,” I breathed, the realization hitting me with blunt force, leaving me shaking with excitement. “If we have a three-character palindrome…”
You didn’t need to understand a language to recognize a palindrome.
I broke out in sweat, then shook my head. “It’s wildly unlikely one of the scrolls would mention the Ziz.”
Daziel shrugged. “Okay.”
“But…on the off chance…or if there’s another palindrome in there we could match to a proper noun…”
He laughed. “You’re dying to run to the Keep and check right now, aren’t you?”
“I mean, yeah!”
“It’s past nine bells.”
“Please,” I begged, more to be funny than anything else. Making Daziel laugh always lit a delighted spark within me.
He grinned, his eyes gleaming with silver amusement, and sure enough, it sent a thrill through me. “I’m surprised you haven’t left yet.”
If I’d been a more spontaneous person, I would have pressed my lips to his right then. But while Daziel had called me impulsive, it turned out that only applied to my physical safety, not my heart’s.
So I channeled my energy into dashing to the Keep.
We ran into Yael and Stefan leaving a pub on our way there, bundled up in sweaters beneath their blazers and hats pulled over their ears.
Yael looked surprised, but no more so than me to see the two of them together. “Where are you going?” she asked.
“The Keep,” I said. “It’s probably nothing, but…”
They both went on alert. “But what?” Stefan asked.
“The name ‘Ziz’—it’s a palindrome. We could recognize a palindrome in Language X.”
I watched as the realization hit them, the hope they desperately tried to temper. “It’s super unlikely the Ziz is mentioned,” Stefan finally said.
“Super unlikely,” I agreed.
“Let’s go,” Yael said, and started running.
Gidon was alone in the scroll room, still working, when the four of us burst in. He startled, looking a bit like an upright grasshopper. “What’s going on?”
“Ziz,” I said.
“What?”
“Don’t you people take breaks?” Daziel asked, looking at the two cups of coffee next to Gidon’s desk. “Gidon, did you even have dinner?”
“It’s a palindrome.” I strode to the reference binder containing the thirty-five hundred words in the scrolls. I could probably modify a spell to sort them by character length, but I didn’t have the patience. Instead, I started paging through, scanning for three-character words.
Gidon’s mouth parted with understanding.
My cohort crowded around me, our heads almost knocking as we scanned Yael’s neat handwriting. We wanted a short palindrome. We wanted—
Gidon let out a strange sound, half a laugh and half a sob. He jutted his finger halfway down the first column on the third page. “There. A palindrome. A three-character palindrome.”
Stefan grasped Yael’s shoulder, squeezing tight, and she didn’t seem to mind; she was beaming too.
“Ziz,” he said, and then we were all saying it, staring at the letters we hadn’t been able to pronounce before, that we had eked meaning out of.
Now we could understand two of the letters, something we’d never been able to do.
We could pull sound from characters silenced for thousands of years.
“Ziz,” we said, like a chorus of insects. We were laughing and cheering, and I caught a few suspiciously gleaming eyes. “Ziz.”
Beside each word in the binder, a number showed how often it occurred. “Ziz” showed up fifteen times, a startling frequency for an uncommon word. Also, unexpectedly, an asterisk marked it as a word included in one of the scrolls’ headings.
“Here,” Daziel said, pointing. We gathered to look at the heading he indicated, and we let out another round of congratulatory hollers.
We should have known we were being too loud, especially given the closeness of Professor Altschuler’s office. Yet we couldn’t help ourselves, lost in excitement, unable to stifle our happiness about connecting a few scant dots.
So we shouldn’t have been surprised when someone else entered the room, though I didn’t think any of us noticed him until he spoke—and not for the first time, if the volume of his voice was any indication.
“What,” Professor Altschuler said, staring at us, and now finally we quieted and stared back, “is going on?”
I flinched, my heart thudding. I felt like I’d been caught robbing a museum or plagiarizing a paper. But no, we’d done something good. “We’ve found a word. Well. We can’t confirm it. But a guess. A three-letter palindrome we think might be ‘Ziz.’ ”
For a moment, I wasn’t sure if Professor Altschuler had heard me. He stood very, very still, and then he drifted over to the scroll. Gidon pointed out the palindrome in the heading.
The professor closed his eyes. A look of almost ecstatic relief crossed his face, smoothing lines away and making him look much younger.
“Then we have Z and I,” he breathed. His hand flexed, as though he didn’t know what to do with the energy within him.
I realized, for maybe the first time, Altschuler cared about this the way my cohort did—he too longed to unearth hidden secrets, to bring the unknown to light.
“Next we need other words that might contain Z and I,” Yael said. “We should start looking—”
“Not now,” Professor Altschuler said. “It’s nine thirty on a Saturday, and I have places to be. We’ll return to this tomorrow.” He gestured for us to leave the room before him.
“But, Professor—”
“We’re on a roll—”
“We’re not tired, I promise—”
“Out,” Professor Altschuler said firmly. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
Banished, we stood outside the scroll room, buzzing with energy and stumped on what to do next. Then I started laughing. “Do you think he’s afraid we’re going to steal his discovery?”
Stefan let out a hoot and shot me a look of appreciation. “Honestly, yes.”
“What are we going to do now?” Gidon looked like he might tear his hair out.
“Easy,” Stefan said. “We’re going to fucking celebrate.”