Chapter 13
THIRTEEN
GWENNA
The day doesn’t get better from there. I hustle back to our room and take a scalding hot shower, but Morgan’s already gone for her three-hour seminar, so I brave the dining hall alone. Not that I’m even that hungry.
Someone “accidentally” spills an entire glass of water across my tray, leaving my waffle and bacon soggy. When I’m rushing off to calculus, someone holds the door, only to let it slam in my face and almost stub the toe of my boot.
And as I’m walking through the building after class, I hear two girls whispering to each other, a few feet away.
I am, fully and entirely, persona non grata .
I don’t give them the satisfaction of a reaction and just hide my face, walking briskly to the only place that I think will be safe, the alcove at the very back of the library on the B2 level.
It’s where I spent my first day and where I’m starting to suspect I’ll spend a lot of days, crammed where there’s no sunlight and very few people, surrounded by compact, movable shelves that don’t even work with a touch button, but instead a series of hand cranks.
Inside them are all kinds of dull, thick, undigitized records.
The sort of minutiae that you’d have to be dedicated or a PhD student to get into. And further beyond that, the archives.
Point being, nobody comes here. Not when there’s a beautiful collegiate gothic aesthetic main study room, not to mention countless corridors with armchairs and study rooms.
But maybe that’s for the best.
I crunch on the apple I swiped on my way out of breakfast and sit with my heels on the seat of the chair, compact and folded over.
They want to bully me? Play pranks? Fine. Sticks and stones. Name calling doesn’t bother me. What is this, preschool?
I chew the apple, tasting like dust in my mouth, as a single tear trickles down my cheek.
Be normal, I think . Be happy. You belong here as much as anyone else. You belong here more than anywhere else.
When I get up at last with just ten minutes to get to Latin, my scarf hooks on the edge of the chair, pulls itself from my throat as I stand up. It looks comfortable there, the deep red against the polished wood of the arms.
Impulsively, I decide to leave it there. A test, maybe, to see, who, if anyone, comes down here. If I return and it’s gone or moved, I’ll know.
If not, I’ve got a place to hide. And that, more than anything, is valuable.
Latin 302 is at the very top of the Classics building, and I fail to account for just how long it takes to scale the stairs.
There’s no listed textbook, so I’m coming with just a notebook and pens and the half-digested apple in my stomach and a fierce curiosity for what this Dr. Emrys is all about.
This truly is the heart of what Caliburn University means , I think, thudding up step after step in the echoing stairwell.
This is what we’re meant to be learning and studying: the oldest, the most obscure, the trickiest, the least useful, in a lot of senses.
This is, and this must be ? —
“Gwenna.”
My boots skid to a squeaking stop as I get to the threshold.
The room is smaller than I had expected, with just two windows and a cramped series of two-person tables pushed in front of a battered teacher’s desk at the front.
A handful of stares fall on me. Five people.
That’s all there is in this class. And one of them is, yes, the professor.
“You are Gwenna?”
Oh. I pant out a breath or two from the effort of scaling up the steps as much as the shock of seeing him here.
Kingston.
I never would have had him pegged as a Latin student, let alone one this advanced. Maybe that’s dickish of me to say, but…in my experience, the guys who get really into the study of dead and ancient languages look a lot more like Ponytail Brett and a lot less like GQ models.
“Very well,” says the professor. “I’m Dr. Emrys, and I’m glad you finally made it.”
He smiles, an avuncular smile. Kindly, but no nonsense. “Please, if you would,” he gestures at the only empty seat in the room, the one next to Kingston.
Great , I think. I grip my bag strap harder and slide into place.
“Your timing is fortuitous,” Dr. Emrys goes on, “as we’ve just finished the, shall we say, warm-up portion of our semester.
As the rest of these illustrious students know, I don’t teach based on mere translation or memorization.
I am here to recruit you to the legions of scholars who have studied these texts for thousands of years.
To crack open some of their mysteries and telegraph their meaning to the world. ”
Okay , I think, a little intense. But then again, classics professors tend to have a flair for the theatrical.
And this man, well…theatrical might be too strong a word, but he’s certainly quirky.
He’s dressed in classic college professor garb, tweed jacket, rumpled sweater, the whole bit, but all in a shade of dusky purple, like he’s cosplaying Professor Plum from the board game Clue.
His hair, shockingly white, as is his beard.
I’d say he looks like Santa Claus, except he’s much too thin.
And while there’s a twinkle in his eyes, I wouldn’t say he’s coming off particularly jolly.
Instinctively, I sit straighter in my seat, pull out a notebook, and set a pen on top of it.
To my left, Kingston moves his own note supplies an inch further away.
I set my jaw. He could just be being polite, or he could be avoiding me like I have leprosy, like everyone else on this campus seems to be, except his stepsister.
“As you all may know,” Dr. Emrys goes on, “These codices, manuscripts, and books are not only valuable for their looks and for their rarity, but for the knowledge that is contained within them. These days, we see scraped sheepskin bound in leather, written upon with boiled ink from a quill clutched long ago in a freezing scriptorium, and think of it as some kind of bespoke treasure, which, to be sure, it was a luxury. A flock of sheep in every book.” A few murmurs of laughter from the class, not from Kingston or from me.
“But in their essence, books were created then for the same reason they are now: to record, to transmit, to explain, to make permanent and articulate the mysterious truths of nature, and the vagaries of human thought. We stand on the shoulders of giants. Don’t we, Gwenna? ”
I startle a bit. “Um. Yes. Bernard of Chartres?”
There’s a flicker in his gaze, like I’ve passed a first test. “That is,” he says, “indeed, who coined that phrase. ”
He turns to the desk, and to a sheaf of paper.
“Now. The primary work of this semester is transliteration. Not translation, or not only that. Trans lit eration: copying the way so many monks and learned men of yore copied before. It’s one thing to translate black and white text from a typeset book in the Harvard Classical Library, all cleaned up and prettified for you.
It’s another entirely to deal with the messy realities of the primary document: poor handwriting, damaged leaves, muddiness all around.
But for you, who are in this class, you are here because this is a pursuit you intend to continue for the rest of your scholarly careers, and indeed your lives. ”
At that I slide a glance at Kingston. I really don’t see him as go-to-grad-school-and-get-an-obscure-PhD material, but what do I know?
“This is the grunt work that you must now be familiar with, in sum,” says Dr. Emrys.
“And now…we practice.” He steps around to our tables, handing out a facsimile of a manuscript page, a photocopy or something similar, but clearly the source material is vellum, crackling with age and the barest sheen of animal fat that can never be tanned out of a manuscript page, scratched up and down with minuscule, the handwriting I know of but have never really read .
I can make out an occasional et or ut, but at a glance, it all looks like tiny lines, little hash marks like a prisoner would keep on the wall of his cell to mark the days.
It’s dense, impossible.
“Why so small, you may ask?” Dr. Emrys goes on. “For good reason. Which is…” he turns this time to Kingston.
“Scarcity,” Kingston says simply. “Books were rare. More words on a page was economical.”
“Indeed, indeed,” says Dr. Emrys, nodding approval.
“Not a particularly future-proof solution, but the men, and I’m sorry to say they were mostly men, of the 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th centuries, did not have the college students of the 21st in mind when they put these collections together.
So!” He rubs his hands together. “Dive in, in partners, and we’ll see who can make the best of it. ”
“What do you want us to do?” says a girl’s voice from the back.
“Copy out. Transliterate,” Dr. Emrys says. “It’s a text you’ll find familiar once you figure it out.”
I look at it and can’t believe this is the truth.
It feels like a magic eye painting, something I need to stare at from varying distances until it all slides into place.
“We’ve got about 35 minutes left in class, so I’ll give you an even half hour.
First pair to complete transliteration and translation wins…
” He frowns as if he hadn’t thought this far.
“I’m not sure. Something enticing. Perhaps you’ll name your prize—if any of you finishes, that is. And… pergite !”
Notebooks are flipped open, pens uncapped. Everyone hunches in over the paper. Everyone, of course, except Kingston, who sits with a ramrod straight back and simply inclines his head.
Wordlessly, he glances between the page and his blank sheet of notebook paper.
Printing out with careful precision some options for the first line.
Mostly gibberish, from what I can tell. The requisite Latin endings for words, um s and us es, but not coming together into any words I’m familiar with.
He pauses, looks at me, staring.
“Do you need help?” he asks, voice low.