Chapter 2 #4
I picked a fistful of those little white flowers before I left. Then I stood, damp-kneed and dry-eyed, and went down to the tavern. My father wasn’t there, but the barkeep told me she would save the dragonscales for him.
I asked, “The what?”
She nodded at the flowers hanging limply from my hand. “Dragonscales, my mother always called them.”
“Ah,” I said. I looked them up later; they’re also called ulla flowers, which means many, in Middle Mothertongue, because they’re so common as to be considered weeds.
I tucked the flowers obediently into a little jam jar and thanked the barkeep, who kissed me on the cheek and told me my father had worried himself sick, which I did not imagine was distinguishable from drinking himself sick.
Then I walked to the village post office, where I mailed a letter to my old adviser apologizing for going to war in the middle of term and begging to be readmitted to the Cantford Department of History.
If you would not come to me, I thought, I would go to you.
Professor Sawbridge’s reply arrived four days later, so heavily redacted that it was mostly prepositions and conjunctions.
(Gilda Sawbridge had a low opinion of the government and a high temper, which tended to upset the censors.
It also upset the Cantford Board of Fellows, her students, the other faculty, and me, but, as she was the most acclaimed archaeologist of her generation, we all did our best to overlook it.)
Tucked in the envelope alongside the letter was a formal notice of acceptance on school letterhead. At the top, Sawbridge had written: Don’t make me regret it.
I returned to Cantford campus the following week. In our first meeting, I told Professor Sawbridge that I’d chosen a specialization: the folkloric traditions of Middle Dominion.
She propped her glasses on top of her head and gave me her full attention. I’ve never been vivisected, but I imagine it feels very much like receiving Gilda Sawbridge’s full attention.
Eventually she said, without looking away, “Too broad.”
“I intend to focus on the Everlasting Cycle, our founding mythological—”
“It’s played out.”
“It’s patriotic.”
“Please, I’ve just had breakfast,” she said, without inflection.
“I wonder that you, of all people, could fail to appreciate the need for further study of Una Everlasting.” This, I thought, was clever of me: Sawbridge was the only female professor in the whole of Cantford.
“Her story tells us that a woman might take up arms as well as a man. That she might fight, even lead—”
“So long as she dies before she starts wondering why she can’t vote, divorce, or open a bank account. Do not patronize me, Mallory.” This, too, was delivered flatly. “Now tell me honestly: Why?”
I answered, softly, “Erxa Dominus, ma’am.”
It was a good line, well delivered, and even a little true.
I had failed my country on the field, but still hoped to serve it better on the page.
To earn the medal I could hardly stand to look at, to finally become—despite my embarrassing origins and even more embarrassing father—a true son of Dominion.
I imagined myself standing proudly behind lecterns and oaken desks, beyond all reproach and suspicion, unassailable at last.
But beneath all that, of course, there was another reason, which I could not say aloud.
Professor Sawbridge looked at me some more. She looked at my hands, which were shaking again, and at my throat, which I kept hidden behind tightly buttoned collars. She looked at my eyes, and perhaps she saw something of that last, unspoken reason there.
She said, on a sigh that made her book towers wobble dangerously, “Good luck.”
I left the office that day feeling like a hound let off the leash, permitted at last to give chase.
In the years that followed, there was nothing but the hunt. I ignored the papers and wireless speeches and my father’s pamphlets. I ignored everything—save you.
You led me into archives and private collections, libraries and museums, ancient ruins and family vaults.
I excelled at the chase—I had a better-than-average memory and an eye for detail, and a mind that clicked obediently along like a series of bright brass gears.
But it was like hunting in a hall of mirrors; I caught glimpses of bright armor or pale hair, but when I reached out, I touched nothing but glass.
I read and re-read every accounting of your story—Lazamon’s shambling anthology of legends, Marie de Meulan’s romantic verses, Montmer’s Historica—but all of them were third- or fourth-hand, history watered down into mere hearsay.
Most of the authors claimed to have based their versions on The Death of Una Everlasting—a true accounting of your adventures as written by an anonymous traveling companion—but, as there was no evidence that such a text had ever existed, most modern historians saw this as a bid for legitimacy rather than a fact.
My undergraduate work was therefore little more than an echo’s echo.
My papers were all reinterpretations of reinterpretations, dissections of lines that had already been dissected a hundred times before.
It was received well enough—I graduated with the second-highest marks in the history of the department, after Sawbridge herself, and my article on the grail as a metonym for nationhood had been quoted in the Times—but Professor Sawbridge was not fooled.
(“You are clever enough to convince the swine that you are giving them pearls,” she observed, idly. “Alas, alack! I am not a pig.”)
My current manuscript—An Everlasting Legacy: A Survey of Modern Translations—was supposed to earn me the Middle Dominion Faculty Fellow title, the respect of my peers, and a living wage.
But it was so anemic and derivative that even the swine (the other faculty) were beginning to entertain doubts.
They muttered often about the benefits of fresh air, and more than once I’d heard the words extended leave floating ghoulishly down the hall.
Though I had nowhere else to go—I wasn’t even sure I could crawl back home, after the things my father and I had said to one another during our last fight—I was on the verge of agreeing with them.
Until I received that book in the post, and you saved me for the fourth time.