Chapter 11 #5
All my fault. All your fault: a favourite phrase of my mother’s.
She used to alternate it with, It’s all my fault, for bringing you up so badly.
As far as Svangerd was concerned, I could see where she was coming from.
I had, after all, bought a box in a shop in Mavais.
And I’d brought the Mesoge into all our lives, or at the very least I’d woken it up from its tomb-confined slumber and provoked it into walking.
In consequence, Mother Krimhild wouldn’t be resting easily in her grave (apart from the few odds and ends they’d trimmed off to keep as holy relics in gold-and-enamel reliquaries); instead, she’d be a full-on exemplar of the Resurrection and the life everlasting, world without end, right here in Choris Anthropou, the most horrible thing anyone could imagine happening to anybody.
And I did that; or it wouldn’t have happened except for me, which is more or less the same thing, isn’t it?
Think about it, the old man had urged me; really think.
Unfortunately I wasn’t really up to it at that precise moment.
My head was full of wasps, swarming, buzzing, billowing up in my face, and I couldn’t get in there with Saloninus’ razor and clear them out for fear of getting stung.
The implications: who was controlling who, who was on which side, who was under control and who was out of control, and what all that meant for the future of humanity and civilisation as we know it.
One of my few gifts is a better-than-average capacity for concentration, but I can’t concentrate with my head full of buzzing, stinging things.
It’s times like that when you discover that I can’t hear myself think is a strikingly precise and accurate description of a particular state of mind, rather than just a cliché.
If I didn’t think things through, however, who else would?
Vitimer didn’t have the facts and wouldn’t listen to me if I went and told him.
Svangerd was dissolving in grief, and would probably damage me quite badly if I tried to talk to her about it.
The enemy – it’s surprising how often talking to the enemy can improve things, but I’d tried it and been stonewalled, so that was no good.
Rotlaug had failed and was dead – at least for now; it didn’t bear thinking about – and there wasn’t anyone else.
Beautiful irony: here we had the most brilliant minds, the highest concentration of scholarship and learning in the known world in our generation, all cooped up in one place, and whose job is it to sort things out?
Mine. It was enough to make a pig laugh.
Talking to the enemy … He’d stomped off in a huff (because it was all my fault), but at the last moment he’d relented and thrown me some sort of crust. Why?
To mislead me? I didn’t think so. Maybe, in spite of everything, on some level he felt sorry for me.
Sympathy from the devil. Or maybe he’d grown as sick of it all as I had, and just wanted it cleared up, by someone, even if that someone was the other side.
The librarian was in his office. He looked awful. “Isn’t it dreadful?” he said. “Mother Krimhild, of all people. Who would have thought Evil could do a thing like that?”
“She’s my third cousin, once removed,” I said. “From the Mesoge.”
His eyes grew wide. “Really?”
I nodded. “I can see why she never mentioned it to anybody,” I said. “It’s not something you’d want people to know about you. Still,” I added, with a grin, “life must go on. No pun intended.”
That, he didn’t say, was in rather poor taste. “Is there something I can do for you?”
“As a matter of fact,” I said, “yes, there is. And it’s really, really important. Would you happen to know anybody who’s fluent in classical Aelian?”
“Yes. What does—?”
“I need to talk to him. Right now.”
He looked at me as though I’d put a knife to his throat. “That’s not a problem,” he said. “He works in the muniment room, in the next building. I can take you to see him, if you like.”
“I like.”
“Fine. We’ll go and see him tonight, after the library closes.”
I shook my head. “Now.”
“But I can’t—”
“Yes, you can.”
He looked at me, and I could read his mind. From the Mesoge; they’re all dangerous lunatics up there, cut your throat soon as look at you. “All right,” he said. “We’ll go there and I’ll introduce you. It won’t take a moment.”
It was raining as we crossed the yard. It hadn’t rained for weeks, not since before we got there.
There was that delicious smell of freshly watered stone, which I particularly enjoy, and then we were back inside, climbing flight after flight of horrible screw thread stairs.
Not so horrible as all that, I found myself thinking.
If it wasn’t for stairs like these, I’d be dead.
Brother Unctuarius was sitting at a lectern, under a tall, narrow window, copying a book. He looked up, smiled at his friend, then saw me.
“This man,” the librarian said, “needs to know something about classical Aelian. Excuse me, I’ve got to get back to the library.”
He darted off, leaving me with the good brother. “Classical Aelian,” said Brother Unctuarius. “Not a lot of interest in it these days, I’m afraid, but it’s a beautiful language.”
“Quite,” I said. “What does diapygon mean?”
He raised both eyebrows. “I beg your pardon?”
“I know it’s a swear word and rude and all that, but what does it actually mean? If it means anything.”
He pursed his lips. “Well,” he said, “it’s a compound, as you’ve probably already gathered.
Dia, meaning in or through. Pyge, meaning buttocks.
Thus a diapygon is one who enters, or is entered, in through the buttocks; by extension, one who experiments with unorthodox sexual practices, subsequently a male or female prostitute, and thereafter a mere term of vulgar abuse. ”
“Male or female.”
He nodded. “The feminine form should, properly speaking, be diapygaena, but in late classical Aelian, where the extended meaning is more common, we have the tendency to dispense with feminine and neuter forms of compound words, and so the masculine form is also used for the feminine and neuter. Also, in this instance, you have societal and ethical shift, with the change in attitudes towards same-sex relationships that came with the rise of fundamentalist religion in the latter stages of the late empire. Essentially, people could no longer envisage such a thing as a male prostitute, so the term came to refer to females exclusively, despite the masculine form.”
“But that was later.”
“Oh yes.”
“So when, say, Lactantius was writing—”
He smiled at the thought of Lactantius. “Late classical Aelian,” he said, “but archaising, therefore deliberately using words in their earlier, uncorrupted meaning. Thus, if Lactantius uses the word, he intends it to be understood with its earlier definition and connotations.”
“One who enters or is entered.”
He frowned slightly. “In Lactantius, yes. If, say, Varro or Athanaric were to use the word it would carry its later meaning, even though they were Lactantius’ contemporaries.
But Lactantius and the Archaic movement as a whole sought a return to a purer, more authentic Aelian, by which they hoped to regenerate a society they saw as increasingly decadent and corrupt—”
“Thanks,” I said.
“Was that helpful?”
I nodded. “You may just have saved civilisation as we know it,” I said, and left quickly.