Page 49 of The Black Table
“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 ofyears. 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, itwasa 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. Nottranslation,or notonlythat. Transliteration: 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 reallyread. 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,ums anduses, 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.
I blush, in spite of myself. “No,” I say fiercely.Although we’re supposed to be working as a team, I think,but I suppose that only applies to you if there’s a sword involved. Otherwise it’s every man for himself.
Instead, I chew the end of my pen, wishing I had something more substantial to eat, and study it.
My approach is more haphazard than Kingston’s. He’s writingstraight across, copying out every word line for line. I write down columns, options for each word, and for where they could divide.
