Dagna Boulderback's Arc

Chapter 3 of 17

The next morning Dagna set Mikhael before the sealed hides. She meant to begin at once. Mikhael was the young man who had helped her copy and save the marks. Now he was her only student. She pointed to the largest hide on the rack and told him to read it. He stared at the rows of black scratches. His mouth opened, then closed. "I can't," he said. "They all look the same to me." She pointed to a single mark. "That one means a warm wind from the south." She pointed to the mark beside it. "That one is the age of a glacier in seasons." She kept going. Each symbol she named held ten meanings folded inside it. Mikhael's eyes glazed. He gripped his knees. "Slower," he said. "Please. You're throwing whole mountains at me." Dagna stopped. He was right again. She had learned these as a girl, across many winters, one simple stroke at a time. Her teacher had started her small. But every hide on the rack held the hardest marks her people ever cut. There was nothing simple here for him to grip. She had saved the ending of the language and none of its beginning. Her chest tightened. The urgency in her failing heart made her want to rush. Rushing was killing them both. She pulled a stack of blank hides from beneath the bench. She took a charcoal pen from the bundle beside the marked stack. Her fingers ached around it. "Sit," she said. "We stop reading the hard ones. I'll make you new ones." "New marks?" "Old marks. The first ones any child learns." She drew a single line. "Cold." She drew a second line crossing it. "Cold that kills." She drew a curve. "Water under ice." Mikhael leaned in. His eyes cleared. He copied the line. Then the cross. Then the curve. He named each one back to her without looking. "Again," she said. He drew them again, faster. By midday he had ten simple marks and knew them all cold. He grinned like a boy who had caught his first fish. Dagna sat back. The stall was broken. He could learn. But she looked at the fresh hides filling with her own hand, and a new weight settled on her. The rack held hundreds of marks. She had just started him at the very bottom. To reach the top he would need every step between, drawn out simple, one at a time. That was many winters of teaching. She pressed a hand to her chest and felt her heart skip and drag. She did not have many winters. She had this one, maybe less. "Keep drawing," she told him. "We go faster than any teacher should." Mikhael bent over the hide and drew. Dagna watched, and began the count she could not win: her lessons against her heart.