Dagna Boulderback's Arc

Chapter 8 of 17

The white cat still watched from the dark when Mikhael tried to read the cave marks aloud the next morning. He held the sealed hide near the fire and pointed at a row he had copied from the cave walls. He sounded out one shape, then stopped. "I know these are words," he said. "But they mean nothing to me." His finger dropped. "I learned to read from your marks, Dagna. The simple ones you made. The old forms don't match." Dagna took the hide in her shaking hands. She had feared this. Years ago she cut easy marks to teach him fast, because her heart gave her no time. Those marks were her own. The true forms, cut in the cave stone, were older and harder. Mikhael had learned a bridge to nowhere. He could read her hand. He could not read his people's. "There is a way," she said. "But it must come from me, and my time is short." She pulled the blue practice ice close. Her fingers ached on the pen. She carved one simple mark, the one she had taught him for "ice." Beside it she carved the true form from the cave, the strange one with the shared strokes. "Same word," she said. "Two hands. Watch how one grows into the other." Mikhael leaned in. She carved another pair. Then another. Simple mark, true mark, side by side. "Ice," she said. "Warm wind. Stone." Each time she showed how her teaching shape hid inside the old one. His breath quickened. He took the pen from her. "Let me," he said. He carved a simple mark he knew well. Then, slowly, he added the strokes that made it the true form. He looked up at the hide. He read the cave row again. This time he did not stop. "Deep," he read. "Cold keeps the deep marks safe." He read the whole line. Dagna sank back into her furs. The two scripts had joined in his head. She could not carry him to the cave, but she had built the ladder between what she taught and what his people left in stone. "Cut them all," she told him. "Every pair you can. On the ice, on new hides. Make the bridge yours before I'm gone." He worked through the day. She watched his hand fill the tan hides with paired marks. Near dark he set down the pen. His face was grim. "I can read the cave now," he said. "But I've only copied a few rows. The rest are still on the walls. And the beast won't let me near them." Dagna followed his eyes to the mouth of the hollow. The white cat sat there, fangs pale in the last light. Mikhael could read the old marks at last. The marks he needed most still waited in the stone the animal guarded.