Julie Lee, Professional Smart-ass Oboist, swept by us, bussing our cups without asking, as Tristan’s phone made a noise and he glanced down at the screen.
He typed something into the phone and then pocketed it. “I just told them you passed with flying colors,” he said, “and they just told me you passed the background check.”
“Of course I passed the background check,” I said. “What do you take me for?”
“You’re hired.”
“Thank you,” I said, “but whoever they are, please let them know I’m the creator of the test I just passed.”
He shook his head no. “Then we get into an IP inquiry with the university and things get messy and public, and shadowy government entities can’t go there. Sorry. If this project falls apart, though, feel free to take it up with Blevins.” His phone beeped again and he checked the new incoming message. “Meanwhile, let’s get to work.” He pocketed the phone and held out his hand for me to shake. “You have an agreeably uninteresting existence. Let’s see if we can change that.”
Diachronicle
DAYS 34–56 (SEPTEMBER, YEAR 0)
In which magic is brought to my attention
TRISTAN DETERMINED TO BEGIN the translations immediately—that very evening—and so he ordered carry-out Chinese, asked for my address, and said that he would show up in an hour with the first of several documents. I was, please know, outraged that he was driving around with ancient artifacts in the backseat of his beat-up Jeep.
At that time, I dwelt alone in a one-bedroom walk-up flat in North Cambridge (without being considered a spinster or a loose woman, as would be the case in my current environment). It was walking distance from the Porter Square T stop and an easy bicycle ride down Massachusetts Avenue, cutting through Harvard Yard, to the department (although I would no longer be making that ride). Tristan appeared punctually with bags of Chinese and a six-pack of Old Tearsheet Best Bitter, which as I was to learn was the only beer he would consider drinking. He casually commandeered the living/dining/cooking area, placing the food on the counter, far from the coffee table, where he laid out four documents and the cuneiform tablet, a notepad, and several pens. He looked around the space, zeroed in on my personal reference library, pulled out four dictionaries, and set them on the table.
“Let’s eat first,” he said. “I’m starving.”
For the first time, we made small talk. It was only brief, for he eats too fast, although I did not comment on it that first time. Tristan had studied physics at West Point but ended up assigned to the Military Intelligence branch of the Army, which—in roundabout ways he constantly deflected with the term “classified”—led to his recruitment by his “shadowy government entity.”
For my part, since nothing was classified, I divulged the source of my polyglot tendencies, that being: my agnostic parents having been raised Catholic and Jewish, my two sets of grandparents competed for my faith from my earliest years. At the age of seven I proposed to my Catholic grandparents that I learn to read the New Testament in Latin, in lieu of attending Sunday school. Thinking I would never attain this, they agreed—and I was functionally fluent in classical Latin within six months. Emboldened by this, shortly before my thirteenth birthday I similarly evaded being bat mitzvahed by testing out at college level for classical Hebrew. My Jewish grandparents offered to fund one semester of university education per each ancient language I mastered at college level. That was how I afforded my first three years of school.
Tristan was very pleased with this story—almost as pleased with himself as with me, as if patting himself on the back for having chosen such a prodigy. When we finished our meal, he collected the disposable containers, rinsed them, and packed them neatly back in their bag. “All right, let’s start!” he said, and we moved to the couch so I might examine the documents.
In addition to the cuneiform tablet there was something in Guānhuà (Middle Mandarin) on rice paper, about five hundred years old—Tristan to his credit at least knew to handle this with gloves on. There was also, on vellum, a piece written in a mixture of medieval French and Latin, I would say at least eight hundred years old. (It was fucking insane to see these things sitting casually on my coffee table.) Finally there was a fragment of a journal, this written in Russian on paper that looked positively brand-new in comparison, and was dated 1847. The librarian in me noticed that all of them had been marked with the same stamp—a somewhat ill-defined family crest, surrounded by blurry words in a blend of Latin and Italian. They had, in other words, been acquired by a library or a private collection, and been duly stamped and cataloged at some point.
As he had warned, Tristan would not tell me where he had obtained these artifacts, nor why it was such a (seemingly) random collection. After several hours with them, however, I saw the common theme . . . although it was hard to believe what I was reading.
In short, each of these documents referred to magic—yes, magic—as casually as a court document refers to the law, or a doctor’s report refers to medical tests. Not magician-trick magic, but magic as we know it from myths and fairy tales: an inexplicable and supernatural force employed by witches—for they were, per these documents, all women. I don’t mean the belief in magic, or a mere weakness for magical thinking. I mean the writer of each document was discussing a situation in which magic was a fact of life.
For example, the cuneiform tablet was a declaration laying down what a witch at the royal court of Kahta was due in recompense for her services, and regulated the uses of magic that courtiers were allowed to ask of her. The Latin/French one was written by the Abbess of Chaalis regarding the struggles that one of her nuns faced, trying but failing to renounce her magic powers, and the abbess wondered if she herself was to blame, as she was not truly wholehearted in her own prayers for the sister to be relieved of her powers, since those powers often made life easier at the abbey. The Guānhuà took a little more work—I had but a cursory relationship to Asian language groups by then. It was itself a recipe from the provinces for a dish involving various hard-to-find aromatic herbs, as described to the writer (a circuit-riding Mandarin magistrate) by self-reported witches (whose activities were referred to as a footnote on the side of the recipe). Finally, the nineteenth-century Russian was written by a self-identified (aging) witch and lamented the fading powers of her sister witches and herself. This one also made a passing reference to the desirability of finding certain herbs.
These were rough, almost off-the-cuff translations. When I had finished the fourth one, there was a silence between us for a moment. Then Tristan gave me a disarmingly sly grin, and spoke:
“What if I told you we had more than a thousand such documents. All eras, from six continents.”