Bego shook his head, laughing. "Do you want to get the priests in your ears like gnats? Keep thoughts like that to yourself, Mon. It's daring enough for me to be speculating that perhaps the Oversoul can't read these inscriptions. Besides, it doesn't matter, really. I've been assigned to figure them out. I have some guesses but I have no way of knowing if I'm right."
Suddenly Mon understood how Bego wanted him to help. "You think I might be able to tell whether you're right or not?"
"It's something we've seen before from you, Mon. Sometimes you know what can't be known. It was Edhadeya who had the dream of the Zenifi but you were the one who knew that it was a true dream. Perhaps you can also tell me whether my translation is a true one."
"But my gift comes from the Keeper, and if the Keeper doesn't know... ."
"Then you won't be able to help me," said Bego. "And maybe your gift only works on-well, on other things. But it's worth a try. So let me show you what I've done so far."
Mon grew more and more afraid as Bego spread out the other waxed barks, drawing more and more from the box. He listened as best he could to Bego's explanations of how he went about copying the inscriptions and studying them, but what kept running through his mind was the idea that somehow he was supposed to come up with some kind of knowledge about a language that not even the Oversoul could read.
"Pay attention," said Bego. "It can't possibly work if you're just going to stand there being nervous."
Only then did Mon realize that he had been fidgeting. "Sorry."
"I started with elements that were on the Coriantumr stone as well as on the gold leaves. See this? It gets repeated more than any other element. And this one comes in second. But the second one, it has this mark in front of it." He pointed to a feather-shaped drawing. "And that mark shows up in a lot of other places. Like this, and this. My guess is that this mark is like the honorific ‘ak' or ‘ka,' and means king."
Bego looked hopefully at Mon, who could only shrug in reply. "Could be. Makes sense."
Bego sighed.
"Well, don't give up that easily," said Mon, disgusted. "What, you expect to be right on everything?"
"It was the thing I was most sure of," said Bego.
"Oh, and didn't you teach me long ago that just because you're really, really sure doesn't mean that you're right?"
Bego laughed. "Well, for all I know, it could just be a nymic."
"A what?"
"A mark that signifies that what follows it is a name."
"That sounds better," said Mon. "That makes sense."
Bego said nothing. Mon looked up from the waxed barks and their eyes met. "Well?" asked Bego. "How much sense does it make?"
Mon realized what Bego was asking, and examined his own feelings, tried to imagine if the mark wasn't a nymic. "It... it makes a lot of sense. It's right. It's true, Bego."
"True the way Edhadeya's dream was true?"
Mon smiled. "They came back with the wrong Zenifi, remember?"
"Don't try to wriggle out of the question, Mon. You know that Ilihiak and Khideo both confirmed that Edhadeya's dream was of the former priest of Nuab named Akmaro."
"Bego, I can only tell you that if you try to tell me that the words linked to that feather mark aren't names, I'd have to swear you were wrong."
"That's good enough for me," said Bego. "So they aren't names of kings, but they are names. That's good. That's the most important thing. See, Mon? The Keeper rfo« want us to read this language! Now, this is the most common of the names on the stone, and it's also very common here at the end of the record on the plates."
"How do you know it's the end?"
"Because I think the name is Coriantumr, and he's the last king- or at least the last man-from this group of humans who destroyed themselves in Opustoshen. So the place where his name is mentioned would have to be at the end, don't you think?"
"So who wrote the gold leaves?"
"I don't know! Mon, I'm barely decoding anything yet. I just want to know from you: Is this Coriantumr's name here?"
"Yes," said Mon. "Definitely."
Bego nodded. "Good, good. These were the obvious ones. I figured them out weeks ago, but it's good to know you can tell that they're right. So now I'm going to go through the other words. I think this one, for instance ... I think this one means battle.'"
It didn't feel quite right to Mon at first. Finally, though, after several tries, they decided that the best fit for the meaning of the word was "fight." At least it felt correct enough to Mon.
But the successes were mostly early on; as Bego went deeper into his speculations, more and more of them turned out to be wrong- or at least Mon couldn't confirm that they were right. It was slow, frustrating work. Late in the afternoon, he sent his digger servant to inform Motiak that Mon and Bego would both be missing the council that night, and would eat in their rooms as they worked on "the problem."
"It's that important?" asked Mon, when the servant had left. "So important that you don't have to explain anything else? Or even ask Father's permission not to go?"
"Even if I end up telling him that we can't read any more than these few scraps," said Bego, "it's still more than we knew before. And since the Keeper meant us to know whatever we can know from these writings, it is important, yes."
"But what if I'm wrong?"
"Are you wrong?"
"No."
"That's good enough for me." Bego laughed. "It has to be good enough, doesn't it?"
"I have it now," said the Oversoul.
Shedemei was angry, and couldn't understand why. "I don't care," she said.
"Mon gave Bego just enough information that I was able to correlate the language forms with Earth languages from before the dispersal. It's Arabic, at least in origin. No wonder I couldn't decode it at first. Not even Indo-European. And it went through a tremendous amount of permutation-far more than the Russian at the root of all the languages of Harmony."
"Very interesting." Shedemei leaned forward and buried her head in her hands.
"Most remarkable is the fact that the orthography has nothing at all to do with the old Arabic script. I would never have expected that. The Arab colony fleet at the dispersal was profoundly Islamic, and one of the unshakable tenets of Islam is that the Quran can only be written in the Arabic language and the Arabic script. What in the world happened on the planet Ramadan, I wonder?"
"Is this really all that you can think of?" asked Shedemei. "Why the Arabs would change their system of writing to this hieroglyphic stuff they found in the desert?"
"It's syllabic, not ideographic, and we have no idea if it was temple-based."
"Are you listening to what I'm saying?" asked Shedemei.
"I'm processing everything," said the Oversoul.
"Process this, then: How did an inscription in a language descended from Arabic get written on Earth so recently?"