There was another knock at the door. She was immensely grateful for the interruption.
“Who’s there?”
“Mudrin 505,” a quavering voice replied.
“Come in. Please.”
“I’ll leave now,” Balik said.
“No. He’s here to see the tablets. They’re your tablets as much as mine, aren’t they?”
“Siferra, I’m sorry if—”
“Forget it. Forget it!”
Mudrin came doddering in. He was a frail, desiccated-looking man in his late seventies, well past retirement age, but still retained as a member of the faculty in a nonteaching post so that he could continue his paleographic studies. His mild graygreen eyes, watery from a lifetime of poring over old faded manuscripts, peered out from behind thick spectacles. Yet Siferra knew that their watery appearance was deceptive: those were the sharpest eyes she had ever known, at least where ancient inscriptions were concerned.
“So these are the famous tablets,” Mudrin said. “You know I’ve thought about nothing else since you told me.” But he made no immediate move to examine them.—“Can you give me a little information about the context, the matrix?”
“Here’s Balik’s master photo,” Siferra said, handing him the huge glossy enlargement. “The Hill of Thombo, the old midden-heap south of Beklimot Major. When the sandstorm slit it open, this was the view we had. And then we ran our trench down here—and down to here, next—we laid the whole thing open. Can you make out this dark line here?”
“Charcoal?” Mudrin asked.
“Exactly. A fire line here, the whole town burned. Now we skip down to here and we see a second batch of foundations, and a second fire line. And if you look here—and here—”
Mudrin studied the photograph a long while. “What do you have here? Eight successive settlement sites?”
“Seven,” Balik blurted.
“Nine, I think,” said Siferra curtly. “But I agree it gets pretty difficult to tell, down toward the base of the hill. We’ll need chemical analysis to clear it up, and radiographic testing. But obviously there was a whole series of conflagrations here. And the Thombo people went on building and rebuilding, time after time.”
“But this site must be incredibly ancient, if that’s the case!” Mudrin said.
“My guess is that the occupation period was a span of at least five thousand years. Perhaps much more. Perhaps ten or fifteen. We won’t know until we’ve fully uncovered the lowest level, and that’ll have to wait for the next expedition. Or the one after that.”
“Five thousand years, you say? Can it be?”
“To build and rebuild and rebuild again? Five thousand at a minimum.”
“But no site we’ve ever excavated anywhere in the world is remotely as old as that,” Mudrin said, looking startled. “Beklimot itself is less than two thousand years old, isn’t that so? And we regard it as the oldest known human settlement on Kalgash.”
“The oldest known settlement,” Siferra said. “But what’s to say that there aren’t older ones? Much older ones? Mudrin, this photo gives you your own answer. Here’s a site that has to be older than Beklimot—there are Beklimot-style artifacts in its highest level, and it goes down a long way from there. Beklimot must be a very recent settlement as human history goes. The Thombo settlement, which was ancient before Beklimot ever existed, must have burned and burned and burned again, and was rebuilt every time, down through what must have been hundreds of generations.”
“A very unlucky place, then,” Mudrin observed. “Hardly beloved of the gods, was it?”
“Eventually that must have occurred to them,” Balik said.
Siferra nodded. “Yes. Finally they must have decided there was a curse on the place. So instead of rebuilding it after the last fire in the series they moved a short distance away and built Beklimot. But before that they must have occupied Thombo a long, long time. We were able to recognize the architectural styles of the two topmost settlements—see, it’s cyclopean middle-Beklimot here, and proto-Beklimot crosshatch beneath. But the third town down, what there is left of it, is like nothing I can identify. The fourth is even stranger, and very crude. The fifth makes the fourth look sophisticated by comparison. Below that, everything’s such a primitive jumble that it’s not easy to tell which town is which. But each one is separated by a burn line from the one above it, or so we think. And the tablets—”
“Yes, the tablets,” Mudrin said, trembling with excitement.
“We found this set, the square ones, in the third level. The oblong ones came from the fifth one. I can’t even begin to make any sense out of them, of course, but I’m no paleographer.”
“How wonderful it would be,” Balik began, “if these tablets contained some kind of account of the destruction and rebuilding of the Thombo towns, and—”
Siferra shot him a poisonous glance. “How wonderful it would be, Balik, if you wouldn’t spin cozy little wish-fulfillment fantasies like that!”
“I’m sorry, Siferra,” he said icily. “Forgive me for breathing.”
Mudrin took no need of their bickering. He was at Siferra’s desk, head bent low over the square tablets for a long while, then over the oblong ones.
Finally the paleographer said, “Astonishing! Absolutely astonishing!”
“Can you read them?” Siferra asked.
The old man chuckled. “Read them? Of course not. Do you want miracles? But I see word-groups here.”
“Yes. So did I,” Siferra said.
“And I can almost recognize letters. Not on the older tablets—they’re done in a completely unfamiliar script, very likely a syllabic one, too many different characters for it to be alphabetic. But the square tablets seem to be written in a very primitive form of the Beklimot script. See, this is a quhas here, I’d almost be willing to wager on it, and this appears to be a somewhat distorted form of the letter tifjak—it is a tifjak, wouldn’t you say?—I need to work on these, Siferra. With my own lighting equipment, my cameras, my scanning screens. May I take them with me?”
“Take them?” she said, as if he had asked to borrow some of her fingers.
“It’s the only way I can begin to decipher them.”
“Do you think you can decipher them?” Balik asked.
“I offer no guarantees. But if this character is a tifjak and this a quhas, then I should be able to find other letters ancestral to the Beklimot ones, and at least produce a transliteration. Whether we can understand the language once we read the script, that’s hard to say. And I doubt I can get very far with the oblong tablets unless you’ve uncovered a bilingual that will give me some way of approaching this even older script. But let me try, Siferra. Let me try.”
“Yes. Here.”
Lovingly she gathered up the tablets and put them back in the container in which she had carried them all the way from Sagikan. It pained her to let them go out of her possession. But Mudrin was right. He couldn’t do anything with them at a quick glance; he had to subject them to laboratory analysis.