The archaeologists finally had the opportunity to go out and see how the forest was changing. The thorns that had covered every tree, shrub, and vine within sight of the gate were almost gone, having receded into little nubs, no longer so wickedly sharp. No one had ventured out there yet, and when they did, they would need tools to clear a path; the thorns might be almost gone, but the forest floor was still choked with undergrowth. Waiting for the airship might be a better strategy after all; some of the archaeologists could evacuate with a few of the palace residents, and immediately send more airships to evacuate the rest of them, or at least airdrop more crates of food, if the weather wouldn’t let them hover steadily enough to pick up passengers. Or with the forest clear of thorns, they could fell trees and build mooring infrastructure so the airships could board passengers even in moderately windy weather.

And the weather was clearing up; Sgensar estimated that the airship would return for them within the next couple of days.

At supper that night, the archaeologists sat at the head table with the royal family; Ftangu sat between Tailiki and her aunt. The princess asked him more questions about the modern world and about his family and personal background; Ftangu continued to hold off on telling her he’d been a woman until yesterday. He’d have to tell her eventually, but… actually, these people would probably be more used to the idea of magically changing sex than modern people who were born centuries after the last black dragons died and generations after the last of their teeth were used up. Although it was probably never a frequently cast spell; even before they were overhunted to extinction, black dragons and unicorns weren’t exactly common.

But in any case, he wanted to tell her in private, or at least in a less public venue than this – not in earshot of her whole family, and who knew how many of the courtiers at the next table might be able to overhear as well. So he fudged the stories of his childhood and young adulthood, leaving out any telling details that would give away his birth sex without outright lying. It helped that Tupaskai didn’t mark gender as pervasively as Kosyan or the other Dyramyni languages; speaking in Kosyan, he would have to start getting used to describing himself with masculine nouns and adjectives, but that wasn’t much of an issue in Tupaskai except for a few kinship terms like “daughter,” “son,” etc.

After she’d pumped him for information about himself and the world outside the Thornwood for most of dinner, he finally persuaded Tailiki to tell him a little about herself.

“There’s not that much to say,” she said. “I’ve never been out of my father’s kingdom. I was born in the capital and I’ve traveled around the kingdom with the court. I’ve met visitors from other places, but none from as far away as Kosyndar.”

“Did you… have any particular plans before the curse?”

She frowned, and Ftangu realized his question had been an ill-advised one.

“The kings of our neighboring kingdoms all wanted me to marry their son or nephew or younger brother,” she said. “And I liked Tomozi and Poiskowai, and wouldn’t have minded marrying either of them, but Father told them he would let me choose among them when I turned seventeen and not a day sooner. I didn’t understand why until now. I think he wanted me to wait until the danger of the curse had passed before committing to anything. And now they’re all dead, both the good ones and the ones I couldn’t stand. If I’d found that horrible thing a month earlier, Tomozi would have been here with us, but…”

She trailed off, and Ftangu wanted to comfort her, but couldn’t think of anything to say or do that wouldn’t make matters worse.

After supper, which was followed by hours of celebratory drinking and entertainment – a capella ballad singing by a couple of bards, then a puppet show – the king wouldn’t hear of the archaeologists sleeping in their bedrolls in the dining hall as they’d done before waking his daughter. He rearranged the courtiers to free up a couple of rooms in the nobles’ quarters, one for Sgensar and Dripota, and one for Ftangu and Mysen.

The next day dawned much clearer, and Sgensar was hopeful that the airship might return for them that day or the next. However, to be safe, the king sent out scouting parties immediately. Ftangu and Sgensar watched as they hacked their way from the gate into the surrounding underbrush in two directions; it took several minutes for them all to cut enough of a trail to get out of sight, so thick was the undergrowth even after losing its unnatural thorns. One team was trying to find the old roadbed, which should run straight out of the palace gate, through a nearby village (no longer visible from the air, if any trace of it remained), and in various directions from the crossroads in the village. The other team was trying to blaze a new trail toward the edge of the forest, which was equally far away in all directions; Sgensar’s maps indicated the direction to go in order to reach the largest town at the edge of the forest.

While they waited for the scouts to report back, Mysen continued meeting with the king’s sorcerer, Thailospa, discussing ancient and modern magic in Laipan, while the other expedition members interviewed various members of the court, as well as the servants, about what their daily lives had been like a thousand years ago. Ftangu did not see much of the princess except at meals.

Just a few hours after the scouting parties left, there was a commotion, shouting coming from the courtyard. Ftangu and the others rushed out to see what it was, and saw people looking up; the airship was hovering over the courtyard. They weren’t lowering a rope ladder yet.

Dripota beckoned Ftangu, and they immediately went to the radio. Ftangu cranked it while Dripota spoke. “This is Professor Dripota of the Thosai Palace expedition. Is this the H.A.S. Audacious?”

“Confirmed,” came a staticky voice from the radio. “Who are all those other people with you?”

“King Taisko IV, his court, and his servants – fifty-three people in all. They were not dead, but in suspended animation; we broke the curse yesterday. We will need an evacuation plan for them; a few can return to the aerodrome with you today, and we can send more airships for the rest until they can all be evacuated either by airship or by ground through the forest.”

“Observers at the edge of the forest saw the thorns disappear yesterday morning,” said the radio operator on the airship. “A couple of groups have begun cutting trails into the forest already.”

“Perhaps we can coordinate the efforts of the king’s trailblazers and those from the nearby towns,” Dripota suggested. “In any event, please lower the ladder to evacuate…”

She looked at Sgensar, who said: “Eight – the royal family plus Ftangu, Mysen and Thailospa. You and I will stay here to continue interviewing people and translate between the airship crews and the evacuees. The airship would hold a good deal more than eight, but I don’t think our boarding house would have room for more, and Ftangu and Mysen will need to arrange lodging before we evacuate the rest.”

But first, Ftangu had to delicately inform Queen Wulomai and Princess Tailiki that they couldn’t board the airship with bare breasts.

---

The flight back to the aerodrome wasn’t actually crowded – the gondola had room for more people than the half-dozen crew and eight passengers. On a longer voyage, it would have enough crew for three shifts. But it felt crowded, with not only Princess Tailiki but her elders constantly rushing from the windows on one side of the passenger area to the other, frantic not to miss anything of their first flight, and constantly asking questions of Ftangu and Mysen, many of which they couldn’t answer and had to translate for the crew. Even Thailospa, who Ftangu gathered had flown before on rare occasions using ancient magic, was impressed by the ease and comfort of the ride. Ftangu enjoyed explaining things to the ancient Tupaskans, especially Princess Tailiki, even though he had only been on a handful of airship voyages himself.

They cleared the edge of the formerly enchanted forest after an hour and a half, and passed over a number of farms and villages before reaching the aerodrome. From the windows, they couldn’t see as much of the process of mooring the airship and guiding it into the hangar as you could see from a good vantage point on the ground, but they saw enough to fascinate them.

Once the Audacious was safely secured in its hangar, and the passengers disembarked, Ftangu took charge of the royal family and Thailospa while Mysen supervised the unloading of the archaeologists’ cargo. Ftangu led his charges to the telegraph office, where he sent off messages to the Hureshan Bureau of Antiquities and the University of Kosyndar about their discoveries and the fifty-three reawakened Tupaskans, and to ask for a doctor for the sick woman. Mysen had spent part of the voyage writing a brief telegram and a much longer letter to Gysar, since he could explain better than Ftangu the magical significance of their finds, and Ftangu sent this telegram as well, and arranged for air delivery of the letter.

Their limited budget for the expedition would pay for just three local airship trips into the Thornwood – one for the initial expedition, one to return when they were done, and one to resupply partway through the allotted time. They would only be able to evacuate a few more people with the one additional round trip they had in the budget; to hire larger airships to evacuate all the remaining courtiers and servants would require additional funds, hopefully from the government of Huresh.

“Now,” Ftangu explained to their guests, “we must wait. I am sure that once our contact at the Bureau of Antiquities sees that message, she will inform the necessary people in other departments, and they will send people here to help you and your subjects as soon as possible.” And to renegotiate the deal about divvying up King Taisko’s entire worldly wealth among the expedition’s sponsors, hopefully. “But we can’t expect a response for at least an hour or two, and more likely until tomorrow. Do you have anything you’d like to do here in town? There’s not much to see besides the aerodrome, I’m afraid – we’re a long way from the capital.”

Taisko and Thailospa wanted to know more about how the telegraph worked, which was a little difficult to explain – not only was there no ancient Tupaskai word for “electricity,” but Ftangu couldn’t think of the word for “lightning” either, and had to use circumlocutions to describe lightning storms and elicit that word from his informants, then narrow down what he meant before even approaching an explanation. By then, their stomachs were beginning to grumble, and he led them to the boarding house near the aerodrome where he and the other expedition members had stayed while waiting for favorable weather to fly to the palace. The landlady had promised to hold their rooms for them, and she set a good board at this time of day. Before he left, he paid one of the boys who hung around the aerodrome a fifty-lepton piece to run to the boarding house and tell him if a telegram came for him.

Ftangu was so caught up in easing the ancient royals through their ongoing culture shock that he had completely forgotten that the landlady wouldn’t recognize him in his new body.

“It’s really me, Madam Shotroha,” Ftangu pleaded in his heavily accented but mostly grammatical Hureshan. “I know I look different, but you never know what sort of magic you’ll run across in an ancient archaeological site.”

“Well, that’s true, I suppose,” she grudgingly allowed. “And who did you say all these outlandish strangers were?”

“The royal family of ancient Tupaska,” he explained again. “They’ve been asleep for a thousand years, and they don’t speak modern Hureshan. And none of us have eaten since breakfast.”

“I hope they don’t expect us to start bowing and scraping before them like our ancestors,” Shotroha said with a sniff. “They’ll find they’re expected to work.”

“Well, yes, eventually, although first, I suppose, somebody is going to have to help them learn Hureshan and, you know, everything else that’s changed in the last thousand years. Dripota, Sgensar, Mysen and I have been explaining a lot, but there’s a limit to how fast people can take in new information, and also limits to our vocabulary in ancient Tupaskai. For now, you can put their dinner on the expedition’s tab.”

“I still don’t have any proof that you’re Ftangu,” she pointed out. “When Sgensar gets back, he might refuse to pay the tab for a pack of strangers.”

“All right,” he said, resigned. “When Mysen gets here, he can vouch for me.”

Taisko and his family were not best pleased to have to wait, but fortunately they didn’t have to wait long before Mysen arrived and confirmed Ftangu’s identity. Before long, they were sitting down to a late but hearty dinner. The reawakened royals were surprised and not entirely pleased at the imported spices that made up a large component of modern Hureshan cooking, and also, it seemed, were used to much weaker beer and wine than modern brewing methods produced. They were already looking a little drunk when Ftangu spoke to Shotroha about it and had their next beers watered.

Near the end of dinner, the boy Ftangu had paid earlier arrived, out of breath, to bring Ftangu a telegram. It was brief message from the Bureau of Antiquities promising to send a team to investigate and arrange for the evacuation of the remaining archaeologists, courtiers and servants at the palace. Ftangu hoped they had paid attention to the part of his earlier message saying that the ancients only spoke Tupaskai and in a few cases Laipan.

After dinner, and a discussion of where everyone would sleep that night, Ftangu showed the royals around the town. It was a backwater with only one minor historic site and no buildings that could impress a modern tourist – but almost everything the ancients saw was new to them in some way, and they had innumerable questions.

Meanwhile, Mysen went to look for temporary accommodations for those left behind at the palace. There wouldn’t be room for the royal family, much less everyone else, at Shotroha’s boarding house when Sgensar and Dripota returned. For now, Ftangu and Thailospa would room with Mysen, while the king, queen, and princess would take Sgensar and Dripota’s room, and Duke Kaspan and Duchess Datai would take Ftangu’s old room.

After showing them the town’s small railway station, watching a train arrive and a few passengers disembark, visiting a service station and paying the mechanic a couple of hundred leptons to let the ancient tourists watch him working on an engine, and explaining the purpose of the gas pumps and air pumps, Ftangu took them back to the boarding house just after sunset for supper and bed.

During supper, at first, the royals’ conversation focused on the technological marvels they’d seen that day, but gradually turned to the political and cultural shifts since their day. Ftangu and Dripota had explained the basics of modern representative democracy to the ancients not long after they were awakened, but none of the archaeologists except for Sgensar were extremely familiar with the structure of Huresh’s government or the current political situation, and Ftangu and Mysen had to appeal to Shotroha and the Hureshan guests staying in the boarding house for more information. They had to be careful how they translated Shotroha’s belligerent anti-monarchist answers; apparently there was a small but wealthy faction that supported a return to monarchy, and they were not popular in this part of the country.

Of course Taisko was extremely interested to hear that, once Ftangu had filtered out Shotroha’s invectives. “Can you introduce us to these monarchists?” Taisko asked. “Who are the most important of them?”

“I don’t know them personally,” Ftangu pleaded. “Madam Shotroha didn’t mention any names, except for somebody named ‘Kaeho’.” He asked Madam Shotroha for more information, and she launched into another diatribe about Kaeho from which Ftangu gleaned a couple of actual facts. “He’s a rich automobile manufacturer, and very proud of his remote descent from a king’s bastard.”

Taisko looked disgusted and muttered something that Ftangu thought sounded like “Well, if that’s what we’ve got to work with…”

Privately, Ftangu thought it would be a terrible idea to introduce Taisko to the monarchists; even with several years of intense study of modern conditions, he would make a terrible ruler of a modern country even for those people who had a bizarre nostalgic preference for monarchy. But the monarchist faction would be sure to hear of the reawakened ancients before long, and would find a way to get in contact with them even if they were sequestered by the populist faction that currently controlled the Diet and most of the bureaucracy.

Tailiki said hardly anything during the political conversation, though she’d had a number of questions for Ftangu earlier during their tour of the town. After supper, Queen Wulomai suggested that Ftangu and Tailiki sit on the porch for a while, and that she could chaperone them while they had a private conversation. Ftangu felt awkward about it, but couldn’t see a polite way to refuse. So as Mysen and Shotroha showed the others to their rooms, the queen sat down at one end of the porch and Ftangu and Tailiki at the other end, within view but not in earshot if they kept their voices low.

Maybe now would be a good time for Ftangu to mention that he was born a girl?

“Thank you again for showing us all those wonderful things today,” Tailiki said. “We’ve lost so much, but I feel like we might have gained as much or more.”

“You’re welcome,” Ftangu said. “I know it will be difficult, learning one or more modern languages and so many things you’ll need to know about modern customs and tools, but I’ll do what I can to help, and soon you’ll have help from others as well.”

“Will you be going back to Kosyndar soon?”

“Probably not as soon as we planned, but we need to be back by the beginning of…” He paused, not knowing a word for “semester” in Tupaskai and not sure offhand how their lunar calendar mapped to the modern solar calendar. “In a bit less than two months,” he concluded.

“I suppose I won’t see you again for a long time. Kosyndar is very far away, isn’t it? Across the mountains and the desert, near the eastern ocean?”

“Yes, but it’s not so long a journey as it was in your day, remember? An airship can take us there in two or three days, if the weather is favorable, and the coastal train takes much longer but is still far faster than horse travel used to be.”

“Then I can come visit you, or you me.”

“…I expect so,” Ftangu said after an awkward pause. It depended a great deal on how the Bureau of Antiquities, and the Hureshan government as a whole, treated the royals and whether they allowed the Kosyan archaeologists to return after dumping such a political problem in their laps. Ftangu didn’t want to be trapped into an illegal betrothal, but he liked Tailiki and wouldn’t mind spending time with her if there weren’t such heavy expectations lying on them.

They were quiet for a few moments, and then Tailiki asked him about his work as an archaeologist, and that passed the remainder of the time until Wulomai said it was time for Tailiki to go to bed. Ftangu still hadn’t gotten around to telling her he used to be a woman.

 

This week's recommendation is The Book of Lost Tales by J.R.R. Tolkien.  These were the first versions of what later became the Silmarillion, written during World War I and shortly afterward, and in my opinion they're more accessible and fun than the Silmarillion versions in some cases.

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