Early the next morning, Mysen went to the telegraph office while Ftangu interpreted for the royals at breakfast. When Mysen returned, he had two telegrams, one from Gysar, saying he was making arrangements to come and would arrive in a few days, and one from the Bureau of Antiquities, saying that a response team would arrive at the aerodrome before noon.
Ftangu suggested that, as they’d already seen most of the interesting sights in town, they spend the next few hours until the response team arrived studying modern Hureshan. Taisko readily agreed and the rest of his family went along without argument. Ftangu, though far from natively fluent in the language, was still much more so than Mysen, so the primary burden of teaching the ancient royals fell to him. He suggested that Mysen go to the bookstore and look for some children’s books that might help to teach them to read, though he planned to spend the first few hours focusing on the spoken language.
By the time Mysen returned with a small stack of books written for small children, Ftangu had taught his charges a few basic greetings and other expressions, including how to say “What is this?” and “My name is…” Only Tailiki and Datai had mastered the “sh” sound, and none of them could pronounce the the “h.” After Mysen’s return, he started teaching them the alphabet used by modern Hureshan, which was only distantly related to the mixed alphabet-syllabary used to write Laipan, Tupaskai, and pre-modern Hureshan – it had been adapted from the alphabet used by the eastern city-states after the revolution, with some improvements.
The quickest of his students had worked their way through copying out the first three letters ten times each by the time a messenger boy arrived to tell Ftangu and Mysen that the team from the Bureau of Antiquities had arrived, and was waiting for them at City Hall, where they had commandeered a conference room.
So they all trooped over to City Hall, where they found the government functionaries waiting. They were three Hureshan men, one a good bit older than the other two and all at least ten years older than Ftangu. Ftangu introduced himself, Mysen, and the royals, and the men from the Bureau of Antiquities introduced themselves; the older man was Baetra, the Director of Archaeology, and the other two were Kushat, a folklorist specializing in the Tuebak province (roughly corresponding to ancient Tupaska), and Hano, a philologist specializing in the history of Tupaskai. He was the most fluent of the three in written ancient Tupaskai, though all of them had studied it. But none of them, even Hano, were as fluent in spoken ancient Tupaskai as Ftangu had become after two days of conversation with the ancients.
Still, with help from Ftangu, Hano managed to make himself understood by the ancient royals, and to understand much of what they said – perhaps nearly all after he asked them to repeat things more slowly.
“The government of Huresh is committed to getting the rest of your people out of the palace before they run out of food,” he reassured them. “And we will find you all places to live while you learn modern Hureshan and other things you need to know. It may take until tomorrow or the next day to arrange for the airships, however. We will send the first on a day with very little wind and have part of its crew descend to build mooring infrastructure in the palace courtyard; then other ships can come and go whenever it’s not storming, and won’t have to wait for windless days.”
The men from the Bureau of Antiquities spent several hours asking the ancient royals, as well as Ftangu and Mysen, a great many questions. They also answered some of the royals’ questions, though in some cases they said they would have to wait and see what their superiors did. When Taisko asked for more information about the monarchists, the bureaucrats downplayed their numbers and importance – Ftangu wasn’t sure how honestly.
They had supper brought in without interruption of business – a custom that Ftangu and Mysen were used to after their meetings with bureaucrats during their first week in Huresh, but which seemed to offend the ancients. By the end of the afternoon, Hano was more fluent than Ftangu, and didn’t need his help – he had already had a much larger vocabulary and a better grasp of the grammar than Ftangu (who had only had two semesters of the language before this expedition), and only need a few hours of practice with native speakers to turn his book-knowledge into a fair degree of conversational fluency. The other two seemed able to understand most of what Hano and the others said, pausing to ask clarifying questions less and less often as the evening went on.
Ftangu thought Tailiki looked bored, and her mother and aunt seemed bored as well, though they hid it better. Hano and his colleagues were directing most of their questions to King Taisko and Duke Kaspan. At one point, Ftangu suggested that he or Mysen could escort the ladies back to the boarding house, as their presence seemed not to be needed – but the result of this was that the antiquarians thought of more questions for them.
Finally, an hour after supper, they returned to the boarding house in a couple of cars the Bureau of Antiquities had hired for their use. The expedition’s budget hadn’t extended to the hire of a car, which was why the archaeologists had stayed at the closest boarding house they could find to the aerodrome. The ancient royals had seen cars, but had not yet been inside one, and were eager to experience a car ride. Ftangu rode with the princess and her parents, while Mysen rode with the sorcerer, the duke and the duchess.
Taisko had just started to say, “I am not pleased with –” when their driver started the engine, startling Taisko and Wulomai (but not Tailiki) into a gasp of surprise and then silence. The car started moving a moment later, and Tailiki made a joyous exclamation, leaning forward and laughing as the wind blew her hair about. Her parents gripped their seats, their knuckles turning white, but relaxed after a minute or so passed with no mishap.
It wasn’t until they got out at the boarding house that Taisko resumed his interrupted remark. “I am displeased with the way those men behaved toward us,” he said. “I may have lost my kingdom, but even if I am no longer a king, I am still a man.”
“Why did you not insist on better treatment earlier?” asked Wulomai.
“We are dependent on their goodwill, though it pains me to say so. We can scarcely communicate with anyone, and we will need to rely on someone to lodge and feed us until we learn this new language, Urisan. And even then, we will probably need to work for our living, like peasants, or at best like craftsmen or merchants. There is faint chance of taking back my kingdom. Few of the nobles who supported me are still alive, and those who slept through the millennium with us have no more lands or retainers than I do. And I suspect this Kaeho of whom we heard would rather take the throne for himself than put me on it.”
“People in different times and places have different ways of showing politeness,” Ftangu said carefully. “Just because they do not treat you exactly the way you would have treated an honored guest, does not mean they are not showing you honor in their way.”
This led to a short argument about the relativity of customs, a subject about which Taisko, coming from an era where it was an enormous undertaking to travel a hundred miles, knew little but firmly believed he knew everything. It was short only because Ftangu broke it off after half an hour, saying they should all go to bed as they would have an early day tomorrow.
The next day began in a similar way, with breakfast at the boarding house followed by car rides to City Hall and several hours of meetings with the men from the Bureau of Antiquities. By lunch, they received word that their request for more airships had been approved; the first would be arriving the next day.
By mid-afternoon, the men from the Bureau of Antiquities had finished asking their first sets of prepared questions for the royal family. “We will undoubtedly have more questions later,” Baetra explained, “once we think about what you’ve told us for a while, and examine the artifacts that the airships will be bringing from the palace along with the people evacuating. For now, have you any questions for us?”
Of course they did. Taisko asked, “Where will my people and I live? I have been told that we will move out of Madam Shotroha’s house in due course, but nothing more specific than that.”
“We are still working out the details of that,” Kushat said. “Until you and your people are thoroughly oriented to modern life, and fluent enough in modern Hureshan to work for a living, it would be safest for you to live with host families who can teach you various things that we might not think to mention in our first intensive course. But there are very few people who can speak your language these days, so we can’t assign you host families, except for a few families of scholars, until you have learned basic modern Hureshan. Until then, you and your courtiers and servants will probably live at a dormitory of the University of Tuebak.”
That led to a series of more questions, mostly things they had previously asked Ftangu and which he hadn’t been able to answer with any certainty. After a couple of hours of that, they returned to the boarding house. Queen Wulomai made sure that Tailiki sat beside Ftangu again at supper, and after supper, Duchess Datai chaperoned them as they sat on the porch for half an hour. This time, Ftangu resolved, he’d tell her.
“Can you tell me more about this school we will be staying at?” Tailiki asked.
“Well, I’ve never been there, and when I visited another Hureshan university, I didn’t see any of the dorms. So I’m not sure how their dorms compare to our dorms at universities in Kosyndar or other League cities? Back home, we have the men students stay in certain buildings, and the women in others, though I hear the University of Sderamyn has a couple of buildings where men stay in the north wing and women in the south wing. And the rooms are usually small, about ten by ten feet, with two or three beds stacked on top of one another, each big enough for one person.”
“So Mother and I would be in one building with the women, and Father and the other men in another?”
“Well, maybe, but they might make an exception for guests staying there in the summer when the students are away. Put couples in a room together and their children in adjacent rooms, or something. I think that’s what my university does when they host conferences in the summer, but I don’t know for sure that the University of Tuebak would do the same.”
Then Tailiki asked more questions about Ftangu’s experiences at the university, which led to more questions about the previous archaeological digs he had been part of. He told her about the tomb of Saiwo and the local dig he and some fellow students had done on a farm near Kosyndar, where the farmer’s plow had turned up a glazed urn from the fifth century – they’d found evidence the site had been continuously inhabited for at least three thousand years. Then he realized that he was procrastinating telling her something important.
Again.
“That reminds me,” he said, though it really didn’t, “of something that happened just before I, uh, woke you up.”
“Just before you kissed me, you mean,” she teased. “Go on.”
"Well, when Dripota found the chronicle that described the curse you were under, and said we’d need a young man of royal descent to wake you, at first they thought we’d have to hire a prince from Khareush, where they have several kingdoms still. But I told them I was descended from the royal family of Huresh – I hadn’t told them before because it didn’t matter, with my family having been deposed and mostly executed eighty years ago, and because, well, it would have caused political problems with the expedition if the government of Huresh knew that one of the Kosyan archaeologists was related to their deposed royals. It probably still will, I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop… Anyway.
“Well, Dripota said that wouldn’t do, we needed a young man of royal descent, not a woman.”
“What?”
“Yes, that’s what I should have already told you – I was a woman until a few days ago. I said if Mysen could use a spell we’d found in Thailospa’s spellbook to turn me into a man, maybe I could wake you and we wouldn’t have to bring in a prince from one of the Khareushi kingdoms, and have to cut his kingdom in on the deal between the expedition’s sponsors.”
“Oh! You would do such a thing, just to break the curse?”
“Yes. I’ve wanted to do it for years, but when I asked a fellow student who was studying sorcery about it a few years ago, she couldn’t find out that there was any way to do it. But with the ingredients in Thailospa’s workshop, Mysen was able to cast the spell on me, and then I was able to wake you.”
“I suppose if you were able to break the curse, you are a true man.”
“I think I was already a man on the inside, even though it took a spell with rare ingredients to make me so on the outside. This body feels right in a way my old body never did.”
“Thank you for telling me. I don’t think I’ll mention it to my parents, though; they might not understand.”
“That’s probably for the best.”
The next day brought not only another airship load of evacuees from the palace, but more political functionaries from the capital and researchers from various universities around the country. Ftangu, the royal family, and all the evacuees brought in that day were sent by train to Tuebak City, and then to the University of Tuebak, where they were met by more political functionaries and more scholars fluent to varying degrees in Tupaskai. It seemed like the Bureau of Antiquities was scrounging up every scholar in the country who was halfway fluent and sending them to the University of Tuebak.
However, Ftangu barely had time to unpack his things in the dorm room assigned him before he was summoned to a private meeting with Nusha, one of the bureaucrats from the capital.
“Apologies for the short notice,” the man said. “But something has come up that must be urgently dealt with, if the rumor I heard is true.”
“All right, I suppose there are a lot of rumors flying. What do you want to know?” Ftangu asked, with a sinking feeling.
“The scholars who have been interviewing the awakened ancients tell me that they could only be awakened by having a prince kiss the sleeping princess.”
“It didn’t have to be a kiss, and it didn’t have to be a prince per se, just a young man with a royal ancestor. But yeah, basically.”
“And you are the man who woke her?”
“I am.”
“Can you tell me what royal family you are related to?”
“I would rather not.”
“Then if you cannot categorically deny it, I am afraid I must ask you to leave. There are rumors about that you are the last scion of our deposed royal family, and we cannot risk the monarchist faction finding out and trying to put you on the throne.”
“I would categorically refuse any such attempt. I am a loyal citizen of Kosyndar, and have no interest in ruling Huresh or any part of it.”
“Nonetheless, you must understand that for the sake of peace, we must unfortunately require you to return to Kosyndar.”
“Can I have an hour to write a few letters and say goodbye to the ancients I’ve been serving as guide to?”
“You may.”
So Ftangu sat down to write letters to Sgensar and Mysen, and then hastily explained his departure to Tailiki and her parents.
“They can’t exile you,” Taisko stormed. “You are betrothed to Tailiki!”
“But we can’t get married for nine years,” Ftangu pointed out. “And the political situation could change a lot in that time. Perhaps my deportation is only temporary, and might be undone when another faction controls the Diet.” Privately, he had no intention of returning until and unless Tailiki and her parents adapted to the modern world enough to give up on this illegal betrothal.
“We can correspond, can’t we?” asked Tailiki. “With telegrams or letters.”
“Letters would be more practical than telegrams,” Ftangu said. “Less expensive and allowing us to say more. Also, you can write to me in Tupaskai until you are fluent in modern Hureshan, but you can’t send a telegram in Tupaskai, as the telegraph operators won’t know the ancient alphasyllabary.”
So he gave Tailiki his address at the University of Kosyndar grad student housing, and was on an airship to Kosyndar less than three hours later. They did not see each other in person again for almost four years.
