Part Two
Twenty-ninth day of the fourth month, 1253
Dear Ftangu,
I’m sorry I haven’t written sooner, but they’ve been keeping us busy learning Hureshan and how things work now all day almost every day for the weeks since you were forced to go home. And even on the days when we don’t have lessons, we’re answering so many questions from scholars – Sgensar and Dripota and so many new people, most of them old men but a few younger ones and some women. Plus we’re supposed to practice talking and reading in Hureshan.
We have a couple of teachers, a man who teaches us from breakfast until lunch, and a woman who teaches from lunch until supper. During meals, we listen to someone reading aloud from a Hureshan book, a new chapter each day. It is mentally fatiguing, but I think it’s working – at least some of us young people are already getting somewhere with the language, though our parents are making slower progress.
The weather has been hot, and I’m still not used to keeping my breasts covered all the time. I slipped up once and took off my blouse when the heat in the classroom got to be too much – fortunately not many people were around besides us “ancients,” but the woman who was teaching us Hureshan was so scandalized! And yet she thought nothing of showing her calves in a knee-length skirt, which was never thought of before we fell asleep.
A couple of days after you left, when the rest of our courtiers and servants had arrived and were getting settled in, they started bringing us all to a small room in another nearby building one by one, where a nurse stuck us with needles. They said it was to prevent us from getting sick. I didn’t understand why at first, but one of the things they’ve been teaching us along with Hureshan is how germs cause disease, and how you can ward your body against them by squirting in a little bit of dead germs, and how you can kill most of them by washing your hands. It’s all very fascinating.
There is so much that is new and exciting, but I suppose I’ll stop there for now. Everything I can think of is surely something you already know about.
Write to me and tell me how you are doing. Were people surprised that you came home so soon, before Sgensar and Dripota and Mysen? And how did your family and friends react when you came home as a man?
Your betrothed,
Tailiki
1253/5/13
Dear Tailiki,
My mother and cousins were shocked to find me a man, to say the least. Most of my friends were less surprised. “It figures,” one of them said. “You’ve been going by a masculine nickname and wearing men’s clothes for years.” I had a little trouble with the university administration, proving who I am and getting them to recognize me as the same person, but Mysen sent a telegram testifying that he’d transformed me, and that helped.
I’m taking advantage of the enforced break to plan for my thesis, which I’ll have to write during the coming school year. I’m writing back and forth with Sgensar about my choice of topic. Actually, I should have selected my thesis topic sometime in the previous academic year, and done a great deal of research by now if not already started writing, but as you know I have a tendency to put things off. But at least this procrastination gives me a chance to write about the things we’re learning from the palace artifacts and books, and our conversations with you and the other ancients, which I wouldn’t have had if I’d locked into a thesis topic earlier.
Yes, inoculations are important. There are only a few diseases we can prevent that way, but doctors are working on figuring out how to prevent more. And handwashing may be even more so; I think I read somewhere that after doctors started washing their hands between patients, around fifty or sixty years ago, the number of fatalities from surgery dropped by some huge amount, maybe over 90%? And then more recently doctors have started telling people to wash their hands before eating or drinking, and that’s helped reduce disease a lot too.
I’m trying to think of more things about the modern world you might not have been told about yet. Have you seen or used a telephone yet? Madam Shotroha didn’t have one, and we don’t have individual ones in the grad student dorms here, but there’s a shared one in the common room. It’s pretty much always busy. – Oh, and have you heard any modern music yet? It seems strange to think of you growing up with nothing but a capella singing – such a rare thing in human history. Even our remote ancestors, long before we forged bronze or invented writing, carved simple flutes of wood and made drums out of animal hide. But going from no instruments at all to the complexity and variety of a modern orchestra – I can barely imagine it. And yet that’s just one of a hundred new things you’re getting used to, or will soon. I admire your resilience a great deal.
Your friend,
Ftangu
Seventh day of the sixth month, 1253
Dear Ftangu,
The school year has begun, and the young scholars need their dorms back, so Father and Mother and I have moved from the dorm to the home of a scholar at the university. Only Professor Daodru can speak Tupaskai, so we have to speak Hureshan with his wife Hetran and his daughter Kenet – she is not much younger than me. I’m getting pretty good at Hureshan after the intense course we took during the summer, but Father and Mother are still having trouble.
Uncle Kaspan and Aunt Datai are living with another professor’s family just over on the next street, but the courtiers and our servants have been scattered all over the city and in other cities. I don’t know if we’ll ever gather in one place again, and that makes me melancholy.
Sgensar and Dripota stayed here, talking with us and our courtiers and servants, until just before we left the dorms to live with host families. But I suppose you would know that, since they have returned to the same university where you are a student, right? Tell them I said hello.
I am still getting used to not having servants. And to the machines that take the place of many of them – but far from all. Even if we have machines to wash clothes, we must still haul them to the laundromat, put them into the machine and take them out again and hang them up to dry, and even if we don’t have to draw water up from the well, we still have to wash our dishes… but of course you know this already. You’re used to not having servants, and probably think I’m being silly to complain… only I’m not complaining, not exactly. Or at least I’m trying not to. Just thinking about how different everything is.
And the music! Yes, it’s astonishing to think that all this was kept from me (and other young people in Tupaska) to try to keep the curse from falling on me, and of course it didn’t work. And besides all the amazing variety of musical instruments I’m learning about, there’s the radio and the phonograph. Daodru’s family listens to the nightly concert from the capital every evening, and I can’t get over how modern music has such a rich sound, with so many ways to make interesting sounds besides the human voice. I can’t wait to go to a concert in person; the radio is wonderful, but there is occasional static that mars the flow of the music, and the phonograph doesn’t have that, but does usually have some small skips that Kenet tells me are due to scratches on the records.
I wish I still had a few of my things from the palace, but they were all claimed and divided up between the museum here and your university. Sgensar tried to argue for us to be allowed to keep a few personal possessions, but the men from the Bureau of Antiquities were adamant. I have nothing from my old life, not even my old clothes – those are hanging on a set of mannequins at the museum. The museum director said I could have a tour guide job there once I am more fluent in Hureshan. A far fall for a princess! But it is better than sleeping on forever, I’m sure.
Write to me and tell me how your studies are going.
Your betrothed,
Tailiki
1253/7/3
Dear Princess Tailiki,
I’m glad to hear that you’re making good progress with Hureshan. I’ve started my last year of grad school and I’m very busy with my studies, too, both with seminars and my thesis, which I’m writing on your palace and your family, actually. I’m still working on narrowing down my topic, but since I had more opportunity to talk with you and your parents than with your courtiers and servants, I’ll probably focus on your everyday life in the palace, if you’re all right with answering some more of my questions. Sorry, I know you’ve been doing hardly anything but answer scholars’ questions for months now. Or if you could get me the addresses of some of the courtiers and servants, wherever they’re living, that would also help.
Do you think you would enjoy the museum tour guide job? It would use your unique knowledge in a more dignified way than simply answering questions for one historian after another, but somehow if I found myself sleeping a thousand years and waking up in the far future, I don’t think I’d want to work at a museum, explaining life in thirteenth century Kosyndar to distractable schoolchildren and tourists. I’d rather learn to live in the present, learn new skills that no one in my past life dreamed of. But you and I are different people, and there would be nothing wrong with you accepting the museum job. I’m pretty sure you will eventually need to find some work – the political mood in Huresh will not be friendly to indefinitely supporting your family so you can answer scholars’ questions.
I enclose a list of questions about everyday life in your palace, but feel free to ignore them if you’re tired of answering questions. Or take your time answering them, but if you could send answers to particularly questions #1-4 by the ninth month, it would help me a lot.
Your friend,
Ftangu
