Armand’s First Letter. Amelia’s First Letter.
15 May 1021, L’Ecole du Sorciers
My dearest cousin Armand,
I believe I have made a discovery. I am not certain—not certain of my command of Old Provençese, not certain of my facts, and not certain I trust my source—but it is something!
I am still trudging through Florissant’s Annals so as to increase my grasp of Old Provençese. It is rather like crossing the worst of Cumbria’s moors in November: slow, and you find the most unpleasant things on your boots on your return home. They were a red-handed people, the Salians, so it appears; never saw an enemy but to slaughter them wholesale. I suppose that’s how your dynasty survives to found a modern land, but it becomes tedious in the extreme when it is repeated over and over and over again: Hlodomar succeeded by Hlotar succeeded by Hlodobert, all drenched in waves of vital fluid.
But it is helping me to learn the language, and persistence gains me aid from Dr. L’Auberge; and so I persist.
In the meantime, however, I have begun to sample another ancient text. In Cumbrian it is known (to those very few who know of its existence) as the Ancient of Brutus, but in Old Provençese it is suggestively title the Iture de Brut. As before we have seen “the Iturians” transform into “the Ancients,” so here: Iture, or as we woulds say, “Iturian”, becomes, simply, “Ancient.”
Among scholars of ancient texts, so Dr. L’Auberge says, the term Iture is the general term for a long, fanciful tale: not a chronicle or an annals or a history, but something legendary, meant to entertain and amaze, and never, ever to be trusted. That is to, say, it is an ancient forebear of your penny-dreadfuls.
I was bemused to learn that the Iture de Brut is ostensibly a history of the founding of what is now the land of Britonia, which is to say, Cumbria, though it forms no part of any Cumbrian folk tale I have ever heard. It tells of a pair of brothers, Brutus and Enius, who fled with a remnant of their people after the complete destruction of their city. They eventually founded a new city in another land, which they called Florentia, “the Blooming.” No one knows where this city might have been, and Dr. L’Auberge says that most scholars regard both the brothers and their city as entirely fabulous.
Brutus and Enius quarreled after a time, and Brutus, now followed by a remnant of a remnant, traveled on to Britonia and founded a city he called Eburacon, which some of the more fanciful scholars of the past have identified with our city of Yorke.
It may seem odd that a tale of the founding of Britonia is written in Old Provençese; but according to its opening passage the Brut is a translation (and likely revision) of much older work (now lost) which came to the author from Britonia itself.
I do not know any of this from my own reading, of course; the above is the brief summary I was given by Dr. L’Auberge from his dim memories of having read the tale in his student days.
But the title suggests Iturian influence, as I’ve noted; and the unknown and lost city of the Blooming has certainly captured my imagination. We are looking for an ancient people, the Iturians; we are looking for evidence of an ancient catastrophe, and here we have a lost and unknown city, linked to the origin of a city that you and I know quite well; in an Old Provençese text that references an Old Britonian text in an age when travel between the Lands of Cumbria and Provençe should have been nearly impossible.
I have barely begun to make a start on the Brut, but I am nearly prostrate with anticipation.
Your enthralled and eager cousin,
Amelia
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