Armand’s First Letter. Amelia’s First Letter.
16 November 1021, Veronica’s College, Edenford
My dearest cousin Armand,
As you see from the direction, Maximilian and I have escaped the confines of L’École du Sorciers (much loved though they are) and are temporarily in residence in Edenford, the better to collaborate with Dr. Tillotson and his colleagues.
In my last I wrote you of our discovery that a provincial Provençese saint (do I repeat myself?) may have used the ley lines around the village of San Rocher as a means of transport. This sent me into a flight of giddy speculation, from which I fear I have not yet descended. Still, I have moved forward with caution.
Shortly after writing to you I met with Dr. L’Auberge for my continued instruction in Old Provençese, and I asked him if the annals might contain any references to the Ancients (that is, the Iturians) that described their means of transport. He began to shake his head, and then stopped and stared off into the space above my head.
“Perhaps,” he said, and then collected himself. “Madame Archer, I might perhaps have something for you; I must reacquaint myself with the details. For now, let us return to your declensions, which are abominable.”
He returned the following morning, bearing a thick volume that contained the proceedings of the meeting of the Académie Provençese for the year 973. “When I was a student,” he began, placing the tome on the table between us, “my instructor advised me to acquaint myself with the past work in the field.”
“So that you might build upon it?”
“Non, non,” he said. “So that my in youthful enthusiasm I might not repeat old mistakes or reopen dead controversies and so become a figure of ridicule, n’est-ce pas? For one must choose one’s battles, and it is foolish to engage in a battle that is already lost. And here,” he said, patting the tome gently, “is one of these. Whether it will have value to you, I do not know.” And then he shrugged, in that way the Provençese have. “I have marked the page; you shall read it for yourself. Bonjour!“
You will remember Hlodowig and the Salians, the founders of what is now called Provençe. There is a text, the Deeds of the Salians, which says (as translated into modern Provençese) that Hlodowig unsuccessfully attempted to use the “means of the Ancients” to bind his kingdom together. The original text speaks of the Iturians, as so often; and the word translated as “means” might more literally be translated “ways”.
The word “way” is ambiguous in Old Provençese as it is in modern Cumbrian. It can mean a manner of doing something, as you might say, “Oh, that’s just Amelia’s way”; or it can mean the route to a place, as you might say, “That’s the way to Bois-de-Bas.” In this latter usage, it can be synonymous with “road” or “path”.
The article in Dr. L’Auberge’s tome describes a heated argument that took place at a particular meeting of the Académie Provençese, during which two scholars came to blows. The first scholar suggested that the “ways of the Ancients” were the ways—the roads—along which the Ancients marched their armies, and so bound their realm together by force of arms. The second scholar suggested that the first scholar was a damned fool, that no one had ever found the remains of any such roads, and that the “ways of the Ancients” undoubtedly referred to their skills in the arts of statecraft, skills that Hlodowig, for all his accomplishments, had had no opportunity to acquire.
The second scholar was censured for the intemperate language that lead to the altercation—he was fined two livres of money—but for all that the assembled scholars judged him correct in his assertions.
There are, so Dr. L’Auberge tells me, multiple references in ancient texts to the “ways of the Ancients”; but although ruins of ancient cities are present here and there across the Old Lands, none have found any signs of roads dating to those times, and current scholarship regards the matter as settled.
But suppose, Armand, suppose that we are right. Suppose the ley lines were a means of transport. Might they not be the “ways of the Ancients”? Might they not have been used to transport men and materiel?
If they could do so, perhaps we can as well. And so we are here in Edenford to work with Dr. Tillotson and ponder how the trick might have been accomplished!
Your youthfully enthusiastic cousin,
Amelia
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Photo by Adriano Pucciarelli on Unsplash
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