L'Enyorance

"Mercè, you will take dictation, please."

L'Ausa Majaur tapped a yellowed scroll lightly against the tussock of down between her beak and maw. One of the Cucs sidled up beside me, reached for a pocked chalcedony bench with her two forelegs, and slowly pulled herself erect. She beamed at me, a simple little girl's grin, appropriately shy, her saffron comb unfurling and tacking into the moist dawn like a heliotrope. I nodded at the child and startled to grin in return. Within a few seconds, a small, disjointed congregation of her sisters began to trickle from the shadow of the archway and scurried singlefile across the peristyle, over weeds and rumpled loaves of limestone and sprigs of vermillion feldspar, towards the looming, flowering lhedouner where L'Ausa waited. We all exchanged wide grins, as would only befit a summons from the old mendicant.

La Majaur drew an appreciative smile for the crowd, dropped to one knee, and handed me the scroll. I plucked it from the underside of her paw, between my thumb and forefinger, quickly, daintily, as she had once taught me. Her hand vanished immediately beneath an ebony fold in her robe, motes of dander wafting across my nose and mouth, as she stood up and receded into the hulking shadow of the nettle tree. She smiled again, sagacious and yet again capriciously maternal, and began with a recitation of the events of the past eighteen years; how hers brought us here as a misunderstood act of peace, how the Chathalans greeted the Cucs, that endearing, almost infantile proto-species under Ausana tutelage, with cannon and flashing turret, and taught their kind that word, guerha, although they never once, in their entire existence, fashioned such a concept. It did not matter, I thought as I wrote, that my fathers and grandfathers were mere frontiersmen, utterly unarmed save the odd hunting rifle. La Majaur then recited the old story of the Roman conquest of Gaul; how Julius Caesar had all communiques to and from Italy encoded in Greek because barbaric, Celtic Gaulish and Latin were in most regards nearly the same tongue. She insisted that lhengua des Auses and Chathalà must have been mutually intelligible due to the same incomprehensible serendipity of cosmic benevolence, even though by the time I celebrated my twenty-fifth birthday I had deciphered much if not most of the written form of the Auses' primeval language and found it to be a leviathan with myriad unwieldy declensions, completely devoid of syntax, as well as probably their only system of mathematics.

It was at that point, I suppose, that I stopped listening for the import of L'Ausa's words and contented myself simply to transcribe them, glancing up at her, with restrained incredulity, periodically. For her part, the old bear grinned approvingly down on me from time to time, favoring me with a slight nod as she did. I should not have balked when she finally delivered the summation of her sermon.

"As we have decided to return our beloved Mercè to Fideus, and conclude, after what will be many decades of silence, this grand ritual."

I narrowed my eyes at L'Ausa. She flared her beak nostrils, parted her lips slightly, and nodded. I put down my pen and gazed up at her.

"Yes, my dear girl, we received their reply last week. They asked about you, all of you, of course." She licked at her beak with her upper lip for a moment and addressed the Cucs again. "We will meet again next week, as usual, for further instructions. Our departure will not be for long, however. I assure you. Well, then ...