A Gift of Flame

Chapter 7

The next morning, the Sazi handed his secretary such a large stack of letters to re-copy that Coward wondered if he had slept at all. Indeed, that scarlet face was paler than normal and the Sazi lacked his typical sharp focus. Distant and distracted, he directed his secretary in his morning duties.

 When at last his employer left the little office, Coward hoped that he had gone to rest.

 Using only his fingertips to touch the translucent scraps of parchment, Coward carefully read each missive. The pieces of parchment that the Sazi used for his rough drafts were tattered, small, and delicate. They were reused from more official documents, the cow and goat hides scraped to remove the previously inked glyphs. A few of them had been reused to the point where the slaves had been unable to remove the previous contents without also removing the hide they were inscribed onto. The Sazi's angular and clumsy writing arched around these holes, resulting in small and cramped sections that required re-reading several times to untangle the correct string of hieroglyphs.

 This time he found two messages that seemed to lack conclusions. That was unusual. Was he was just too inexperienced to recognize that the letters had ended correctly?

 He hesitated for several long moments over the first letter, hands vacillating between placing it on the main pile or setting it in a separate pile. He took calming breaths to stem the rising panic of indecision, but his heart was racing and his hands trembled by the time he made the decision to put both drafts aside.

 The next step was to take a wax tablet and transcribe the letters. Pervasively sweet, the smell of beeswax filled his nose as his blade incised the words. It saturated his brain with the best memories of his past and present. His anxious heartbeat slowed to a meditative murmur.

 It was best to not think about the contents of the missives that flowed through his brain and out his thin fingers. The worlds and people written of were so out of his ken as to be unintelligible. Some referred to unusual events like a birthing or a death.  More often though they were commonplace for the Empire, but equally beyond Coward’s experience, like the state of the harvest or a raid on an Empire slave settlement.

 There had been a lot of death notices written early in his employment, as the Sazi undertook the task of notifying the Empires of those killed in the Fights or who had been broken into uselessness as their result and had taken the warrior’s way out. These letters were short and plain for such an uncommon and disgraceful event as death, but the Empires of the fallen did not care to dwell on the details surrounding the failure of their blood to thrive.

 It was best to not dwell on such things himself. His own disgraceful state of limbo did not benefit from introspection. Just cut the ‘glyphs into the wax, and blow away the soft golden curls and flecks. Cut and blow. Cut and blow.

 Due to his lame hand, the Sazi usually abbreviated the standard strings of hieroglyphs. Coward carefully carved these strings in full - miniature pictures of suns and waves, animals and human figures taking shape as his thin fingers remembered their prior skill.

 The only breaks in this relaxing routine came when Coward checked the huge scroll of standardized strings to ensure he had the correct order and glyphs. He felt a little proud that he no longer had to check before and after every single string, and smiled with a sweet, shy quirk. He could admit it to himself - he was infatuated. He loved this, loved losing himself to this peaceful occupation, loved the feeling that in this world dominated by the strong, he could still do something right, even if it was what any other member of his race would consider shameful.

 Today there were other thoughts that disturbed his peace, and as much as he tried to avoid them, they took the moments of tranquility to float to the surface.