He raised his head; he flicked his ears.

Rommm, he tasted the air.

He trotted off, dry paws padding over dry stone, over lichen and moss. Stopping, sniffing, listening, he followed the sound down through the mountains, under the shadows of trees, a shadow himself, gray and soft, all soft padding paws and nose and ears quivering what sound, what sound.

XVII

TRUTHS, OR TWO WHEELS SHEEP CHEESE

In the beginning, learning to decipher the insect-legs—in secret, at night, outside, under the pale light of a lantern—was challenging. Having tried for so long to read the auguries of the world around her—the shimmer of moonlight on water, the zigzagging path of the sparrow through the sky—Alba could see only insects carrying portents when she looked at the letters.

J looked like a comet followed by its bright tail.

Q looked like a hawk spiraling into the beyond.

F looked like lightning forking across the sky.

“Sounds,” the boy-priest would repeat, only partly managing to conceal his frustration. “Sounds.”

Each night, he would bring a new parchment—whatever he could take with some measure of ease. Crouching in the dirt outside the chamber, they would lean together over the writing.

“This must be poor news,” Alba would say on seeing a collection of ee’s that appeared to her like an unfortunate division of veins. “Look at this arrangement of marks!”

“This merely lists the priests’ stores of food. E. It’s a sound. It sounds like eeeee. Two wheels sheep cheese, it says here. And moderately moldy, it says here, so yes, I suppose after all, the news is not so good.”

As time wore on, Alba grew more and more used to recognizing the shapes as sounds. “To… day, the oracle and her… app-apprentice re-received seven visitors,” she read haltingly. “All se-seven wanted… to know if they were mar-marrying the right person. Yes, this is right: I remember this. Only one asked about love. All the others wanted to know about wealth.”

The boy-priest carried whole scrolls to her. She learned to read the priests’ catalogs of the day—what they observed, what reports had come to them from afar. She gained a sense of the news of the land—more, a sense of its size and its people. She learned of its sufferings—the crops lost, the hunger felt, the disease that ravaged a village—and then, too, even in the midst of such suffering, its sometime celebrations—festivals that brightened a region with music and theater and games for a few shining days.

In the half dark, she practiced writing the sounds, the boy showing her how to hold the reed in her fingers, how to dip its sharp end in ink, how to keep the flat of her hand away from the parchment so the lines would not smudge and become something else altogether.

CHEESE, she copied. ORACLE, she copied. The little insect-legs carried the words firmly across the parchment. She thrilled at the truths they invoked. Days, when she was away from the parchments and sitting beside the oracle in the chamber, she traced the words again and again in her mind. APPRENTICE. PRIEST. VISITOR. PROPHECY. She envisioned the beetle-bodies skittering everywhere over the damp walls. More than once, the oracle had to gently nudge her from reverie—“Apprentice, your vision is elsewhere today. You leave me lonely”—and Alba, apologizing, would bring her attention back to the cave.