Page 78 of A Winding Wave of Magic
“How can you possibly know that?” I asked. “Can you See back forty thousand years to the beginnings of human civilization?”
Jonathan offered a sardonic smile. “I cannot. But once, someone like you could. And she shared it with the rest of us. Since then, we’ve tried to regain the knowledge we’ve lost.”
I opened my mouth to argue, then found I couldn’t. After all, how many unintelligible languages had I heard on a bad day? Who was to say, if that Sight was clarified, how far back I was actually Seeing?
Jonathan took a sip of his wine. “Call it the original language, if you want.”
“You mean a proto-language? Do you really subscribe to that theory? Isn’t it possible that something like, well, Thai, could have evolved separately from Latin?”
He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter whether there were multiple languages that had the ability to speak efficiently with various energies or just one. My point is just that somewhere in history, the old tongue—or tongues,” he corrected himself at my glance, “were lost, along with the oral histories they conveyed.Faehistory. We have some of the words in the oldest, what you call dead languages, but even those are millennia removed from the oldest. And we’ve lost the pronunciation, the correct cadence, all of the fluency that comes with being a native speaker. We know some of the words, but no one is ever entirely sure if they are saying them correctly.”
His voice was taking on the dreamy quality of a scholar lost in nostalgia. I laid my head on the couch to listen more attentively.
“We think some modern languages may be closer to the old tongues than previously thought. Goidelic forms, like Irish, are reasonably old. Greek. Hebrew. Arabic. And then there are the language isolates too, like Basque. The theory is that native speakers of the older languages can appropriate a greater command of the old tongue, and could possibly help to uncover its origins. It’s why you’ll find so many sorcerers in ancient language courses. I’m sure you have a few taking yours.”
Jonathan glanced over at me for confirmation, and I nodded. I had been a TA for a few introductory Irish courses over the years, which had in fact contained an odd percentage of young sorcerers. Most of them weren’t even Irish majors, but chemists and physicists. The occasional biologist.
Real grade grubbers too.
“Would you consider yourself more lawyer or physicist?” I wondered as my thoughts began to wander.
Jonathan chuckled. “I am a scientist. I have a law degree, but it’s certainly not what I do most of the time.”
“You just happened to pick up a JD, did you?”
“I find certain occupational degrees useful in navigating through the plain world of humans. Surely you can understand that.” Something in his voice told me he didn’t want to explain this odd statement anymore.
“I suppose. So what do you research when you’re not executing wills?”
Jonathan reached over his head and stretched in a distinctly feline manner. The room was pleasantly warm, and we both gazed peacefully at the beamed ceiling as he spoke. Under my bare fingertips, playing with the woolen skin, glimpses of other nights like this came back to me. Gran on the floor with a friend or two before Mom and I arrived. Maybe even a lover she’d never revealed.
My mind was pleasantly fuzzy—all I picked up was the joy of those evenings, as opposed to the details. I quite preferred it that way.
“I’m a physicist,” Jonathan was saying. “My home institution is in Rome, but I’ve been working at Harvard for the last six months.”
“Not Oregon?” I teased.
“No. Not Oregon.” His mouth quirked. “That was a snap decision. You thought I was a criminal.”
“Well, you sort of were.”
He chuckled. “I should have known better than to lie to my—to a seer anyway.”
I couldn’t argue with him. “So, particle physics, right? Can you tell me more or would it all go over my head?”
He rubbed his mouth. “That depends. Do you know what a singularity is?”
“The term sounds familiar. I watchedCosmoswith my dad when I was a kid, but I don’t remember much.”
“Cosmologists use the term, but they’re more interested in what started the whole universe, what started everything. I work in particle physics, looking at the here and now. ”
I took a drink. “All I know about the beginning of the universe is how nothing came from Chaos. Or Chronos, depending on who’s telling the story. But that’s it.”
Jonathan tipped his head to one side as he watched the flames dance. “Myths and physics probably have more in common than we think. They both seem to be at the heart of the mystery of magic.”
“The mystery of magic?”
“The singularity,” he corrected me.
