A Time of Omens. Katharine Kerr
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are mostly the same as in English, with these exceptions:
C is always hard as in cat.
G is always hard as in get.
DD is the voiced th as in thin, or breathe, but the voicing is more pronounced than in English. It is opposed to TH, the unvoiced sound as in th or breath. (This is the sound that the Greeks called the Celtic tau.)
R is heavily rolled.
RH is a voiceless R, approximately pronounced as if it were spelled hr in Deverry proper. In Eldidd, the sound is fast becoming indistinguishable from R.
DW, GW, and TW are single sounds, as in Gwendolen or twit.
Y is never a consonant.
I before a vowel at the beginning of a word is consonantal, as it is in the plural ending -ion, pronounced yawn.
Doubled consonants are both sounded clearly, unlike in English. Note, however, that DD is a single letter, not a doubled consonant.
Accent is generally on the penultimate syllable, but compound words and place names are often an exception to this rule.
I have used this system of transcription for the Bardekian and Elvish alphabets as well as the Deverrian, which is, of course, based upon the Greek rather than the Roman model. In spite of the ridiculous controversy still continuing in certain university circles, I see no reason to confuse the ordinary reader with the technical method of Elvish transcription in common use among linguists and scholars. Anyone who wishes to learn this system may of course refer to the standard works upon the subject available from the University of Aberwyn Press; the average reader of popular fiction would no doubt rather forego such a formidable experience. I am surprised at the stubbornness of certain professors of Elvish, to say nothing of a certain Elvish professor, which has forced me to append such a self-evident remark to these notes. One can only assume that these persons are under-employed by their academic institutions if they have the leisure to write scurrilous articles about contemporary novelists rather than devoting themselves to their proper areas of expertise.
On the Inner Planes, Time as we know it no longer exists. This is why an omen may refer to things which we perceive as long over and done with as well as to things in process at the moment in which the omen is cast and to things which we have yet to perceive at all. Past, Present, Future – these states do not exist in the world from which an omen proceeds, yet there is no denying, of course, that they do exist in ours …
The Pseudo-Iamblichus Scroll
In those days the eastern border of the elven lands lay in the middle of a forest. A traveller leaving the high plains and heading east came down a long gentle decline into the oaks to find several rivers that might mark a border – if only anyone at all had lived on either side of them. In that vast tangle of tree and shrub, bracken and thorn, finding the lands of men (that is, the three western provinces – Eldidd, Pyrdon, Arcodd – of the kingdom of Deverry) was no easy job. If you wanted to go from west to east, the sandy coast of the Southern Sea made a much more reliable road, if, of course, you could fight your way south to reach it. The ancient forest had a way of tricking travellers unless they or their companions knew the route well.
The woman who rode out of the forest late on a summer day travelled with a horde of such companions – not that most human beings would have seen them. Sylphs and sprites hovered round her in the air, gnomes clung to her saddle or perched on the back of the spare horse she was leading, undines rose out of every stream and pool she passed to wave a friendly greeting. Her friends weren’t the only odd thing about Jill. If you looked carefully at her silver hair, cropped short like a lad’s, and the fine lines that webbed her eyes round and latticed her cheeks, you realized that she had to be at least fifty years old if not somewhat more, but she radiated so much vitality, the way a fire gives off heat, that it was impossible to think of her as anything but young. She was, you see, the most powerful sorcerer in all of Deverry.
The first human settlement that any traveller coming from the west reached on the coast was the holy precinct of Wmmglaedd, although in those days, before the silting of the river and the meddling of humans had extended the shore, the temple lay a little ways out to sea on a low-lying cluster of islands. Jill rode along the sea cliffs through meadows of tall grass to a rocky beach, where the waves washed over gravel with a mutter, as if the sea were endlessly regretting some poor decision. A fair mile offshore, she could see the rise of the main island against the glitter of the Southern Sea.
She led her pair of horses down to the two stone pillars that marked the entrance to a stone causeway, still underwater at the moment, though when she looked at the water lapping at the carved notches along the edge of one pillar, she found each wave falling a little lower than the one before. Crying and mewling, sea birds swooped overhead, graceful gulls and the ungainly pelicans who were sacred to the god Wmm, all come to feed as the dropping tide exposed the rocky shallows. At last the causeway emerged, streaming water like a silver sea-snake, to let her lead her horses across die uncertain footing. At the far end of the causeway stood a stone arch inlaid with coloured marble in panels of interlace and roundels decorated with pelicans; it sported an inscription, too, ‘water covers and reveals all things.’
About ten miles long and seven wide, with a central hill standing in the midst of meadows of coarse sea-grass, the island sheltered four different temple complexes at that time, brochs as tall as a lord’s dun, clusters of wooden guest houses, cattle-barns and riding stables as well as a series of holy shrines placed at picturesque locations. Although the temple had been founded in the year 690 as a modest refuge for scholars and mystics, during the long Civil Wars of the ninth century its priests had the shrewdness and the good fortune to play a crucial role in placing the True King on his throne. When the wars were over, their fame drew an occasional desperate soul seeking an oracle, and as the long years went by, the rare case became a swarm of pilgrims, all laden with gifts to earn the favour of the god.
Now Wmm was rich. Still leading her horses rather than riding, Jill left the causeway and followed a fine road, paved with limestone blocks, through the smallish town that had sprung up near the temples. In among the round, thatched houses townsfolk and visitors strolled around or sat in the windows of one of the many inns, and pedlars kept accosting her with trays of sweetmeats or baskets of little silver medals and pottery souvenirs. She brushed them all off and strode on her way, skirting the main complex, too, bustling with visitors and priests here in the summer season, and took a little-used path that ran south-east through pine trees, all twisted and bowed down from the constant wind. In a little bay of rocky shore a jetty stood with a ferry bobbing at anchor beside it. Beyond, a scant mile away, she could see the rise of East Island, a long sliver of land that most visitors knew or cared nothing about.
‘Jill, halloo!’ The ferryman, a stout priest draped in an orange cloak, waved both hands at her as she led her horses gingerly down the steep path. ‘Back so soon?’
‘I am, at that. How have things been? Quiet?’
‘They always are, out our way.’ He grinned, revealing brown and broken teeth. ‘His holiness has pains in his joints again.’
‘I’m surprised you aren’t all as bent and stiff as village crones, frankly, out here in the fog.’
‘True, true. But well, we’ve got a bit of sun today at least. Enjoy it while we can, say I.’
Since the tide was running out, the journey was quick and easy, though the ferryman was bound to have a harder trip rowing back by himself. Jill coaxed her horses off, left him sighing at the job ahead, and headed across a wind-scoured meadow