I don't want to endure the gauntlet of the dining hall with him, so I... I pull out the apple from earlier and crunch on it as I distractedly try to use the remaining 50-odd minutes to try and piece together some of what I missed in Middle French.
And then, too quickly, and yet... agonizingly slowly, it's time to go to Emrys's classroom.
The many staircases have me breathing hard again, and I wonder if this counts as exercise, and if I'll actually get in shape this way. Lanz seems fine. I glance at him between the fourth and fifth floors. He isn't even breaking a sweat, and he's still wearing his winter coat and a scarf.
"Must be in good shape," I say, irritably.
Lanz draws his eyebrows together. "I am an athlete," he says.
"Yeah, but—" I don't finish the sentence.
I've seen them fence. It looks exhausting, even if the bouts are quick. I guess I just don't mentally think of fencing as a sport that requires any, well, athleticism. Which is absurd, given what I know about the four of them.
"Right," is all I say out loud.
We've reached the fifth floor. Lanz stuffs his hands in his pockets and nods at me. "Well, have a good class," he says a little awkwardly.
"You're not..."
I shake my head. Of course he's not. I'm in class with Kingston. I guess they really have to plan around their schedules, too. Somehow the thought hadn't even occurred to me, but obviously. They're all still students.
I take a deep breath and push into the door. Inside, it's like class was before, the seminar, except smaller. Just one other student, who's there before me, of course, sitting at a desk. He turns, and noticing me come in, gets to his feet.
Oh, gross, is all I can think. Because I'm a woman coming in, I blow out a hard, firm exhale through my nostrils, grip the strap of my bag, and take the desk. Well, across the room would seem ridiculous, ridiculous, and that would have Professor Emrys basically doing laps to shuttle between the two of us. So, next to him, I guess.
A pulsing, painful feeling settles into my throat as I slide into the chair, unload a notebook, and a few pens.
If Professor Emrys noticed anything unusual going on, he's hiding it extremely well.
“Well, welcome back to class,” he says, sweeping his hands in a too-large gesture that I suppose is meant to highlight the absurdity of there just being two of us.
I take the chance. I look sideways at Kingston. His head is bowed. He's writing something on a piece of paper. The date. How practical. I lick my lips and look back to Emrys. “Are we all feeling…”
“Energized and enthusiastic about cracking the secrets of the universe?”
Kingston says nothing. I give a half shrug. “What exactly are we going to do?”
“What else?” Emrys says, bending behind his desk and retrieving what seems like an endless supply of accordion folders looped shut with string. “Catalog, and compare.”
That turns out to be work so tedious it's almost comforting. What he's brought is facsimiles of every conceivably related piece of doctrine, legend, historical record, religious text, or otherwise that could even remotely be related to something Grail-like.
“You'll notice favoritism for Occidental texts,” Emrys says, walking around, as Kingston and I diligently scan down the facsimiles, highlighting terms and puzzling out the letters. “I'm no Western chauvinist, but I have every reason to believe that given the locality of our friends of St. Vincent and the bounty of potentially related texts and traditions in that corner of the world…”
“All roads lead to Rome,” I mutter, squinting at a terribly reproduced line of Fraktur-style German letters.
“Or Avignon, as the case may be,” Emrys says. “But yes, as it were. I'd assume our colleagues in the Ancient Eastern Studies Department are much more enlightened beyond this kind of messiness anyway.”
Kingston says nothing. He has said nothing this entire time, and is simply looking from page to page, transliterating what he can, noting down anything of significance, and writing them into his database.
The three-hour seminar block passes slowly and then all in a rush, the way time tends to go when I get involved in things, because despite everything, despite that pulsing sort of ache I feel when I think about all the circumstances that led to me being here like this—no, all the things that Kingston did or didn't do, rather, that led me to being here like this—I love this work.
I love reading. I love words. I love the fact that someone could have put pen to paper, or quill to parchment, I guess, overa thousand years ago and scratch down little marks that today conjure the exact meaning they intended in my brain, me who's seen iPhones and microwaves and airplanes, and them who probably never drank a clean glass of water in their entire life, connected through this shared realm of words and sentences.
Not that it's all incredibly romantic work. We're essentially making a database, creating a sort of catalog system of all these different intersecting points, so that I guess we can compare them and see what they have in common. Idea being that if at least two people wrote about something that seems to be the same, it's probably true, or at least worth investigating further.
And that's the thing about the Middle Ages. People forget that it was over a thousand years, depending on when you stop and start. But from the fall of Rome to the dawn of the Renaissance, centuries. And even looking only at Europe, some of Scandinavia, and the Near East, the geographical range is breathtaking. To be sure, my interest was piqued the same way plenty of people's are: knights, princesses, castles, fairy tales. But now that I'm here and have given it a closer look, I appreciate just how much there is to all of this.
It would be thrilling and luxurious if it didn't also feel so urgent. Because somewhere in this tangled and hole-filled and looped and knotted network of stories and myths and histories, somewhere in there is something to do with me.
