Poem 85

[nike_ravus]

Title: Poem 85 (High D'Haran Love Poetry 8/13)
Author: Alsike
Fandom: LotS
Rating: PG (sorry)
Pairing: Berdine/Raina
Word Count: ~1800
Apologies: The Linguistics monster attacked, I'm sorry. I promise this is the only chapter where the linguistics monster makes an appearance. The Classics monster returns next time. And I'm really nearing the end with this one. I'm hoping that means more frequent updates.

Summary: Literacy is important to Mord'Sith.



Poem 51
Poem 2b
Poem 92
Poem 99
Poem 8
Poem 70 
Poem 15

 


Raina appeared in the library like the mist, hanging around in the corner, looking ready to dissipate at any moment. Berdine flinched and then restrained herself. This would be a bit like coaxing a cat down from a tree. She could handle scratches, but she didn't want to scare her off.


"Come on," she said, not looking at her, just waving her over. "You can sit down. No one's going to catch you here." Finally she turned and looked at Raina, flashing her a wry smile. "No one ever really comes here, save for you. It's been nice to have a visitor."


"I shouldn't be here."


Berdine stood and pointed to the chair. "Sit," she instructed, and Raina obeyed. The way she was sitting was almost Cara-level sullenness, but her expression was pure Mord'Sith. She hadn't really seen that expression on Raina before, except for at the few meetings with Lord Rahl, and even then, Berdine's mere presence was usually enough to spoil it. Sometimes she wondered if that was the reason she hadn't given up on this, because of the way Raina's eyes had laughed at her, when she had forgotten her own name in the Lord Rahl's presence. And it was the wrong expression for learning reading. This was not going to work if she expected it to be like training. Being punished for failure really wasn't effective. And she didn't want Raina to submit to her, to not question her. That wasn't how this should be, and she wouldn't allow it. She had to change the tone.


Berdine swung herself up to sit on the desk in front of her student and cocked her head. Beyond the Mord'Sith mask the abject misery, desperation, and hope were clouding Raina's pretty eyes, and Berdine hurt for her. "So," she started, keeping it easy. "What do you know about sounds?"


Raina looked suspicious.


"Basically, D'Haran uses thirty sounds to make words, and it has nineteen letters to represent those sounds. So what it does is it classes some of the sounds that are related as the same, and uses a single letter to represent them."


"What? Why don't they just have thirty letters?" And that was the expression Berdine had wanted to see, the open one, irritated and confused, but listening. If she thought about it, that had probably started this whole mess, Raina was beautiful when she was listening, and Berdine never could resist an audience.


"Historical reasons, and phonological. Some of the sounds are underlyingly the same, but are produced differently based on their position in the word."


Raina stared at her. "Are you serious?"


"It could be worse. D'Haran, at least, is essentially phonetic."


"What does that even mean?" She was frustrated and disdainful at the same time, and Berdine couldn't help the smile. It was probably good before she got into the complicated history of spelling reforms, and their orthographic system as compared to the one of the Midlands, because honestly, D'Haran and most of the languages of the Midlands were all descended from the same source, and to some extent were mutually intelligible. But the Midlands council could never agree on anything, and their orthographic conventions were a mess. If they had just maintained the original spellings, then fine, it would at least have been etymologically helpful, but no, various nobles would institute a reform that would promote their particular dialectical differences, which would last for enough years to confuse everyone about spelling, and then there would be a new movement, to change things back, or to put in a new reform, and each land had their own conventions. To some extent, Berdine felt sorry for the Confessors, because reading documents from those subsidiaries must be an awful headache. (Not that Confessors were immune from spelling idiocy, who on earth used an 'h' to mark a diphthong? 'Kahlan,' honestly.) For this sort of thing, she would take a tyrant over a council any day.


"Nothing, just that it could be worse." She leaned forward, reaching out to touch her lips. Raina's eyes widened, but she didn't flinch away. "Tell me a sound that uses your lips."


"What?"


"Any words that start with a kiss?"


Raina jerked back. "Are you mocking me?"


Berdine didn't look away. "No. Say my name. Pay attention to what your lips are doing."


"B- Berdine?" She looked confused and her skin darkened, and Berdine had to breathe in swiftly through her nose to keep control.


"Did you feel it?"


"Feel what?"


Feel the kiss, she wanted to say, but she couldn't. It would be too much, to see her reaction to that. "Did you feel your lips strike each other and release the sound?"


"I... yes. I think so." Raina frowned, and mouthed a few sounds silently. "Yes."


Berdine smiled. "So there are other sounds that use your lips, some just lips, others lips and teeth. Fear, pet, vie, wait. Can you tell the difference between those sounds?"


Raina scowled. "Why is this important?"


"Trust me."


Raina's eyes narrowed even more and she frowned. Berdine laughed and produced her chart with the images of the mouth explaining the positions of the sounds. The letters were each matched with their appropriate picture.


"You're probably right not to trust me. You're my first student. I'm testing things out on you."


Raina groaned and grabbed the chart. "What is this?"


Berdine slid off the desk so she could lean over her shoulder and explain.


"Oh, so, I think I see. If I see-" She pointed. "that thing, I should..."


"This was why I was walking you through the sounds. If you can feel where they're produced and remember them, you can shape the right sound when you see the letter."


"You have those marked as two different letters, but they're the same position." Raina pointed and Berdine nodded. Honestly, she was far too intelligent to have any trouble with something this basic, and too determined to let it slide. This was going to be as simple as anything. She placed her fingers against Raina's throat. "What are you-?"


"Say our Lord's name."


"What? Lord Rahl."


Berdine laughed. "No, his given name."


Raina's eyes flicked suspiciously to her. "Darken."


"Did you feel my fingers vibrating against your throat?"


"I- yes."


"Now pretend his name was Tarken."


"Tarken?" The inflection seemed to say, 'who on earth would suggest a lousy name like that?'


"Do you hear the difference between the two?"


"Of course."


"Do you feel the difference?"


"What?"


"Say them both, and pay attention to my fingers. In which name do they start vibrating first?"


Raina frowned and tried to sort this out. She said both names a few times and then stopped. "Oh," she said. "It starts first in Darken, doesn't it?"


"You're really excellent at this."


Raina rolled her eyes. "You have no one to compare me to."


"Even so." Berdine leaned close. "The vibration is called voicing, and that's what differentiates those letters."


Berdine walked her through the chart until she could match the image to the shape of her mouth. She glared seriously at the symbols and at the images, making the shapes, muddling and mistaking various letters, forgetting how to interpret the images, but in general making excellent steady progress.


"So now for vowels, they're harder."


Raina groaned.


Berdine had given a lot of thought as to how she wanted to teach this. It wasn't training, and she wasn't going to be there, cracking the whip. Raina didn't need any whip cracking anyway. She wanted this, more than anything. Berdine's intention was to give her the tools to have her set out on her own, so she could work alone, checking and doublechecking, and not have to ask for help. It was pretty clear she didn't like to ask for help.


After they covered the sounds, Berdine set her to muddling out short words, and went back to her own work. They would do stress patterns the next day.


It was nice to have her around though, grumbling in annoyance over the similar looking letters and sounding out words. Sometimes it was distractingly alluring, and Berdine would sit there, letting her eyes take in the sight of her. And then Raina would look up, catch her eye, and scowl at her. "Don't you have work to do?"


Berdine felt just as much affection for her while she was teaching, but the desire was restrained, and she could keep herself under control. She thought she could at least, but something unsettling in her stomach suggested that the affection she had each day when Raina fought and scowled over the letters of the alphabet was only getting worse. It felt different, more real, because she had spent so much time with her, learned so much about how she looked and behaved, and yet she was still completely absorbed in every new look and flinch.


Each day was a new trial, and each day Raina improved, forming the letters roughly and awkwardly, as she wrote out short brisk reports, her spelling wildly off at times, and yet phonetically sensitive. Long words were a trial to read, because she still had to hold each decoded sound in her head and combine them. But fluency was practice, and Raina was dutiful. She spent most of her time at her duty, training her students, but she would slip away for an hour or two, to sit across from Berdine, scowling at her papers, stretching the fingers unused to holding a pen.


Sometimes she would laugh, and Berdine found herself mesmerized by it. She would look for simple texts, but interesting ones, her favorites, moving or funny, especially funny, and then she would wait, hardly working, for Raina to decode it, and to see her response. And she wanted her.


But she had promised to steal no more kisses. This was worth far more than a momentary brush of lips and an immediate rejection. It was worth it, even as it ached like an infected wound.


"Here," Berdine said, handing her a sheet with a small couplet written out. "I bet you can read this now."


She thought she could. Raina was nothing if not studious, and she glared down the sheets of letters and combinations of sounds with ferocity that would make a living enemy flee in his tracks.


Raina bit her lip as she stared at the words, her throat and the underside of her jaw flexing slightly as she rehearsed the sounds without opening her mouth.


"'I hate and I love,'" she said finally, pausing to find the words that matched the meaningless marks on the page. "''Why do I do this?' you ask. I don't know.'" It was more fluid now as she recognized words she had seen before, and grew interested in what came next. That was the important part. You'd never learn to read, Berdine knew, if you weren't interested in what came next. "'But I feel it happening.'" She frowned at the last phrase, containing a word that was long and difficult, but as she worked it out it was undeniably familiar. "'And it tortures me.'"


* * *


Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris?


Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

Part 9

Comments

[chickinwhite.livejournal.com]

AW, this was beautiful!! I am a fan of good words and sounds, and you managed to make them visible!! Great!
And Berdine is the perfect transmitter for it. Her art of teaching is sensitive; passionate. And her loving Raina is flowing along with her teaching...
Perfect!!

[(Anonymous)]

The way to this Mord'Sith's heart, is through words. How utterly romantic!

As speech/language pathologist, I enjoyed your attention to the details of speech production. Speech therapy has never been this sexy or romantic!

Austin

[mayireadtoday.livejournal.com]

What a great image: "The way she was sitting was almost Cara-level sullenness"

And that poem fits perfectly.

Whose poems are these?

[nike-ravus.livejournal.com]

Oi, I keep forgetting to disclaim the poems.

They're Catullus' Poems of course!

http://rudy.negenborn.net/catullus/text2/e1.htm

[mayireadtoday.livejournal.com]

Thanks.

[whitewildhorses.livejournal.com]

Oh ! I just discovered that, and I might never have been so happy. I mean... Phonetic + Mord'Sith! I guess heaven looks a bit like that. Everything I like.
And I also love your story (and those scenes were so sweet, but still not too sweet.) This is amazing. And it's not that often that I find fanfiction including love for latin poetry. This is sooo great. Linguistic monster is kind of nice.