Willow Bark I

[Lani Stranger]

12th of Winter, 518AV

When Lani entered into the library, the thick and familiar dusty smell of the books welcomed her. She enjoyed coming to the Enclave for work, especially when she got to do copying. Her mind was set on finding a book that she could copy which she could bind herself, as the new skill she had learned remained fresh in her memory. Lani had enjoyed the tangible result of such work, and looked forward to doing it herself.

”Good morning Kavisan,” Lani whistled a greeting to the Enclave’s head librarian in Nari, and the man looked up from his material.

”Oh, hello Lani. We don’t have too much to do today, one of the Avora would like a journal of his copied. Do you feel comfortable with the Nari alphabet?” He spoke in monotone while still looking down at the texts he was pouring through. Nerves set to light her cheeks and she thought over the opportunity he was giving her. Clearly he had witness the improvement of her Nari over the past two seasons, but the mixed blood was still nervous about the idea of it.

”Yes, of course.” She smoothed her voice over in time to talk, trying to keep her face as calm as possible, even though he was not looking. She swiped a finger behind her ear, feeling the thick locks of straight black hair that she had braided together in the typical Inartan sense. Despite the physical aspects of her appearance that she could not change, she felt as though she blended in with the Inarta almost perfectly now. She wore their clothing, their hair, and spoke their language. Her talon sword did not come with her to the Enclave, the large weapon was too gawky and unnecessary, but with Narth’s help her skill was vastly improving, making for a proper swordsman out of the foreigner. Perhaps Kavisan was noticing more than just her progression with the language.

”Excellent,” He seemed to answer her before she finished speaking, picking up a ratted old journal from his desk and thrusting it towards the woman who stood over him. She took it gracefully with two hands, bowing slightly and then departed from his desk. Walking swiftly, she let the book land at her usual desk, among the other Chiet scribes, and then continued onto the workroom in the back. Lani selected the fullest black inkwell she could find and a fresh glass quill. She had always used feather quills, or sometimes metal, but never glass. She found she actually preferred the fine tip of the glass quill that did not scratch her paper and still carried the ink well. Lani made a mental note to acquire one, knowing that the glassblowers in Wind Reach were the best in the world.

Lani pulled out a few of the massive parchments, using a razor to cut them down to a size of eight by twelve, knowing she would be folding them once she was done. Additionally Lani grabbed a hard ruler, twine, and a rag. With all her supplies stacked neatly between her arms, she headed back towards her desk, setting her materials out in the way that she liked them. Before she took her seat, Lani ducked out of the bag that was strapped across her chest and one shoulder, carefully placing it on the desk. It held her chalk, which Lani had recently learned was very important for such a job. It was not the most common of tactics, so the material was not found in the workroom, but the Chiet did not mind bringing it herself, it was dirt cheap.

[Lani Stranger]

Settling into her work, Lani scooted her chair closer, tapping the sides of the parchment on the table to straighten it before setting it off to her left and selecting one page from the pile to lay before her. Making sure the fibers within the parchment lined up how she liked, the scribe selected a piece of chalk from her personal store and lightly pressed a dot into the parchment half an inch into the paper. She did three more dots down that side, and then did the same thing on all four sides of the paper so that she had created half-inch margins all the way around. Then Lani took the ruler and measured out the center, creating a line of dots down the center of the page. For the last part she measured three quarters of an inch out from the center line on each side, making those margins slightly larger in anticipation of the binding of the book taking up room.

Lani then took the length of twine she had gathered from the work room and picked up her chalk. She set the twine down and then set to rubbing all over it with the chalk piece, until she had rubbed down a third of the way through it, but the twine was thoroughly coated. Then Lani carefully picked the twine up, slowly straightening it so that the action did not dismiss the thread of all the chalk she had just covered it with. Once it was perfectly straight she laid it on the parchment lining it up with the dot marks she had made earlier so that there was a faint white line on the yellowed paper which created the perfect margin that she needed.

Now Lani had to be careful. She liked to use chalk because once the ink was dry it was a simple matter of brushing away the white powder, and getting rid of the evidence that the perfect script she worked so hard to achieve was not natural talent. It also meant that in the meantime she would have to be careful not to erase any of the lines so that she didn’t lose her margins.

One her first sheet was prepped, Lani picked up the book in order to actually look at what the Avora had written. Her grasp on the alphabet was good enough now that she could actually skim the book and get a gist of what the journal was written on. It seemed it was a herbalist Avora who was tracking the effects of various plants. She didn’t understand some of the larger words, but she could read the script easy enough. Lani could see that this Avora was right handed and tended towards large loopy letters which was not terribly common in the Nari script, but somehow it worked. Lani smiled to herself as she flipped through the pages seeing the scratched out words and whole paragraphs as well as random doodles in the margins. He had a tendency to try and cram last words into the bottoms of the page, which made them somewhat difficult to read, but nothing stood out to Lani as immediately illegible.

[Lani Stranger]

Deciding that the journal wasn’t going to throw her any hardballs, she took two paperweights that always sat at the desk and placed them on each side of the journal so that she could begin copying. The Avora had only written on one side of the page, clearly the bend of the book had been too difficult to write on both sides of the pages, so Lani could guess that once she had finished it would be a rather thin journal. In theory it might have been worth turning into a scroll, but since it had been written in a book first, the scribe used it as an eager excuse to bind a book again.

While she wrote, she took her time as usual. It was difficult not to get tunnel vision and write into the margins or not plan out the page properly, but Lani was more used to the practice and work it took to write in the journal now. Lani understood the first passage well enough, paying attention to the Nari words as she slowly copied them down with her glass pen. Lani had divided the page up into four parts, two on the front, and two on the back. She decided to skip one side entirely, and then only begin on the second half of the back side of the page. There would have to be a cover page that bound into the book and then a blank page at the beginning for the date and author information, so there was not a lot of room on the first page for her to write. Still, the trained scribe’s sharper more compact scroll was more legible than the herbalist’s large loopy letters, and she had flipped through two pages before she reached the end of her one.

As far as she had yet read and understood the doctor was writing a section on the costs and benefits of chewing on willow bark. It fascinated Lani to read his writing, learning that chewing on willow bark was actually quite an old method of relieving pain. Even then it was hard and did not always release whatever medication inside of it that relieved the pain as quickly as possible. When she reached the second page in his book she learned that he was attempting to dry the bark and turn it into a tea, making it easier and more potent to consume. Lani had not known that willow bark could be used as a pain reliever in the first place and the idea of turning it into tea seemed brilliant to her.

As she wrote, Lani could help but realize the information that the Avora had stored in his journal was excellent, and she had the urge to make notes for herself on a separate piece of parchment. All the parchment she had brought with her were cut for the book however, and so she took a few ticks to wipe her quill off on her rag and set it down. Scooting back out of her chair she rose to go to the workroom and snag herself an extra piece of paper. While she did so, her thoughts floated back to her own journal. It had once been a book and was now a shell of a book with parchment stuffed and stacked within it all the way back from when she was merely eleven years old. It had everything from glyphing and alchemy notes to sad attempts at drawing Okomo and Jamoura to recipes from all stages of her childhood. At least this herbalist had relative organization to his notes, whereas hers was a complete mess. Lani had the idea to copy her own journal, straighten it out and make it presentable, but she almost enjoyed the homely feel of the patchwork journal that she kept near and dear to her heart.

[Lani Stranger]

When Lani returned to her desk with a spare piece of uncut parchment, she began scrawling notes in common on the paper from the journal she was copying.

White Willow Bark: Pain Relief
Side Effects: Bleeding, Stomach Pains*

Having not been sure what the common translation for the Nari word was, she scrawled the Nari word and underlined it, intending on translating it at a later time, or perhaps asking Val for help. She continued writing.

Intake: Raw, Tincture*, Tea
Uses: Pain Relief, Fever Relief, Muscle* Cramp* Relief

There was not too much information on the bark remedy. Lani had to digest a lot of the Avora’s rambling and long descriptions that she did not understand in order to glean the information she did, and there were still even words and definitions that she had no concept for, not yet. When she reached the end of the information on the bark she back tracked back to her actual job, dipping her quill once again she returned to penning in the careful script of her work. Lani copying the herbalist’s journal word for word while she did so, only skipping the words and phrases that had clearly been scratched out.

By the time she had finished her first complete page, she realized her mistake.

”Petch meeee.” She groaned silently to herself in Common as she watched the ink dry on the first page. It was perfect, every margin had been respected, there were no ink splotches or spelling errors. Normally Lani would have been satisfied with this, but she had been so caught up with making sure her penmanship was perfect she forgot to think about how a book was laid out. The first half of the page would be seen in the front of the book and the second half would be in the back, making for an illegible book with information in no particular order. Lani groaned, leaning back in her chair and stretching out her shoulders and popping her knuckles. You’re and idiot. She allowed herself a few more unkind words in punishment before she sighed and got to work.

Planning ahead better now, Lani picked up the journal she was to copy and painstakingly counted the pages. Then to make sure she had the number right, she counted again. Her mistake had gleaned her some information, and she knew it took about two of his pages to create one of hers, and she was doing her’s double sided. This meant that since his book was sixty one pages long, hers would be a mere fifteen. She would have to make it sixteen for binding purposes and to allow for any extra room that she would need. Of course since each of the sixteen parchments would be half of a piece she would only need eight pieces of parchment, which when Lani counted, she realized she had. Glad for her luck at randomly cutting ten pages, only one of which was wasted, she would have a whole page left over. That would be perfect.

[Lani Stranger]

Lani set to resetting the new parchment, laying the chalk lines out and double checking their measurements to make sure she had them correct. This time she drew a chalk mark across the segments of the parchment that she was not to touch in order to maintain continuity and began writing. Although her pace was the same, it took her one page to complete two of his, Lani felt as if she was being interrupted more. Her script was small and her hands were sore, so she didn’t mind the few ticks break to let the ink dry before she flipped the page and measured out the margins for the back side. She was paying less attention to the information within the journal now, focusing on making sure her script was perfect and that her lay out was correct. By the time she was half way through the book, the scribed was slightly surprised to find it was time to flip, going back on the same parchments she had been writing on, but now she had allowed herself to write in the segments she had crossed out. Each time she had to flip a parchment to write the next page she had to reset the chalk and found herself burning through ten pieces in no time.

When she neared the end of writing the book, she found her fingers were even sorer than they were when she begun, and so she took more stretch breaks to pop her joints and clean the ink from her hands, as a way to get the blood flowing again in between writing. By the time Lani had written her way through the end of the journal, her fingers were very sore. She glanced up at the air shafts to gauge the time, finding the shadows where longer indicating it had been a few bells. After the last page dried, she saw that she had used up less segments than she thought she would and there were would be two blank pages at the end of the book rather than just one. Disregarding that information Lani poured through the pages, reading them thoroughly through to make sure she had made no errors, and then made sure she had numbered each page correctly as well. Once she was sure everything was written perfectly, the scribe straightened the papers together, taking the clean end of her rag and brushing away any chalk that hadn’t already found its way to her forearms and Vinati.

Once all the writing had been complete and the parchment stacked correctly, Lani knew it was time to bind the book. The day was wearing on, and she needed a few chimes to let her mind reset and her hands rest, so she let the finished book rest at the end of her desk. Her newly learned bookbinding skill would not be the best, but it would get the job done. Her writing alone had made the journal much neater and nicer than it was already. Lani knew when the Avora sent the journal to be copied and completed, that he was expecting it to take a few days. So she had no qualms about setting the book aside and approaching Kavisan for another copying assignment. Book binding would take her the whole day, and if she could prepare two to be bound it would be more work her time. So Lani glanced at her completed work one last time and then rose to approach Kavisan and continue with her work for the day.

[Ssezzkero]

Acting +1, Planning +3, Bookbinding +1, Logic +1, Writing +3, Copying +3, Herbalism +1, Research +1, Reading in Nari, Writing in Nari, Inarta: Adopting the culture, Writing with a glass quill, Bookbinding: Use of chalk, Bookbinding: Page layout, Planning for binding a book when copying, Research: Learning while you copy, Herbalism: Willow bark helps relieve pain, Willow Bark: Can be dried and made into a tea, Writing: Translating from Nari to Common