Table of Contents
Translator’s Preface
SCENE I: Show Business
SCENE II: Making an Exit
SCENE III: Desperate Times
SCENE IV: A New Problem
SCENE V: Things Can Always Get Worse
SCENE VI: The gatehouse
SCENE VII: No Virtue in Almost
SCENE VIII: The Wheatsheaf
SCENE IX: The Road East
SCENE X: Improvisation
SCENE XI: Of Gorse and Wild Thyme
SCENE XII: The Desert
SCENE XIII: The Party Leader
SCENE XIV: The Hide
SCENE XV: The Cormorant
SCENE XVI: Consequences
SCENE XVII: A Kind of Welcome
SCENE XVIII: Harsh Realities
SCENE XIX: A Council Meeting
SCENE XX: Beacons of Honor
SCENE XXI: Stories
SCENE XXII: Opening Moves
SCENE XXIII: Glimpses by Firelight
SCENE XXIV: Questions
SCENE XXV: Seaholme
SCENE XXVI: The lighthouse
SCENE XXVII: The Convoy
SCENE XXVIII: Chaos
SCENE XXIX: The Fallen
SCENE XXX: Ironwall
SCENE XXXI: More Consequences
SCENE XXXII: The Elixir of Sensenon
SCENE XXXIII: Romance
SCENE XXXIV: The Ritual
SCENE XXXV: The Hopetown Road
SCENE XXXVI: Investigations
SCENE XXXVII: Time for a Beer
SCENE XXXVIII: The Razor’s Edge
SCENE XXXIX: Watching
SCENE XL: The Assassins
SCENE XLI: Rest in Peace
SCENE XLII: The Farmhouse by the Woods
SCENE XLIII: One of Them
SCENE XLIV: The Raid
SCENE XLV: Flight
SCENE XLVI: Harvest
SCENE XLVII: Alone at Last
SCENE XLVIII: The Secret of the Caves
SCENE XLIX: Adsine Again
SCENE L: Implications
SCENE LI: A Decision
SCENE LII: A Different Road
SCENE LIII: Back on the Horse
SCENE LIV: The Gathering
SCENE LV: The Enemy
SCENE LVI: Desperate Times
SCENE LVII: Desperate Measures
SCENE LVIII: Casualties
SCENE LIX: Realism
SCENE LX: The Curtain
Acknowledgment
TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE
Until a few years ago, the collection of manuscripts now known as the Hawthorne Saga had been sitting in a climate-controlled case in an obscure English library for over a century, baffling all attempts to decipher the strange language in which they were written. We knew from library records that they were once part of the Fossington collection and that they were almost lost when the east wing of Fossington House was badly damaged by fire in 1784. Parts of the second manuscript showed some light scorching, and there was moderately severe water damage to much of the first book, but how they were originally acquired and from where remains a mystery. The eighteenth-century records refer to the crate of Fossington manuscripts only as “handwritten, very old, bound in calf, in indecipherable cursive: language unknown.”
Being completely unreadable, the manuscripts would have remained no more than linguistic and historical curiosities were it not for the recent discovery of certain papers located in the attic of an Elizabethan manor house in Oxfordshire, the precise location of which I am not at liberty to reveal. I was first shown these papers eight years ago. Various experts concurred that the author was none other than the famous translator Sir Thomas Henby (1542–1609). The papers were all in Elizabethan secretary hand and difficult to read, which is the only explanation I can offer for not immediately recognizing that while some of them were in plain English, others were actually transcripts of the strange language featured in the Fossington House papers. Even after I had made the connection, it was another year before I realized that the English pages were actually translations of the so-called indecipherable cursive of the Fossington manuscripts, which actually turned out to be a previously undocumented language: Thrusian. How and with what assistance, if any, Henby accessed the key to this remarkable literary find, I cannot begin to imagine, but there is no question that he did, and left both direct translations of several dozen pages and notes by which the rest might be rendered into English.*
I have made up for my slowness to realize the significance of my find by diligent work on the manuscripts ever since. Using Henby’s translations and notes as a kind of Rosetta stone, I have been able to work out the grammar, diction, and tone of the Fossington House papers, which I have renamed the Hawthorne Saga for reasons that will become apparent. In the translation, I have used a modern, colloquial style in an attempt to capture—or at least echo—the uniquely sprightly and energetic Thrusian used by the author. The book in your hands, faithfully translated from the original, is the result. I only hope that you find my labor in bringing this ancient text to light to be worth the reading. If this meets with sufficient approval and I encounter no serious hurdles in the translation, I plan to complete work on the second volume of the series approximately one year from now.
—A. J. Hartley, 2009
* No identification of the place—or even the period—from which the original came has yet been made. All attempts to identify known landmarks, places, or geographical features have failed. Militarily, it lacks gunpowder and therefore seems early medieval, but the culture as presented seems later, more