He paused as he looked down at Grawp’s letter. It wasn’t printed on parchment at all but an expanse of what appeared to be untanned leather, thin as a bedsheet, irregularly shaped and curling at the edges. The entire surface was scrawled with tiny pictograms and symbols, clustered so tightly as to blend into a nearly seamless mash.
James turned his head this way and that as he leaned over it, trying to make sense of it and failing. The text of the letter—if text was what it could be called—didn’t run in lines down the page, but along the top, down the side, then across the bottom. In fact, the line of symbols followed the uneven edges of the skin, turning upside-down and running back up the side again, twisting in on itself in dense concentric circles like a fingerprint, or the rings of a tree stump. James blinked at it and gave his head a shake, unable to follow the dizzying line of imagery.
“Right,” Rose said slowly. “I don’t think even a person fluent in Giantish could just read this letter, Hagrid. Do you have a quill and parchment ready? We can help decipher it if you like.”
James wasn’t certain that he was quite prepared to spend the rest of the evening hunkered over a musty-smelling book translating hundreds and hundreds of tiny hand-scrawled symbols, and the look Ralph shot him communicated the same. But Hagrid’s response made it impossible to deny him. He nearly burst into relieved tears and scrambled to make more room on the table, retrieving a stack of damp parchment from a nearby drawer.
“Oh, Rosie, Ralph, James, that’d be just golden o’ yeh! I was reachin’ th’ end o’ my wits! And I know many would say that wa’an’t a long trek, but still. I’ll make tea! And thanks to yeh ever so much! Ever so much!”
James sighed to himself, unable to keep the smile from his face.
Ralph settled onto Hagrid’s abandoned chair as the half-giant bustled into his tiny kitchen.
“Well,” he said, shaking his head wryly. “It’s not like I had any plans for the rest of the year.”
“Oh tosh,” Rose said, climbing onto another chair, kneeling on it to lean over the table. She peered closely at the huge green book, which James could now see was a dictionary of giant symbology, with translations in English. “Giantish has no grammar, no spelling, no pronunciation. That’s one of the beauties of the language. It’s made entirely of pictograms, translatable to any other tongue. Once we get started and learn some of the basic recurring imagery, everything should start falling easily into place.”
“I don’t know what’s more daunting,” James sighed, tugging the huge sheepskin letter out from under the book and turning it this way and that, “how hard Hagrid makes it seem, or how easy you do.”
Hagrid made tea, serving it in his usual collection of chipped cups and mugs, and provided a platter of iced cookies in the shapes of hippogriffs, Christmas trees, and, inexplicably, Yeti footprints. Ralph transcribed what Rose and James translated, leaving crumbs on the sheepskin as they turned it round and round, following the line of symbols as it spiraled toward the centre of Grawp’s letter.
It became evident as they worked that the letter had been a group effort, written not only by Grawp, but also Prechka, his wife, and several other members of their mountain tribe, up to and including their local king. James began to recognize the drawing styles of each hand, simply by looking at the weight of the strokes, the straightness of the lines, and the relative artistic merits of the symbols. As they worked, he learned via Rose that the giants’ “ink” was a mixture of blood, tar, vegetable juice, and red clay. They painted the symbols with brushes made of bicorn eyelashes.
Ralph’s prediction that translating the letter would take the rest of the year turned out to be inaccurate, although James had to admit as the night wore on that it certainly felt like it was taking months rather than hours. Outside the hut’s square windows, the night turned inky black and snow indeed began to fall again. The wind gusted, rattling the panes and howling around the chimney, but the foursome stayed warm and busy, drinking tea until they could drink no more, dining on cheese, crusty bread with butter and peppery olive oil, cucumber slices, tiny blood sausage links, and more iced cookies for dessert. Tempers grew thin, and occasionally James and Rose would argue about the meanings of certain pictograms, especially when Grawp was their author, since his Giantish penmanship, as it were, was the most haphazard of all.
“It’s clearly a sun rising,” James insisted, stabbing at the drawing with a sausage-greasy finger.
“It’s King Kilroy looking over a mountain!” Rose argued impatiently. “See the hair!?”
“Those are sunbeams!”
“You’re as blind as a cave nargle! King Kilroy is the symbol for authority! It makes sense in context!”
“The rising sun represents the future,” James persisted doggedly.
“That makes more sense in context!”
Ralph, as usual, broke the stalemate. “Let’s just call it ‘authority in the future’ and move on, shall we? My bum’s going to sleep.”
It was nearly midnight by the time they finished the transcription. Finally, weary but gratified and curious, they retired to the chair and sofa before the fire to read the letter in its entirety. Hagrid stoked the coals to a fierce red glow, crackling and bursting with sparks, and eased into the huge easy chair, his stocking feet crossed on the rug, one big toe poking through a frayed hole. Trife turned three circles next to Hagrid’s knees and lay down with a contented snuffle.
James and Rose plopped onto the sprung sofa while Ralph remained standing as if he was about to give a presentation in class.
He began to recite the transcription, which, while written in his own handwriting, was still rather a task. As Rose had pointed out, Giantish is a language with no grammar or structure, leaving Ralph to fill in the blanks between ideas and concepts as he went.
“Grawp, Prechka, and the rest of the tribe send greetings and…the mountain-sized, ten-headed manticore of prosperity.”
“Ah, that’s a traditional giant’s greetin’, that is,” Hagrid nodded, his eyes half-lidded with happy anticipation. “Means riches and meat for endless seasons. Go on, go on…”
Ralph nodded uncertainly. “Time is hard as the year gets old.
The future is foggy and full of danger. But smaller worries first.
Dragon…” Ralph paused and looked up. “We’re sure he means Norberta here, right?”
“No other dragons in the mountain tribes,” Hagrid said. “He’s got to mean good old Norberta. She was their weddin’ gift, if yeh recall.
I’d loved t’ have kept ‘er myself, but it’s nice knowing she’s still in th’ family, at least.”
Ralph nodded and frowned back down at the letter. “Norberta smells a different dragon on the wind. She is excited and hard to control. Her desire for the male dragon of her kind makes her disobey the command of the giants who love and keep her. She leaves her cave home to go find the male dragon, but Grawp and Prechka, with the help of the tribe, even the king, bring her back. Soon, she will go far enough and fast enough that they won’t catch her in time. She goes always south and east, bypassing the small man places, heading toward the Sea of Light.”