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“Oh, at last, a letter from General Yawan—she is alive!”
The young man looked up from his book in delight. A letter, of course! He had just been wishing he could talk to his tutor—he had a thousand questions about the tower and what he could see surrounding it, and at least as many more arising from the books he had read here—and he had forgotten that people in books talked to each other over great distances all the time.
He himself had never written a letter. Nearly everyone he had ever met had lived in the red house with him, and his cold-faced parents did not seem to like him to speak even when they were in the same room. His tutor had received letters rarely, and written responses even more rarely, but the young man had never been permitted to read them. From books, he knew they were sheets of folded paper sealed with hard wax, or placed inside something called an envelope. He had asked his tutor the meaning of this word, which he could guess meant something which envelops but did not entirely understand. His tutor had shown him what seemed to be a sheet of paper cunningly folded so that other paper could be placed inside, and then a flap closed and sealed—again with wax—so that the letter could not be removed without tearing the envelope. This had led into a longer lesson about all the reasons why someone might want to protect what they had written, from personal affairs to deadly secrets to matters of state.
The young man had neither envelope nor wax, but he had paper and pens and ink aplenty, and he had often found that things simply appeared in the tower when he wished for them, so perhaps he would find some when he had finished. He sat down at his writing desk, dipped his pen, and realized he did not have any idea what went in a letter. He stood up again and wandered around looking at the tower’s many bookshelves until he happened serendipitously upon a volume titled How to Write Letters: A Manual of Correspondence. He brought the book back to his desk to peruse.
He began with the index, as he had been taught, and discovered that there were many more types of letters than he had ever imagined. Social letters; business letters; love letters; announcements of births, deaths, marriages, and so on; invitations, congratulations, and commiserations; anniversaries and presentations, acceptances and regrets. There were rules about papers and inks and handwriting, salutations and signatures, whether something should be conveyed in a letter or a note or a card. Punctuation had no less than twelve sub-headings, and “Introduction of letters” was not the same thing as “Introduction, letters of”. It was, in a word, overwhelming.
The young man considered the best way to begin. On the one hand, his tutor had always said that it was good to take one’s time about things, and that anything worth doing was worth doing well. But his tutor also said that the best way to learn was by doing. The young man decided that his tutor would forgive him if he got some of the rules wrong, this being his first letter, and flipped to “Structures of letters” to begin.
The Heading consists of the Place and the Date. In other words, it is a statement of the place where, and time when, the letter is written.
The young man dipped his pen and wrote at the top of the page:
A.Er. 24, The Tower, Colhélhé(?)
He nodded in satisfaction and turned to the next page of the book. What followed the paragraph he had read was some five pages of details about the placement, format, punctuation, and content of the heading, none of which his attempt had followed. He looked over the examples for future use—though he did not think he would ever have a more detailed address like the ones in the book, which intrigued him with their many parts—and went on.
The Salutation is the term of politeness, respect, or affection, with which we introduce a letter ; such as, Dear Sir, My dear friend, My dear and honored Father, etc.
Having learned his lesson, the young man read on before writing anything down. Most of the strictest rules seemed to apply to business letters and other formal communication, which he did not think this was; after spending several minutes trying to understand a dizzying array of rules about punctuation and indentation, he at last chose one of the samples under Social Form (Familiar) and wrote:
My dearest Master Tutor,
This seemed terribly silly, and not very familiar at all, but he had already broken several rules, and thought he ought to follow them where he could.
The Body of the letter is the communication itself, exclusive of the heading, introduction, and conclusion.
“Aha,” said the young man aloud. “Now we’re getting somewhere.” But as he read on, he began to frown; the author seemed concerned only with minutiae of margins and paragraphs, and not with the actual content. A note to this effect directed him to Chapter 3, “The Art of Rhetoric”, which began:
Invention is the action of the mind that precedes writing. In all kinds of composition, there are two things necessary: first, to have something to say ; second, to say it. Invention is finding something to say.
This was not an area in which the young man had ever had trouble; his tutor had been fond of remarking that he seemed to find things to say faster than his tongue could keep up with.
“But what,” he said aloud, as the book continued on in this vein, “do I put in a letter?”
The book, alas, could not hear him, and spent several pages expounding the importance of correct spelling, diction, clarity, and the ever-present punctuation. The young man had not realized that the exacting usage of periods and commas and semicolons was so very important to letter-writing, but the author seemed quite taken with them.
Paging through in frustration, he at last landed on a section promisingly titled “Style and specimens of social letters”.
The supreme excellence of a familiar letter is naturalness. Such a letter should be unstudied, free from affectation, and as nearly as possible like good conversation. And it should be perfectly characteristic of the writer, so that the recipient may feel when reading it, as if his friend were actually present and speaking. When you are about to write a letter to a friend, think what you would say to him if he were at that moment with you, and then write it. We all like talking letters—good talking, of course.
Talking letters! The young man sat up in triumph. If a letter was only talking on paper, that was easy—why had the book made such a fuss about style and punctuation and the like? He set the book aside, dipped his pen again, and wrote:
Why are there so many rules for writing letters? Why is it important for the salutation to start one inch to the right of the last line of the heading? What happens if you get it wrong?
Also, in Saya Legoni and the Art of Espionage, when Saya Legoni puts a glamour on the scullery boy, why does she ask for permission first? It was for his own good, because without it he would probably have been caught by the bandits, and it would have endangered her mission, too. Shouldn’t she have just cast the spell and not been late for her meeting with the duchess?
The young man frowned again. This did not seem very productive, as his tutor wasn’t able to answer questions as they were asked the way he normally did. He flipped ahead to the sample letters provided, read them carefully, and tried again:
I have been doing very well here. There are very many books and the tower provides all sorts of interesting food, though I think I preferred Cook’s food, and I wish there was a Cook here to tell me what the food is named, because most of it I do not recognize and although some of the books are cookbooks, they aren’t terribly helpful when you don’t know what something is called. Breakfast today was very yellow, and made my nose run, but that’s not the sort of thing you can look up in a cookbook, is it? Someone ought to write a field guide for food, with sketches and identifying features, like you have for your wildflowers. I wonder if there are any interesting wildflowers here? I have not been able to leave the tower to look for any. Out the window I can see a lot of grass, so there probably are some, but I can’t count the petals or see the growth pattern of the leaves. If you were here, maybe we could go outside to look for them.
The water falling off the edge of the world makes a tremendous noise, but I became accustomed to it very quickly. Where do you think it comes from? Surely there cannot be enough snowmelt on all of Colhélhé, unless your maps were wrong and it is entirely made of mountains. But if the whole world is mountains, then wouldn’t it all be flat? How is elevation determined if there is no sea to measure from? I wonder what elevation my tower is. I wonder how tall it is.
Three days later, the young man returned to his forgotten letter:
I have measured the shadow of the tower and determined that it is one thousand, two hundred and eighty-six feet tall. Or perhaps it is eight thousand, six hundred and twelve. Will you please check my calculations?
He then included a rough sketch of the triangle formed by the tower, its shadow, and the sun, with measurements, which took up most of the rest of the page. After a moment’s thought, he added at the bottom:
Not to scale.
He found a fresh sheet and continued:
I have been using a book called How to Write Letters to write this letter, but it has not been terribly useful, except to tell me that most of letter-writing seems to be rules about punctuation. I hope I haven’t gotten it too wrong. You never seemed to write very many letters at the red house, and you were always unhappy when you received them, but it was a different kind of unhappiness from when I got things wrong in my lessons, so I hope you will not be unhappy to receive this one.
The book says I ought not to be afraid to write about “little things”. The tower has lots of little things, and big ones too—I think even you would be jealous about some of the equipment I have found in the storerooms—
The young man went on for some time, describing all the interesting things he had found, the books he had read, the little amusements he had come up with to occupy the time between rituals. When he had filled all four sheets of paper, and stood to retrieve more, his eye happened to fall upon the forgotten book, open to a paragraph which he had skipped in his impatience:
Affection.— The best domestic letters are dictated by the heart rather than the head. A loving heart naturally imparts a glow to the written page, and this warmth is communicated, by the mysterious power of words, to the heart of the reader. It is wrong to indulge in strained and artificial expressions of affection; and it is equally wrong to suppress those that are prompted by genuine feeling. To a fond mother, an affectionate sister, a devoted wife, whose every breath is laden with a prayer for your safety and happiness, a loving word is inexpressibly precious, filling the soul with sunshine, and making it for a time oblivious of the pain of separation.
“The pain of separation” was a very odd phrase. It was the sort of metaphor he had come across in romantic epics and the like, where lovers torn apart cried of aching hearts. He had not expected to find it in this dry punctuation manual. He frowned, touching his chest, but it did not hurt in the slightest.
His eyes were watering, as they did sometimes when he stayed up late and yawned too many times in a row, or when his food was heavily spiced. He wiped at his face impatiently, but the water didn’t stop, and his nose was running now too. He didn’t like it at all.
It is a very lonely tower. I hope the house is not too quiet without me. I'm glad you have Cook and the others to keep you company.
Annoyed, wishing his eyes would stop watering, he left the letter there, and occupied himself with other things.
He recalled the unfinished letter some days later, when he was searching his desk for a passage of an epic poem he had copied out, and came across the letter-writing book instead. He dug out the letter to finish it, and opened the book to the section called "The Conclusion". Alongside yet more rules of placement and punctuation, the book had a long list of closings to choose from, ranging across a wide spectrum of formality, affection, rank, and so on. After reading this list very carefully, the young man thought a while and then wrote:
With sincere and affectionate thanks,
Your student
There. He had written his first-ever letter, and it hadn’t been so very difficult after all. Pleased, he returned to the book to discover what he ought to do next, and came across a paragraph he had missed in his earlier haste:
Penmanship.—Letter writing presupposes the ability to write a legible hand. But we should not be satisfied with mere legibility: we should endeavor to attain neatness and elegance. A letter should be regarded not merely as a medium for the communication of intelligence, but also as a work of art.
The young man looked back over his pages, which were written in his habitual scrawl with many arrows and crossings-out, and flecked and blotted with ink. In one place he had accidentally smudged a few words before the ink was quite dry, and had rewritten the words in a clear space between lines. Well, while the young man’s tutor had often complained of his pupil’s handwriting, he had nearly always been successful at reading it, so the young man did not think it would be a problem. Just in case, he pulled the last page back towards himself and added in cramped writing beneath his signature a line which his book informed him was called a postscript:
Postscript: If you have any difficulties deciphering my handwriting, I will happily clarify in my next letter.
While waiting for the ink to dry on the last sheet, he went wandering through the storerooms, and just as he had expected, found envelopes and sealing wax in very little time. He brought these back to his desk and set about following the book’s surprisingly helpful directions as to how to properly fold the paper to fit. His early attempts were not very neat, but by the time he reached the last page he thought he had quite gotten the hang of it.
When he had been younger, his tutor had shown him a west Collian paper-folding technique, which in just a few steps transformed a flat piece of paper into a three-dimensional object. There had been a whole book of these, and for each chapter of his other studies the boy had successfully mastered, his tutor had allowed him to learn one new paper-folded shape. The boy had spent hours bent over his desk, painstakingly folding and creasing little pieces of paper to transmogrify them into birds, insects, and most especially flowers, for his tutor had lined these up on a special shelf in his study alongside the real specimens he had collected. The boy had liked to see his own flowers, once-flat sheets now given depth and form, beside the pressed flowers, which had once been three dimensional but now were flat. The poetry of it pleased him.
The young man had no pressed flowers, but he found a fresh sheet of paper and began the steps of the butterfly iris, which was his tutor’s favorite flower that they had found upon the grounds of the red house. His fingers remembered what his mind had forgotten, and in only a few moments the iris took shape on his desk. He turned it this way and that in the light, admiring the way the shadows fell between its folds. Then he unfolded it again, smoothing it back into a flat sheet, running his fingers over the creases marked indelibly upon the page. The flower had gone, but the evidence of its existence could not be removed.
He folded the paper into quarters, careful not to make any new crease-lines, and slipped it into the envelope with his finished letter. His tutor probably didn’t remember how to fold the iris, but the young man was not sure any books had ever left the red house, so the paper-folding book was likely still there for him to use.
Following the format laid out in the letter-writing book, he wrote on the outside of the envelope:
Master Tutor
The Red House
Kavanduru
Zunidh
The sealing wax was a mystery, and the book seemed to assume he would know how to use it, which he didn’t. It was shaped more or less like a candle, if an oddly rectangular one, so he lit the wick and then waited to see what would happen. What happened, it transpired, was that the melted wax dripped down the sides and burnt his fingertips.
In the end it took ten minutes, more scalded fingers, and red wax liberally spattered across his shirt front and most of the desk, but he managed to position a serviceable, if misshapen, puddle of wax over the flap of the envelope. He knew from books that people sometimes had specially-engraved rings or stamps to press into the wax before it fully hardened, but there was nothing like that on his desk, and he didn’t think he had time to find one before the wax cooled. He recalled a scene from The Cavalier’s Courtesan in which the titular nobleman had impressed his letter of proposal not with any of his many seals of office, but with a simple thumbprint to convey his abject humility. The young man did not feel particularly abject, nor was he naturally inclined to be humble, but he liked the idea of it—his tutor had told him that no two thumbprints were alike, so in a way it was his own personal seal. He pressed his thumb into the wax and then held it up to the light of the window, admiring the whorls and ridges.
Now then. How did one go about sending a letter?