[Issue 2025.74]

‘Limue’s Alphabet’, Eleanor Glewwe

Art © 2025 Barbara Candiotti

---

In the dappled shade of a stand of bamboo, an old woman takes a stick and scratches two curved lines in the dusty yellow earth.

“Pai is for pera
Limue’s plucked eye”

Her grandson, squatting beside her, repeats the couplet with lusty emphasis on the strong syllables. The old woman shushes him, nodding toward the house where his parents are napping. She passes him the stick. Her hand is bent, papery skin straining over swollen knuckles. His is dimpled and unpracticed with writing instruments. Next to her letter pai, he traces his own: a swooping curve for the upper eyelid, a dipping one for the lower.

“Granny, what’s pluckt?”

“Pluck means to pick, like a fruit or a flower.” The old woman holds out her hand for the stick, but her grandson doesn’t give it back.

“How can you pluck an eye?”

“Aiya!” The grandmother shudders. “That’s just how the rhyme goes. So the words fit nicely.”

“Why not Limue’s brown eye?” The child frowns. “What color are Limue’s eyes?”

The old woman clucks at his foolishness. “Brown, of course. Who doesn’t have brown eyes?”

“The foreigners don’t,” the boy points out wisely.

“That’s because they’re foreigners,” his grandmother says tartly. “Keep asking so many questions, and we’ll never reach the end of the alphabet.” She takes the writing stick back.

“Tai is for tepun
The goddess’s hand…”

---

I first laid eyes on my poet at a village festival on a warm spring evening. I had taken a nightjar’s form and was flitting across the darkening sky, snatching the occasional insect out of the air. It was the sparks from the bonfire in the village square that drew me first. As I darted closer, a figure broke free from the crowd, approaching the fire. A hush rolled across the square. Who was this person who commanded such attention? I alighted on a thatched roof to observe them.

It was a young woman. Her golden skin glowed ruddy in the firelight, and she carried herself with dignity. The throng collectively leaned in, waiting.

She began to recite a poem. I have forgotten what it was about, or perhaps I never really attended. Her beauty, after all, was arresting. But even if I cannot recall the words she spoke, I remember how they felt: like water dancing over mountain rapids, like sunlight shattering on a wind-ridged sea.

When she finished, the villagers roared. She blushed at their acclamation and smiled, her neat teeth resting endearingly on her lip.

The festival fragmented into drinking, dancing, and carousing. The young woman retreated into the background, joining two or three friends in a quiet spot away from the fire. I flew up into the night sky to harry the moon, but my heart wasn’t in it. Mischief had lost some of its luster.

I, who was so given to roam, stayed near that village for days, spying on the poet. She was a daydreamer, as all poets are. When she was alone, she conceived new verses and tinkered with them, pondering different turns of phrase. In the shape of a bee, I crept along her windowsill, watching her lips move as she tumbled words in her mouth.

She was not a slothful girl, though. She spent her days hauling water, collecting firewood, tending stews over the hearth, mending her younger siblings’ clothes, weaving reed baskets. Often, in communal labor, she devised short poems to entertain her companions. She had no pretentions: her subject was whatever humble work they were engaged in, and she didn’t hesitate to discard the classical meters for shorter lines. But the artistry of her words was still breathtaking.

At last, I could no longer resist: I had to meet her. I hovered near her family’s house, restlessly shifting forms, until I heard her mother tell her to go to the forest to gather fiddleheads. The poet slipped out, wearing a secret smile I already recognized. As long as she returned with a satisfactory harvest, she could linger a while in the woods. Now a blue dragonfly, I followed her.

She collected the young coiled ferns as quickly as she could and then settled down on a bed of moss beside a creek. Hidden behind a nearby tree, I assumed my true form. She was already murmuring verses. When I stepped out into the open, though, she broke off, startled.

“Older sister,” she began. Then she was at a loss, so unexpected was my appearance.

“Greetings, poet,” I said, drawing closer, though not too close. It had been some time since I had had dealings with humans, and I didn’t want her to bolt like a frightened animal. Already I could tell my first words had been too direct.

“Who are you? How do you know I’m a poet?” She was afraid, but she still spoke bravely. I liked that.

“I am Limue.”

Her face betrayed no recognition, but I could not take offense. Back then, I was hardly even a minor deity, and the poet’s village was a long way from my home valley, where a few faithful honored me.

“Are you a traveler?” the poet asked. “My village isn’t far. If you are looking for a place to spend the night, we would offer you hospitality.”

“Thank you, but I do not need a place to stay,” I answered. “I wanted to meet you.”

“Why?” she said bluntly. “That is, how did you know there was anyone to meet?”

“I’ve heard you share your verses. I’ve been in the area a little while.”

I watched her solemn face as she considered the implications of what I’d said. One of her hands gripped the shaggy moss on which she sat. At last, she lifted her basket of fiddleheads.

“Would you like these, honored guest?”

I was pleased that she had so quickly deduced my nature. She was being very polite, trying to appease me without even knowing what I wanted. I wasn’t yet sure myself.

“I don’t wish to take your fiddleheads,” I said. “I know your mother expects them.”

If she’d held on to any remaining doubt, it was gone now. “You are very gracious.”

“There’s no need to be so formal.” I stepped closer, my skirt shushing through the carpet of ferns and bamboo. “I’m really no one very important.” I’d almost reached the mossy bank of the creek. “May I join you?”

“With respect,” she said, “you still haven’t told me why you wanted to meet me.”

“I’m an admirer.” I approached no further. “Of your poetry.”

“There are many of those.”

In her village, they would have decried this as arrogance, but I liked her matter-of-factness. “And they’ve all met you, haven’t they?”

She let out a barking laugh. “Very well. You may join me.”

I sat on the moss and dangled my bare feet in the cool water. The poet wore old sandals that were almost hidden by the embroidered hem of her skirt.

“I told you my name,” I said. “What is yours?” In some places I have wandered, it is dangerous to reveal your name to spirits and divinities. In other regions, the gods seem to know all the humans’ names already. In our country, neither is true, and so the poet did not hesitate, especially since it was she who still owed me in this exchange.

“I’m Rusena.” A breath. “I’m surprised you did not already know it.”

It was my turn to laugh, and I could not help kicking my feet in the water. These flashes of boldness delighted me. “You’re right. I was not attentive to all I should have been.”

“We don’t know you in these parts,” Rusena said, all respect once more. “Will you tell me where you come from and what it’s like there?”

Willingly, I told her.

---

A pigtailed child writes clumsy letters in black ink on the back of a cast-off practice essay.

“Kai is for ki’ai
Her third knucklebone”

Her singsong voice accompanies the flick of her brush.

“Bai is for buet
Limue’s left—”

“Will you stop chanting? You know it by heart already.” A young woman looks up, exasperated, from where she kneels at a desk in the corner of the room.

“But I like it,” her little sister says plaintively.

“If you like it so much, you can come with me to Limue’s temple.” The older girl rises, beckoning the child, who scampers past her out of the room, clutching her practice sheet.

The sisters walk through the streets of their town, the elder holding the younger by the hand so she can’t dart into the path of a cart or linger at the stalls selling roasted sweet potatoes. When they reach my temple, they leave their shoes in the vestibule and step over the threshold into the main hall. The haze of incense emanating from the sand-filled vessel in the middle of the room makes the younger sister sneeze. Other visitors, most around the same age as the elder sister, mill around the hall.

The girls approach my altar. A gray cat lies sprawled beneath it, asleep. This temple has a fairly old idol of me, a carved wooden figure with remnants of paint in the folds of its robe. The young woman bows toward this statue. She doesn’t know that I observe her not from the altar but from the octagonal wooden dome centered over it, on whose inside surface the letters of the alphabet are rendered in exquisite calligraphy. From there, and from the sheet of paper half crumpled in her sister’s hand.

“Limue,” she murmurs, palms joined, “thank you for watching over me in my studies. Please help me pass the civil service examination next week. Please give me a calm heart and a clear mind on the day of the exam. Please let me win a post so I may help support my siblings.”

The sibling who is here with her has knelt down to cheep at the cat under the altar.

“And Limue,” the scholar sister continues, “forgive me for studying the foreigners’ tongue and sitting the foreign section of the exam. So many government posts require knowledge of the serpent boat people’s language now, but I will always remember and venerate you.”

I hear and appreciate her prayers, as I do those of the countless students who make up a not insignificant share of my devotees. But I have no power to grant their requests. I accept their adulation, but I cannot act, and they pass or fail by the strength of their own intellect and fortitude.

“Are you going to pray to Rusena too?” asks the pigtailed girl as she bounds down the temple steps ahead of her sister.

“Why not,” the scholar says grimly. “At this point, I should be petitioning all the gods.”

I accompany the sisters to a neighboring temple dedicated to my poet. It is more crowded than mine was, but I am not jealous. My poet is a more popular deity among civil service candidates than I am, given how crucial familiarity with her works is to success on the exam. The sisters wriggle their way toward the altar, on which stands a golden figure of Rusena holding a pen and a scroll. The scroll is anachronistic.

The elder sister offers hastier prayers to my poet and then drags her sibling away, anxious to return to her studies. As they head home, I hear her muttering under her breath: not lines of Rusena’s poetry, but conjugations of the foreigners’ verbs.

---

I invented the alphabet, but it was my poet who taught our people to read and write. She told them how the alphabet had come to be, though she glossed over the details, making it sound more mystical and less visceral. And so my name spread far and wide as writing rapidly caught on. A minor divinity in life, honored only in one valley, I now became a household name. Had I still been a deity, I would have become one of the strongest in the land, sustained by the praise and prayers of devotees in every town and hamlet. As it was, this veneration had no real effect.

Rusena decided on the letters’ ultimate order, which was not the haphazard one I had scrawled in the cave. She did it so cleverly, according to logical principles: first the consonants without voice, starting at the lips… She wasn’t the one to devise the mnemonic rhyme, though; it sprang up in her wake. As a poem, it showed none of her signature artistry. But because of its structure, it introduced rhymed verse into the poetic tradition of our country. That was not a result I had anticipated.

Rusena recorded all her poems on strips of bamboo. It took her a long time to finish because she had an extensive oeuvre. By then, reading and writing were commonplace. People revered me as the creator of the letters—after all, my name was right there in the rhyme—but for the most part, they had forgotten the original story. The alphabet became something I had given, not something I had become. Only Rusena and the initiates of the new cult of Limue remembered the truth. Not that Rusena had anything to do with the cult. She had no interest in honoring my memory through ritual, abstinence, and chant. She was a poet, and her business was writing poetry.

So it was that she hid from my cult a secret which she alone had divined. If the initiates thought I was dead, beyond consciousness, she would not enlighten them. She probably thought it served me right. Nor did she go around correcting the ordinary people who told their children about me or petitioned me for inspiration or a clever mind. She saw no reason to puncture their illusions. Instead, in the quiet, she spoke to me.

The first time was late one evening in the upper room of a house in the capital. Its wealthy owner had secured himself the privilege of hosting her during her visit for a festival where she would perform. She must have excused herself from the feast downstairs because as she began to scratch out lines on a leaf she was using for drafting, I could hear a distant hubbub and the clink of earthenware. A gibbous moon shone through the open window, bathing Rusena in silver light and accentuating the whiteness of her hair.

She often paused in composing her verses, mulling over the next word or image, but this time when she stopped writing, her stillness was unusually complete, and there was something different about her gaze. Instead of going soft and unfocused, it bored into the letters carved into the leaf.

“I know you’re there,” she said, her voice too quiet to carry beyond the room. “I can feel your presence.”

I could not react or reply. I was the alphabet. I was the pen strokes forming her half-grown poem.

“In case you’re wondering,” my poet went on, “no, I haven’t forgiven you.” While there wasn’t much heat in her voice, I didn’t think she was jesting either.

After that night, she would occasionally address me as she wrote new poems. She spoke to me of the way the country had transformed, though she seemed to understand I was observing these changes for myself too. I looked up from every merchant’s accounts, gazed out from every grave marker, watched the faces of the new palace historians as they recorded the first royal annals.

“You changed everything,” Rusena told me one day as she contemplated a copy of one of her epics, the bamboo strips bound together with hemp flowing across her hands. “I wonder if you predicted it. I wonder if you even thought about that at all. Siwan is long dead, and his former apprentice has her own apprentice now, but how long will we have storytellers like them? I think I’m glad I won’t live to find out.”

She paused, as though listening to the reply she imagined me making.

“Don’t think me ungrateful. Writing is a wondrous thing. I’m happy I have these.” She lifted the section of linked strips in her hands. “Would I give it back, though, if…?” She let the strips drop, and they struck the layer below with a dry crack. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t forgive you.”

I did not yearn for her forgiveness. It would have made me happy if she had come around, but I already had what I wanted.

When Rusena died, the entire country mourned her. She was buried near her village, but funerary ceremonies were held for her all over, with days of reciting her verses to honor her. Her deification was rapid. Within months of her death, aspiring poets began murmuring prayers to her spirit, asking for talent, recognition, and success. It only took a few years for the first temple dedicated to her to be built. Her name and epithets were inscribed inside the dome, giving me a fine view of the worshippers below. And as her cult grew, she attained godhood.

It happened in the dead of night. When I saw the human figure shimmer into being beside the altar in one of her temples, I recognized my poet immediately. Her hair was black again, her face barely lined. She looked exactly as old as she’d been the day I had led her to the cave.

She looked down at herself in confusion, then extended her arms in dismay. She touched the polished wood of the altar and gazed at the carved figure there, but it was not a good likeness, and even in daylight she wouldn’t have recognized herself. When she peered up into the dome, though, she made out her own name there.

Her first cry was wordless, and then she said, “Limue!” All accusation and rancor. Another inarticulate exclamation of rage. “They have—why did they—”

At least she understood I was not responsible. The deification of mortals is done by mortals, through their adoration and assiduity in prayer. I could not have raised her even if I had still been a goddess.

“Was the rest of my life without you not enough?” she demanded, face still upturned. “Now it is to be an eternity?” She looked around, eager for something to rip or smash. But there weren’t even any flower garlands to fling off the altar. I thought she might knock the figure down, but she restrained herself and looked up at me again.

“Now I am made like you when it doesn’t even profit me?” The grief in her voice surprised me. I thought it would have been worn smooth by now, or been choked by anger and bitterness. Maybe it had something to do with her being a new deity. Not quite set yet and therefore still vulnerable.

That was the last time she spoke to me. I glimpsed her again a few times, and those few sightings showed me she was already strengthening, the people’s love for her and the ever-growing popularity of her cult lending her power. But each time I saw her, she was farther from the heart of the country, until at last she disappeared from my view. I surmised that she had gone to wander the world, as I had so liked doing before I met her. But she never came back. Poets and teachers, students and scholars continued to pay their respects at her temples, not knowing that they fueled her with the vitality to walk through other lands.

---

The red-bearded priest stands at a lectern in a cluttered office, dips his quill, and writes letters from memory on a blank page.

“Dai is for duwi
Her eyelashes three”

Another priest, this one’s beard yellow streaked with gray, appears in the doorway and frowns.

“Why are you speaking that uncivilized tongue?”

The writer jumps, and his sleeve narrowly misses dashing his inkpot to the floor.

“My apologies,” he says, nodding to the newcomer. “The locals have a rhyme they use to teach their children their alphabet. It’s a helpful mnemonic for the letter shapes, though most of them are quite stylized—”

“I don’t care.” The older priest pushes into the office like a boar spoiling for a fight. In three strides, he’s at the lectern and glaring down at his colleague’s work.

“This is the letter dai.” The redheaded priest doesn’t seem unaware of the other’s mood, but he still can’t quite help himself. “The word duwi, the plural of ‘eyelash,’ starts with dai, and these three strokes do look more or less like eyelashes. This letter reminds me of a character they use in the Emerald Isles that represents the word for ‘hair.’”

His expression slips into dreaminess. I suspect he wishes he were still posted to the Emerald Isles. I didn’t know the foreigners and their serpent-prowed ships had taken that land too.

“Hozor.” The priest with the yellow beard practically vibrates with fury at his companion’s failure to appear intimidated. “Nobody cares about any of the natives’ languages. Aren’t you supposed to be preparing for an audience with the governor?”

“That’s just it,” says Hozor, excitement seeping through his deliberate calm. “I have a proposal for the governor. A way to impose our language much more quickly. It involves a concession on our part, but I think it stands to be so effective that—”

“A concession?” the senior priest says icily.

“We teach them to use their own writing for our language. Funnily enough, both our languages have twenty-one sounds. They have an alphabet, with twenty-one letters. We use a syllabary, so there are many more characters to learn. It’s no trouble for us, naturally, but it is a barrier for the locals. If we make a simpler system for them, I’m confident they will adopt our language rapidly.”

He replenishes his quill and writes out the five letters Rusena placed at the end of the alphabet.

“They have four vowels, you see, whereas we have five. But their alphabet includes a letter for the diphthong ai. If we simply switch its value to o—”

“Stop your blather.” The other priest doesn’t even raise his voice, but his tone couldn’t be shorter. “If you think the governor will approve this bastardization of our language, you’re more of a fool than I thought.”

“Don’t be dramatic,” Hozor says, but his shoulders slump ever so slightly.

“Come on. The head priest has some other matters he wishes you to raise to the governor.”

---

After our first meeting, Rusena and I met often, first in the forest near her village and then openly in the village itself. She told me she could not keep me a secret from her family and friends forever, and I did not object to her telling them who I was. Her people were humble, sensible folk who took my identity in stride. No one was as bold with me as Rusena could be—they were wary of offending a deity—but neither were they paralyzed with awe. I was a small divinity, after all, and not local.

I liked to question Rusena about how she conceived her verses, and she would beg me for stories from distant lands. She took me to meet the old village storyteller who knew, in addition to folktales and legends, many of the famous poems of our country, passed down from generation to generation. It was he who had taught her the different meters and their proper uses, the notions of caesura and enjambment. He was not a poet himself, but he was fiercely proud of her and had added many of her poems to his repertoire, which he would bequeath to his apprentice.

I told Rusena that I knew some of the storyteller’s poems from other towns and cities. In each place, they were a little bit different: a word changed here, two verses swapped there. Sometimes a whole stanza was missing, or existed in only one village.

“I know poems change from being constantly passed down,” Rusena said, up to her forearms in a basin of water as she washed bamboo leaves for wrapping rice dumplings. “Wandering poets come through our village, and we recognize the verses they recite and notice the differences from the way Siwan recites them.”

“And this doesn’t bother you?” I asked with honest curiosity. Our country had only oral traditions; our language was not written. But with my peripatetic ways, I had encountered writing before. I had seen royal stelae with their grandiose inscriptions, clay tablets recording court proceedings, gravestones carved with the names of the dead.

Rusena considered a while before replying, “I know this will happen to my poems someday. I don’t think I mind. I’ll be happy if people who don’t know me find my poems worth remembering and passing on.” She paused in her scrubbing of the leaves. “But it would be nice if at least here where I’m from, people remembered my verses as I composed them.”

“But even Siwan changes the old poems sometimes,” I said.

She looked up from the basin. “How do you know that?”

It was in fact a guess, but from Rusena’s expression, I thought I had jogged a memory. “Am I wrong?”

“No,” she said grudgingly. “I remember when I was around eleven, he changed the trailing clouds to the dwindling clouds in A’iduk’s poem about migratory birds. It’s been dwindling ever since.”

I laughed at the double meaning, and she glanced heavenward in exasperation.

“I don’t think he knows he did it,” she added. “If I told him it used to be the trailing clouds, I don’t know if he’d believe me.”

“How do you know you won’t do the same to your own poems?” I teased. “After all, you have more and more of them. Mightn’t a petal become a blossom?”

She splashed water at me. “A petal and a blossom are not the same! And anyway, you could remember them for me. You will outlive me by a thousand lifetimes.”

Her voice caught then, and I felt a thrill. I knew Rusena cared for me, but I wasn’t always sure how much. I couldn’t help a stirring of triumph, followed by a rush of tenderness.

“I will outlive you,” I said, no longer playful, “but that does not mean I can preserve all your poems for you. Our memories are no better than mortals’, for all we live a long time.”

“Are you saying you’ll forget me?” Rusena looked straight at me, with that directness I found so appealing. “Forget… this?”

I could have told her the truth: No, I could never forget you. Instead I said, daring, “What is this this you would not wish me to forget?”

---

A teacher picks up a stick of chalk and makes swift, clean strokes on the blackboard of a village schoolhouse.

“Gai is for gingaq
The goddess’s ear”

As the students chant from their benches, the breeze carries their voices out the open windows. The older ones could recite the rhyme in their sleep, but it is tradition for them to join in with the youngest. Besides, the school has only one room, so it isn’t as though they could concentrate on other lessons while the little ones are shouting the alphabet.

The teacher dismisses the students for the midday recess but leaves the letters up on the board. So it is that I am watching when a priest and two district officials walk into the school and stride down the aisle to the teacher’s desk. The younger official is not a foreigner; he is one of our people.

The teacher rubs his chalky palms together nervously. He greets the visitors, first in our language, then in the serpent boat people’s tongue.

“We understand this school still operates in the local language,” says the priest, speaking in his own native tongue. His baleful gaze lingers on the letters on the blackboard.

“It does,” the teacher says cautiously.

“The governor has issued a new edict.” The priest glances at the district officials, who nod. “All instruction must be given in the official language, as of this month. Perhaps you hadn’t heard yet.”

He pauses. The teacher works his jaw, as though he wants to say something but knows better. Perhaps, like me, he objects to the foreigners calling their tongue the official language of our land.

“Schools that do not comply will be closed,” the priest says, “and teachers that flout the edict will be dismissed.”

“I understand,” the teacher says, in the official language.

The priest turns to the officials, points to the one who is from here, and then flicks his finger toward the board. “Go on. Do our friend here a favor and erase all this.”

The teacher stands straighter. “The children will still have to learn these letters—”

“They’re in the wrong order,” the priest says derisively.

They are. To the serpent boat people, at least. Hozor changed the names of my letters and the order they went in to better match his native syllabary. Pa, ba, ma, va… There was no va in my alphabet. Our language had no such sound. Or at least my poet’s dialect didn’t, and that was all I’d cared about. Meanwhile, the foreigners’ language lacked the more liquid wai, so Hozor took that letter (Wai is for welu / Limue’s liver) and gave it to a harsher sound. It’s not the only such case.

Hozor was clever. Despite his brethren’s contempt for his proposal, he persuaded the governor that his plan would help cement their people’s conquest of our land. Now half the country uses me to write a foreign language. I am an ill-fitting skin stretched across unwanted sounds. It’s like having an itch I can’t find no matter where my fingers reach.

“Go on,” the priest in the school repeats.

The district official, the one who is of our people, walks slowly forward. He takes a rag from the ledge of the chalkboard, and letter by letter, he erases me.

---

As Rusena’s reputation as a poet spread, she began to receive invitations to perform in other towns and villages. What finally catapulted her to universal fame was her composition of a new epic recounting the creation of the world and the great gods’ genealogy. Many famous poems describing these events already existed, but Rusena’s work was monumental, and she had a knack for gazing upon the familiar from a new angle and evoking that novelty with deft turns of phrase.

This epic earned her an invitation to the royal palace. We traveled to the capital together, sleeping side by side on our bedrolls under the stars. When we arrived, the king hosted a banquet in Rusena’s honor. Her much-anticipated recital took place the following day, outdoors in the central courtyard of the palace, as dusk drew its veil across the sky. The audience stood rapt for three and a half hours.

The king kept her at court for weeks, only reluctantly letting her depart when she pleaded homesickness. But after that, she was the most celebrated poet in the country. There was no one who didn’t know her name.

Meanwhile, I was still an insignificant goddess, known only in Rusena’s village and in the valley I had come from. And there, less and less. I seldom went back home, so my cult, small to start with, was eroding. As my worshippers’ numbers declined, I began to fade. Not enough for Rusena to perceive, but I felt it. I didn’t tell her, of course. She would think it was her fault for keeping me from my valley, when in fact I didn’t want to be anywhere but by her side. Eventually, if I did nothing, I would dwindle to a shade, but not before my poet reached the end of her days.

One day, years after I had teased her about petals and blossoms, Rusena turned to me and said, “I wish my poems could live forever.”

We were sitting close together on a riverbank, bathing our aching feet in the rushing water.

“How so?” I asked.

“I know I won’t live forever,” she said, gazing down into the brown river. “But I wish my poems could. I wish there was a way to preserve them as I intended. People recite them all over now. In the capital, in the countryside. And I know the way of poems once they belong to everyone.”

“We spoke of this once before,” I said slowly. On the opposite bank, a monkey bounded out along a limb overhanging the river. “If you like, I will promise to remember each one of your poems exactly as you composed it, not a word out of place.”

She pulled away from the shelter of my body and twisted to face me. “Last time, you said you couldn’t. You said your memories were no better than ours. And I…” Dread shadowed her face. “Even I can’t be sure all my poems are still the same in my own head.”

“They are,” I assured her, and I wasn’t lying. I had never heard her change a word of a poem after she had decided on its final form. Though doubts might creep in, she did have a prodigious memory. “And as for what I said before, I would do it for you. I would make the effort.”

She didn’t look entirely convinced. I didn’t tell her I had a trick up my sleeve: I could adopt one of the many systems I had encountered in the wide world and write her verses down somewhere safe so that I wouldn’t forget them.

“Don’t you trust me?” I wanted the gap between our bodies closed, but I wanted her to be the one to close it.

“I do,” she said. Now I was not entirely convinced. “But… you also told me once that it is possible for divinities to die.”

I had told her that, in a conversation on another subject entirely. I’d just said we could be killed, not that we could wither.

“Nothing is eternal,” I said, a little piqued. Did she have some inkling of how diminished I was? But that was impossible.

My poet laughed ruefully. “I know. Of course you’re right, Limue. I’m being greedy and vain.”

It was this self-deprecatory admission—not even true—that made me soften.

“There is a way,” I said, deliberately quiet, so that she had to lean closer to hear me over the voice of the river. “A way to preserve your poems exactly as you conceived them.”

Her dark gaze was sharp with the knowledge that I was alluding to something new. “What is it?”

“Writing.”

She frowned, not understanding. The word I had used in our language referred to scratching tally marks into a hard surface to count pigs or jars of oil.

“I don’t mean keeping accounts,” I said. “Let me show you.” I swung my legs out of the river, trying not to drip on the edge of her skirt. I brushed my hand across the sandy soil on the bank to make a flat surface.

“Writing is a way to mark language on a physical object, so it can be seen. You can write words down so that someone else can read them.” Here I used a word for interpreting signs in nature: the shape of a storm cloud, the tracks of a tiger.

“How does that work?” Rusena pulled her feet out of the water too and folded her legs under herself.

“I’ll give you an example.” I cast about for a twig or even a reed, but in the end, I used my finger. “In the Emerald Isles, they write in characters.”

“You never mentioned that before,” Rusena said, accusatory. The Emerald Isles had figured in many tales I’d told her of the distant lands I’d seen, lands most of our people didn’t know existed.

“I’m mentioning it now.” I made a stroke in the dirt. “This is ‘one.’” Next to the first character, I traced two strokes, one on top of the other. “This is ‘two.’” Three strokes, still stacked. “And ‘three.’”

“This is just counting,” Rusena protested. “I can see that these mean one, two, and three.”

“No,” I said. “It looks that way. But these are not meanings, or not just meanings. These are words, made up of sounds. And look, here is ‘four.’” I wrote another character, this one consisting of five strokes, not arranged in a stack. Rusena stared at it, her mind turning like a waterwheel. “Any literate person in the Emerald Isles could look at this character and instantly read the word ‘four,’ which in their language is hli. That is what this written form represents. Hli.”

Rusena contemplated the four words a while longer, still thinking hard.

“But if every word has its own character,” she said finally, “you must need so many.”

“That’s true,” I said, “though it’s not actually every word, since some words are compounds of… Maybe I began with the wrong example.” I rubbed out the characters. “There is another country, a cold and windy land, where they write differently. Each sign represents a syllable.” Rusena could count those in her sleep. “This is lu.” I wrote the sign from the syllabary of the serpent boat people.

“Lu,” Rusena repeated doubtfully.

“Now, it so happens that in this language, lu is actually a word. It means ‘if.’”

“So this sign means ‘if.’”

“No,” I said patiently. Overhead, the sun passed behind a cloud, and my calves were cold where the water was still evaporating off of them. “This sign represents the syllable lu. If I wrote nothing else, then the message would say lu, and yes, that would be the word for ‘if.’ But say I added another sign, the one for ti.” I drew my finger through the soil. “Now I have written luti. And luti means ‘frog.’ There is no ‘if’ in this word.”

My poet sat back and drew her knees up under her chin. I waited, letting her absorb all I had told her.

At last she said, “Does this…writing have a symbol that would be said ya?”

“Yes,” I answered, though I was not sure I could remember it. Back then, I did not know the whole syllabary by heart.

“So if I were to put this sign”—she pointed to lu—“before the sign for ya, that would make luya.” She gestured at the sky.

“Yes!” I said, delighted. “They made the syllabary for their language, but it represents sounds, so if those sounds exist in our language too, then the signs can be used to write our language. It wouldn’t work for everything; they have no w, no—”

“You never told me.” Her voice was hushed. “You knew about writing all this time and you never mentioned such a thing was possible.”

For a moment, I was speechless. I didn’t feel guilty—it is not in our nature—but I could tell she was hurt and I would have to tread carefully. I disliked fighting with my poet; it was not harmonious.

“I didn’t want to interfere,” I said finally. “Mortals invent writing for themselves or learn of it through trade or migration. It was not for me to introduce it.”

“You just did!” Rusena burst out. She was no longer curled up tight: she had unfolded her body to sit cross-legged, and her arms were flung wide.

“You asked,” I said. “Or rather, you expressed a wish. I can grant you this wish. And I want you to have what you desire. Maybe it’s interfering, but we can give gifts to mortals, on occasion.”

“All right.” Rusena seemed calmer, overtaken by a newfound focus. “This is the solution, then. I need to learn to write. If you teach me all the signs from this northern people…”

“I don’t know them all,” I admitted. “And actually, I think we can do better. The serpent boat people’s writing takes many fewer signs than the writing of the Emerald Isles. But there’s a way to take even fewer.”

Rusena waited, attentive.

“Take the syllable lu.” I pointed at the sign in the earth. “It actually has two parts, the lll and the uuu.”

“What?” Rusena seemed amused by my exaggerated sounds. “What do you mean? Lu is a whole. It just is.”

“You think that because you’re used to thinking in syllables. But feel it in your mouth. Lu. There are two sounds.”

“Lu,” she repeated dutifully. “It feels like one sound to me. If you say it’s two, what’s to stop you from saying it’s three or four? Llluuu.” She dragged it out to a comical degree.

I was surprised by her stubbornness. To me, it was obvious that a syllable could be further broken down into individual sounds. Had my passing acquaintance with two or three alphabets so altered my perception of the language I shared with my poet?

“Think of it this way,” I said. “Luya begins with the same sound as my name, doesn’t it? Limue. Luya.”

Rusena’s lips moved silently. “Maybe?”

“It does. But my name doesn’t start with lu. It starts with li. So there is a part these two syllables have in common, and a part that is different. The part in common is l. Just that much.”

She was nodding now, and smiling with that wondering delight that came over her when she’d hit upon the version of a new verse that felt exactly right. “I see. I mean, I feel it!”

“So,” I said, “a writing system that uses one sign for each sound requires the smallest number of symbols. It would be easiest to learn. Then you could write down all your poems and teach others to read them.”

“Yes,” she said, a fierce light in her eyes. “This is what I want. But…I don’t know if I can do it. I don’t even trust myself to know how many sounds our language has. It’s all so—”

“Rusena,” I said. “I will make you an alphabet. This will be my gift.”

---

The aspirants’ voices rise alongside those of the initiates through the incense-laden air.

“Mai is for matuk
Limue’s own heart”

They are not writing the alphabet as they recite it, but I watch them from the letters carved inside the dome of the monastery’s main hall. When the chanting ends, the aspirants spill out into the yard. Some sneak off to the dormitory for a nap; others head to the kitchens to wheedle a snack from the cooks. Even out here, I can observe them. Brightly painted letters adorn the round ends of the roof tiles on the eaves of all the buildings.

Two aspirants, both scrawny in their gray robes, walk through the monastery garden.

“I can’t believe they make us recite that stupid alphabet rhyme so much,” the boy grouses, speaking the serpent boat people’s tongue. “Everyone here’s known it forever.”

“Don’t let the preceptor catch you speaking that language.” The girl says it in our tongue, but her syntax is ever so slightly clumsy.

“All right, all right,” the boy says, switching over grudgingly.

“Anyway, I don’t think it’s about remembering the alphabet,” says his companion. “It’s about honoring the goddess.”

“It’s babyish.” He glares at an ornamental stone lantern next to an osmanthus tree. “I thought we’d be taught, I don’t know, hymns or something.”

“I bet there’s a reason they consider the rhyme so important.” The girl lowers her voice. “Want to find out what it is?”

The boy narrows his eyes. “What do you mean?”

“It’s the senior aspirants’ initiation ceremony this afternoon. Don’t you want to know what secrets they’re told?”

“Doesn’t everyone?” the boy says. “But we’re forbidden from attending.”

The girl grins. “I have a plan.”

After the noon meal, the preceptor assigns afternoon chores to the younger aspirants. The girl volunteers herself and her friend to sweep pine needles off the roof of the main hall. The preceptor gives her a look of disapprobation—it is not for aspirants to choose which tasks they are given—but she grants the request. If she assumes the children will drag out the job admiring the view from the rooftop, she doesn’t think it will do much harm.

Along the back wall of the main hall, the girl steadies the ladder for the boy and then scampers up behind him. Though the slope of the roof isn’t steep, the boy presses his belly to the tiles.

“Did you forget your broom?” the girl exclaims, peering over the eaves.

The boy clings to the roof tiles. “Just show me why we came up here.”

The girl purses her lips at him, warning him to keep silent. Brandishing her short-handled broom, she makes an energetic show of sweeping a few needles onto the ground. Then, flattening herself like the boy, she creeps toward the cupola at the peak of the roof. It is the exterior counterpart of the dome above the altar inside the hall. The cupola has its own small tiled roof, but its sides are wooden, and the girl points out a hole gnawed into one panel.

The boy goggles at her. “How did you know this was here?” he mouths.

“You mean you haven’t climbed all the monastery roofs?” the girl says in mock surprise. But then she purses her lips again and presses her ear to the hole, leaving room as best she can for her companion to do the same.

They are fortunate in the main hall’s acoustics and blessed with the sharp ears of the young. Floorboards creak and robes whisper as the aspirants deemed worthy to take their new vows find their places.

“I swear, if they chant the alphabet rhyme again—”

The girl shoves her hand over the boy’s mouth.

The ceremony begins with the presentation of the prospective initiates. The children’s expressions shift as they recognize the names of certain aspirants, both beloved and hated. Their attention wanders during the administering of the vows. But their patience is rewarded when the abbot, in a solemn voice that happily carries up to the dome, begins to reveal the mysteries reserved for initiates of Limue.

“The holy truth at the heart of our cult is this: the alphabet rhyme is not a metaphor or a mnemonic. It is literal. It is a vessel of memory. The goddess Limue gave her body piece by piece to make our alphabet. It is her flesh, sacrificed for our people.”

Silence reigns in the main hall, weightier than the usual respectful quiet observed between chants and instruction. On the roof, the children stare wide-eyed at each other.

“What this means,” the abbot pursues, “is that Limue is dead. She gave her life to create the alphabet. The cult of Limue is not the cult of a living deity. As new initiates of Limue, you are now keepers of this knowledge too.”

The boy’s expression is more horrified than before, but the girl’s brow is knitted. Just then, footsteps sound on a nearby path, and the preceptor calls the children’s names. The girl signals urgently to her companion and shimmies down the slope of the roof, toward the eaves. She attacks a pile of needles with her broom, and they shower over the edge.

The preceptor stops by the ladder. “Haven’t you finished yet?”

“Almost done!” the girl sings.

When the preceptor has hurried off to chivy other derelict children, the boy joins the girl sweeping diligently along the eaves.

“The goddess is dead?” He sounds angry, but his ashen complexion reveals how shaken he is. “This whole monastery is for a dead divinity? The people who pray to Limue in her temples aren’t talking to anyone?”

The girl’s movements falter, as though she hadn’t thought of that. Before she can respond, a commotion at the monastery gates diverts my attention. A party of soldiers, priests, and officials has come up the road to the main entrance and is demanding admittance. The initiate on gatekeeping duty argues with them through the gatehouse window while a couple of aspirants stop in the yard to gawk. With the abbot and most of the initiates still at the ceremony, it is the preceptor who finally comes running to see what the disturbance is about.

“Your people have no right of entry to our monasteries,” she tells the priest and the commander at the head of the company.

“We had no right,” the priest corrects her. “But the new governor has changed all that. We’re shutting down the monasteries. On his orders.”

“You…what?” The preceptor’s face is gray.

Inside the main hall, the freshly minted initiates of my cult listen still as the abbot impresses upon them the importance of their new responsibilities.

---

When I was ready, I led my poet into the forest where we had first met. We climbed up into the hills until we reached a shallow cave whose entrance was hidden by a curtain of thick vines. Inside, it was cool and humid, and green light filtered in through the vines. I set down the bag I had been carrying and turned to Rusena.

“I will show you how to write, and your poetry will endure forever.”

She smiled, her eyes lit with excitement and perhaps some amusement at my solemnity.

“I used a principle I have known other alphabets to follow,” I said, rooting around in my bag for the first tools I would need. “Let me show you.”

I took a paring knife and trimmed my left thumbnail, in one piece. I could have pulled the whole nail out, but I’d thought the shape of it would be less memorable. Besides, it wouldn’t do to start off with anything too frightening.

I sat down cross-legged so Rusena would join me and laid my fingernail carefully on the packed earth. “Imin. The word starts with i. So the letter will look like this, a crescent facing down.”

I picked up the piece of charcoal I’d taken out of my bag and stood to scrape the letter i on the cave wall.

“I is for imin,” I said. “But this is the letter for the sound i in every word. Like in my name.”

“Limue,” Rusena said, drawing the sounds out. “Yes, I see. And the letter looks like an imin.”

She understood. The rest would be easier. Maybe.

I reached up and pinched at my eyelashes. Three came away in my fingers.

“Du.” It was hard to place such tiny, light things exactly where I wanted them, but I managed to arrange my lashes parallel to one another on the ground.

“Duwi,” said Rusena. “There are three.”

I laughed. “Either way, this letter is dai, for du.” I made three strokes on the cave wall to write the letter.

Settling back onto the earth, I slid my hand into my bag and clasped the handle of the cleaver hidden inside. I’d have to do this next part quickly.

I laid my left hand flat on the ground, splayed out the little finger, drew the cleaver from my bag, and chopped off the last phalanx.

“Limue!” Rusena cried.

Unattached to my body, the tip of my finger looked strange. I wrapped a strip of cloth around the bleeding. The wound was painful, but it did not hurt. My heart swelled with a savage gladness.

“What are you doing?” Rusena shouted. “Can you heal yourself?”

I ignored her questions. “It’s not obvious right now, but this is kai for ki’ai.” I wrote the new letter on the rugged stone, a stylized squiggle meant to evoke the contour of a finger bone.

“What are you doing?” my poet repeated. “You don’t need to do this. The fingernail and the eyelashes were one thing, but you can’t cut off your—”

“I’m making the alphabet,” I said, implacable.

“What are you talking about?” Rusena kept staring at my fingertip and then away. “I understand the principle. All you have to do is teach me the letters. Are they all body parts?”

“Yes. The next one is gai.” This time I wrote it in charcoal first. A misshapen spiral, elongated and wider at the top than at the bottom.

“Gai for…” Rusena looked at the newest letter. Her gaze slid to me as I drew my hair back to expose my ear.

“No!” She caught my wrist. “This isn’t what I asked for. I don’t want you to do this!”

“I know,” I said, “but this is what I choose to do.”

“You can’t!” Her whole body was tense with denial. “If you keep going, you’ll die. Won’t you?” She looked at me, begging me to tell her she was wrong.

This time, I wasn’t sure how to respond. To her, I supposed, it would almost be no different than if I were dead, so I replied, “Yes, I will.”

“No.” She was trembling, her fingers still encircling my wrist. “This isn’t what we—I won’t let you. Why? It’s not necessary!”

“You want people to remember your poems perfectly forever. And I want—”

“I don’t care!” She threw up her hands. “Forget about my poems. They’ll be remembered. So what if they change? And besides, you don’t even—you said mortals usually invent writing. You’ve told me all I need to know. We don’t need you for this now.”

All at once, I was furious. How dare she refuse the greatest gift I would ever give her? Give us? What ingratitude was this? I had meant to explain, to try to make her understand why I wished to do it this way, but now I didn’t want to, and my rage billowed like a wildfire, fueling a power I had thought was almost extinguished. My divine strength rose up in me, and I wasn’t sure how to direct it, but instinct kept me from harming Rusena. My vision wavered for an instant, and when it settled, my poet had crumpled to the ground. I hadn’t hurt her; she was sleeping, so soundly her brow was clear, no trace remaining of her distress of moments ago.

My anger subsided, but its embers still smoldered. It was her own fault she wouldn’t get to hear my explanation. If she’d listened, I would have told her the truth: I wanted to live forever too. But not as a goddess, bereft of my poet. I had no desire to revive my cult to save myself from oblivion.

As it was, Rusena and I were mismatched. She would turn to dust while I lived more mortal lifetimes. At the same time, I would eventually fade to nothing while her poetry lived on. But if I was the alphabet and it was me, we could be together forever: her words written in letters imbued with my spirit. I would be the embodied record of her poetry. Our two immortalities inextricably bound up, for as long as her poems weren’t lost and my letters weren’t forgotten.

Without Rusena’s protests, the rest of the alphabet went quickly. It got harder as I went along—the blood, the insistent pain, the piecemeal mangling of my body as I carved it apart—but this was my final act as a goddess, and I poured every drop of my will into seeing it through. Letter by letter, I became something other than I had been. When I was done, I was divided, incorporeal, a more fleeting consciousness than before. But I was still here, in twenty-one charcoal letters on rough stone. The remains of my physical shape lay scattered on the cave floor: an eye here, a hand there, assorted viscera toward the end.

I was there when Rusena awoke and discovered my handiwork, of course. From the cave wall, I bore witness to her horror and anguish. And to her rage. I regretted that I could no longer do anything to comfort her or explain myself, but I didn’t regret what I had done. There was a moment—after she had stumbled out of the cavern to vomit, after she had bent double heaving groans that sounded too deep for her body—when I feared she would reject my gift. That she would smear the letters to unrecognizable smudges, bury the pieces of me, and curse the ground where they lay.

But that’s not what she did. Was a readymade alphabet too great a temptation to refuse, however much she hated me in the end? Or did she feel duty-bound to honor my gift even if she had tried to prevent me from giving it? Either way, she learned the alphabet I had left for her. And she began to write.

---

Our temples are quiet nowadays, mine and Rusena’s. Some are abandoned or only swept now and then by one lone caretaker. Others have long since been repurposed, converted to stables or warehouses or even schools where the conquerors’ tongue is taught. And while I no longer rely on prayers for my continued existence, my poet-goddess does. She must feel what I felt centuries ago now: the drought of worshippers, the creeping gray of a new kind of tiredness. Does she understand, though? Does she know what it means?

One day, Rusena steps through the doorway of a temple in the borderlands. I recognize her instantly, and for the first time since that day in the cave I wish for a physical body again. I am nothing but paint on wood, yet from the inner surface of the dome I feel irresistibly drawn toward my poet.

She shuffles through the dust toward the altar and stops beneath the dome.

“Did you miss me?” she asks. As though we are resuming a conversation from only a moment ago.

Yes. I am burning with this answer, and somehow the dome does not catch fire.

“I came back to find out why I was dying,” she says. “Were you already dying too? Is that why you…?” She doesn’t look up at my vantage point as she speaks to me. “Out there”—she gestures toward the entrance—“they don’t speak our language anymore. They write another language with your body. It’s like this all the way to the coast, isn’t it?” She sighs. “In the end, it’s like you said: nothing is eternal. And maybe I’m ready to be done.” She looks up at last. “What do you think?”

No, no, no.

Rusena waits expectantly, but there is no message to receive. I cannot reach her. After a while, she turns and walks out of the temple.

---

“Pai is for pera
Limue’s plucked eye”

My eye opens, and I stare up at my poet’s face. She sits on a bench in a dim room, surrounded by people, mostly toothless elders and children too young for school.

She hands the pen to a girl with teeth like tiny pearls, and the child writes her own pai next to Rusena’s. A wizened old woman hovering behind her beams, and in her smile I recognize a pigtailed child whose boisterous chanting annoyed her studious older sister.

“Tai is for tepun / The goddess’s hand,” she warbles now.

Next to the old woman is an even older man who once learned his letters as his grandmother wrote them in the yellow earth.

“Kai is for ki’ai / Her third knucklebone,” he says, voice gravelly with age.

On the bench beside Rusena sit two more elders whose families once entrusted them to a monastery. In a gesture that belies her age, the woman elbows her companion, and he lifts his gaze heavenward. But he can’t help grinning as the words come back to him.

“Bai is for buet
Limue’s left foot”

Outside in the evening sky, a nightjar calls.

© 2025 Eleanor Glewwe

[Issue 2025.74]

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