"Bird, bird, palm tree, man sitting down, another bird..."

Made a small breakthrough on the sax. The low C was giving me trouble again and I changed my embouchure to fix it. Meaning I have some sense now of how the embouchure works, and the beginnings of the tools to get around problems. Now the biggest hole I have to playing "almost anything" is I haven't memorized the fingering for any of the non-chromatic tones.

A bigger breakthrough on the novel. I changed one letter. (Or, rather, changed from the Ugarit Letter to the Medinet Habu inscriptions). And so much fell together.

I've been outlining too long. There's still so much to learn. Not a day goes by when I don't discover something that totally throws my previous understanding. Yesterday was finding out there were other Mycenae capitals on Crete (well...yeah! It's a big place! But I simply hadn't thought of it). But it is time to start making choices. Even poor, under-researched choices. It is time to start writing.

So I love this change of a letter. It means I know magic is in (at least that one skill is), it tells me how Setna and Kes meet, it also tells me why Setna was in Amarna, it tells me who they think the threat is and what they'll do to try to stop it, it tells me how I want to understand the LBA Collapse and the role and structure of the Mycenae in LHIIIB-C. It puts the Sea Peoples firmly into the picture, too. And it even gives me a good lead as to why Kes left the Peak Sanctuary to come to Knossos.*

It is also firming up my itinerary. Since the Sea Peoples are a thing and the Acheans have a suspected connection, Mainland Greek is on the table. Even Mycenae itself, Lion Gate and all. And if I'm hitting the big cities (started in Knossos, after all), then really should show off Pharaonic Egypt with Pi Rameses if not Memphis.

*See, the Medinet Habu funerary inscriptions are in Egyptian Hieroglyphs. Which were sometimes embroidered onto trade goods for the Egyptian market by Mycenae weavers -- in my mind they didn't know the language and these come across like those jumbled English words on Japanese novelty t-shirts, but I don't know if that's true. And then there's thinking about Markov chains, and that you can write nonsense that is still grammatical (or nonsense words that still agree with the phonemic rules).

And then there's memory, and all the bardic tricks (like Homeric epithets) that allow you to memorize a long poem. I don't memorize a poem as a photograph of a piece of paper with characters on it, I memorize strings of words which are organized in grammatical ways. Apply these same necessary crutches to make a vision coherent, and -- voila, Kes has to learn hieroglyphs before she can "see" the entire inscription and decode it.

But before that she could realize that some of the words -- even as she doesn't even know how they are pronounced -- have dread meaning. Words like "Sherden" (one of the Sea Peoples). So she's writing that one out a lot. And Setna finds it on an embroidered border, and he knows about the Sherden from the Amarna letters (things that may have been temporarily lost to the Egyptians in their race to erase the Heretic Pharaoh and his entire era from history).

But even before this, at the Peak Sanctuary she grew up in, there's the moment when she is first struck down by a vision. Obvious assumption it is from the gods, so what, child, did you see?

"Birds."

(Which if you know anything about Greco-Roman soothsaying is exactly the right -- or wrong -- answer).

The scene gets even better, though, if she elaborates; "Birds made of stone. They were trying to tell me something."