16 Ashan 721
”The bears clearly represent slave labor,” insisted the one student, ”force by an oppressive patriarchy to dance to the tune of their masters!”
”That makes no sense!” replied the second. ”the main antagonist is a bear himself. The bears must represent something else…”
”Slave masters recruit overseers from within slave ranks!” persisted the first student. ”It’s a metaphor for the process of co-option…”
Oram sipped his tea and listened to the students who had joined him at the Scholar’s Nook. While all the bickering and unfamiliar big words made the hunter’s head hurt, he nonetheless was finding this exercise useful. He had been puzzling for trials about the meaning of the story of Si and the Dancing Bear. And he had no question that it had meaning. The book containing it had appeared among a collection of books and maps that had all promised to be highly useful to his intelligence efforts against Slag’s Deep. That book, and it’s fable, had been strikingly out of place with all the other stuff, and after puzzling over it a while, Oram had decided that this book, far from being a useless accident, might actually be the most important clue in the pile. But he had not been able to see how, no matter how many times he’d pored over it.
Oram remembered hearing stories involving talking animals before, and he knew that they weren’t just stories about talking animals. Usually they were meant to teach morals, and that, he had assumed, was the point of this story as well: specifically, that it was a fable about not going against an enemy unprepared, and that some enemies might require specific weapons or tactics to defeat. The traveler had felt pretty clever when he came up with that, so he decided to come here, to the Scholar’s Nook, to see if any of the even cleverer and better-read students agreed, or if not, if they had a better idea what the moral might be.
He’d at first thought to go to the Viden Academy itself, but quickly realized this might not be a good idea; everybody there was too busy to set aside time for requests like his. But the Scholar’s Nook seemed to be full of students who were happy to start a random conversation with a stranger about an interesting book or subject, and so he decided to try to ask for help there. He brought the book along, tried to strike up a conversation with some bored-looking students, and offered to buy them hot chocolate if they would spend time looking at the book, listening to the story, and sharing their thoughts about what it might mean.
The ploy had succeeded beyond Oram’s wildest dreams. Three students had quickly joined his table and, for the cost of a few mugs of (albeit stiffly-priced) cocoa, coffee, and tea, settled down for a long, in-depth discussion of the meaning behind the story of Si and the Dancing Bear.
That discussion had quickly taken a turn Oram hadn’t expected, though. He had been thinking in terms of a morality fable or parable, and had assumed the students would end up suggesting various morals the story was supposed to be teaching. Instead, they began speaking in terms of “allegory” and “metaphors”. Everything and everyone in the story represented somebody or something specific in the real world. The bear was slavery. Si the Smith was the presumptuous, complacent, bourgeois class that thought they could remedy the situation through simple engagement and negotiation, only to discover to its cost that defeating slavery required radical systemic change. Or not. It really had something to do with the Shattering, and the nature of Immortals. Or it was really an encoded alchemy text.
This went on for perhaps half a break before the students needed to excuse themselves to attend to their various affairs, leaving Oram with an open book, a cold tea, and a spinning head. Browsing the books on the shelves of the Scholar’s Nook revealed a literary dictionary that explained terms like “fable”, “parable”, “allegory”, “metaphor” and so forth, all the various words the students had used and clearly expected the traveler to know. The dictionary tended to describe these terms abstractly, with definitions that sounded very similar to each other. The one new thing Oram came away with was that allegories often used figures that represented other real-world things. So an argument between a talking owl and a talking bear might represent a dispute between Alberach Kura and Councillor Bao Bao, for instance.
Putting the dictionary back and returning to his own table and book, Oram pondered while he drank the cold remains of his tea. Maybe Cassion wasn’t just teaching him a moral about how to go about his project, Oram realized. Maybe he was actually giving him some sort of coded information about the actual situation he was up against in Slag’s Deep. It was a lot to think about, and by the time he finished his tea and left the shop, he was no closer to figuring out the true message of the story than he had been when he walked in.
He thought about it the rest of that afternoon and evening, and even while he lay in his cot, getting ready to fall asleep. Tired from all the fruitless thinking and puzzling, Oram decided to leave it until the morning. Reluctantly, his spinning mind calmed down enough to give itself over to silence and dreams.
