Illegal Aliens 7

Welcome to weekend writing warriors. Many fine authors, and me, contribute short snippets for your delectation. This is the start of a new work, Illegal Aliens. It is something of a cross between a horror story, a science fiction tale, and a romance.

Roland, an archaeology instructor at Reading University (academic ranks in the UK are different than in the US, he’d be an assistant professor in the land of the free), is on his way to London. He’s on call when something unusual turns up in the works on the new underground. After an interesting conversation on the train, he arrives to find the odd item – a block of Roman Concrete which is covered in inscriptions.

After he’s caught a cab back home, or close enough (his local), he orders dinner and an unusual woman walks in.

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The bartender asked him, “Working hard?”

“This is fun, just the kind of puzzle I like,” He turned back to his paper.

“Placere vinum; Falerian; si quis est in vobis. ”

He looked up, hardly expecting to hear archaic Northern Italian in this pub; there was a woman, a pale woman with long black hair, a strikingly attractive young pale woman with long black hair, and she was having difficulty making herself understood; he said to himself, “Must be a foreign student, just arrived.” and returned to his work.

The bartender called to him, “Hey, Roland, you speak this language?”

“Yes.”

“What’s she want?”

“She said she’d like wine, Falerian if you have any.”

“Falerian? Never heard of it; we’ve got red, and … we’ve got white.”

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My sincere apologies for abusing semi-colons (even in Latin).

First, my sincere apologies for being so late to reply and failing to echo back likes/twitter. I more or less fell ill and by the time I recovered – well guess what it’s time for another.

One of the dilemmas I had for introducing Diana (that’s her name, but you didn’t hear it from me), was the choice of a language. Greek was the lingua franca of the ancient world, but I wanted to use a language where I didn’t need another font. Hence Latin, which if not the language of the francs, was also common.

The Greeks and Romans tended to slot gods from other polytheistic religions into their own. Hence Wodin or Odin would become the German Jupiter or German Zeus.  Bastet because the Egyptian Diana, and she was a daughter of Ra. She’s holding a was in her right hand in this picture.

If you want to go farther into the language I can recommend this book.

I’ve used it with moderate success to understand fairly simple inscriptions.
By the way, did anyone catch the reference to “Hot Fuzz?”

 

You can find my, well our, works here.