Further, as hard as it was for her, James knew that his mum was making a conscious effort to respect her nearly of-age son, and honour his choices.
Thus, it was no great surprise when Nobby returned with her message later the following week, shaking snow from his wings as he landed on the breakfast table. James withdrew the message from the owl’s leg while Nobby himself sniffed and pecked at the remains of a kipper, clearly hungry from his morning’s flight.
The note in his mother’s handwriting was brief but surprisingly illuminating.
Dear James,
We’ll miss you, but I’m certain you will have a lovely time. Your father and I are both familiar with Millie’s family, as Mr. V was Ministry ambassador to the magical government in Norway for several years and Mrs. V is very charitable in central London with both her money and time. Since Albus is bringing his own New Friend home for the holiday, your room will likely be in use anyway. We will all send your gifts to you at the school— look for Kreacher before you leave—but don’t dare make a habit of being away from us for future holidays!
I miss you very much, as does your father, who sends his love and says to be sure not to let things get TOO romantic during the break, for what that’s worth. I reminded him that he married his school sweetheart and things turned out just aces for him.
Grandma Weasley sends her love as well. Oh, and she knows the Countess Eunice Vandergriff from her own days at Hogwarts and says to watch out for her, apparently because ‘the woman hasn’t washed a cauldron or folded a pair of socks in her entire blessed life’.
“What’s your dad mean about not getting too romantic with Millie?” Graham asked with a grin, reading over James’ shoulder. James jerked the letter away, hastily refolding it.
“It means he doesn’t want James getting too handsy with any of the Hufflepuppet Pals while away from school supervision,” Deirdre said wisely, turning to glance back at the Hufflepuff table where Millie sat with a group of her friends.
“You’re all missing the main point,” Rose said, leaning back from the table as Nobby unfurled his wings with a puff of cold air and launched toward the upper windows again. “Apparently Albus is bringing ‘a new friend’ home with him for the holidays.”
Scorpius pointed his chin toward the end of their own table, where Chance Jackson and her friends giggled and conspired in the shadow of the Great Hall Christmas tree. “Indeed, I know at least one Gryffindor who wasn’t too broken up about last week’s big loss to Slytherin. Could that be little Albus’ guest?”
“Got it in one, I wager,” Rose said, vaguely disgusted. “He and Chance have become quite the little item. But still, letting romance come before team…” She shook her head and wrinkled her nose.
“Where’s Hagrid?” James asked, attempting to change the subject as he stuffed his mum’s letter into his knapsack. “We have Care of Magical Creatures this afternoon, right?”
Scorpius shrugged. “Maybe he finally got eaten by one of the monsters he keeps out in that barn of his. All I hear is ‘class dismissed’.”
Rose jabbed Scorpius sharply with her elbow. “The menagerie is mostly empty now, as you well know. The Ministry made him get rid of most of his creatures, just in case any more Muggles come sniffing around the grounds. Ridiculous, of course. Merlin’s fortified the secrecy charms all around. But still, poor Hagrid’s had to send most of his best beasts to some magical preserve in Australia.”
“Wait a minute,” Deirdre said, leaning back and staring up at the teacher’s table. “He’s up there after all. Just… well that’s why we didn’t recognize him at first.”
“He’s…” James furrowed his brow, craning to look up at the dais. “Is he… reading?”
Sure enough, the top of the half-giant’s head could just be seen behind an enormous book, which sat propped upright on the table before him. The book was bound in frayed green cloth, its edges worn almost through. There was no title embossed on the spine or cover, merely a large symbol, tarnished black and illegible.
“I have to say,” Graham said with genuine surprise, “I wasn’t one hundred percent certain that Hagrid could read.”
“Of course he can read,” Rose said tersely, giving Graham a reproachful look. “He reads more than you do, and not just Quidditch scores and Chocolate Frog cards, at that.”
Still, James thought, Graham was right that the sight of Hagrid with his prodigious nose buried in an even more prodigious book was a curious sight indeed, especially at the head table during breakfast. He decided to ask Hagrid about it during that afternoon’s class.
In that endeavor, however, James was disappointed. Just as Ancient Runes was concluding and Professor Votary was announcing the evening’s homework, a message arrived that Care of Magical Creatures was cancelled. The classroom broke into a babble of relief and even a few cheers, until Votary sternly called everyone to attention again.
“You are all still summoned to the South Barn to assist in cleaning duties,” he declared, peering over his spectacles at the note in his hand. “Mr. Filch will be there to supervise.”
The elation of the room immediately melted to dour grumbling.
Ralph looked dolefully past James to the classroom windows, where snow drifted brightly against a dour grey sky.
“And here I thought we were avoiding a tramp out into the tundra,” he sighed.
“Buck up, Ralph,” offered Rose, buckling her bag and slinging it over her shoulder. “Maybe Filch will deputize you as junior muckraker, first order.”
“Har har,” Ralph grumped.
The threesome followed the rest of the class out into the chill of the day, hunching their shoulders against the steady wind and blowing, stinging wraiths of snow. Hagrid’s hut was barely a mound of drifts, with only one window and the chimney visible, its smoke tattering in the wind.
“We should go check on Hagrid after class,” Rose called into the wind, speaking James’ thoughts. He nodded in agreement. Ralph would come along as much for one of Hagrid’s mugs of hot tea and huge misshapen gingerbread cookies as for the visit, but he, James knew, was also curious about whatever was occupying their old friend.
The next hour was a smelly and unhappy affair, partly because the stalls and cages of the barn represented a daunting duty under any circumstance, and partly because Argus Filch enjoyed making every task as painstakingly fussy and difficult as possible. He ambled from corner to corner, stall to stall, clucking his tongue in righteous indignation at the unsatisfactory progress he encountered at every turn. He did little work himself, apart from when he yanked a broom or pitchfork from a students’ hand to impatiently show how it was properly used, clearly wishing to use the instrument as a rod of punishment instead.
James endured one such demonstration, accepting the brush back from the caretaker with a tight frown and watching Filch’s back as he stumped away, fuming gleefully.
“It’s not like anybody’s going to be eating out of this thing,” he muttered, reaching inside one of the cages and resuming the awkward task of scrubbing its interior.
“Well,” Ralph said, grunting with his own arm crooked into a cage, scrubbing its mesh ceiling, “something will probably end up eating out of it, eh?”
“Wargles don’t count,” James replied. “They lick their own nethers. I don’t think they give a care about ‘the excrement tarred into the crevices’.”
Ralph merely shrugged as much as his awkward posture allowed.
James knew that Ralph, as Head Boy, felt a constant pressure not to criticize even the most odious of the Hogwarts staff. James felt no such pressure, of course, and found Ralph’s clumsy discretion grating, at best.
By the time they finished and stepped back outside, weary and smelling of moldy hay and innumerable flavors of beast dung, the sky had grown dark and leaden, whether with early evening or another impending snowfall no one could tell. The tracks of their earlier footprints were already half consumed by the blowing snow, which shone slate blue in the gloom. Hagrid’s hu
t, however, glowed from its single visible window with buttery lamplight and the flicker of the hearth. They angled toward it, not attempting to speak over the wind that buffeted across the drifts, blasting them with ice crystals.
The door of Hagrid’s hut creaked swiftly open even before they reached it, letting out a push of deliciously warm air and firelight.
Hagrid stood framed in the door, half lit by the interior behind him, half by the blue evening gloom, his breath pluming huge clouds into the wind.
“S’about time yeh three showed up at my door,” he called out with such sudden impatience that James nearly stopped in his tracks.
“What yeh waitin’ for? No sense pretendin’ I didn’t know yeh was gonna come out and check on dim ol’ Hagrid, with his silly umbreller wand and hardly enough wits t’ read a simple letter. Come in, come in…”
He stepped back from the door and waved a slab-like hand into the warm clutter of his hut. James shrugged and tromped inside, doing his best to shake the snow from his shoes onto the mat. Ralph and Rose crammed in behind him, shrugging out of their coats and shaking snowflakes from their hair. Hagrid swung the door shut with a firm slam and shot the bolt before stumping back across the small living space and standing near his table.
The interior of Hagrid’s hut hadn’t changed much over the years. It was still a comfortable shamble of miss-matched, oversized furniture, bare wooden floors, and dusty rafters hung with all manner of baskets, nets, and traps. Trife, Hagrid’s old bullmastiff dog, twined happily around the three students, snuffling their hands with his wet nose and nearly knocking them over with his excited greeting. The hearth roared, making the room almost uncomfortably hot, so that James immediately flung his coat onto a nearby bureau, which was already weighed down with nested pots and cauldrons. Hagrid merely glanced back and forth from the new arrivals to the huge green book open on the table, propped before a lantern. A mostly empty iron tankard of butterbeer sat next to it, and James could tell that it hadn’t been Hagrid’s first of the evening.
Rose spoke for all of them when she asked, “Are you all right, Hagrid?”
“Oh, Rosie,” Hagrid cried, raising both of his hands to his face with such a sudden shift of mood that James was again taken aback.
Hagrid folded backwards onto one of his kitchen chairs, which chalked a few inches backwards in alarm. “Oh, Rosie! Yeh remind me so much o’ yer mum. That’s ‘ow I knew yeh three would come. Cuz they would’a.
Ron and Hermione and Harry. They did, yeh know. They came t’ see me back when Norberta was just a wee egg, not even ‘atched. Did I ever tell yeh that story?”
“Only about a thousand times,” James said, not unkindly, moving to join Hagrid at the table. The normal clutter of wooden plates, cheese rinds, and tea mugs had been pushed back in an untidy jumble by the enormous, musty-smelling book. “What is all this, Hagrid?”
“It’s a letter from Grawpie, s’what it is!” Hagrid sniffed hugely, half embarrassed, half exasperated, and lifted the front cover of the green book momentarily, revealing a huge, heavy parchment unrolled beneath it. “An’ I can barely read the blasted thing! I see the symbols fer dragon, which can only mean Norberta. And a few other symbols that are worryin’, t’ say th’ least. But th’ rest is complete gibb’rish to me. I was never partic’ly good at Giantish, and it’s been so many years, I’m nearly useless. Can’t even read a letter from my own dear brother an’ his byootiful bride!” A fat tear trembled and ran down the side of Hagrid’s nose. He swiped it away with a callused thumb.
Ralph shouldered closer to the table and lifted the cover of the green book again, closing it to reveal the letter beneath. “Can’t be that hard, can it? I mean, Giantish is a language made up of, like, cave drawings and stuff. Stick figures and arrows and hands with not enough fingers…”
He paused as he looked down at Grawp’s letter. It wasn’t printed on parchment at all but an expanse of what appeared to be untanned leather, thin as a bedsheet, irregularly shaped and curling at the edges. The entire surface was scrawled with tiny pictograms and symbols, clustered so tightly as to blend into a nearly seamless mash.
James turned his head this way and that as he leaned over it, trying to make sense of it and failing. The text of the letter—if text was what it could be called—didn’t run in lines down the page, but along the top, down the side, then across the bottom. In fact, the line of symbols followed the uneven edges of the skin, turning upside-down and running back up the side again, twisting in on itself in dense concentric circles like a fingerprint, or the rings of a tree stump. James blinked at it and gave his head a shake, unable to follow the dizzying line of imagery.
“Right,” Rose said slowly. “I don’t think even a person fluent in Giantish could just read this letter, Hagrid. Do you have a quill and parchment ready? We can help decipher it if you like.”
James wasn’t certain that he was quite prepared to spend the rest of the evening hunkered over a musty-smelling book translating hundreds and hundreds of tiny hand-scrawled symbols, and the look Ralph shot him communicated the same. But Hagrid’s response made it impossible to deny him. He nearly burst into relieved tears and scrambled to make more room on the table, retrieving a stack of damp parchment from a nearby drawer.
“Oh, Rosie, Ralph, James, that’d be just golden o’ yeh! I was reachin’ th’ end o’ my wits! And I know many would say that wa’an’t a long trek, but still. I’ll make tea! And thanks to yeh ever so much! Ever so much!”
James sighed to himself, unable to keep the smile from his face.
Ralph settled onto Hagrid’s abandoned chair as the half-giant bustled into his tiny kitchen.
“Well,” he said, shaking his head wryly. “It’s not like I had any plans for the rest of the year.”
“Oh tosh,” Rose said, climbing onto another chair, kneeling on it to lean over the table. She peered closely at the huge green book, which James could now see was a dictionary of giant symbology, with translations in English. “Giantish has no grammar, no spelling, no pronunciation. That’s one of the beauties of the language. It’s made entirely of pictograms, translatable to any other tongue. Once we get started and learn some of the basic recurring imagery, everything should start falling easily into place.”
“I don’t know what’s more daunting,” James sighed, tugging the huge sheepskin letter out from under the book and turning it this way and that, “how hard Hagrid makes it seem, or how easy you do.”
Hagrid made tea, serving it in his usual collection of chipped cups and mugs, and provided a platter of iced cookies in the shapes of hippogriffs, Christmas trees, and, inexplicably, Yeti footprints. Ralph transcribed what Rose and James translated, leaving crumbs on the sheepskin as they turned it round and round, following the line of symbols as it spiraled toward the centre of Grawp’s letter.
It became evident as they worked that the letter had been a group effort, written not only by Grawp, but also Prechka, his wife, and several other members of their mountain tribe, up to and including their local king. James began to recognize the drawing styles of each hand, simply by looking at the weight of the strokes, the straightness of the lines, and the relative artistic merits of the symbols. As they worked, he learned via Rose that the giants’ “ink” was a mixture of blood, tar, vegetable juice, and red clay. They painted the symbols with brushes made of bicorn eyelashes.
Ralph’s prediction that translating the letter would take the rest of the year turned out to be inaccurate, although James had to admit as the night wore on that it certainly felt like it was taking months rather than hours. Outside the hut’s square windows, the night turned inky black and snow indeed began to fall again. The wind gusted, rattling the panes and howling around the chimney, but the foursome stayed warm and busy, drinking tea until they could drink no more, dining on cheese, crusty bread with butter and peppery olive oil, cucumber slices, tiny blood sausage links, and more iced cookies for dessert. Tempers grew thin, and occasionally James and Rose
would argue about the meanings of certain pictograms, especially when Grawp was their author, since his Giantish penmanship, as it were, was the most haphazard of all.
“It’s clearly a sun rising,” James insisted, stabbing at the drawing with a sausage-greasy finger.
“It’s King Kilroy looking over a mountain!” Rose argued impatiently. “See the hair!?”
“Those are sunbeams!”
“You’re as blind as a cave nargle! King Kilroy is the symbol for authority! It makes sense in context!”
“The rising sun represents the future,” James persisted doggedly.
“That makes more sense in context!”
Ralph, as usual, broke the stalemate. “Let’s just call it ‘authority in the future’ and move on, shall we? My bum’s going to sleep.”
It was nearly midnight by the time they finished the transcription. Finally, weary but gratified and curious, they retired to the chair and sofa before the fire to read the letter in its entirety. Hagrid stoked the coals to a fierce red glow, crackling and bursting with sparks, and eased into the huge easy chair, his stocking feet crossed on the rug, one big toe poking through a frayed hole. Trife turned three circles next to Hagrid’s knees and lay down with a contented snuffle.
James and Rose plopped onto the sprung sofa while Ralph remained standing as if he was about to give a presentation in class.
He began to recite the transcription, which, while written in his own handwriting, was still rather a task. As Rose had pointed out, Giantish is a language with no grammar or structure, leaving Ralph to fill in the blanks between ideas and concepts as he went.
“Grawp, Prechka, and the rest of the tribe send greetings and…the mountain-sized, ten-headed manticore of prosperity.”
“Ah, that’s a traditional giant’s greetin’, that is,” Hagrid nodded, his eyes half-lidded with happy anticipation. “Means riches and meat for endless seasons. Go on, go on…”
Ralph nodded uncertainly. “Time is hard as the year gets old.
The future is foggy and full of danger. But smaller worries first.