The Academic's Tale
Caius Cornelius, a contemporary of the Dragonborn, had been one of the better known members of a line of professors, scholars, and authors that traced its roots back at least to the middle of the Third Era. The Cornelius family were Imperials, originally from Cyrodiil, but they had moved around a good deal over the years, and most had ended up taking refuge in the relative peace of Skyrim. One of Caius' distant relatives is supposed to have been the ghost-writer responsible for a work that first appeared in Morrowind under the name of the House Hlaalu nobleman Crassius Curio, the notorious nudge-nudge wink-wink multi-volume epic of tasteless word-play and soft-core pornography entitled The Lusty Argonian Maid, whose various parts are still treasured by bandits, whores, and others on the fringes of society. Another long-dead ancestor was said to have been the primary author of the Notes on Racial Phylogeny published under the auspices of the Imperial University Council of Healers, which remains a standard reference work in its field.
At any rate, it was to this latter gentleman that Caius attributed his lifelong "scholarly" interest in cross-race sexual behavior and breeding. This interest eventually resulted in a bulky volume of Supplementary Notes on Racial Phylogeny, far too academic to be titillating; an impressive number of attempted assaults and death threats; and at least one abortive Dark Brotherhood contract for his assassination, the two latter sent his way by assorted members of the mortal races who did not appreciate his curiosity about the less reputable incidents in their family histories. His grandson, Decimus Cornelius, had found himself heir to the family interest in breeding and descent, but had prudently avoided stepping on the toes of others in favor of abstract academic work on the transmission of traits, talents, and weaknesses from generation to generation, including the inherited blindness of the Falmer. It was his interest in the Falmer that had brought him into contact with Herric Spark-striker, the Court Mage in Dawnstar, the contact that in due course led me to the door of his house in Windhelm.
o-o
"It goes without saying that I could never get away with the kind of inquiries Grandfather Caius conducted. Tensions between the races – especially between elves and men, if you can even find any elves in Skyrim these days – are even worse now than in his time, and people are much more inclined to keep their secrets to themselves."
Decimus Cornelius paused and shook his head slowly, as if to dismiss the present age until it was wise enough to repent and amend itself. We were sitting in the front parlor of his small house in Windhelm, which he had wittily but tastelessly nicknamed the Butcher's Block, since it had been the residence of a notorious murderer known by that nickname, who had been tracked down and killed by the Dragonborn.
"He would ask anyone any question that came into his head, however intimate," Decimus continued. "With orcs, he had an edge in that he'd rescued the senior wife and young son of the then chief at Dushnik Yal from some bandits back when he was still a hotheaded teenager, and so they'd put up with just about anything from him short of a battleax. Imperials, he was an Imperial himself and so he knew them inside out. And there are stories that when he was young and wandering the roads, he'd killed the kidnappers of some Argonians who'd been swept up in an illegal slave raid, and so he had a good name among them as well. But the rest? Gods alone know how he survived."
"I certainly wouldn't want to be in his shoes," I replied. "Whatever an orc owed me from the past, I can scarcely imagine myself inquiring if anyone in his family had ever been raped and made pregnant. But if my memory of his book is correct, he got away with that and worse with all the Ten Races, and more than once – dozens or even hundreds of times. Do you think his testimony is fully reliable, then?"
I was taking a bit of a risk myself asking a man's grandson whether his grandfather had fiddled his research data, but I hoped that if I sprung the question on him casually, he would be caught off guard and give his honest opinion.
"I'm pretty sure that it is," Decimus replied, without hesitation. "Not because he's kin, but because I still have most of his notes. Books and parchments covered with his tiny handwriting, dozens, maybe hundreds of them. Most with dates and places set down, and names, the sort of thing he left out of the final text out of respect for the privacy of others. I haven't done a complete check, naturally. That would take weeks...months. But if he faked the data, he certainly put a lot of effort into making it look convincing. I'm thinking of leaving the manuscripts to the Imperial Library when I pass on. By that time, nearly everyone named in them will be long dead, and the information will be useful to other researchers."
"Good idea," I replied, thinking that it was the sort of gift that makes a librarian faint from sheer joy. "I hope you do, and I won't mention the idea to them yet, of course. But you said in your letter to Herric Spark-striker that there was something interesting about the Dragonborn buried in there. Was your grandfather chasing her and Shahvee around with a questionnaire as well? I suppose he wouldn't have had much choice if he wanted to be complete. Same-sex Breton-Argonian couples don't exactly grow on trees. For one thing, the two races don't come into contact all that often."
"He was, and I'm quite sure that was his motivation, but not much got into the final product, as I'm sure you noticed," Decimus said. "And it seems he returned the relevant document in this case. As far as I know, the only time he ever did that with any of the information he collected."
I sat up with a start.
"Returned it? How do you know it wasn't just lost?"
"Because he wrote that he sent it back to them. Here, in one of his letters. I don't know to whom the letter was written, or even when. Grandfather was one of those meticulous types who keeps copies of letters sent, but he didn't indicate the date or addressee for this one in his copybook."
Decimus got up and turned around to take a broad, thin volume out of a bookcase.
"Here, read it for yourself. You can make your own copy if you wish, but I don't think I can allow the original out of my sight."
He gave me a wry smile.
"For one thing, it's one of the very few indications that my grandfather had any tact or delicacy at all, and I cherish it for the honor of the family, if nothing else."
o-o
...Meanwhile I trim and patch my mountain of data, trying to make sure that it is complete in all respects before beginning to write. There are still a few sets for which I have not discovered examples, usually for easily understandable reasons. For instance, I have been entirely unable to find a same-sex Khajiit-Argonian couple, whether male or female, but this was not much of a surprise, given how rare any form of Khajiit-Argonian pairing has always been, due to the ingrained suspicion and hostility between the two races. And I have not been able to discover any mention of an Orc-Khajiit couple of any description whatsoever, this time not due to any special hostility but probably because of the insular nature of Orc society and its concentration in areas where Khajiit are very scarce, if seen at all. There are a number of other absent combinations of this sort, but I suppose such gaps are inevitable, given the natures and sentiments of the populations involved, the lower frequency of same-sex as opposed to opposite-sex relationships, and the unequal distribution of the races across Skyrim.
My least expected gap in the data is shaping up to be same-sex Breton-Argonian. I'm quite sure that's a surprise for you to read. After all, just about everyone can cite one example of such a pair, though no one ever seems able to come up with a second: the Dragonborn, a Breton, and her mate, the Argonian Shahvee. I did get in contact with them, and they responded with a long and detailed answer, but it proved impossible to use the data. No doubt you will assume that I said or did something supremely tactless, and mortally offended them. It's a reasonable guess, all things considered, but not correct, not this time.
I first sent them a short note asking if they would be willing to answer some questions in this area, and received an equally brief but courteous reply indicating that they would. Then I dispatched a copy of my standard long-form questionnaire, hoping they would be willing to reply to at least some of the questions. As I've told you before, virtually no one, whether in person or in writing, answers everything. The questionnaire was deliberately designed to be a bit... probing, shall we say? So I was not at all surprised when their reply, which was unusually prompt, turned out to take the form of a long letter rather than a list of questions and answers. I remember opening it, seeing that it was a very long letter, and reflecting that at least there should be enough data here to represent this rare pairing fairly and completely in my discussion. I had underestimated them, utterly and completely.
When I began to read, I immediately realized that what I had received was not a letter. It answers none of my questions, and at the same time answers all of them, in a way that I will never forget but will never be able to use in an academic context. I suppose the best way to describe it, though still pathetically inadequate, would be to say that it is to letter-writing what the most passionate lovemaking is to a casual village dance. It is shamelessly explicit, but shameless in the sense that the writers genuinely feel no reservations about either their words or their deeds, rather than in the sense that they are deliberately thumbing their noses at society by revealing themselves so completely. It is a model of their relationship built out of script and letters and words, a model that both celebrates its intricacy and depth and warns that there remains a final mystery within that can never be comprehended by anyone but the lovers themselves.
You probably wondered why I mentioned "script" so specifically. It is because of the most unusual and least reproducible feature of their message, the form in which it is crafted. I have seen the Dragonborn's cursive script on official documents, and can recognize it easily here; the other hand is larger and more angular – I presume Shahvee's. And it is immediately evident that they worked on the document at the same time, holding each other, taking turns, linking their letters into intricate designs, borrowing letters and words and phrases from each other's sentences, varying the color of the ink that each of them use, pausing to make love and then continuing the writing as an extension of their lovemaking. Sometimes they alternate regularly in long descriptive passages; sometimes they write separate but related narratives side by side, above and below, vertical and horizontal, in columns, or with the two scripts weaving around each other like vines; sometimes they break into verse; and sometimes one supplies the main text and the other a commentary or critique. The only accounts I have ever seen that speak of something even remotely comparable are descriptions of the interwoven texts in the magical Black Books of Hermaeus Mora.
For all its complexity, the final product is playful, not labored. At one point, Shahvee inscribes an apology in small letters, "Excuse my shaky handwriting, Vivian keeps moving her butt," after which the two of them alternate "Did not!" and "Did too!" all around the margin until the text comes full circle, becomes unreadably small, and terminates with a tiny red heart. The narrative dissolves into a tumble of words and even random letters, lines, and shapes when describing the heights of passion, and then abruptly switches to dry medical language, pornographically explicit but such a wide-eyed innocent mockery of an "objective" academic style that I laughed-with and laughed-at at the same time. They even throw in a couple of footnotes, in miniscule script, one of which trails along the bottom of four successive pages until it suddenly surfaces and expands to usurp the position of the main text and drive it down in turn, to be submerged in a succeeding footnote. It ends with their two names tangled in inseparable graphic intimacy, and a line of shaky printing below – the signature of their adopted daughter, Shah'issol, who must still be very young – held lightly but firmly in the spider-web filigree of her parents' names. It it not a narrative; it is a celebration.
Did they engage in this elaborate display to highlight the inadequacy of our analytic tools to deal with love and passion? Perhaps. But what they wrote gives no hint of being so calculating. I think rather that they did it this way because they had no choice. This is the way they are, this interweaving is their living relationship, and I had asked questions to which the only adequate answer had necessarily to take this form. That the answers would be useless to me, in this form, was not their fault.
They know I have a reputation for being careful with my data and maintaining the privacy of my research subjects, but I still think they are too trusting, not that their passion gives them any alternative. I've thus decided to return their letter to them for safekeeping, with an explanation and a note expressing my sincere thanks, so that no one else ever sees and perhaps misuses it. I will write something brief, but positive, about their relationship. Perhaps a short quotation, unattributed; I have a passage or two in mind. I trust that they will understand.
o-o
"What was your grandfather referring to at the end with that 'passage or two'?" I said, laying the copybook down on the surface of the table between us and looking up at Decimus again for the first time in some minutes. "I read his Supplementary Notes on Racial Phylogeny years ago, the Imperial Library copy, but my memory of its contents is quite dim now. I've never seen it anywhere else. I understand that not many copies were ever produced, and it's become a very rare article. I've asked around, but most booksellers have never even heard of it."
Decimus was standing by the bookshelf, flipping pages in a dusty volume bound in tan leather, evidently the work in question. He paused to read to himself for a moment, and then laid the open book on the table before me, pointing out one passage.
"Sounds like them, doesn't it? The verse at the very end, the Dragonborn writing the first line, Shahvee the second, and so on. It must have been quite a letter. I wish I had known them."
o-o
Our general conclusion must thus be that in both mental and physical aspects, there is no intrinsic barrier to a stable and loving partnership between members of either gender of any combination of the Ten Mortal Races. Personal bonds and family structures seem just as durable in unique or unusual combinations as in more conventional unions, indeed even more so, because of the conviction among the members of the former that only fate could have brought about the union of two from such widely divergent backgrounds. We conclude with a verse in the call-and-response style that expresses something of this sense of destiny, written by an Argonian and a Breton, the component parts of the closest and strongest partnering it has ever been our privilege to witness,
I dreamed of a herd of white horses in Black Marsh,
I dreamed of the hist growing wild in High Rock,
Our difference unites us, it does not divide us,
Our hearts beat as one, our lives interlock.
Before egg or womb, our union was fated,
Come darkness, come death, we still shall be mated.