The story of Si'Wren was culled out of a veritable treasure trove of
hundreds of little clay tablets which were found sealed and submerged
for over 4,000 years in stone jars. The jars were brought up from their
place of discovery on the floor of the Persian Gulf, where they had
lain half-buried under successive layers of sediment for over four
millennia, by an internationally renowned team of archaeologists,
oceanographers, and professional deep sea divers.
Although few realized the true significance of the find at the time, it
was to be recognized later as a momentous event on that fateful day
when the very first stone jar was actually removed safely intact from
the bottom of the sea by a crude, squealing, grease and rust encrusted
loading crane, to be hoisted free after so many centuries and set at
long-last on the heaving deck of the aging expedition ship.
Monetary funding for the expedition was so short at times that the only
affordable ship permanently on duty throughout the entire venture was
an extremely dilapidated and barnacle-festooned vessel of third-world
registry. No doubt many of the people involved viewed it as a minor
miracle that the near-constant threat of mechanical breakdown did not
endanger the success of the mission proper.
But the mechanics and engineers worked more than a few miracles of
their own when catastrophe loomed, as it did more than once, and their
determination ultimately prevailed.
Safely deposited on dry land after having been lost and forgotten for
almost all of recorded human history, the stone jars were finally
opened to reveal, instead of wine or oil, the curious little clay
tablets safely dry and cushioned in a packing medium of loose straw and
uncombed wool. The clay tablets, finally exposed to the light of day
after holding their secrets for so long, were gently removed from their
stone keepers and carefully packed in crates to be secretly shipped to
the back rooms of a major museum. There, it was hoped, they could be
systematically catalogued, transcribed, and translated by the dedicated
ministrations of a team of the foremost scholars of our time.
After careful and intensive study, the story was derived and adapted
-by express and exclusive museum permission- by the author, who poured
himself out in an exhaustive work upon this unspeakably priceless
literary treasure, to such an extent that a state of chronic ill-health
and increasingly strained and weakened eyesight had begun to set in
toward the end of the project. Every effort was taken to achieve the
highest possible standard of accuracy, integrity, and authenticity in
highlighting every nuance of meaning from so obscure an original tongue.
The author has since recovered, and the story of Si'Wren is therefore
presented now in modern literary form, which -it is hoped- will be
found to have suffered but little from the inevitable abuses of such a
distant cultural disparity and linguistically disjointed translation.
The rigorous demand of a simple, honest, and straightforward retelling
of the story of Si'Wren owes it's true success, not so much to the
tireless and unstinting efforts of the author, working with a bank of
modern university supercomputers, but rather to the remarkable purity
of Si'Wren herself, and the crude directness and honesty of the
original telling.
Here, then, is the final result of so much work, such danger and
heartbreak on the high seas, unrelenting secrecy, and endless scrutiny,
the goal, the prize, priceless beyond all calculation, the translation
of those ancient hieroglyphs so painstakingly stick-marked upon the
unimpressive-looking little tablets; a story written in the softness of
clay, and hardened to the rock of ages. It is a brittle, harsh tale of
a tormented adolescent girl who lived out her tragically short life in
a time of the greatest moral evil and physical beauty that the world
has ever known, a story from the dawn of human history.