by Matthew Ward
She said, “But you’re so young. How could they do this to you? I can only imagine if that happened to my son.” She flitted around the room in a panic. “You must be starving. Here have some of this.”
She drew up a bowl of the stew and handed it to Drystn. Drystn hadn’t realized how weak and light-headed he was until he smelled the stew. He brought the bowl to his lips and carefully sipped. A warmth spread into his body he hadn’t known for a long time. He was home.
~
Ahl set her tea down on the table. Drystn had only been living with Naethr and Ahl for a month, but she was beginning to show. Drystn had made a tea to aide in the baby’s intake of nutrients.
His friends back at Talamir Center had no idea where he went or why he left, but he still expected some type of contact to have been made by now. He couldn’t hide here forever. He needed a plan, and he needed it to work soon. He could only imagine the chaos of Talamir Center.
Ahl seemed to sense his anxiety and said, “Have you worked anything out yet?”
He said, “No.”
“You should go back. They need you there more than we need you here. You’ve done good work here, but it isn’t as important as what needs to be done.”
“Don’t you at least want me to stay for your baby?”
“We’ve managed fine in the past. I’ll be okay.”
Drystn said, “But what if they’re just waiting for me there. What good would it do if I was put back into some prison and questioned?”
“What if they’re not? From your story, it sounds like they didn’t even take your name. For all you know, they have no idea who you were.”
“They’ll have figured it out by now. It wouldn’t take much to ask around who went missing.”
Ahl picked her tea back up and brought it to her lips. She left it there and watched the steam rising, lost in thought. Then, all of a sudden, she set it down.
“I need to go check something. I’ll be right back.”
Drystn went back to the room he now called his own. He heard Naethr get back from his daily patrol of the town. Part of his job here was to keep watch for suspicious behavior from outsiders. This was why he was the one to approach Drystn so long ago. He listened to him move about but didn’t go out to greet him. He needed time alone to figure this out.
Then he heard a knock on the door. Drystn listened intently. This sound rarely occurred in the village. It was a new voice he didn’t recognize. Naethr’s voice grew animated, and Drystn walked out to see who it was.
XVI
Maedc and Tumr had been given a small dwelling two floors above where they ate the meal. Maedc tried to get a good night’s rest before embarking on whatever strangeness the next day had in store, but this uncertainty made it difficult. Their small area was private and cozy but not comforting. The dank smell of being underground panicked him, and he stared at the dirt encasing him all night.
He awoke to the sound of stepping and clinking. A small girl carried a tray of food. She set it on the floor and delicately sat in front of the food. Maedc and Tumr rolled out of their cots and moved to the tray. The smell emanating from the food had the aroma of many spices Maedc couldn’t identify. He sat and brought the strange food to his mouth. He almost gagged when he realized it was more flesh of animals.
He examined the girl to take his mind off the food. The more he looked at her, the more he began to think that she was not, in fact, a child, like he originally thought. Unpronounced wrinkles had begun to form on her face. She also had too mature a manner of conducting herself. She had to be a very small woman.
Maedc sat back when rapid, harsh sounds came from her mouth. He wondered at how someone who moved with such a lightness could speak with such harshness.
She reached into a pouch and pulled out a stack of paper. Maedc saw a symbol etched onto the top piece of paper. She had been sent here not as a servant, but as a teacher. She held the first one up and made a sound. She waited. Maedc realized they were supposed to repeat after her. He made the sound as closely as he could to what she had said. She gave a look of approval. She kept holding it, waiting for something else.
Maedc bumped Tumr’s shoulder and whispered, “You’re supposed to say the sound.”
They went through the alphabet this way, one letter at a time, until they reached the bottom of the stack. Before Maedc could do anything, she picked the pile up and began again. Since Maedc and Tumr were both intimately familiar with the subtle differences in the letters already, they both picked up the sounds of the letters quickly.
Many of the letters had only subtle differences, and the woman looked pleased when they were able to distinguish those letters without any difficulty. After about an hour of this, they made it through the stack with no mistakes, and she picked up the letters and empty tray of food.
Maedc thought, this might be easier than I expected if they’re going to send people to specifically teach us.
The woman left as rapidly and gracefully as she had entered. Maedc watched with dismay. He felt eager to learn more, but he couldn’t without the aid of a native speaker. Now they were alone. He turned to Tumr.
“What should we do?”
Tumr said, “I don’t know. Maybe explore? I wonder if they have a place to bathe. There aren’t exactly rivers flowing through this place. It’s been over a week since I was last clean.” He shuttered. “I feel disgusting.”
The two started to make their way up the long spiral. They passed tiers of dwelling areas similar to the one on which they resided. Other tiers appeared to be communal eating areas. Large tables filled these areas and many people were engaged in animated conversation as they ate together. No one paid them any attention as they snuck by.
On one of the tiers, Maedc heard the sound of running water. He asked, “Do you hear that?”
“Yes. But I don’t know how it is possible.”
The two stopped on the floor and followed the sound to a far wall. When they neared the sound, Maedc realized there were two walls. The first marked out a more private area on the other side. They rounded this wall and found an artificial waterfall.
A hole in the back of the enclosure let water in, which pooled into a collection of rocks. The water fell over the edge of these rocks into a depressed area in floor. There must have been a river running down the mountain right above them, and the hole in the side of the mountain allowed it to flow in. One man appeared to bathe under the water.
The man hadn’t heard their approach and was startled when he turned around. He soon calmed and seemed completely unaware of his nakedness. He continued to scrub his body with a strange tool. It looked like a long, polished stick with hair on the end. But the hair didn’t look like it could have come from a human. He made no attempt to cover up in front of his audience. This never would have happened in Talamir.
Maedc asked Tumr, “Well, do you want to bathe? This is apparently one place to do it.”
Tumr began to undress, and Maedc begrudgingly mirrored the act. Maedc tried not to look at Tumr in his vulnerable state, but they had to follow the customs of these people if they were to be accepted. Tumr stepped toward the falling water.
He yelped as his foot touched it. “It’s freezing. I’ve never felt water so cold in my life.”
Maedc watched the First Age man’s eyes grow wide with fright. He pointed and started yelling something. The man jumped out of the water and quickly grabbed his clothing. He fled the area, still yelling.
Maedc said, “I wonder what that was about. Do you think it’s improper to bathe together, or was it something else?”
“I have no idea, but he didn’t seem to mind us watching. We could come back and try to figure it out another time. Be quick! We might be in trouble.”
Maedc moved under the running water and gasped for breath. The frigid water constricted his lungs, and he felt like he might die. He had never felt water so cold in his life. For the next few seconds, Maedc rubbed his body with his hands to get as clean as he c
ould, then hopped out.
By the end, he had started to get used to the cold, but he didn’t want to stay in there any longer than he needed to. When he left the water, an invigorating life flowed through him. The cold woke him up and excited him to learn some more. Unfortunately, he still had no plan on how to do this.
The two continued to explore, but eventually they returned to their living space. No one came to tell them they had broken any laws, so Maedc considered the day a success. The same woman returned that evening with their dinner. She quizzed them on the letters again and seemed satisfied. She pointed to the book, and Maedc handed it to her.
She opened to the first page and handed it back. Maedc looked at the page with the symbols he now knew the names of. Then he realized he wasn’t learning the names of the letters. They were probably the sounds. The woman glanced over the top of the book and pointed to the first word. So he would learn to read from the text he had brought; a deeply significant text if he understood their reverence properly.
Maedc tried to put the letters together. The word came out in a long stream of sounds. It had the same soft rhythm as words in his own language. The woman furrowed her brow at the distortion of the word. She said it the proper way. Maedc struggled to hear how the individual sounds combined to that clicking noise. Pause.
The woman said it again. Maedc imitated the sound, and she looked happier. Unfortunately, he still had no idea how those sounds had combined to make that word. There must be more rules of sounding out words than we know. Maybe they had two and three letter combinations that had their own sounds. Maedc knew they were missing something.
The woman pointed to the second word on the page. Maedc tried again. He felt like he did better at combining the letters into a faster clicking noise, but it was still off. His heart sank. He had been so hopeful in the morning that this would go quickly having already been familiar with the letters. They went back and forth like this for a bit, and then she took the book and gave it to Tumr. Tumr made the same rough attempts but also had to be corrected at every attempt.
The woman left, and Maedc asked Tumr, “What on Talamir? Did you get that at all? Those letters didn’t seem to add up to those words.”
“I thought I started to get the hang of it better near the end. There are certain letter combinations where the sounds merge, and other ones where the sound cuts off and a click is added. Those are the only two things I’ve noticed so far. Maybe it’s just learning which is which.”
Maedc was exhausted from the full day. He walked to his cot in the corner and curled up to go to sleep.
~
As the week went on, Maedc and Tumr settled into a routine. The woman would come with food and teach them pronunciation of the words in the morning and the evening. In the middle of the day, they explored. Maedc started to pick up on the cadence of the language. Without understanding what any of the words meant, he could tell where the different words and phrases started and ended in speech. He couldn’t explain how he knew it, but he’d often know what the ending sound of a phrase would be based on the first sounds. He learned how people greeted each other and departed and other basic patterns.
They hadn’t gone back to the bathing station yet as they explored higher and higher in the mountain. Maedc wanted to understand the taboo they had broken, so he suggested returning to it. Tumr agreed they needed this information so they wouldn’t run into more trouble the next time they bathed. The two walked their familiar path up to the hidden waterfall. This time two voices came from the bathing area.
Maedc and Tumr approached it cautiously. Maedc rounded the outer wall at a distance. Two men were bathing in the water, so it wasn’t a taboo about multiple people being in there at once. One of the men saw them, and he smiled.
He said, “k,” the traditional greeting. Maedc returned the sound with confidence.
Maedc asked Tumr, “Do you want to just wait here and watch?”
“I don’t have a better idea.”
They sat at a distance, and watched. The two men didn’t seem to care.
Maedc suggested, “Maybe it was the fact that we entered before other person finished?”
“Maybe. That doesn’t seem right to me, though.”
“Who knows what they believe.”
Eventually the two chatting men finished. When they stepped out of the pool of water, they both crouched on their knees and kiss the stone edge. They spoke some words and then got dressed. The two said, “t,” to Maedc and Tumr, and they said the words of departure back.
Maedc said, “So it obviously has to do with this ritual of getting into and out of the water.”
“I agree. Let’s wait and see if we can catch someone going in.”
While they waited, Maedc decided to study the design a bit closer. It was clear where the water came from, but he searched for how the water left the area. He walked along the base pool and noticed the water subtly flowed toward the back. A hole in the wall drained the water, so it must have exited back to the mountain.
Maedc returned to where Tumr sat and waited. He realized the people of the First Age must not bathe often, because there had to be thousands of people in the mountain, and this was the only bathing station they had found so far.
A woman rounded the bend. She said, “k.” She undressed without hesitation, and then knelt at the pool’s edge, kissed the rock, then said some words. She stood and began to bathe.
Maedc said, “Do you want to try or should I?”
“Try what?”
“Well, we have to see if it is the kneeling and kissing or the words or both. We can rule one of them out by kneeling and kissing without saying the words.”
“You do it. I am definitely not bathing with a woman I don’t know.”
Maedc gave him an exasperated look. “We’re never going to learn anything with that attitude.”
Maedc stood and undressed. The woman appeared totally unconcerned about this. He approached, knelt, and kissed. He didn’t say any words, then stood and entered the water. The woman shrieked some words and ran out of the water just as the first time. Maedc turned back to Tumr.
“I guess it wasn’t the kneeling and kissing. I can’t believe they put so much emphasis on the words that they would react like that.”
Tumr said, “I’m not so sure that’s what it is.”
“What else could it be?”
“I have no idea, but I agree it’s suspicious, so it might be something else we aren’t even thinking of.”
“This is so frustrating. I wish we could just ask them.”
~
The weeks passed without much change. They had not seen Tkz since the sacrificial incident. This relieved Maedc. He felt uncomfortable that someone with that much control and power over spior existed. If he did anything wrong, Tkz could drain him of his spior, and there was nothing he could do but lie down and die.
The teaching woman continued to arrive with impeccable regularity. She introduced basic words and phrases into their lessons, and they started to attempt speaking the language to each other. The basic spoken language skills came easier than the reading. Maedc was amazed out how easily he caught on to the sounds and words and flow. The strange clicking and harsh sounds had been so difficult to distinguish at first.
The written language, on the other hand, was a mess. It was an outdated system that could use a lot of modernization. There were way too many letters and letter combinations.
Many of the rules Maedc thought he had discovered ended up having huge numbers of exceptions or were wrong altogether. Half the sounds he had to make were merely inferred from context. Other letters appeared to have no function at all if between certain other combinations. Maedc felt like he could create a better, phonetic system in an afternoon.
Despite the frustrations, he felt a sense of pride at how far he had come in such a short time. He longed to be able to read and understand this book they continually used. He also grew impatient at not being able to ask people question
s. One day, Maedc left Tumr to explore near the surface. He hadn’t been outside in weeks, but his earlier claustrophobia had vanished in the mountain. The vibrant spior lighting created the illusion of brightness, as if outside.
Still, in Talamir, he had spent most of every day outside. He longed to feel the wind and the warmth of the sun again. This artificial and secluded space suddenly felt oppressive.
Maedc’s legs had grown in strength from the constant climbing, but the trek to the top floor still made him sweat. The realization of just how far the surface was from where he slept made him nervous about emergency situations. He then realized they hadn’t experienced a quake since they arrived. This was an extremely long time to go without one, and he began to suspect they might not happen out here.
He knew he arrived on the top tier when he reached the busy bazaar. Maedc let his legs rest by wandering to the different stalls and looking around. After some time, he made the last climb to the outside. The bright light of the sun made him squint at first, and he sneezed in reaction. Maedc opened his arms and let the wind blow across his body. Being outside was so freeing.
He spun around at the sound of a noise behind him. Three men carrying strange equipment emerged from the hole in the mountain. Two of them moved in the opposite direction of Maedc, as if they didn’t notice him. One of them stopped in recognition and waved him over. Maedc ran over to see what he wanted. The man spoke rapidly, and Maedc only picked up a few words: something to do with food. He introduced himself as Ktkl.
Ktkl seemed to want him to come along. He had nothing better to do, so he decided to go with them and learn more about this aspect of their culture. The men moved with a shocking silence. Maedc stepped on twigs that snapped and rocks that slipped under his feet. The two men kept giving him angry looks at these noises. Ktkl didn’t seem to mind and found it humorous at each stumble Maedc made. Somehow they had an innate sense of where to step.