The Language of the Dragon

by Margaret Ball

  This wasn’t really a proper trek, even. The old German probably could not have hiked a mile at this altitude, and he didn’t want to: all he wanted was somebody to shepherd him up to Shaimak village and to take care of all his material needs for the duration of the stay. This too was fine with Koshan. He had done enough high-country walking as a boy; he wouldn’t mind if he never had to set foot out of a jeep again. Besides, even when he was sitting quietly in the jeep, Professor Teller’s color and breathing were alarming. Koshan had suggested twice that they might stay a few days at one of the lower-altitude villages they went through, to allow Teller time to acclimatize. The professor had dismissed the suggestions with an irritable snap. His permissions for Shaimak had cleared and he wanted to get there with no further waste of time.

  “It is not wasting time to take care of your health,” Koshan had persisted the second time he tried to get the professor to slow down.

  Teller gave him a sharp look. “You don’t understand. You are young, you have years ahead of you. I do not have time. I have spent all I had and used all my reputation to make this trip happen. If I do not collect the information I need now, I may never have another chance. If my health is another casualty of the search for truth, so be it.”

  And when Koshan asked what kind of “truth” the professor expected to find in an isolated village of the High Pamirs, he got his ears filled with another hour of gobbledygook about glottochronology and missing linguistic links and the early migrations of Central Asian peoples. Mixed in with that was a bunch of nonsense about the reports of last October’s events, which had evidently been what captured the professor’s interest. The reports he liked best were the sensational garbage from the tabloid press, from writers who apparently didn’t understand that the “dragon of Shaimak,” wasn’t an actual dragon but just a colorful way of describing the unstable rock mass that threatened the lake.

  For the most part, even Professor Teller didn’t seem to care about what he was saying: it was just words, words being spouted out the way some marine animals squirted out clouds of ink to disguise themselves.

  But what could an elderly German academic, a man who by his own admission had never before left the comfort of the university libraries to conduct research in the field, have to hide? Koshan couldn’t imagine.

  When they camped below Shaimak, on the last night of the journey, he asked the other two Silk Road employees if they had any idea what the German hoped to find in Shaimak. “Rubies?” suggested Farzad, who had loaded up the other jeep with spices, dehydrated food and other supplies that he turned into a hot meal for them every night.

  Naraiman, driver of the other jeep and keeper of the maps and permits, shook his head. “The mines were closed over a hundred years ago! Every ruby they produced must have been traded out of here for food long since.”

  “I did hear they had re-opened the mines,” Farzad persisted. “Now that the Dragon of Shaimak is crumbled into rubble – isn’t that right, Koshan? You were here, weren’t you?”

  Koshan shook his head unwillingly. “I was down in Tireza when all that happened.” He didn’t like to admit his ignorance, since his supposed expertise in the Shaimak area had been what got him this job. But there was no point in lying to his fellows. It would be too easy for them to catch him out.

  “Even so,” said Naraiman, “there never were enough rubies to make this area worth developing. And I can’t believe that the last half-year has been so productive that a rich man from Germany would expect to get a profit from this little mine!”

  In the morning, when Koshan took his place in the driver’s seat of the lead jeep and started the grinding climb up to Shaimak village – the “new” village that was only a hundred years old, not the original one that had been slowly drowned when Lake Shaimak started to fill up after the earthquake – Professor Teller looked sideways at him and chuckled. “You boys were – trying to find out – what riches the old fool is chasing, eh?” He let go a series of breathy laughs broken by gasps.

  “We did wonder,” Koshan said.

  “I know. Rubies, eh? La’al?”

  Koshan glanced at him, surprised.

  “I know a few words of Taklan,” Professor Teller said.

  “But—” The boss at Silk Road had told Koshan he was being hired as a guide and interpreter.

  “I do not plan to waste my time learning enough Taklan to negotiate with the locals,” Teller said impatiently. “Don’t be concerned, you will – earn – your fee.”

  Koshan would have felt more secure about that if the old man hadn’t started gasping and coughing again.

  When they got their permits, back in Merzadeh, a member of the patrol guarding the Lake Shaimak Restricted Area had driven up to Shaimak to tell the villagers of the honor they were about to receive, whether they wanted it or not. At the outskirts of the village, therefore, they were greeted by brightly dressed girls carrying baskets of bread and salt. Koshan saw one familiar face and waved discreetly. Rukshana returned his signal with a beaming smile and a broad, totally indiscreet wave. One of the older girls elbowed her; he suspected another lecture on proper behavior was in his little cousin’s future. Not that it would bother Rukshana! When she’d stayed with their aunt to attend the village school in Tireza, she’d attracted disapproving lectures the way other girls attracted young men.

  On the day of their arrival Teller was too exhausted by the trip to be much of a nuisance. He let Koshan blow up an air mattress and set up a collapsible table and chair for him in the house that the villagers had made available, ate the meal that Farzad produced to go with the freshly baked rounds of local bread, and went to sleep with his battered German copy of Faust spread open on his chest.

  On the next day, though, the rest seemed to have given him a new lease of life. He wasn’t even gasping and coughing the way he’d done on the way up to Shaimak. Perhaps he was acclimatizing after all! He certainly had enough energy to be a nuisance. First he pointed out the four rows of successively smaller wooden beams rising up to the skylight above the roof and told Koshan that the number four went back to Zoroastrian times. “The first beam stands for the earth, the second water, the next fire and the highest air –that is, the four basic elements.”

  That might be true, but since every Pamiri house had exactly that structure, Koshan didn’t think it proved much about the survivals of ancient folkways among these particular villagers. And the rest of the central room looked just like any other house in any other village, except smaller and shabbier. The layers of felt mats covering the floor were thin and the colors faded, and only a few wooden bowls and dishes were stored in the wall frames. The ragged pieces of patchwork hung here and there on the walls were threadbare and faded, and had never been embroidered. There was not even a copper pitcher for serving water.

  After examining the house, Professor Teller began to exercise his full potential as a pest to the whole village. He elbowed his way in among the women when they were kneading the day’s bread, pointing at the bowl they kneaded in, the oven outside the front door, the carved wooden chests where they kept their clothes, and asking – asking – asking about everything. He bothered the men and women working on their vegetable plots, pointing at plants and clods of dirt and wooden hoes and repeating what they said into his little recording device. There wasn’t a thing he left unquestioned, from the patties of yak dung drying on the tops of stone walls to the patient yaks themselves.

  And at the end of the day he sat over his recorder, playing back his collection of words with a disappointed look. “Angusht,” he said. “Aingus. Gusht…”

  Koshan’s lips twitched, just before Teller himself figured it out. “Himmelherrgott,” the German howled, “I have collected seventy times seven ways to say ‘finger!’” His eyes met Koshan’s and after a moment of pure rage, he began laughing. “Tell me, boy. What should I have done instead of pointing at things?”

  “We, um, we mostly point with our chins. Like this,” Koshan said, jerki
ng his own chin towards the door. “It’s, um, not really polite to jab at things with your finger.”

  “So your people decided to give the old man a little lesson in courtesy.” Teller was sticking to his good-humored tone with some effort. “Very well, very well. Even the few words they have given me are of no use; they are merely a rural dialect of Taklan.”

  “That is what we speak,” Koshan pointed out.

  “But it’s no good to me!” Teller raised his hand as if to dash the little recorder onto the floor, then stopped himself. “I want to learn the old language.”

  Old, he wanted? Very well; on the next day Koshan dragged the oldest man in the village to meet his client. That man listened, nodded, shook his head, and finally gave Teller a few words that sounded like nothing Koshan had ever heard. If dragons existed and had a language, he thought, this is what their speech would sound like: words full of the clashing of rocks, hissing with blue flame.

  Over the next few days Teller became somewhat less of a nuisance to the village as a whole – that is, he was only a nuisance to one person at a time, leaving the others free to get on with their work. It did not seem to Koshan that he was getting much of this “old language” from any one person, but the recordings slowly mounted up. At night, after the communal meal, Teller would sit at his flimsy desk and replay his day’s collection, scribbling as he did so in the narrow ledger with the stained green cover. Koshan contrived to get a glimpse of the writing but was left no wiser than before: it was some kind of spiky script that he couldn’t begin to read.

  A spiky script for a stony language?

  One day a villager interrupted their preparation of dinner to say that the professor wanted an interpreter. Koshan followed the man and found Teller pestering Rukshana. That was odd; Rukshana was one of the few people in the village who’d been sent to Tireza every summer to attend the seasonal school there. The school didn’t teach German, but if anybody knew enough English to communicate with Professor Teller, she should.

  He had the feeling she didn’t want to communicate with Teller. He told Koshan that he needed to know exactly what she had said just before something or other had happened.

  “Nothing happened! The wool is clean now, that is all,” she snapped. She put aside the sieve on which she’d rested a bundle of wool while tweaking the horsehair string tied across the sieve to beat dust out of the bundle.

  “But she barely touched it,” Teller complained.

  Koshan took a pinch of the wool between finger and thumb, raised it and blew on the fibers. “If you can get all the dust and dirt out so quickly, Rukshana, you should clean the wool for the whole village!”

  “The old man is mistaken,” she told him, flushing. “I had to work a long time to clean this much!”

  “Nein! She did not,” said Teller.

  “And now,” Rukshana said, “I must begin cleaning another batch.” She put the clean wool in a large bowl, pulled dirty wool out of the sack beside her and arranged it on the sieve, under the taut horsehair string.

  “And then she said, ‘Djnd vlaad dzlaamk!’” It was Teller who voiced the grating words.

  Dust and loose dirt cascaded from the sieve, and Rukhshana’s fingers were only just raised to pluck the string. White-faced, she turned to the professor, and then to Koshan. “I did not say it,” she cried out. “I never said it, I do not know where he learned it! I never used it to clean the wool – well, only a little, little bit, and my fingers are so sore!” Tearful, she exhibited pink fingertips to Koshan. “Please do not tell anyone!”

  “Do not tell them what?”

  “That I used the language of the dragon to clean my wool.”

  3. A Faustian bargain

  “The language of the dragon!” The old man was so excited that he started gasping and coughing again.

  “Please, sit down and rest,” Koshan begged him. “You will kill yourself if you go on like this.” Teller had come back from Rukshana’s to prance around the house, pointing at things and trying out more sentences that sounded like rockfalls… and then laughing, whooping, and scribbling furiously in that ledger of his.

  “Bin ich ein Gott? Am I a God?” he chanted, waving his copy of Faust. “In these pure symbols do I see / Nature exert her energy!”

  And that was just the part of his activities that Koshan could stand to think about.

  “You need to sit down,” he urged Teller again when he saw the professor rubbing his head. Headache was one of the signs of altitude sickness, and all this pointing and shouting wasn’t going to help. “Altitude sickness can kill you.” Maybe if he said it often enough, the warning would sink in.

  “Ah, who cares about an old man’s life?”

  Koshan had found that the professor wasn’t moved by assertions of empathy. “If you die, they may not pay us for the whole trek, and I need the money.”

  “Ach, money! We shall be rich, you fool! This discovery is worth more than life itself. When I publish, it will make me immortal!” The professor pointed at a brass samovar whose incised surface had grown dingy with neglect. “Samovar vlaad dzlaamk!” he shouted.

  Much to Koshan’s relief, nothing happened. That hadn’t always been the case since their return from Rukshana’s home.

  “The wrong word,” Professor Teller groaned. “Boy, I need to know how to say ‘samovar’ in Alt-Shaimaki. No, I do not,” he contradicted himself immediately. “‘Samovar’ is a Russian loan-word in Taklan; the old ones would have had no word for the thing. I need to learn words for what is always with us. Earth, stones, water, snow…”

  “Alt-Shaimaki?” Koshan asked.

  “Ahh, in English you would say Old Shaimaki. But a German has discovered the secret of the language, not an American or Briton, and so it will be Alt-Shaimaki when I publish. Teller’s Alt-Shaimaki, they will say!” And the old man demanded Koshan’s arm to support him back outside, so that he could collect more words to play with.

  “My little cousin called it ‘the language of the dragon.’”

  Teller cackled and shot Koshan a bright, measuring glance. “So she did – she did! It is a metaphor, of course; this is the language of power. Who speaks Alt-Shaimaki will have power like a dragon – dragons…” His eyes clouded over. “What about dragons? Who are you?” he demanded. “Are you trying to steal my results?”

  Koshan introduced himself all over again and reminded Teller that he’d been hired as a guide and interpreter. “I know that,” the professor said impatiently. “Ask that boy how to say ‘stone’ in the old language.”

  The boy was a few years younger than Rukshana. He shook his head and said, “I am too young to speak with dragons. You will have to ask an elder.”

  The first three men Koshan and Teller approached also shook their heads, frowning. The fourth said, “Why do you need to call tsh?” and then backed away, looking unhappy.

  “Tsh,” Teller repeated for the recorder on his way back to the house.

  “Tsh,” he said again indoors as he scribbled in the notebook that he never showed to anyone. “Faust, Faust, be you my guide!” he cried. “As the student said to Mephistopheles, ‘Was man schwarz auf weiß besitzt / Kann man getrost nach Hause tragen. What we possess in black and white, / We can in peace and comfort bear away!’”

  Back at the door, he stooped and picked up a pebble and leaned on Koshan to get upright again.

  “Tsh vlaad dzlaamk!” he cried out, and minute crumbs of dirt fell from his hand, leaving only the bare rock, as clean as if it had been washed in a basin and dried with a guest towel.

  “I can do anything!” Teller cackled. “I am a great man! I, I shall…” He paused for a moment, frowning as if he was having trouble remembering something. “I shall publish. Yes. That is what we call it.”

  The four older men, the three who hadn’t spoken and the one who had let the word for ‘stone’ slip, approached the door. “What does he plan?”

  Koshan did his best to explain scholarly journals and publications in
the village Taklan.

  “He will give the language of the dragon to strangers?”

  “It will be written for anybody to read?”

  “We cannot permit this,” said the oldest of the four.

  “Ha! You cannot stop me! Nobody can stop me!” Teller laughed when Koshan translated their concerns. He held out his hand with the clean rock in it, and said, “Tsh vlaad… vlaad… ah, yes. Tsh vlaad kzmtq!” He giggled like a child as they all stared at his empty palm. “I did that…” A lost look crossed his features. “Did I do that? My head aches so…” He rubbed his eyes.

  “You dropped your little rock,” Koshan said firmly. “You need to rest now.”

  The professor looked blank and confused.

  “It begins,” said the oldest man.

  “What did you do to him?”

  “He is doing it to himself.”

  They followed Teller and Koshan back to the house they were using, and watched while Koshan persuaded the professor to lie down for a rest. When he stood, the oldest man extended one hand. “You will give us the talking-machine.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Koshan parried.

  The other three men moved in and held him with surprising strength for such ancient villagers, while Zardusht the headman knelt beside Teller and picked up the recorder.

  “Is this Pamiri hospitality?” Koshan demanded, struggling in vain against the arms that restrained him. “Grandfather, uncles, do you steal from guests? You make me ashamed to be Pamiri!”

  “This guest sought to steal from us,” the headman said. “I am sorry about his device, but in the city he will doubtless be able to buy another talking-machine.” Stepping outside, he dropped the recorder on a rock and pressed his boot on it. The flexible yak-hide sole did little damage. He picked up a stone somewhat larger than the one that had… not… disappeared from Professor Teller’s palm, and brought it down on the recorder once, twice, three times. “Bu prdmt vlaad kzmtq!”