The Language of the Dragon

by Margaret Ball

  The shattered bits of metal and plastic were no longer there.

  They left Koshan with the professor then. Farhad and Naraiman had announced their intention of accepting an invitation to the mid-day meal from a large family boasting several marriageable girls, so he was alone to deal with a man whose insanity grew by the minute. As soon as the Pamiris left them, Teller demanded his notebook in a hoarse whisper. “They don’t know about the notebook. Don’t tell them! ‘What we possess in black and white…’” He scribbled for several minutes before falling back against his pillows, pen in hand. “Bu prdmt vlaad kzmtq!” he gasped. The pen vanished and Teller cackled. “But not the notebook, no, not the notebook,” he said. A sly smile crossed his face and he scrabbled for the narrow ledger with its green cover. Koshan put it into his hand and he slid it under the pillow.

  By the time Farhad and Naraiman returned several more small objects had vanished from the house. Teller seemed less rational with each use of the language he called Alt-Shaimaki, and by early evening he had subsided into insane mutterings. Koshan decided that the man was suffering from the cerebral edema that sometimes accompanied altitude sickness. He decided not to think about the fact that Teller had appeared to be acclimatizing, and he definitely did not wish to think about wool that cleaned itself and rocks and recorders that disappeared themselves.

  But in the morning, when they found Teller dead, Koshan managed to slip that notebook in with his own possessions before they packed up the professor’s body and belongings for return to the city.

  4. This thing disappears

  Merzadeh was not a friendly city for Koshan that summer. As he had gloomily predicted, Silk Road Treks paid him and the other two guides only for the days they had actually been on the road, not for the full month the professor had requested. What he received was hardly enough to placate his creditors, and it seemed foolish to try once he found out that the old witch who rented him a room had sold his laptop to cover the unpaid rent. The cost of replacing the laptop made a nasty hole in the payment from Silk Road, but what was a man to do? He couldn’t maintain a civilized life, keep up with his friends, follow the news or play at the new gaming sites without a computer! Besides, a few lucky days of gaming and he would be…

  Even less able to pay his debts than when he’d left Merzadeh for the High Pamirs.

  Gloomily, Koshan considered his remaining assets. Good snowshoes, down pants and jackets, other cold-weather gear would fetch him far less than the price he’d paid for those items. And without his own gear, his chance of picking up occasional guiding jobs would shrink to almost nothing. He would sell the new laptop before he sold his trekking gear – and he was not going to sell the new laptop.

  Only one thing remained: that small notebook filled with the illegible, spiky script of the old professor. Teller had thought the notebook would make him rich and famous. It ought to be worth something… to the right person. But how was he going to find that person?

  It would have to be somebody at a university. And not the University of Merzadeh, where the study of Taklan traditions was considered vastly inferior to important subjects like highway engineering and industrial psychology. No, he needed a foreigner, from a foreign university, with the vast sums of money all those people threw around when they visited Taklanistan.

  He did know one American with university connections. Better yet, he had been nice to her when they’d been held hostage by those terrorists last fall; she might feel some good will towards him still. And during the time they spent together she had made it clear that her alma mater, the University of Texas at Austin, was the finest university in the United States, to which better-known institutions such as Harvard and Princeton were like butter-lamps to an electric light. So Koshan felt quite confident that he was contacting the right person when he sent an email to Thalia Lensky, including some scans of notebook pages, to ask how he could turn this information into money.

  Thalia’s reply was instant, warm-hearted, and – initially – disappointing. She couldn’t read the notebook pages any better than he could, and she had no idea to whom he could send them.

  With her second paragraph, things began to look up. He’d mentioned a recent trek to Shaimak? After several foolish feminine questions about Rukshana and other unimportant people in the village, she got to the point. Every July, the university hosted a conference on Central Asian Languages and Cultures. Could he possibly attend the upcoming conference? There he was sure to find people who could interpret the notes and tell him what they were worth.

  Koshan wrote back lamenting the poverty that made a transatlantic journey impossible for him. Americans were rich; maybe she would send him a ticket.

  She didn’t do that, but she did find a way to get him invited to the conference as a speaker, which meant that his way would be paid. She commented that people seemed to be quite interested in hearing from someone who was actually familiar with the remote, fabled region of Shaimak. Somebody had even asked her if it was true that the villagers still practiced Zoroastrianism. Of course she couldn’t speak to such matters, but if Koshan could…

  Koshan decided on the spot that if the Americans wanted the Shaimak villagers to be Zoroastrians, they would be Zoroastrians. He could tell them what Teller had said about the skylight construction without mentioning that every single Pamiri village used the same structure. To add to that he did some quick Web research, was relieved to find that the religion was mostly about fire worship with no icky stuff about human sacrifice, and sent off an abstract that got him the desired formal invitation. It didn’t actually pay money, but at least his fare to and from the conference would be covered.

  He could probably get a refund on the return portion of the ticket and use that to cover his expenses until he located an American who would make him rich in return for the contents of the notebook.

  Thalia’s good will extended to finding Koshan an inexpensive place to stay during the conference, a vacant room in the house of some woman who’d tutored her in French and who only accepted him as a short-term tenant on Thalia’s enthusiastic recommendation.

  It had been a good day for Koshan when he persuaded the terrorists to let Thalia scrounge up some warm clothes from the villagers at Tireza before they dragged her up to the heights of New Shaimak. She must have mentioned that warm outfit half a dozen times in the few minutes she spent introducing him to this Sienna Brown. Getting the impression that he had literally saved her friend’s life, Sienna Brown was almost as favorably inclined to him as Thalia herself. The only thing that confused him was why she wanted to rent out a room. Anybody who possessed such a fine house, with stucco walls and glass windows, with four bedrooms and two indoor bathrooms, with floors of real wood and furniture instead of cushions, must be even richer than most Americans. There was even a separate room for cooking pots and utensils!

  Not that it mattered much, once he was there. Thalia Lensky was no longer the little, quick-moving woman he had rather admired last fall: she was extremely pregnant, far past the stage at which a decent Taklan woman would keep to her house instead of forcing men to look at her swollen body. She and Sienna wasted his time jabbering about heat and the discomforts of pregnancy until he could only be grateful when she left saying that she might not be back; it was so hot, she thought she would not leave the comfort of her own air-conditioned home again until it was time to go to the hospital.

  As for his new landlady, she seemed to think a lot of her own linguistic abilities, but Koshan was not that impressed. She had tutored Thalia in French, and she mentioned a handful of other languages, but none of them were any use: why should he care that she knew German and Spanish? She didn’t speak Taklan or any of the neighboring languages like Kyrgyz or Uzbek. He didn’t waste his time asking her about the notebook pages; he stuffed the notebook itself under his mattress and went off to the conference, computer under his arm, to act the expert on Shaimak and, hopefully, to meet a real expert who would see the potential in the scanned im
ages on the laptop.

  He did have one name now, thanks to this Sienna Brown. She’d told him that the expert on Central Asia in the linguistics department was a tenured professor named Edward Osborne. He was not, she said, an easy man to approach, but his scholarship was amazing.

  “You could introduce me?”

  Sienna shook her head. “I was just one of a hundred undergraduates in his survey course. The T.A. might remember me, but not Dr. Osborne. In any case, given his attitude towards undergraduates you might be better off without my introduction. He felt that teaching us was an intolerable imposition on his time; all he really cared about was giving a couple of advanced seminars for his dissertation candidates.”

  But since the person Koshan actually got to talk to was one of the teaching assistants, Sienna’s name did him some good.

  “Oh, Sienna!” Mira Martinez said happily. “No, I wasn’t one of Dr. Osborne’s T.A.’s then, I was just an undergraduate, but we had Russian together. Everybody around here knows Sienna! Crazy girl, she used to go through language classes like Michael Moore would go through a hotel buffet. If she thinks your papers are something Dr. Osborne would be interested in, you can leave them with me. I’ll make sure he takes a look at them.”

  On the way to the campus, Koshan had stopped at an Internet café to print out just one of his three scanned pages from the notebook. Now he took that printout, tore it in half, scribbled his new phone number on one piece and gave it to the teaching assistant. He had no intention of being conned into giving away too much; if these notes were as valuable as the old German had claimed, this would be enough of a sample to whet the professor’s interest.

  He still hadn’t heard from Osborne three days later, when it was time for him to give his scheduled talk, “Remnants of Zoroastrianism and Mazdayasna in the High Pamirs.” He’d had ample time to do his research by then, and he felt proud of his speech. Describing the position of Shaimak, overlooking the Lake of the Dragon and cut off from the world for months at a time behind snowed-in passes, required only telling what was actually so. Even his description of village life was mostly straightforward: the grinding poverty, the trade-offs between using yak dung as fertilizer for the crops or as fuel to keep the people from freezing, the long winter nights of storytelling and singing. Then his imagination took over and he described the sacred cord given to children when they reached the age of reason and could be initiated into the secret cult, the temple where the sacred fire must be kept constantly alive, the solemnization of marriage by the couple’s jumping hand in hand over the fire… The more details he pulled out of his recent reading, the happier the audience seemed to be. By the end of the talk nearly all of them were scribbling notes or recording his speech on their phones.

  It was a good thing that Shaimak really was so isolated, Koshan thought. His little cousin Rukshana would never stop teasing him if she could hear the farrago of dreams and fantasies he’d fed to this crowd.

  He had some trouble extricating himself from the people who wanted to ask questions, but after about half an hour one of the conference organizers whisked him away to a quiet back room, thanked him for his contributions to scholarship, and left him to recollect himself in peace.

  Well, almost in peace. The aide’s last words were, “… someone who shares your deep knowledge of and interest in Pamiri life,” and when he left the room, a middle-aged man with a deeply creased, weatherbeaten face entered. “Mighty interesting presentation, son,” the man drawled. He introduced himself as Hank Henderson – “just plain Hank, I don’t have any academic initials to put before or after my name” – and followed up his initial compliment by affably informing Koshan that his presentation had been one of the finest examples of creative bullshit he had been privileged to hear.

  “I don’t know what you are talking about,” Koshan said, and then, recognizing a better line of defense, “and I think you do not know what you are talking about either! I am Pamiri—”

  “But not Shaimaki, eh, son? Come on, now, you got the material for that very imaginative talk off the Internet. Half of it was lifted straight from the Occult Arts of Asia website, I recognized the wording.”

  Koshan shook his head. “Well, it don’t matter,” Hank said cheerfully. “I was just a tad interested when I heard somebody from Shaimak was speaking here, but all that’s been lost is a little bit of my time. Too bad you don’t actually know anything about Shaimak, or I might have made it worth your while to help me out here.”

  “Maybe I know more than you think!” Koshan riposted. “Do you know any of…” What had Teller called it? “Of the old language of Shaimak?”

  Hank’s grey eyes blazed with sudden light. “Do you? Or is this just another line of BS?”

  Koshan took a ballpoint pen out of his pocket and balanced it on his open hand. He’d show this nobody who he was talking to! “Bu prdmt vlaad kzmtq!”

  Hank applauded, gently clapping his hands together. “So you do magic tricks as well?”

  All this – something or other – was giving Koshan a headache and making it hard to concentrate. Why shouldn’t he just make Hank disappear? Oh, right, the man had hinted that he had money.

  “I think you know it is not a trick,” he said. “How much is it worth to you?”

  “One sentence, one little trick? Not much,” Hank said.

  Koshan pulled the remaining scrap of his printed scan out of his pocket and showed it to the American. While Hank was studying it Koshan’s phone buzzed, and he glanced at the screen. Osborne! “Think it over,” he told Hank. “Maybe I will get back to you.” And maybe not, if this Dr. Osborne was prepared to be generous.

  Edward Osborne scowled at the impudent young man who was trying to sell him – him! Paul Teller’s research on Alt-Shaimaki. “Scholarship, young man, is not to be bought and sold in the marketplace. You should be ashamed of trying to profit from Professor Teller’s work.”

  “He thought to profit from it,” the man insisted. “He said we would be rich!”

  Osborne laughed gently. “You misunderstood. Teller was a scholar; he meant that this work would make him famous. That is the only wealth that matters among those of us who devote our lives to the search for truth.”

  “Then I suppose the question is, how much is fame worth to you?”

  Osborne glanced at the door to his office. The lights in the outer office were out. Before this Koshan Idrisov arrived, he had told his secretary that she could take the rest of the day off. If he did get forced into paying for data, well, that wasn’t something he’d want to have generally known. But surely he could get the information out of this kid without going that far!

  “No, the question is, what can you actually deliver?” He tapped the crumpled half-sheet printout on his desk. “A few phrases – so far, what you have to offer is not impressive.”

  “You can read it?”

  “German script,” Osborne said off-handedly. Good point, that, and one that was on his side of the argument. “Most Americans cannot read German script. Your ‘valuable information’ would be no more than some spiky scribbling to my compatriots. I am afraid, Mr. Idrisov, that I am the only possible customer for your information. And as you must know, when there is but one buyer, he sets the price.”

  “There might be others.”

  “Then I suggest you speak to them.”

  “You have no use for the paper I gave you?”

  “None,” Osborn lied. It wasn’t even much of a lie; as soon as he had transcribed the handful of phrases on the printout, he would destroy the paper.”

  Idrisov’s eyes narrowed. “Bu prdmt vlaad kzmtq!”

  The paper vanished from between Osborne’s fingers; he could almost feel its molecules floating free into the air.

  “You destructive fool!” He jumped up from his desk and grabbed Idrisov by the shoulders. “Do you have any idea of the value of this material? You idiot!” Idrisov was young, but Osborne was tall and powerfully built; he shook Idrisov and pushed h
im away in one furious move. The Taklan seemed to be dizzy. Instead of resisting he put one hand to his head, staggered, and fell to his knees. His head hit the corner of the desk with a terrible crack.

  And then he stopped moving.

  Panting, Osborne stared down at the body of the younger man. It hadn’t happened. None of this had happened. He was dreaming. In a minute he would come back to reality. He would still be holding that fragment of a page with words in Alt-Shaimaki, and this greedy little Taklan would still be trying to make him set a price on priceless knowledge.

  But there was no sound in the office louder than the blood rushing through his head, and the Taklan guide, lying in a loose-limbed sprawl that bent his body unnaturally, did not move.

  Very slowly, Osborne picked up the laptop that Koshan Idrisov had brought with him and placed it in a bottom desk drawer. When he called the campus police and explained the terrible accident, there would be no need to mention that little detail.

  But – perhaps he need not do even that. He did have a good memory for languages; the one thing Idrisov had said in Alt-Shaimaki still rang clear in his mind. It was ridiculous, of course, to think that what made a piece of paper vanish would work on something as large as a body – but – no harm in trying?

  Fighting revulsion, he knelt beside Koshan’s body and reached into a pocket to get his phone. He didn’t know where the paper had gone, but if he did manage to send the body to the same place, he didn’t want the phone, with its record of his call, to go with it. He needed to keep control of that incriminating thing.