The Language of the Dragon

by Margaret Ball

  The house seemed very empty after he slammed the front door. I sat on the floor for a long time, listening to the rain drumming on the roof and splashing into puddles outside.

  17. We have to stop him

  Sunday morning dawned clean and clear and sweet-smelling, all the dust and heat of summer washed away by that cloudburst. It would be back, of course – our first cool days don’t come until October and then only if we’re lucky – but for the moment I was willing to pretend that summer was over.

  If only the summer’s problems had been so cleanly washed away.

  I still hadn’t figured out how I was going to destroy that notebook in front of Osborne. Between worrying about that and wondering if there would be anything left of my minuscule front yard after the storm, I hadn’t slept much. I would have been willing to sleep in this morning, but no, here I was twitching and nervous and worrying, and it wasn’t even seven a. m.

  I made coffee very quietly so as not to wake up Laura, and took myself out onto the front porch, planning to sit in the glider and stare into the coffee mug and gently accustom my system to the concept of being awake this early.

  The air smelled sweet and fresh after the rain, and the storm hadn’t done as much damage as I feared. The tiny squares of dead grass on either side of the porch steps were still there.

  So was a little red sports car parked against the curb.

  I narrowed my eyes. Michael had stomped off hours ago. Why—

  I went down the steps and rapped on the driver’s-side window.

  The dark-haired man who was curled up with his head on a duffel bag straightened violently, banged his elbow on the steering wheel, sat up and lowered the window.

  “Is that for me?” He reached for the mug that I happened to be holding.

  “What are you doing here? I thought you left.”

  “I’m not in the house, okay? You don’t own the street. Gimme.”

  His bloodshot eyes made a decent case that his need for coffee was even greater than mine. I let him have the mug. He tilted his head back, inhaled a stream of coffee, yelped and plopped the mug on the dashboard.

  “Wha’ the hell! You s’ill ma’ a’ me? Tha’ burn’ my ‘ongue!”

  “Serves you right for gulping. Can’t you wait until it gets cool enough to drink?”

  “Tha’s wha’ milk is for!”

  “Wimp.”

  He inhaled and exhaled several times, passing cool air over his tongue. “That’s my thanks for sitting here all night watching for Osborne? An attack with scalding coffee?”

  I thought about pointing out that he’d asked for the coffee. And that I had not asked him to sit guard outside the house. Then I thought that this was a stupid argument to be having in the street. My nosy next-door neighbor, Jenn, was probably flapping her ears already. “Oh, stop complaining and come inside. I’ll give you some more coffee. With milk. Ice cubes too, if you like.”

  I wound up making pancakes as well. I’d been missing too many meals lately, and I didn’t feel up to going out in public. Besides, I figured it would be easier to finish this fight in the privacy of the kitchen.

  That may have been a mistake. The smells and sounds of cooking brought a heavy-eyed Laura out of her side of the house, wrapped in a dark red brocade robe that probably cost more than my entire wardrobe.

  “Blueberries,” she mumbled through her first cup of coffee, waving at the refrigerator. Those were an excellent addition to the rather boring pancakes from a mix. Given the cost of blueberries here – they probably had to be flown in from some place like Maine – I felt rather as if I were pouring a basket of gold nuggets into the pancake mix. Oh well, they were Laura’s gold nuggets.

  “Syrup?” Michael asked.

  I rummaged through the pantry and came up with two bottles: one plastic bottle of IHOP syrup and one glass bottle that claimed to contain authentic Vermont maple syrup. Laura’s, of course.

  By the time we were all working our way through a breakfast made luxurious by Laura’s contributions, the fight had fizzled into a strategy planning session. How could I safely and nonviolently convince Osborne that the notebook no longer existed?

  “Have Michael hold your gun on him while you rip out the pages and burn them in the fireplace?”

  “Laura, what part of nonviolent didn’t you hear?”

  “Well, he doesn’t necessarily have to shoot him.”

  “And I don’t want Osborne inside this house.”

  “When was the last time you used the fireplace?” Michael asked while getting himself another half-cup of coffee. He added enough milk that I wasn’t sure the result even counted as coffee any more.

  Laura started counting on her fingers. “It was cold enough for a fire that time it snowed…”

  “The year after we graduated,” I contributed, and then, remembering more, “but we didn’t actually build a fire, because we didn’t have any wood.”

  “I vote against the fireplace, then,” Michael said, “it’s probably clogged up with birds’ nests.”

  Remembering Cath Palug’s habit of staring into the empty fireplace and swishing his tail at the recurring spring sounds of twittering and fluttering, I had to agree with him.

  Maybe one of us knew somebody with an outdoor grill?

  “And burning books is harder than you’d think,” Michael added. “Unless you tear out the pages and crumple them up…”

  Problems, problems. Yes, I could probably use Old Shaimaki to make the notebook burn up. But I wasn’t really eager to court brain damage yet again. Defending myself against Osborne yesterday had been…

  “First we have to find Dr. Osborne,” I said. “He might have been hospitalized; I’m not sure just how badly he was burned.”

  But he’d used the Language to whisk himself home. Maybe he was still there?

  “I’ll call,” Michael said, pulling out his phone. “What’s his number?”

  I read it off the backlog of messages on my own phone.

  But he didn’t answer Michael’s call.

  “He probably thinks you’re a solicitor,” I said. “He’ll pick up for me.”

  But I was wrong about that.

  I began worrying that I’d killed him with that fire attack.

  “Good,” Laura said, “that solves the problem.”

  Michael put his arm around my shoulders. I actually didn’t mind. “No. Sienna doesn’t need to have killed anybody. Anyway, she can’t have. He was alive enough when he disappeared yesterday, Sienna. You didn’t burn him nearly enough to have killed him. I doubt he was even hospitalized. It was only a few seconds; at worst, today he’ll be feeling like somebody with a really bad sunburn.”

  I liked that theory, but I still felt shaky. “Old people’s skin is thinner…” Now I really wanted to know that Osborne was still alive. I couldn’t wait until Monday. A little searching got me Sammy’s big sister’s number, so I called Mira Martinez next.

  “You’re looking for Dr. Osborne? That’s funny!”

  “Why, is he looking for me?” But he knew where I was.

  “No, I just mean you’re only a couple of hours too late. Cassie and Frank and I all got a text from him this morning. He’s leaving the country and may not be back for the beginning of the semester, so we get to cover all his lectures instead of just most of them.”

  “Can he do that?”

  “There isn’t much the holder of an endowed chair can’t do,” Mira said grimly. “And all three of us are trying to get him to approve our dissertations, so we don’t dare not cover for him. The –"

  She broke into a string of Spanish which significantly added to my vocabulary, but the translation would do nothing for the tone of this document.

  “Where is he going?”

  “He said research. So, probably one of the ‘stans. I’m sure we’ll hear all about it when he deigns to come back.”

  After I got off the phone, Michael and Laura and I stared at each other.

  “Well, at leas
t he won’t be stalking me for the notebook,” I said, lifting my hands and letting them fall on the tabletop.

  “Worse,” Michael said. “Your success in using the Language yesterday must have made up his mind. He’s not going to settle for third-hand field notes; he’s going to the source.”

  “Taklanistan.”

  “The village. Shaimak.”

  “We have to warn them,” Michael said.

  “How?” Laura asked. “I doubt they have phones.”

  “We have to stop him,” I said.

  “How?” Laura asked again.

  “We have to go there.” That was Michael, getting in half a breath ahead of me. Before Laura could ask again, I answered her.

  “I can get a mortgage on the house.” Whether I could ever pay it off, that was another question. One I refused to think about, for fear of chickening out.

  18. Words of power

  Zardusht Timurov, headman of Shaimak village, listened with a frown as the village cleric translated the visitor’s demands. The most learned man in the village, Muloqot Parsa was able to turn the foreigner’s stilted Farsi into comprehensible Taklan far faster than Zardusht could have puzzled out the meaning for himself.

  But he hoped the Muloqot had misunderstood…

  “Grandfather, he has translated rightly,” piped up little Rukshana, who had no business even being present at a meeting of the elders, much less speaking up so pertly. But in this desperate situation Zardusht would listen to anybody.

  “Remember the foreigner who came here last year, the one who died?” she went on.

  “He died of the mountain sickness,” Zardusht said quickly. “It had nothing to do with us or with… anything else.”

  He avoided meeting Rukshana’s eyes. In fact, all the men of the council seemed to be looking away from them. They all knew that what killed the German professor had not been the mountain sickness. It had been overuse of the Old Language.

  “Perhaps this one, too, will destroy himself by using the Old Language,” Rukshana said.

  “If we meet his demands, and teach it to him?” It was a cheering thought.

  The American had begun, insultingly, by demanding food and shelter. As though the Shaimaki were barbarians who did not understand the laws of hospitality to a guest! Even a blood-enemy, arriving at evening, would have been given bread and salt and a place to sleep. Of course, he might have been followed from the village and killed on the next day.

  This man was worse than a blood-enemy. But if he spoke truth, killing him would be a disaster to the village.

  They had destroyed the talking-machine belonging to the German professor, and had thought that with his death the danger was over. Now there came this American who claimed that the German had made written notes as well as recording the Old Language with his talking-machine. That he, this man called Os-Born, had transcribed the notes and that if he did not return safely to America, they would be published for any fool to read and use. That the same consequence would follow if they refused to teach him more of the Old Language.

  “He might have been lying?” one of the council members suggested.

  Zardusht shook his head. “He knows something of the Old Language. Remember when he said ‘Bu prdmt vla!!mqd bze kzmtq?’”

  “Except he didn’t say exactly that, Grandfather,” put in Rukshana. “He said—”

  “Stop!” Zardusht and the Muloqot shouted simultaneously. Rukshana put her fingers over her mouth and blinked away tears.

  “I only meant—”

  “I apologize for this impertinent child,” Zardusht talked over her. “Clearly her parents have failed twice over, once when they allowed her to play with Adjdaak and again when they omitted to beat her soundly for bringing what she learned from him back to the village. No one under the age of discretion should ever be allowed to keep company with Adjdaak.”

  “She amuses him,” Rukshana’s father mumbled. “Especially now that he cannot travel. In his boredom he would have cost us many more sheep if it were not for Rukshana’s distracting him.”

  “We can afford to lose sheep,” Zardusht said loftily. “We cannot afford the destruction that would be spread by children using the Old Language. My son, do you want your daughter to end like Simple Ali?”

  “Rukshana has better sense than that!”

  “I have seen little evidence of it! Perhaps I did not beat you enough, eh?”

  “Grandfather, uncle, are we not forgetting the immediate problem?” said Muloqot Parsa. Despite the stature granted by his title, sometimes he still felt like the weedy, lame boy who had been sent away to school in Tireza because he was so useless in the fields. Especially when he had to join a village council composed largely of the men who had made that decision.

  Zardusht glowered at his son and promised that they would revisit the matter of Rukshana later. Then, with a sigh, he returned to considering the problem of Os-Born.

  The evasion they had used with the German, trying to teach him only the roundabout verb forms that would not change the material world, would do them no good with this man. He had already demonstrated that he knew better than to say the safe sentence Bu prdmt vla!!mqd bze kzmtq, or ‘This thing might disappear’. Instead he had said, correctly, Bu prdmt vlaad kzmtq, or ‘This thing becomes nowhere’. And the rock he’d picked up had disappeared.

  “If he already knows so much,” Muloqot Parsa suggested, “perhaps it is best to teach him more – much more – and to hope that he uses it too freely, so that he kills himself like the German.”

  “I have a better idea,” Zardusht’s son said. “Let us teach him words of great power and tell him that they are only little words of small power. Then he will not be afraid to use them, and he will hurt himself much more than he is prepared for.”

  “Suns and Dragons have mercy upon me,” Zardusht said mildly, “I am accursed in my old age to preside over a council of babbling idiots. Do you not remember what will happen if the American fails to return to his own country?” His voice grew sharp as a whiplash. “That which this foreigner already knows will be published,” (he used the English word) “and every fool will use the Old Language as he likes. The world will be darkened and twisted until all vanishes. But first what horrors will we see? Our women becoming boys, our children turned into birds? The structure of the world warped beyond recognition? I myself,” he concluded with a return to his pose of mild reasonableness, “would prefer not to be witness to those last days. But you may differ.”

  “Very fine to make speeches,” grumbled a middle-aged man, “when it was our headman’s own family who brought all this trouble on us!”

  That aroused a babble of argument and tracings of genealogical lines, in which the grumbler proved conclusively that Koshan Idrisov, the guide who’d brought the old German to Shaimak, was a second cousin to Rukshana’s mother’s sister’s husband in Tireza on the far side of the pass, and Zardusht argued that by such relaxed standards of kinship everybody in the High Pamirs was related to everybody else, and Rukshana’s father added that his family was innocent of any wrongdoing and they barely knew Koshan anyway.

  “But I used to play with him…” Rukshana murmured, “when his family came to the high valleys every summer…”

  The quarreling men ignored her until she raised her voice. “Where is Koshan now?”

  “Ashamed to show his face in the mountains, I suppose,” said her father, dusting his hands together as if to shake off that unworthy not-really-a-kinsman.

  “No, he went to Merika and sold our language to this Os-Born!”

  “Did he know any more of it than the German learned?”

  All the men stared at Rukshana.

  “We- never- I never told Koshan about the Dragon of Shaimak!”

  “But did you teach him any of the dragon’s language?”

  Rukshana vowed she had never done that, and brought chronology to her aid. “Our aunt used to tell him to watch me, when he was fifteen and I was six, yes! But I never v
isited Adjdaak until I was more than ten years old, and by then Koshan had gone away to Merzadeh and I never saw him again until last year.”

  That initiated another argument about the folly of Rukshana’s parents, letting the child play around the dragon when she was far too young to be apprenticed to him to learn the old language properly.

  Finally Zardusht sighed. “Then all that Os-Born knows is what was in the German’s notes. And he was not here long enough to learn very much.”

  “He learned enough to kill himself with it,” the Muloqot reminded them.

  “Perhaps,” one of the men said, “Adjdaak will be angry that a foreigner tries to learn his language. Perhaps Adjdaak will deal with him as he did with those fools who tried to blow up the lake and flood the whole world.”

  “And then what he does already know will be published.”

  “What does that mean exactly?”

  “I think it means that they will make a book of it for anybody to read.”

  “Would that be so bad? How many people can read?”

  “Os-Born claims that all the people in Merika can read.”

  “Well, that is obviously a lie.”

  “Even if it is only a few – there are many, many people there. They say there are more people in Merika than in Merzadeh! A hundred times more!”

  “That too is probably a lie. Think what great herds of sheep and yaks they would need.”

  The meeting ended without any satisfactory strategy for dealing with the American, except that everybody would be very polite, and very stupid, and very ignorant, until they worked out what to do.

  19. Vodka and ammunition

  Apart from a sprinkling of bombed or burnt-out buildings, the capital of Taklanistan didn’t look like a place that had been in the run-up to a second civil war when Thalia was there. The ruined buildings were mostly in the process of being torn down or repaired, shops were open everywhere, young people strolled in the parks and children in simple uniforms marched quietly off to school. Jennifer McAusland, Thalia’s contact at the American Embassy, commented that you did have to say one thing for competent dictators: when they succeeded in stifling a war, they did so quickly and efficiently.