The Language of the Dragon

by Margaret Ball

  “And the rebels would have been even more dictatorial,” she said, “so on the whole, I’d call this a happy ending.” She gave a tiny sigh. “Of course, life was more interesting when there was shooting in the streets… The only fun I have now is going up to Gundiz Fort.” Last year, while Thalia and her husband had been preoccupied with little things like being taken hostage (Thalia) and trying to effect a hostage rescue without getting the Lake Shaimak dam destroyed (Lensky) Jennifer had found time for a romantic hookup with the Russian officer in command of the border fort at Gundiz. The good part about this, from our perspective, was that she had exceedingly good relations with everybody in Merzadeh who had business in this Gundiz place. She said it would be easy for her to get a helicopter ride there, and we could tag along with her.

  “Why a Russian?” I muttered to Michael while she was telephoning around her contacts.

  “He’s probably lonely.”

  “No, I mean, what’s a Russian army officer doing in Taklanistan?”

  “They help the Taklans guard the Afghan border,” Jennifer explained between telephone calls. “But I don’t know how much longer that’s going to last. They could withdraw their people any time if they decide it’s cheaper just to guard their own border and let Taklanistan get flooded with drugs and religious fanatics.”

  A potentially doomed romance, then.

  The prospect didn’t seem to bother Jennifer much. From the way she was joking with the people she called to bum a ride, the Russian romance also didn’t cramp her style that much; to get us three seats on a helicopter leaving tomorrow, she promised somebody a dinner date when he got back to Merzadeh. To get us passes for travel into the Lake Shaimak Restricted Area, she agreed to get a Taklan official a season pass for two to the State Opera and to keep him company at the opening performance of Aida.

  “Could be worse,” she said, putting the phone down. “The second opera on this year’s list is a local composition. Interpretive dance, a dramatization of Supreme Leader Ergashi’s conquest of the rebels last year, and atonal music. If he’d asked me to go to that, you two would be stuck waiting in line for your travel passes and trying to figure out who to bribe. See you tomorrow. I’ll pick you up at seven.”

  That left us with a free afternoon in the capital of Taklanistan. I looked at the handful of leaflets I’d picked up on the ground floor of the embassy. “We could go see the aluminum plant, I guess. Or the Palace of National Culture.” I yawned. “Or go back to sleep.”

  “No,” Michael said. “If you want to get over jet lag, you need to stay awake for the rest of the day and go to sleep at a normal time. Besides, we have something more important than tourism to work on.”

  “We do?”

  “We know now that Osborne didn’t go through the embassy.”

  “Do we? Maybe he did. Could be that Jennifer McAusland just wasn’t in on that.”

  “Given her taste for helicopter rides into the mountains, I expect that lady knows all about any travel into the Pamirs that’s connected with the embassy. We need to talk to the people who organize mountain treks.” He took the leaflets from me and ruffled through them. “Three outfits left their ads with the embassy – Pamir Expeditions, Silk Road, Roof of the World. Shiny brochures with beautiful color photographs. These are probably the major players, and I bet they can get permits for their customers to explore restricted areas.”

  I squinted at the fine print under a picture of snow-capped mountains and an improbably blue lake. “Michael, they’re aimed at hikers. I don’t think that’s exactly Osborne’s style.”

  “They do jeep tours too. At least, Silk Road and Roof of the World do. Look on the back page. See, they attract tourists with the beautiful scenery and the romance of boldly going on foot into the back country… then they rent jeeps and drivers to the people who suddenly realize they’re not actually up for carrying a huge backpack and plodding to the top of the pass.”

  Well, we had time to check it out, he was right about that. And I felt that Michael had kind of a right to take the lead here, because I hadn’t, after all, mortgaged my house to get us to Taklanistan. While Aunt Georgia was still telling me what a terrible idea that was, Michael’s boss Hank had turned up in Austin and volunteered to pay our way. Possibly in response to some prodding from Michael, though neither of them admitted that.

  Unlike Michael, Hank was a sweetie. I trusted him as soon as we met, and I felt really sorry that he couldn’t join us on this expedition. But as he himself admitted, his health wasn’t that great; he’d slow us down, and he probably shouldn’t take himself and his pacemaker into the High Pamirs at all. I’d promised to take a ton of pictures and videos for him.

  We lucked out at our second stop. Not only had Edward Osborne hired a guide and a jeep and gotten his permits issued by Silk Road, but they’d made a similar arrangement six months earlier for a German professor whose guide had been Koshan Idrisov.

  That information didn’t come via the management, who preferred not to talk about it; Michael picked up a hint about it from a guide who was hanging around the office, hoping for work, and we took him out for a late lunch to pick his brains.

  “The boss doesn’t like us talking about that trip,” Farzad told us over shish kebabs and pilau. “It didn’t end well; the old foreigner died of altitude sickness. It absolutely wasn’t our fault, he must have had a heart problem and he shouldn’t have been bounding around in the mountains – Koshan tried to get him to rest, but he was a stubborn man. And he got into it with the villagers: I wasn’t there at the time, but apparently they had some kind of superstitious fear of his little recording device and they broke it. He lost his temper and – well – he should never have been there in the first place,” Farzad concluded.

  “Why did he want to go up to Shaimak, anyway?” Michael asked.

  “Koshan said he wanted to study the language.”

  Michael and I did not look at each other.

  “But the villagers didn’t want him to?”

  “Ignorant mountain people.” Farzad shrugged. “They probably thought he was stealing their voices by recording them, or maybe that the voices coming back out of the recorder proved it was full of demons. The German was nuts, anyway. There are plenty of dialects of Taklan in places that aren’t so high up in the mountains. He could have studied one of them and gone home safely.”

  “Is there any possibility that the villagers killed him?” Michael asked.

  Farzad shook his head. “No way. I told you, altitude sickness. Koshan was with him all afternoon; he got worse so quickly! He was incoherent by the time Naraiman and I came back. And we were with him, all three of us, when he died.”

  “Then what?”

  “We packed up his things and his body and came straight back to Merzadeh. It was getting hot, and the Germans said he had no relatives to ask for the body, so he was buried in the foreign cemetery out on the Gundiz road.”

  “What happened to his things?”

  “I have no idea. They would have been sent back to Germany, but since there were no kinfolk, the boss probably threw them away. Eventually.”

  I was having a really hard time not looking at Michael.

  After we parted from Farzad, we went for a walk. I don’t know about Michael, but I really needed to stay vertical and moving if I wasn’t going to fall asleep. We wandered down a noisy street full of stores and blaring with music, turned off along the river to get away from the boom boxes, and stumbled upon the city’s flower market. Stalls filled with bouquets in brilliant colors surrounded us.

  “Roses? This late in the summer?” I stopped and inhaled deeply. The flowers looked small compared to American hybrid roses, but their scent was much stronger.

  “What do you think about Farzad’s story?” Michael asked. I looked at him over bundles of little purple blooms that looked kind of like bachelor’s buttons.

  “I think that if this German was studying Old Shaimaki, and if he took notes as well as making rec
ordings, Koshan could have stolen the notebook without anybody else noticing or caring. In fact,” I said, “it’s the only explanation I can think of for a field notebook of Old Shaimaki words and phrases… in German script, with German annotations!”

  “Yes, that’s obvious,” Michael said absently. He sniffed a bunch of rust-colored chrysanthemums. “Mmm, smells like autumn… What I found really interesting was what Farzad said about the attitude of the villagers.”

  “Ignorant? Superstitious?”

  “That’s his interpretation. I can think of another reason why they’d break the German’s recording device, can’t you?”

  I could, and it cheered me up considerably. “They don’t want their language made public.” I couldn’t keep the smile from my face. “Maybe they’ll kill Dr. Osborne.”

  “Bloodthirsty wench! I’d settle for them convincing him that they don’t know any such language, and that he’s in the wrong mountain village.”

  “That would be good too.”

  We didn’t know, then, what he was using to blackmail the villagers into teaching him Old Shaimaki.

  Jennifer McAusland turned out to be one of those people who is obnoxiously bright and cheerful first thing in the morning. Michael had tendencies that way too, but at least he needed coffee to get going. And since the hotel only served black coffee, which he considered undrinkable, his cheerfulness was muted. Mine, at seven in the morning, was nonexistent. I didn’t even have the energy to ask Jennifer why she’d told us to wear our coats and to buy warm hats and scarves in one of the local markets. I mean, even at this hour it was barely pleasantly cool in Merzadeh.

  Halfway through the helicopter ride I found out. The thing climbed, and kept on climbing, and my ears popped in the thin, cold air. So did pieces of the helicopter. I tried to ignore Jennifer’s breezy travelogue. She appeared to be on a first-name basis with each mountain that we nearly collided with. Me, I was regretting that morning coffee. I would have been happier with an empty stomach and less vivid awareness of my surroundings, which appeared to be trying to kill us.

  “I don’t know what it is about Americans back home,” Jennifer said sadly after I squeezed my eyes shut and begged her not to tell me about any more mountain peaks. “Y’all seem to have no sense of adventure. Lensky was a party pooper too: he hated this trip and he had the nerve to complain about my driving.”

  That sounded ominous, given that the plan was for us to borrow a jeep from the fort at Gundiz and drive up into the High Pamirs. I had assumed Michael would insist on driving, but now it looked like he might have to arm-wrestle Jennifer for the keys.

  Jennifer had a brief, passionate reunion with her Russian boyfriend at the fort, but when she started making promises for “when we get back,” the colonel announced that he was coming with us.

  I wondered if he would want to drive, but he handed the keys to Jennifer and told her to warm up the vehicle while he collected supplies. The “supplies” consisted of approximately equal quantities of vodka and ammunition for the two machine guns he brought and the pistol on his hip.

  “I hope he doesn’t drink and drive,” I murmured to Michael while the colonel and his aide loaded the supplies.

  “I hope he doesn’t drink and shoot,” Michael said. “This guy could be an even worse menace than you.”

  “Hey. I made a perfect grouping at the range, remember?”

  “You probably cheated. Is there a way to say, ‘I am a superb marksman,’ in Old Shaimaki?”

  “If there is, I don’t know it,” I said truthfully. I felt no need to explain what Old Shaimaki sentence I had actually used.

  20. The lake of the dragon

  Jennifer drove, with Colonel Grisha sitting beside her. When he wasn’t drinking vodka or singing, he gave us a quick tour of agriculture in the Pamirs. When I wasn’t praying as Jennifer swung the jeep out to a sharp edge of the road to avoid ruts or boulders, I tried to pay attention.

  In the Gundiz valley the harvest was already gathered in, and most villages had even threshed their grain with the help of patient oxen trudging in a circle. Now, outside little mud-brick villages, we saw fountains of pale gold grain rising in the air and falling again. Grisha slewed round in his seat to explain to us that today’s stiff breeze made perfect conditions for the first winnowing of the grain. Men with wooden pitchforks stood in a circle around a pile of grain, tossing it in the air for the wind to blow away the chaff. After this first pass, women would spend laborious hours letting streams of grain fall from their hands into baskets, again letting the breeze blow away the lightweight husks.

  “You’d think they would have a machine to do that,” Michael commented.

  “They did once. In the days of the Soviet Union my country gave them agricultural machinery. Then there was the civil war, and things broke down because no one knew how to fix them, and they could not get parts, and the machines rusted in the fields, and now they have to relearn the old ways of their ancestors. Russia is too poor now to give new machines.”

  “What about American aid?”

  Grisha spat out the window of the jeep and made some pungent comments about the corruption of the current regime.

  The brilliant blue autumn sky set off the cascades of pale golden grain and the bright rust and gold flowers outside most of the houses. They made a cheerful picture, almost idyllic. But when you thought about blistered hands and aching backs and the incredible boredom of spending all day bending, lifting and tossing, it didn’t seem quite so idyllic. I wondered whether the Shaimaki had a sentence or two to help with threshing and winnowing.

  Where the folds of the surrounding hills made some shelter against the wind, there were orchards. “Apples,” Grisha said, “plums, even apricots. This is a rich valley.” We whizzed through a village where women sitting in their front yards peeled and sliced the fruit and laid it out on trays to dry.

  Half a bottle of vodka later, the road climbed through a stony wilderness to level out again at a higher altitude. Here the threshing was still going on, and people were picking the last apples from their trees.

  Past the boundary of the Lake Shaimak Restricted Area, we had climbed so high that only mulberry trees remained, sprinkled among ripening fields where children ran and threw stones to keep away the birds. The jeep slowed, then came to a stop. I looked around and saw nothing but barren mountainsides, including the cliff that rose precipitously to one side of the jeep and fell equally precipitously on the other.

  Grisha interrupted his spirited rendering of “New York, New York,” to say, “Are you sure this is a good idea?”

  Oh. Just ahead, the right-hand cliff bellied out, forcing vehicles – like the one I was sitting in – to swerve onto a snow-covered patch where the left-hand cliff, I hoped, curved out leftwards to match the other one. There was barely enough room for the jeep to creep across.

  “I think it’s solid,” Jennifer said. “Wait a minute, I’ll test it.” She grabbed one of Grisha’s rifles, hopped out of the car, and walked slowly forwards, jabbing the barrel of the gun downwards at intervals. Grisha moaned. I wasn’t sure what made him more unhappy, Jennifer’s risking herself or the prospect of snow filling the business end of his rifle.

  Where the road resumed, she came back, grinning. “Solid all the way!”

  At least she took the curve slowly.

  The bad thing about that was that I was sitting on the left, so I had plenty of time to look at where we’d fall when the road failed. If the cliff really curved outwards underneath us, it must curve back right away: I could look straight down into the abyss. I wrenched my gaze back to the inside of the jeep and saw that Grisha was upending a vodka bottle into his open mouth. I considered asking him to pass it back to us.

  Once we were back on the regular “road,” Jennifer pressed on the accelerator and the jeep roared forwards. Making up for lost time?

  Grisha switched to “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas.” His knowledge of American popular songs was impressive.
Next time the jeep slowed, he interrupted his singing to say, “Almost at Shaimak village now,” and to point out the vast blue lake stretching along the north side of the road. “Lake Shaimak – the Lake of the Dragon.”

  “And how,” Jennifer put in.

  “What d’you mean?”

  Grisha laughed and offered us the vodka bottle. “Did you not tell them?” he asked Jennifer.

  “They’d think I was crazy.”

  Oh, I already thought that. She might have shown respect for the latest hazard, but she hadn’t slowed for boulders, ditches, or the occasional would-be hitchhiker trudging along the side of the road. If the colonel didn’t object to what her driving style did to the army’s jeep, that was his business. But I was a little worried about having my teeth rattled out of my head.

  “Ah, you Americans. The ‘show-me’ people, yes?”

  “That’s just Missouri,” Michael said.

  “No, you are all like that. Just wait, then. You will see, then you will believe. In Camelot,” Grisha started singing, “the rain may never…”

  Not much rain today, at least. But as we rounded a mountain outcropping Jennifer stood on the brakes and the jeep came to a squealing stop, slewing round until it blocked the road. In front of us stood several scowling men and a young girl.

  Jennifer said something that I thought translated as, “What kind of hospitality do you call this?” After navigating Merzadeh, I was beginning to get a handle on Taklan-flavored Farsi: a lot of slurred word endings, and a lot of Russian loanwords.

  One of the men gently pushed the girl forward. She held out a basket containing a single loaf of bread.

  “Rukshana?” Jennifer asked. She got out of the jeep.

  “We give bread and salt and a place to rest,” Rukshana said in heavily accented English. “But you please not come into village now. There is trouble.”