That apparently used up her English, because she and Jennifer went into a quick exchange in Taklan – well, the Taklan version of Farsi. I might be starting to develop an ear for it, but they talked too fast for me. I heard something that sounded like “Osborne” more than once. Then Jennifer got back into the jeep, nodding, and wrenched the wheel to the right, at an angle to the road. As we followed Rukshana up a piece of mountain that was slightly less steep than the rest of the terrain off the road, Jennifer explained what was going on.
“Your Professor Osborne seems to have freaked them out.”
“Not ours,” I said quickly. “You know that. Did you tell them we’ve come to stop him?”
“Yes, but I’m not sure they believed me. It seems Professor Osborne told them that he has the German researcher’s written notes on some language, and threatened to publish what he does have unless they teach him more of the language. He also said that the notes would be published if he did not return home.”
“Old Shaimaki! But he’s lying about the notebook. I have that.”
“Well, you’re about to meet a native speaker. You can tell him all about it.”
The pitiful excuse for a road came to an end between two stony outcroppings. We grabbed our packs and followed Rukshana, single file, along a footpath that skirted the highest hill and wound around and down towards a sea of blue.
“Lake Shaimak,” Rukshana said, pointing downwards.
A few minutes later we could see a cluster of houses climbing the side of the hill behind us.
“Shaimak.”
Apparently they wanted us to go around the village. That was okay with me; I would just as soon not face Osborne again until the villagers understood that we were on their side.
For a while the path sloped so steeply downhill that I had to keep all my attention on picking the next step. My knees were quivering when it finally leveled out enough that I could look up again.
Another path joined ours here. It looked as if it led straight back to the village. Before us, a tumble of gray boulders, ranging in size from pumpkin to small house, bordered an expanse of milky blue water that stretched out to a distant horizon. On either side, snow-capped mountains framed the lake.
As we approached the boulders, I realized that one pile actually was a small house – a shelter, anyway. Leaning pillars supported a stone slab over an opening high enough for us to walk inside without ducking, and there were a couple of faded rugs draped over the ground under the slab.
“The… the shogird stay here,” Rukshana explained. “In summer.”
“Shogird?”
“Apprentice,” Jennifer McAusland suggested, and Rukshana nodded.
That didn’t make a whole lot of sense. ‘Apprentice’ meant somebody who was learning a craft or a trade, didn’t it? What could anybody learn, stuck outside the village with a pile of rocks for company?
“You might want to look again at the rocks,” Jennifer said. She and Grisha both appeared to be suppressing a fit of giggles.
Okay, I looked at the rocks. Gray-green boulders, piled up anyhow, some of them gleaming silver as if they were wet. It must have rained earlier.
One of the silver surfaces seemed to undulate and move as I looked at it. I rubbed my eyes. It was… definitely… moving. As it expanded, I saw a fan-like structure of long straight lines, with smooth and very silvery surfaces connecting them…
A wing. It was a wing. And that rounded greenish boulder was a knee, and those quartz shards were claws…
I was backed up against one of the walls of the shelter.
“Adjdaak,” Rukshana said. “The Dragon of Shaimak.”
“Uh, yes, I see, dragon, okay, that is definitely a dragon.” I sounded and felt like a babbling idiot. I shut my mouth with a conscious effort and just took in the shape before me. Fan-shaped scales undulated over a long body, glowing very faintly blue-green along the edges. Claws like long quartz crystals sparkled in the pale sunlight. Long silver fans extended, revealing angular wings that might have been made from some blend of ice and crystals. And eyes that glowed like monstrous topazes looked down on me. How had I ever mistaken this giant, living jewel for a mere pile of rocks?
“Adjdaak might speak now.”
A mouth the length of my arm opened, revealing very large, sharp teeth. I tried even harder to melt into the rock at my back. A warm hand took mine. “Breathe,” whispered Michael.
Oh. Yeah. Breathing. I remembered how to do that… I thought.
Sounds of rocks clashing together emanated from the dragon’s mouth, and I realized how poor my attempts at interpreting the notebook transcriptions had been. Amazing that they’d worked at all.
Breathe.
Now I could pick out subjunctive markers in what the dragon was saying. Most of the vocabulary was beyond me, but the liberal sprinkling of verb endings like !!mqdi and the recurring bze particle assured me that he was not planning to change the world. And as long as he was talking, he wasn’t eating anybody. I relaxed just enough to envy his articulation.
The rock-noises seemed to emanate from very deep in his throat. Did he have an organ there that could pulverize coal? That would be handy for a being that breathed flame, wouldn’t it? And over time it could have been adapted to use in generating speech. But then, I hadn’t actually seen him making fire. My theory might be all wet.
The flow of words ended abruptly. “He might not like people who try to steal his language,” Rukshana announced.
Time for some visual aids. “Tell him we are not stealing it, we are giving it back.” I let go of Michael’s hand, reached into my tote bag and pulled out the shabby, battered green notebook.
Sounds of tumbled stones came from the dragon.
“What might that be?” Rukshana translated. “It could not be his language.”
“It is how humans store his language.” I flipped the notebook open and read, “O!dm vla!!mqd bze bakhsh#,” running my finger along the written words.
The dragon didn’t react, so I continued reading. “M?n. Tsh. Dzlaamk. Djnd vla!!mqd bze dzlaamk.”
He opened his mouth, so I stopped reading to listen. Whatever he said meant nothing to me, but it made Rukshana giggle.
“He say your accent might be terrible.”
“Well, there are some differences between human and dragon anatomy.”
Rukshana addressed the dragon and he replied briefly.
“He say that even a stupid little girl like me could speak better.”
“Yes, well, there’s actually nothing I would like better than to study his language from the source, but unlike Osborne, I respect his privacy.”
“Prdmt bze s’d os born?”
Ha, I thought so. He could understand me just fine without an interpreter. And even I could figure out what that question meant. I looked at Rukshana. “You have not told him about Osborne?”
“I will tell now,” she said. Turning back to the dragon, she launched into a long, complicated-sounding speech. And I had to admit, her accent was loads better than mine.
“He want to know why we have not simply brought this Os-Born to him. He would like a small meal.”
While I tried once again to melt into the rock behind me, Rukshana spoke to the dragon again, this time for quite a long while. I could guess what she was telling him when she said “Dja!mk ‘publish’ o!dm dve g’#ati.” Explaining Osborne’s threat.
Partway through her speech the dragon made a low rumbling noise. His eyes glowed bright topaz, an orange radiance lit up his mouth and made his teeth look like jagged black silhouettes, and small jets of flame flickered from his nostrils. OK. Fire breather, check. That could be useful. It would be easier to figure out how to use it if I weren’t terrified. She kept talking long enough for me to calm myself down by focusing on picking out words and syntactic markers from what she said, and then it was obvious what we needed to do.
When she stopped, I said, “Osborne lied. This notebook I have in my hand is what he claims
to have. If Adjdaak could come with us into the village, we could find Osborne and show everybody the notebook and then he could burn it up.”
Rukshana said, “He cannot move now.”
“How come? Is he under some kind of enchantment?”
She giggled. “No, he is…” She groped for a word, gave it up and started over. “He cannot leave the eggs.”
“Eggs!” Was he actually a she?
Rukshana shook her head and explained that Adjdaak’s mate - who lived in an even more isolated part of the Pamirs - had come here to lay the eggs, because among dragons it was the job of the male to keep them safe and warm until they hatched. It was a good thing that Adjdaak lived near a village that supplied him with sheep, because sometimes the male starved to death during the months when he could not hunt.
“Xr!gi qo’r mt vla!!mqd bze ksa#lk b’lng.”
“Y#q! That sheep was not sickly, Adjdaak!”
“Dva z’bik, dva eng q’yn…”
“It was not either old and tough!”
“Dva zta!!mqd bze o!dm.”
“I don’t care what you prefer, you promised not to eat people.”
Michael moved in front of me.
“He not eat friend,” Rukshana said to us.
“For someone who doesn’t eat people, he made quite a mess of those terrorists last year,” Jennifer McAusland said under her breath.
Oh, great. A seriously good motive for keeping on the dragon’s good side, that.
21. A failure of hospitality
There were some smooth boulders, curved just enough to be semi-comfortable to sit on, by the lakeside. We settled down there, where Adjdaak could join in the conversation, to plan our next move.
“Why don’t we just go back to the village and put the notebook on an open fire?”
“Is not so easy to burn the books,” Colonel Grisha said. “Takes a long time and inside pages don’t burn anyway.”
“We could tear out the pages and crumple them up.”
“What if the wind blows them around?” Jennifer asked. “Do we want to be running all over the village trying to collect the pages?”
“Okay, a regular fire may be more trouble than it’s worth. But I think I can destroy the notebook using Old Shaimaki.”
It seemed to me to be a reasonable proposition, but this time it was Michael who raised an objection. More than just an objection, really. “You are not going to do that, Sienna.”
“Why?”
“You don’t need to damage your brains any more. It’s hard to burn books; if the effect on you is proportional to the work you’re asking the language to do, you could do yourself permanent harm. You’ve already pushed your luck far enough. I’ll do it. What do I say?”
“You can’t afford to damage your brains either,” I said nastily, “you haven’t got any to spare.”
Jennifer whistled. “Low blow, Sienna!”
“Shut up and tell me what to say,” Michael snarled.
“How can I tell you if I have to shut up?”
“Dammit, Sienna. Will you just quit arguing already?”
“If you don’t want me to say the sentence, how can I teach it to you?”
“One. Word. At a Time.” he growled.
“Oh, all right. ‘Book is T!kp.”
“Tikup.”
“You put in extra vowels and left out the glottal stop.” Actually the ! symbol was more like a glottal stop followed by a cough. I tried to demonstrate. “T!kp.”
“Tughkip.”
“Um, maybe you’d better just say ‘this thing.’ That’s bu prdmt.”
“Bu.”
“Now say prdmt.”
“Purdammit.”
At this point Adjdaak said something that made Rukshana giggle. We looked at her for translation.
“Sienna, he say your accent might be bad, but he would sound like dying cow and he should forget about using a language he cannot begin to pronounce.”
Michael scowled. I felt better. I had not actually been terribly happy about teaching Michael how to do something that was going to hurt him.
“Ok, that gets us back to me doing it. Why don’t I—”
“I have other reasons why you shouldn’t do it,” Michael interrupted, “even if I were willing to let you court brain damage – which I am not. First, if you show people in the village that you can use even one sentence of Old Shaimaki, they might want to kill you. You haven’t got the protection of threatening to publish. Second, I don’t want you getting anywhere near Osborne. Have you forgotten that he tried to burn you alive last time?”
Men. Evidently he’d forgotten that Osborne was the one who’d gotten scorched. “Fortunately, you’re not the boss of me!” I snapped, and then felt like a quarrelsome third-grader. But it was true.
Michael stood up and put both hands on my shoulders. “I am not going to let you go back and sacrifice yourself. You must have serious brain damage already if you think that’s a good idea!”
I tried to pull free. He was a lot stronger than me.
“It’s none of your business what I do! And don’t grab me!”
He let go and I jumped up to face him. At least now he couldn’t loom over me like that: we were exactly the same height.
“Isn’t it, Sienna? Isn’t it? Didn’t you understand what I said when I apologized to you back in Austin?”
“What does that have to do with this?”
He was standing too close to me. It did funny things to my breathing.
“This is what it has to do with me,” he said, and kissed me.
I thought I ought to pull away and slap his face, but my body wasn’t cooperating. My arms seemed to be going around him despite what I thought. Then I stopped thinking and kissed him back.
Rukshana giggled again and I stepped back. I could feel my face turning red.
“Is simple,” she told us. “Bring Os-Born here, then Adjdaak burn notebook in front of him. Maybe he also burn Os-Born,” she suggested cheerfully.
“No! I mean, don’t ask him to burn Osborne.”
“Sounds good to me,” Jennifer McAusland said. “What’s the matter, are you squeamish?”
“Very,” I told her. Michael was looking a bit green himself, but I resisted the temptation to point that out. “But how do we get him out to the lake?”
“I ask my grandfather. He is very clever man.”
***
The Shaimakis were clearly interpreting their tradition of hospitality as narrowly as possible, Osborne thought. True, they had given him a house to stay in rather than making him share one, but he suspected that was because nobody wanted the social contamination of getting too friendly with him. And the house whose family had moved out for him was very small and leaky, plagued with damp spots and infested with surreptitious rustlings that he suspected were rats. He was lucky that he’d loaded the jeep with freeze-dried foods, because the only foods the villagers offered him after the initial bread and salt were a kind of unseasoned porridge and a thin soup of wheat noodles, also unseasoned.
He did occasionally regret having made his Taklan-speaking guide from Silk Road Treks stay behind at the last village before the Lake Shaimak Restricted Area. He didn’t want some local finding out about Old Shaimaki. But the drive from there to Shaimak village had been tiring and dangerous, and these stupid peasants kept pretending not to understand the Farsi he’d studied for field work in neighboring Tajikistan. That was where he’d first heard the rumors of an isolated village, high in the Pamirs, where the people knew a language that would work magic. At the time he’d dismissed the stories as a rural myth, not without reason; the tellers embroidered shamelessly, even claiming that the people of Shaimak had learned their magical language from a dragon! But his curiosity about the area had persisted… and then, many years later, the man calling himself Koshan Idrisov had demonstrated the power of the language. He’d made the most of the three scanned pages he’d found on Idrisov’s laptop, and although even pronouncing the words ke
pt giving him a headache, the power implicit in those sentences had made him frantic to get hold of the rest of the notebook. But now he had something better than some German’s transcriptions! At least he would have, if he could summon up the patience to extract information from these blockheads who had so much trouble understanding him and who kept misinterpreting his questions. They should be able to understand when he spoke slowly; Taklan was nothing but a degenerate dialect of Farsi.
The prospect of power should give him infinite patience. He wasn’t about to admit defeat and go home with nothing to show for this expensive jaunt.
When the old, gap-toothed idiot who had spoken most loudly against him sidled up to him behind a house, he wondered if the villagers’ resistance to him might be weakening. Up to now no one had approached him, even with the promise of generous payments. And the people he approached all seemed to be involved with dull agricultural and household tasks, too immersed in their work to respond to his questions. This very man, old Zardusht, had tried to excuse them by saying that this was the busy time of year for the village, when they collected and stored up food for the winter. A likely story, when the grain in the fields hadn’t yet been reaped!
Now this same Zardusht asked, in his heavily Taklan-accented Farsi, whether Osborne had been serious in his promises of payment to informants.
“The woman of my house desires things from the lowlands,” he said, “sugar instead of pounded mulberries, dried apricots as well as our own dried apples, fine bright fabric and boots of leather.” He shook his head over the folly of women. “Such luxuries! She is a terrible nag, and it is my shame that I give in to her. But I am an old man, and I desire peace in my house.”
Osborne assured him that he would be paid more than enough to buy the ‘luxuries’ his wife wanted, and backed up that assurance by showing a thick wad of twenty-ergashi notes. Zardusht’s eyes brightened.
“Better not to show that to others,” he said. “Some people here might kill you for it.”
“What a failure of hospitality,” Osborne said blandly. He was not seriously worried by the warning. Two days had been enough to assure him that the villagers, although angry and stupid, were thoroughly cowed by his threats of publication should he fail to return on schedule.
The Language of the Dragon Page 17