The Language of the Dragon

by Margaret Ball

  “If you want the money,” he said into Zardusht’s continuing silence, “talk to me.”

  “I do not want to be seen with you,” Zardusht told him. He pointed away from the village. “Do you see that path? It leads to a place beside the lake that cannot be seen from here. I will go now. You follow me after I am no longer in sight. I will meet you and guide you the rest of the way.”

  Inwardly exulting, Osborne readily agreed.

  ***

  While we waited for Zardusht to bring Dr. Osborne, Adjdaak lowered his head and body to the ground, furled his wings and gave an extremely good imitation of a pile of weathered boulders. Michael and Colonel Grisha took positions on either side of the path where they could grab Osborne as soon as he came around the bend. When Jennifer McAusland complained about being left out of the fun, Grisha suggested that she could gag him with her scarf so that he wouldn’t be able to employ whatever scraps of Old Shaimaki he knew.

  All I did was hold the battered notebook. My job was to show it to Dr. Osborne and make sure he knew that it was what he’d been seeking. That was one reason the men had to hold Osborne; getting close enough to him to demonstrate what was in the notebook, they said, was too risky otherwise.

  Couldn’t argue with that.

  Once Osborne knew what the notebook was, I was to toss it to Adjdaak, who boasted that he could flambé it in mid-air.

  It almost worked out like that.

  Dr. Osborne was looking down, watching his step on the uneven ground of the path as it slanted downhill to the lake, when Michael and Grisha jumped him. He started to shout something but Jennifer shoved the end of her scarf into his open mouth and wound the rest of it around his head. He struggled so furiously that his glasses fell off.

  I wanted him to have the glasses so that he could see that I really did have the notebook he’d attempted to steal. I ran up to rescue them before somebody stepped on them and he kicked me in the head, hard, with one of his heavy hiking boots. A starburst of pain exploded on the left side of my head and I fell to my hands and knees, dizzy.

  When my vision cleared, Michael had his hands around Osborne’s neck.

  “No, Michael!” I struggled to my feet and grabbed his arm. “Don’t kill him!”

  “Why not?” Grisha asked.

  “Sounds good to me,” said Jennifer.

  “I don’t want you to be a murderer!” I told Michael.

  His hands loosened. Osborne was making choked crowing noises. But as soon as Michael let go of his neck, he twisted and drove his elbow into Grisha’s belly. The next moment he had freed himself and was running away from us, away from the village, towards the lake.

  Behind him came Zardusht, clicking his tongue censoriously. He said something which Rukshana translated for us, just in case I hadn’t followed.

  “I did not go to the trouble of bringing him here just for you to play with him.”

  Grisha said several things in Russian which nobody felt the need to translate. I hoped I would be able to remember everything later. They would be a useful addition to my vocabulary; we never learned those kind of words in Intensive Russian, but I could deduce their meaning from the context.

  Michael just growled.

  And the pile of boulders that Osborne had been making for unfurled vast silvery wings, raised its head, and fixed him with a swirling golden eye. Lazily, as if swatting a pest, he raised one foreleg and trapped Osborne under his extended claws.

  He asked Rukshana a question, and she ran to him and knelt beside Osborne. She answered him and then turned to us. “He is not dead. But he is…um…”

  “Fainted?” I suggested. “Lost consciousness? Passed out?”

  She nodded. “He is fain ted.” She made two words out of it.

  After that, we had to persuade Adjdaak to raise his claws so that we could pull Osborne out from underneath them, tie him up with my nice warm wool scarf, and splash lake water on his face until his eyes opened.

  He looked at Adjdaak and made frantic noises through the gag. I was afraid he would choke, so I unwound Jennifer’s scarf and pulled the end out of his mouth.

  “Get it away from me,” he gasped. “It’s not real. I’m hallucinating…”

  “Stupid soft thing,” Adjdaak roared. “I might be more real than you are!”

  He spoke English? Well, I’d already guessed he understood it. I guess it was just dragonish intransigence that he’d insisted everything we said had to pass through his language of grinding and crushing sounds.

  “Look at this, Eddie,” I snarled, thrusting the open notebook at him. I might still think of him as Dr. Osborne, but he’d lost the right to be addressed respectfully. “See the German script? Can you read it?”

  “Q!x vlaad —”

  Before he could say whatever disaster he was aiming at me, I slammed the notebook shut and Jennifer shoved her scarf back between his teeth.

  “This,” I said slowly and clearly, “is the notebook you tried to steal.” I looked at Zardusht and tried to add a Taklan flavor to my Farsi. “Grandfather, this is the book. The book Osborne said he would publish. He lied. He does not have anything to publish.”

  I could tell by the way Zardusht’s frown cleared that he understood and believed me.

  “Adjdaak!” I called to make sure he was watching. “Here!”

  I threw the notebook up in the air, pages ruffling in the wind off the lake. Adjdaak reared up and belched flame into the sky, surrounding the notebook and reducing it to ashes that fell, appropriately, over Edward Osborne.

  “Do you think we can ungag him now?” Jennifer asked. “It’s getting cold and I’d like my scarf back.”

  I regretted having donated my own scarf to tie his hands, because I for sure didn’t want to untie him.

  “You want the gag out of your mouth?” Michael asked Osborne. “Get this straight. You try anything in the dragon’s language, and you’ll be counting your teeth.”

  “I think we just shoot him,” said Grisha.

  “Cut off his tongue,” Jennifer suggested.

  Didn’t these two people have any boundaries? I could understand their romance now; they were the same brand of crazy.

  “Eddie,” I said, “it won’t do you any good to pull out the pitiful scraps of Old Shaimaki you may be able to remember. Even if you could hurt us, the entire village hates you, and now Zardusht can tell them that they don’t have to fear your threats. Rukshana, what do your people do to someone who threatens their existence?”

  “Give to dragon,” she said with a cheerful smile.

  Adjdaak rumbled deep in his throat, and little tongues of flame darted from his nostrils. Osborne turned green and fainted again.

  “Dammit,” Jennifer said, “we’ll have to carry him.” She pulled her scarf free and looked sadly at the damp bits. “And I’m not sure I want to wear this again.”

  Michael sat down beside me and put his arm around my shoulders. I realized that I was shaking after all that.

  “How’s the head? How badly did he hurt you?” he asked while Grisha heaved Osborne’s unconscious body across his shoulder.

  “See you in the village!” Jennifer called cheerfully, and they started back along the path, preceded by Zardusht and trailed by Rukshana.

  “I don’t know,” I told Michael. “How bad does it look?”

  “You’re going to have an impressive shiner,” he said. “Do you have a headache?”

  “Well, it hurts where he kicked me, but that’s all.”

  “Any nausea? Dizziness? Confusion? Do you remember what happened?” He fired off those and more questions rapidly, as if testing my ability to keep up with him. Finally he said, “Well, I don’t think you have a concussion, but the dizziness and seeing stars right after he kicked you are not a good sign.”

  “Oh! Did anybody pick up his glasses?” I suddenly remembered how I’d gotten in a position to be kicked in the first place. He’d been able to see well enough to recognize the notebook anyway, so I didn’t
care that much about the glasses now.

  “Jennifer has them. Look, you’re probably going to be all right, but somebody should stay with you tonight and keep checking on you. I’m volunteering. I mean… if that’s all right with you?”

  “More than all right.” I let my aching head rest on his shoulder.

  “You know,” he said, “when you said you didn’t want me to be a murderer… I have killed people before.”

  “When you were in the army?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s different, though. I mean, it was kind of your job.” I thought for a moment. I’d heard other veterans complain about the people who asked if they’d ever killed anybody. “I don’t want to hear about it – I mean, if you want to talk about it, that’s fine, but you don’t need to.”

  “Well, protecting you is kind of my job now.”

  I was poised to snap that I didn’t need protection. But I couldn’t very well start that fight while my head was on his shoulder and he had a warm arm around me, and I didn’t want to move just yet.

  22. Words of great power

  We promised Zardusht that we would leave the next morning.

  “And you will take Os-Born with you,” he said.

  I sighed. “I suppose we must.” Though how we were going to manage him I did not know. We could hardly keep him tied and gagged all the way to Gundiz.

  “We’ll have to,” Michael said when I consulted him. I’d waited until the villagers had left us alone in the house where Osborne had stayed, and until he had been moved to a tiny back room where he couldn’t eavesdrop on us.

  I made a face. “It’s going to be messy.”

  “You don’t want him, but you wouldn’t let Adjdaak have him either,” Jennifer observed. “I call that rather a dog-in-the-manger attitude.”

  “You don’t seriously want to give him up to be eaten by a dragon!”

  She shrugged. “Why not? In that standoff last year Adjdaak took out three terrorists, and this guy is potentially more dangerous than all three of those nuts.”

  “I don’t think he’s learned enough Old Shaimaki to be that dangerous,” I said, “and if he uses any strong sentences, his head will hurt and he won’t be able to remember what he’s doing.”

  “Are you absolutely sure of that?” Grisha demanded.

  Well, no, I wasn’t. He was smart and fast; since our encounter at the Rivers house he’d figured out why his Shaimaki sentence hadn’t worked and mine had, and he’d generalized that to use indicative when he tried to use the language on me. “The girl becomes –” and the gag had stopped whatever unpleasant condition he’d been about to wish on me.

  Even if finishing the sentence might have given him a headache, it might have done something far worse to me.

  We thrashed all that out in detail and even I had to admit that if we didn’t kill Osborne, we would have to keep him gagged.

  But that was only putting off the problem. While we might manage that in the High Pamirs, it was bound to occasion some comment as we got back to civilization. We couldn’t keep him under control forever. And Michael and I couldn’t quite reconcile ourselves to killing him in cold blood, or handing him over to Adjdaak to kill and eat.

  Well, I couldn’t, anyway. I wasn’t so sure about Michael. By the end of the discussion he seemed to be leaning towards Jennifer’s and Grisha’s point of view.

  Then I remembered something Rukshana had mentioned while chattering to me about that good-looking boy in the Varshas family, the council’s deliberations on how to deal with Osborne’s demands, the hard work of the upcoming harvest and her grandfather’s totally unreasonable ban on using any of the language of the dragon to make the work just a tiny bit easier. I excused myself from the discussion by saying I needed to stretch my legs outdoors before trying to sleep.

  Michael, naturally, insisted on coming with me, and I couldn’t explain why that was not possible until we were well away from Grisha and Jennifer.

  “I’ve had an idea about Osborne,” I told him, “but I need to talk to Rukshana. And her family may not be happy about me taking her for a walk if you’re along. They already think she’s boy-crazy.”

  “They’re right,” Michael said. “If you go for a walk with her, better steer clear of the Varshas house.”

  I promised to keep her well away from young Rustam Varshas, and Michael consented to skulk along well behind us and keep to the shadows. It seemed like the best deal I was going to get.

  Rukshana was delighted to get out of evening chores by going for a walk with The Foreign Lady Who Speaks Taklan, and her mother had no objection. I got the feeling that some things were universal: getting a moody teenage daughter to do her chores was more trouble than doing them yourself.

  We picked our way uphill and away from the village until Rukshana found a patch of gently time-worn boulders that were slightly less uncomfortable for sitting on than the rest of the mountainside. “Also, from here you can see everything!” she confided happily. She’d quit trying to improve her English with me in favor of unrestricted chatter in Taklan, most of which I could follow. “There’s our house, and Rustam’s house, and…”

  “And the house your people are letting us stay in,” I said quickly, before she could get going again on Rustam’s many perfections.

  “Old Paikan and Hasti’s place,” Rukshana said. “They moved in with their son’s family. They are happy enough there, but the son’s wife can’t wait for you to leave so her in-laws can go back to their own house.” She giggled. “Zhala says her mother-in-law finds enough to criticize when she’s only living next door, having her in the next room is intolerable. But why did Zhala and her man build such a big house, if they didn’t want to have relatives stay with them?”

  I could think of other reasons for wanting a big house, but I didn’t want to get Rukshana started speculating on Zhala’s fertility. “No idea,” I said, “but I wanted to ask you about something else. This afternoon you mentioned that someone on the council had an idea for tricking Osborne with the language.”

  She nodded. “It would have been fun, too, but my grandfather thought it was too dangerous. It was my father’s idea that we should teach him words of great power that would hurt him to use, and tell him they were only words of small power. Then maybe he would make himself mad, or die, from using too much of the language’s power. But my grandfather said it might not work, and anyway it would not solve the threat of somebody else publishing the language. That was before we knew that he was lying, you see.”

  “I have been thinking about that. If someone could teach him to say words that had great power but would do no harm, and tell him they were words that would give him revenge on me – on us…”

  “I can think of some!” Rukshana interrupted my slow Farsi. “There are words to bring a warm wind from the south, and others to make the clouds disappear and the sun to shine. Those are good things. They give us more time for the mulberries and wheat to ripen and more time to harvest them before the world freezes. We need those words now, because the harvest is so late. But we have waited and waited, because whoever speaks those words becomes mad. Sometimes they die.”

  She started to teach me the sentences, safely using only one word at a time, but I stopped her. “I can’t tell him. He wouldn’t believe me. Maybe your grandfather…?”

  Rukshana shook her head. “Zardusht already lied to him once, remember?”

  “Your father, then. He should be willing; it was his idea.”

  “Nobody ever listens to my father,” Rukshana said. “My mother says that a shitan spat between his lips and cursed him that he should never be believed. I have a better idea….”

  “Oh, no,” I said when she finished, shocked back into English. “No way.”

  “Is way,” said Rukshana, pouting, and then reverted to rapid-fire Taklan that I could barely follow, ‘explaining’ why she was the best person and the only person to deal with Osborne.

  “He is dangerous,” I said
weakly. I couldn’t begin to match her fluency and power of exposition in Taklan-Farsi. “If he harms you, your parents will kill us. And they will be right!”

  Rukshana’s lower lip stuck out so far I could have used it for a bookshelf.

  “There must be someone else. Who is there on the council who might do this?”

  “Nobody,” Rukshana said. “You are taking Os-Born away. He is not their problem now. I would help, and I would not even ask you for a dowry.”

  “Well, that’s a good thing, because you’re not getting one,” I said as sternly as I could. “You’re a little girl. It’s far too soon for you to think of marriage.”

  “Rustam Varshas does not think so!”

  I made a mental note: never have a teenage daughter. Not that it seemed likely to happen.

  I still don’t know how she wore me down, but by the time we were both shaking with cold we had the elements of a plan. By that time Michael had given up on skulking at a distance and had joined us; if it weren’t for his backing I think I never would have let Rukshana take the risk. We settled that Rukshana would bring food for all of us and would volunteer to feed Osborne. Michael would go with her to the back room, to watch while she worked on Osborne. She would tell him in Taklanese Farsi – which Michael did not speak, so he could credibly guard them without realizing the plot – that in return for his cash to use as a dowry, she would teach Osborne some words that would give him revenge on us. But she would exact a promise that he wouldn’t use them until we were out of the village, because she didn’t want to get into trouble with her parents.

  “I will pretend to be a silly little girl who thinks him a very fine man,” Rukshana said, giggling, “and he will like to believe that, and so he will believe all the rest as well.”

  She was going to be a dangerous woman when she grew up.

  Oh, strike that. Rukshana was dangerous now. I underlined my mental note to avoid having a teenage daughter.

  ***

  “You take that off, let him eat,” the native girl said to that interfering bastard Michael Ryan, pointing at the scarf gagging him. Ryan looked sour but followed the girl’s instructions, adding some of his own: “One syllable out of you and remember what I said before, you’ll be counting your teeth.” He squatted on the floor, close enough to carry out his threat.