The Language of the Dragon

by Margaret Ball

  “They are being cruel to you,” Rukshana said in slow, carefully clear Taklan.

  Osborne nodded. His tongue felt thick and dry. He was in no condition to shape the harsh sounds of Old Shaimaki, even if he hadn’t been afraid of Ryan.

  Rukshana held a cup for him to drink from – by God, it wasn’t just water! This lovely child had spiked it with some of the Russian’s vodka! Osborne slurped eagerly, realizing now how much he really needed a drink to help him get over the day’s horrors. After that she spooned some bland porridge into his mouth. These peasants really were stupid; with all the power of the language to use, why did they stay in miserable huts and eat this crap? They lived no better than anybody in the other villages of the High Pamirs – and yet they could have been kings.

  “People are unkind to me too,” said the girl, offering him another sip of ‘water.’ “My father is poor and my man will not marry me without a dowry.”

  As if he cared about her problems.

  “He is a good-looking man,” she went on, “though not as fine as you.” She patted his shoulder.

  Well, no surprise if he’d turned a village maiden’s head. He supposed she’d never seen a civilized man before. But what good taste she had, recognizing that he was in a different class from the American and Russian thugs!

  “If I told you some words of power,” she said, “would you give my dowry?”

  He nodded, then glanced at Ryan. The American wasn’t even watching them. Of course, he wouldn’t know Farsi, let alone the Taklan dialect; he had no idea what the girl was offering him.

  “They must be worth it,” he said, very low, and keeping his eyes on the American, who seemed to be wrapped in his own thoughts and ignoring them.

  “What do you wish? Power, wealth, revenge?”

  She could not know any words that would give real wealth, or she’d use them to get her own dowry.

  “Revenge,” he said. Once he had destroyed these thugs who’d tied him up, he would be able to force the villagers to teach him all he wanted of the language.

  “You must promise not to use them until you have left this place,” the girl said. “My father and grandfather would be angry and beat me.”

  So what?

  “And they might use their own words of power against you.”

  Very well, it might be best to take his revenge after they were at least out of sight of the village. Then when he returned, these dull peasants wouldn’t realize immediately that he had the upper hand of them. He might have to use the revenge words on some of them to encourage the others.

  “Tell me.”

  “My dowry!”

  “Take the… flat purse… from my pocket.”

  Rukshana extricated his wallet and counted the fifty- and twenty- ergashi notes with a pleased smile.

  Ryan roused himself. “Hey, what are you doing?”

  “The kind gentleman gives me for my dowry,” Rukshana said in English.

  “Oh, well…” Ryan moved back to the corner of the room and braced himself against the walls, his eyelids drooping.

  “These words make your enemy’s heart stop,” Rukshana said, very low. “First…”

  She gave him the phrase “Iszk zh’m#l kla!d jndb’dn,” one word at a time. He mouthed the words after her until he felt sure of the whole sentence. It didn’t take long. After all, he’d initially specialized in linguistics because he was good at learning languages; before he figured out that linguists in America really didn’t like foreign languages, they preferred to believe that everything could be learned by studying English because all languages had identical properties.

  “I want more,” he told her. “What if I wish one of them to suffer first?”

  “Of course,” the girl purred, “a great man must see his enemies suffer greatly. This will make a man or woman do your bidding, even if you tell her to kill her lover. Our men use it on faithless wives.” And she taught him, “B#lt zmok uz!qa.”

  By the time she had finished feeding him and left, Ryan was looking very sleepy. He made a gesture towards replacing the gag, but wound it so loosely that Osborne found a little work with his tongue pushed the thing out of his mouth while leaving it over the lower part of his face. With luck they’d never notice that he was now free to speak.

  He mouthed the words the girl had given him silently, one word at a time, until the two sentences were indelibly engraved in his memory.

  The villagers saw them off in the morning with both jeeps, the Russian one and the one Osborne had hired from Silk Road. That vicious woman from the embassy and her Russian friend took the army jeep. Michael Ryan and that little bitch Sienna took his jeep, relegating him to the back seat. All the better! He would control them first, make Sienna untie him and let Ryan watch while he showed the impudent girl what she deserved for insulting him and trying to destroy his great research project. Then he would stop their hearts. As for the Russian and his American mistress, they could go on back to Gundiz for all he cared, unless they were stupid enough to come back and interfere with him.

  The couple in the Russian Army jeep took off first, at a speed that no sane driver would emulate. Ryan drove much more cautiously. Osborne was content to sit in the back for a while, letting the other vehicle get far ahead of them. He counted to one hundred after he could no longer hear sounds from the Russian jeep. That was far enough; he didn’t want to have to walk back. Oh, but of course once he had used the control sentence, he could simply get out of the jeep and order Ryan to turn it around. And if the man couldn’t do that, and the jeep went over the cliff, well, small loss.

  But first he would have some fun. He twitched his chin and wriggled against the seat back until the scarf fell away from his face.

  “B#lt zmok uz!qa,” he said, low but with perfect enunciation.

  A blinding pain shot through his forehead and he fell sideways as the jeep went around a sharp turn. Struggling upright, he was half blinded by the morning sun. Funny, it had been cloudy a moment ago. And why was Ryan still driving? Perhaps because he hadn’t yet ordered him to stop?

  “Stop!” he said sharply.

  There was no reaction from the front seat.

  “B#lt zmok uz!qa!” he snapped, quite loudly this time. His head hurt even worse, probably because the sun was so bright now and the cold so piercing.

  The girl Sienna turned and looked at him. “Did you want something, Eddie?”

  “You will not call me Eddie.” Now that he had used the words of control, that sort of insolence would be at an end.

  “I’d prefer not to call you anything at all. Why don’t you shut up?”

  It must be necessary to phrase his commands very precisely. She had obeyed him but hadn’t given him the cringing respect he meant to extract before humiliating her even farther.

  “You are afraid of me.”

  “You’re a menace, that’s for sure!”

  “And you show me total respect. You acknowledge that you are subservient to me in all things. You obey my lightest word.”

  “You enjoy a rich fantasy life, don’t you, Eddie?”

  There must have been something wrong with the first phrase. Very well, enough fooling around; his head was splitting, his vision was blurry and he could barely remember the other sentence. Better go ahead and use it before it was too late.

  “Iszk zh’m#l kla!d jndb’dn!”

  The pain this time was incapacitating. He groaned and fell sideways against the seat. Through watering eyes he felt a surprising warmth in the air. Did he have a fever? Why hadn’t the couple in front fallen dead already?

  “Iszk zh’m#l kla!d jndb’dn!”

  The world went dark.

  ***

  “It’s getting almost warm,” Michael said in surprise.

  Osborne stirred in the back seat. “Q!x…”

  I startled, but Osborne’s sentence trailed off.

  “Q!x… what comes next? Who are you?” he asked plaintively.

  Then again, as though it wer
e burned into his brain too deep to destroy,

  “Iszk zh’m#l kla!d jndb’dn….” He screamed, then fell sideways onto the seat.

  For the next few minutes he alternated between unconsciousness, crying that his head hurt, and babbling that got farther and farther from any possible meaning.

  “I hope it’s permanent,” Michael said viciously.

  “I think it probably is. Rukshana told me that those two sentences are so powerful that they’re only used in dire necessity, and then the oldest man in the village usually volunteers and makes his son promise to kill him afterwards. It would have been her grandfather – Zardusht – if she hadn’t tricked Osborne into using them.” I thought for a minute. “And he used them twice. One of them three times! I’m surprised he isn’t dead already.”

  “It would be a mercy if he were,” said Michael.

  “Can you kill a madman in cold blood? I can’t.”

  “What do they mean, anyway?”

  “Well… he thought the first one would make our wills subordinate to his, that he would be able to make us do whatever he demanded while knowing and hating it inside ourselves.” Despite the warming air, I shivered. “He really was an evil man. And the second sentence was supposed to stop our hearts.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Michael said, but reverently, not like he was swearing. “And why were the times so desperate that Zardusht was about to sacrifice himself?”

  “You know how cold and cloudy it’s been?”

  “Up to now?” It certainly wasn’t like that any more. In fact, we were almost uncomfortably warm. Michael slowed the jeep to a stop so he could remove his scarf and open up his jacket. I unzipped my jacket too.

  “And the harvest was already late. They were afraid it would snow – heavily – before the grain ripened. No harvest, and people die. The old, sick, and the babies for sure. With winter coming on this early, Zardusht would have had to speak those sentences, and they would probably have killed him.”

  “What do they really do?”

  “One of them makes the clouds disappear and the other one makes a warm wind come from the south. I don’t know which is which and I don’t want to.” I shivered again. “At least we don’t live where it can be a matter of survival to use them.”

  A few miles farther on, Osborne’s wailing was beginning to get on both our nerves. We agreed that it was safe to untie him and give him a handful of snow to hold against his head with his gloved hand.

  “But he comes up in the front seat where I can grab him if he tries anything, and you go in the back where he can’t reach you,” Michael insisted.

  We stopped and made the changeover. I didn’t really think Osborne was up to making any more trouble; his babbling sounded like baby sounds now. But I got him some snow as long as I was up. It was so soft now that I had to pack it like a snowball to give him a handful that would last any time at all.

  With all these stops, I expected we would be far behind Jennifer and Grisha, but as we rounded a hairpin turn leading to a long straightaway, we saw their vehicle in front of us, although it was a couple of football fields away. Hmm. They must have stopped somewhere too, and it hadn’t been to tend to an invalid.

  The nasty bit where the cliff bellied out and the road narrowed was at the end of the straight stretch. I watched in horror as the outer wheels of their jeep broke through the snow cover, but Jennifer wrenched the wheel to the left, heading almost into the rocks on the inside of the curve. She speeded up and they made it across the narrow space at the cost of the driver’s-side mirror and the jeep’s paint job.

  Michael pumped the brakes of our jeep very gently and we came to a stop maybe fifty yards from the narrow section, which was now a lot narrower. “The warm wind from the south,” he said grimly. “Some of that “solid” support must have been snowpack or ice.”

  “What do we do now?” I asked. “Reverse all the way to the village and beg them to take us in?”

  “Jennifer made it across,” he said, “and we have the advantage of knowing what we’re up against. And this jeep is a foot narrower than the Russian model, with a correspondingly narrow wheelbase. Also, you’re going to walk across before I try it.”

  “Why don’t we all walk?”

  “Because those two might be too far ahead by now to notice that we’re stranded, and I don’t plan to die of hypothermia while we try to walk out of these mountains. I don’t plan to die at all.”

  He got out of the jeep and started throwing things out: the spare tire, the tool kit, our backpacks. “Make it as light as possible before I attempt to cross,” he explained.

  “Then Osborne had better walk too.” I felt just slightly better about getting out of the jeep if it was a matter of lightening the load, not just saving me while he took all the danger.

  “Not safe,” Michael objected, but he couldn’t fault my reasoning. But he insisted on tying Osborne’s hands in front of him before letting him go.

  “And Fast Eddie here walks ahead of you,” he decreed.

  Persuading the babbling Osborne to walk ahead, hugging the cliff wall, was no more difficult than persuading a toddler to do the same thing. In other words, it took a long time and some shouting from Michael to get him to set off.

  I picked my steps carefully, afraid of hitting a slick patch and sliding off the edge. Osborne, with a toddler’s unconcern for danger, strode out confidently ahead of me and walked much too close to the remaining edge.

  Halfway around the perilous curve, he turned and frowned at me. “Slow!” he complained.

  “Be careful!” I hoped he understood me.

  He shook his head and smiled gaily. “Fly,” he said, and stepped off the edge, ignoring our warning shouts. I could just hear a sickening thud far, far below.

  My knees were trembling. With one hand on the cliff for balance, I made my shaky way to the far side of the curve. Then I sat down on the stony ground.

  I could hear the grinding of the jeep against the cliff, and I prayed. Surely fate would not require that we die for letting Osborne fall? “God, please understand that we could not save him… and let Michael pass safely.”

  No sight in the world had even been more welcome to me than the front of the jeep coming around that bend. I forgot to breathe until the whole of it was on solid ground.

  Michael stopped and looked over the edge. “I saw everything,” he said. “You had no chance of saving him.”

  I realized that I was selfishly glad that Osborne had been too far ahead for me to grab him. We would both surely have fallen.

  And instead of feeling suitably grieved, I was insanely, joyously exhilarated by our reprieve. And Michael, after that look at the abyss, felt the same way. I tottered to him and his arms went around me and held me up, pressed against his strong, warm body.

  “You know,” he said after a long, long kiss, “the other two are way far ahead of us now. And the back seat’s free… and it’s almost warm now.”

  The dizzy exhilaration still had hold of us both, and… well, awkwardness and cold weren’t enough to dissuade me, and neither was common sense. It was probably just as well that Jennifer and Grisha decided to come back up to check on us, though I was slightly disappointed at the time.

  “We thought you’d fallen!” Grisha bellowed while they were still a hundred yards away.

  Michael put the jeep in gear and drove forward slowly to meet them. He told them what had happened to Osborne.

  “Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy,” was Jennifer’s verdict.

  Michael squinted at the narrow, slippery road. “What are you guys going to do now? Reverse all the way to the next village?”

  “No need,” Jennifer said cheerfully, “I only have to back up as far as that wide spot in the road.”

  It didn’t look all that wide to me, but she managed the turnaround. And Grisha said later that it was a base canard to imply that he’d turned green during the process.

  “You know,” Michael said thoughtfully a long time late
r, when we were well out of the Shaimak Restricted Area, “now that Osborne is no longer a threat, are you sorry you destroyed that notebook?”

  “No!” I said. “Hank was right; it’s too dangerous to risk its falling into the wrong hands.” Besides, I still had that flash drive with the pictures I’d taken of every page. But he didn’t need to know that.

  Also by Margaret Ball:

  Applied Topology series:

  A Pocketful of Stars

  A quiet math major has to fight in the magical realm for her life and those of her friends after the CIA decides to make use of her paranormal abilities.

  An Opening in the Air

  When a rival mage attacks, Thalia needs wits as well as magic to save the Center for Applied Topology. And the defense may cost her the man she loves.

  An Annoyance of Grackles

  It’s bad enough when a rival mage tries to destroy you. When he turns out to be a god, that’s worse. And when the god teams up with the most notorious contract bomber in America? If Thalia can’t outwit the duo, she may wind up scattered across the campus in tiny pieces.

  A Tapestry of Fire

  Saving her best friend from life as a fish is difficult. Rescuing the man she loves from a past era of fire and fury ought to be impossible, so it may take Thalia a little longer.

  A Creature of Smokeless Flame

  When CIA officers’ children are kidnapped for revenge, Thalia and her colleagues follow the trail across the continents to an African terrorists’ camp whose leader has the help of his own personal genie.

  A Revolution of Rubies