Broken Crescent (14 page)

Sometimes she looked at him like he was spouting gibberish. This was one of those times. He repeated himself with a number of different items of clothing until she got it.

She responded with one word that she repeated until he could make a shot at pronouncing it.

“Clothes,” Nate repeated his newest noun.

“Yes,” she said.

Nate pointed at the table and said, “You bring food.”

“Yes.”

“You bring drink.”

“Yes.”

Nate pointed at himself. “You bring clothes.”

She got it the first time, Nate could see it in her eyes. However, it took her a long time to respond.

Long pause. Then, “Yes. I will bring you clothes.”

Y
ERITH COULD not stop thinking about the stranger.

Long ago, when she had agreed to become part of Arthiz’s conspiracy, she had never thought she would be in such intimate contact with something so alien. His long pale body, hollow face, and bizarre atonal gibbering dominated her mind even as she walked the market.

Around her, life went on, completely unaware of the secret that preoccupied her. Farmers stood in front of their carts, calling at her to just look and see that this was the largest eggfruit, the finest blood-melon, the most aromatic herbs from the most pampered of gardens, the rarest of spices. . . .

Every farmer acted as if he knew her. They probably did. She walked through the market twice a sixday, buying food for the College’s ghadi. The fact that she represented the College and, more importantly, spent large sums of the College’s money, made her a person of some notoriety.

Several times, she stopped and purchased grains or vegetables to maintain the College’s stock of ghadi.

More than usual, she felt the weight of her dual allegiance. In her heart she had hated the College of Man ever since the death of her father. However, here she was keeping enslaved ghadi of the Manhome College healthy and fed. Ghadi for the scholars of the College to consume like rats feeding on an overripe eggfruit.

It was hard to keep her ambivalence out of her voice as she haggled over the price of salt beans. Even so, she did her job.

The market itself seemed endless. The merchants were spread over three of Manhome’s widest boulevards in an ever-changing chaos. Not just food, but cloth, jewelry, livestock, and—in the public square where all three boulevards met—ghadi.

Yerith passed by the ghadi auction and stopped. The ghadi stood, long-limbed and mute, as their keeper pulled them to the stage, one by one. The interested buyers were encouraged to approach the stage and examine the ghadi in question.

But he spoke. He even named himself. Yerith couldn’t understand that. Speech, language, that was part of the mind. There was the language of Man, and the language of the Gods.

But the gibberish her charge spoke was neither. And, somehow, like an infant, he was learning the language of Man. How could this thing do that, and not be a man himself? No ghadi could ever speak, or even understand, human words, no matter what was spoken in their presence. At best, Yerith could train them to understand hand signals and whistled commands. Something as basic as a name was beyond their comprehension.

But they were more than brute animals. Yerith knew that, and in the end, that was what made her dangerous to the College, and that was why she was valuable to Arthiz, the Monarch’s pet acolyte. The ghadi were invisible to the scholars of the College, mute and interchangeable.

In other words, they were perfect spies.

The third ghadi was brought to the stage. A male whose skin was a faded rose-violet. The lower knee on either leg was swollen, as was the second elbow, the first stages of arthritis. Yerith saw the callused hands and feet and shook her head. This ghadi was trained for heavy labor, but was probably only a year or two away from being crippled. She hoped his new owner would use him for domestic tasks, maybe make things easier for him.

A vain hope. Those rich enough to have domestic servants didn’t buy ghadi at a street auction. The people bidding here were merchants and farmers who needed laborers, or acolytes who needed blood and power. In either case, this ghadi did not have long to live, and the life wouldn’t amount to much.

“So, can you offer an opinion of the goods they’re selling?”

Yerith turned to see Arthiz, his blank mask a blazing white in the midday sun. She felt a slight relief at seeing him. She hadn’t seen him since the day she had brought his creature down to the secret chambers under Manhome.

“You’re late.” She spoke quietly.

Arthiz made an act of studying the ghadi onstage, then looking down at her. “There is a place where we can talk, down the Avenue of Gods. There is a temple with a red door beyond the end of the marketplace. Go there after they’ve sold two more ghadi.”

Before Yerith could respond, he slipped back into the auction crowd.

As the name would suggest, the Avenue of the Gods was once a place for temples and altars and offering houses. That time had passed centuries ago. The current crowded street now bore little resemblance to the broad avenue that showed in some old paintings and tapestries that Yerith had seen. There were no public altars, or marble statues lining the street. The buildings pressed to the edge of the avenue now—boardinghouses, inns, residences, shops.

Several centuries of construction had built over and around Arthiz’s ancient temple, so that it was completely absorbed into the stone flesh of the city. Even the cobbled avenue itself passed above it, so Yerith only spotted the red doors because she was looking for them.

The doors had once been part of a grand entrance. Yerith could see signs of a great arch and a broad stairway, both ending as they met newer walls. The elaborately carved doors themselves had been cut, now ending midway up, truncated by the first floor of an alehouse.

Yerith climbed the makeshift stairway down to the doors and saw that they were still half again as tall as she was.

The doors weren’t locked or barred, so she walked inside.

“Arthiz?” Beyond the doors was a large room that was dark and smelled of damp.

“Here.” Inside, Arthiz lit a lamp, illuminating a small area of the old temple. It felt as if they were between worlds here, the floor was smooth marble, the ceiling rough-hewn timbers supporting the alehouse above. One side of the room was dominated by truncated stone columns, the other by black wooden casks that were just as wide.

“Why did we leave the auction?” Yerith asked. She was nervous about deviating from the pattern they had established. The only places that Yerith was free to mingle with acolytes from the College and not arouse interest or suspicion was either at the market auction or inside the College itself. She might be employed by the College, but she was still an outsider who was only permitted contact with actual members of the College within very strict limits.

Exchanging words at the auction might be passed over as a chance meeting. If anyone became aware that she was here with an acolyte, alone, she could easily find herself in one of the cells under the College.

“There is growing suspicion within the College itself. We need to meet in places unobserved.”

“What has happened?”

“Nothing that was not anticipated. How is the creature?”

Yerith shook his head. “The thing talks.”

“Talks?”

“Barely a sixday passed and it spoke words to me. It counts. It has a name. This is no strange ghadi. I am thinking it may be human.”

Arthiz was quiet for a long time before he spoke. “It learns the Language of Man?” He spoke quietly, mostly to himself. He looked up and nodded at Yerith.

“You are right, of course. He is human. A stranger so removed from us that he does not even know the Language of Man. His name was given as Nateblack.” Arthiz twisted the odd syllables with his tongue, but it was recognizably the words spoken by the creature.

“Nate Black.” Yerith corrected in a neutral tone, placing the pause in the appropriate place. “You told me none of this.”

“You did not need to know this to keep him alive and hidden.”

“What else have I not been told?”

“Yerith, you are valuable to me and the Monarch. The more I tell you, the more danger you are in.”

“And if the College discovers me now, who will my ignorance protect?” Yerith looked at Arthiz. “It, he, wants to learn. Am I wrong to teach him?”

“No. Though I wonder what this implies.”

“He wants clothing.”

“What?”

“He has told me he wants clothing. Shall I get him some?”

“No,” Arthiz said. “I will bring his clothes to you. There are things I must do.”

Yerith nodded. “Is there anything else you would have me or my ghadi do?”

“This is your sole duty now. After our next meeting I will travel to confer with the Monarch. You will keep Nate Black well and safe in my absence. I am trusting to your discretion.”

“Thank you.”

“Do not thank me.” Arthiz extinguished the lamp. “Talking to this thing is the most dangerous act anyone could ask you to do.”

T
HE CLOTHES she brought him were the same ones that he had worn here. That raised a whole host of questions that Nate didn’t have the linguistic skill to express yet. They also raised a sickening wave of emotion that Nate wasn’t prepared for.

In the days he had spent here, recovering, his method of coping with the loss of his world, his family, real food, his stupid cat, was denial. He had managed to half convince himself that his life before captivity had been some sort of delusion. He never directly questioned his own perception of reality, but seeing his leather bomber jacket, jeans, even his old cotton jockeys, shattered some protective illusions that Nate didn’t even know he was building.

He held the old concert T-shirt, and his hands shook.
Is this it? Is this the only fragment of my life I have left?

He’d never even liked that band.

It wasn’t until Yerith started talking in a rapid panic that Nate realized he was crying. He didn’t understand her, but her gist seemed to be, “What’s wrong?”

“I’m a fucking prisoner. What do you think?” Nate looked up at her and saw from her expression that she might not get his English, but she seemed to read his expression well enough.

Nate sighed. “Shouldn’t blame you, should I? You did what I asked.”

He didn’t have the local word for “thanks,” so he just held up the shirt and did his best to smile. “You bring,” he told her.

She looked at him uncertainly and replied, “I bring.”

Nate looked back down at his T-shirt. The language barrier was rising on his list of frustrations. Every new word he learned almost seemed to make the communication barrier worse. Every time he looked at Yerith, a tidal wave of questions tried to smash through his thirty-word vocabulary.

At least she seemed more interested in keeping him comfortable than Scarface and company had been.

Nate got dressed, impressing himself by being strong enough to stand up and pull on his pants without help.

“Let’s see,” Nate muttered to himself, “how committed we are to the learning process.” If he was going to progress at anything approaching a reasonable pace, he needed more than a couple of fifteen minute visits a day.

He didn’t have the words he needed, but he used the concert T-shirt to help get his point across. He laid the shirt on the bed between them, the back of it facing up. The back didn’t have any pictures, just a list of bars and gig dates.

He grabbed a spoon from his last meal and squatted over the shirt, tracing the letters with the tip of the spoon.

Nate looked up at her and said, “You bring . . .” He waved the spoon at the unknown word. She looked at him, then down at the shirt. He could tell he had surprised her again.

She traced the lines of text with her fingers.

He tried to figure out a way of telling her that these were words in his own language. The best he could come up with was, “Clothes speak to eye.” He moved the spoon and traced the letters. “Hand speaks to clothes.”

She looked at him, eyes wide, and said, “You can . . .” The word that followed, almost certainly meant, “Read.”

“You can read,” she repeated.

“I can read,” Nate said, doing his best to pronounce the new verb.