(Were all of those ordinary people human? Or had Draconeans been numerous enough that there were Draconean peasants as well as rulers? My list of unanswered questions only grew longer with each passing day.)
The architecture differed in many ways from that of the Nying. Although the house in which I dwelt was round, it was clearly not built atop a livestock pen as is done in Tser-nga. Instead the floor was covered with that quilted hessian I had noted before, which was remarkably effective at insulating us from the cold—I did not learn why until later. The furnishings were sparse, just a few chests and shelves which held practical items such as pots and blankets. The fire sat in a broad, shallow bowl of bare stone; it was here that my caretakers slept, on thin mattresses they put away during the day. The smoke rose through a hole in the low ceiling (it barely cleared the heads of the inhabitants); the hole must have been shielded in some fashion, for I could not see the sky when I peered into it.
Our only light came from that fire and a handful of lamps whose odour I recognized: it was yak butter. Unless they traded with the Nying, and the entire region had conspired not to breathe a whisper of it to my party, they must herd their own yaks. They did indeed eat a mixed diet, grains and meat and dried fruit, along with the same staggering quantities of butter and fat I had seen among the Nying. And that, too, inclined me to believe these three were not alone, for it was unlikely in the extreme that they could supply themselves with such variety—especially when no more than two of them were ever gone from the house at one time.
I could not ask questions about any of it, though, until we could speak with one another. And that led me to my next task.
We began almost immediately. After my leg was splinted, I came to sit with them by the firepit, swaddled in a blanket, with my three hosts watching me warily. Looking at them, I said, “Anevrai?”
This was how Suhail had pronounced one of the words from the Cataract Stone. We had not known then whether it referred to the Draconeans or to their gods; now that I had conflated those two categories, I thought it would be a good guess. But they only cocked their heads and said nothing.
I was not half the linguist my husband was … but Suhail was not there, and so I must make do. I remembered him saying the words that changed the least were usually the most basic, and cast about for something that was both in the room and a word he had reconstructed. Pointing at the fire, I said, “Irr?”
This only seemed to deepen their confusion, but I kept trying. Leaning forward, I tapped one of the stones that ringed the fire and said, “Abun.” Then I pointed at the fire again. “Irr.”
The three Draconeans looked at one another and talked in low, rapid tones. One seemed to be asking a question, and the other two encouraging it—but perhaps that was only me laying meaning atop behaviour I could not understand. Finally the one turned back to me and pointed at the fire. “Rrt.” Then it tapped a stone. “Vun.”
My heart leapt. Fire. Stone. Two tiny footholds on the slope of an unimaginably large mountain; it was a long way from those two to conversation. But it sounded, to my linguistically amateur ear, as if Suhail was right. The Draconean language was ancestral to those of southern Anthiope—which meant it was not wholly alien to me. By looking for the points of commonality, I could leverage my way up to comprehension.
You must not imagine that this epiphany unlocked everything, any more than the Cataract Stone instantly unveiled the secrets of all Draconean inscriptions. It did nothing of the sort. Being raised in the Magisterial religion, I had never studied Lashon (and now cursed that lack), but my Akhian was passable, and gave me a much better starting point than the few fragments of vocabulary Suhail had tentatively reconstructed. But of course things had changed a great deal since those ancient days; the language my host spoke was not that of its ancestors from thousands of years before. Sounds evolved into completely different sounds, following rules my husband might know, but I did not. Words hived off to mean only a single concept related to the original, while something else came in to fill the void: the Akhian word for “to weave” seemed to be a distant cousin to the modern Draconean word for “cloth,” while their “weave” was unlike anything I had heard before. Progress was excruciatingly slow.
But what else did I have with which to fill my time? Until they allowed me to leave the house, the most useful thing I could do was learn to communicate. Perhaps (I thought with another stifled giggle) I might find a place among the Society of Linguists, if the Colloquium would not have me. And although I am not talented at languages, it is amazing what one can accomplish when one has nothing else to focus on.
It is not true, though, to say I had nothing else to occupy me. One day—I assumed it was day; in truth I had no way of telling time other than by the wakefulness of the Draconeans and my own hunger—my three caretakers held a quiet and tense-looking conference, huddled in a fashion that made it clear I was not welcome, even though I could not have understood them yet. Then, stiff with obvious tension, two departed, leaving one behind.
The remaining Draconean took down my curtains and urged me to the back of the rounded room, as far from the entrance as possible. There it made a nest of the curtains for me and enacted a pantomime. I was to sit in that nest and, if someone came through the door, pull one of the curtains over myself and hide.
This was my first evidence that I was not supposed to be there at all.
I watched this Draconean closely. I had begun to tell them apart: the one who spoke to me in our halting language lessons was the tallest, with pale streaks running down the sides of its neck, and so I called it Streak. Another, with narrower shoulders, most commonly took the task of cooking, and so I dubbed it Cook. This was the smallest and stockiest of the three, and I referred to it as Wary—for of the three, it was the most obviously afraid of me.
Afraid of me! I was half a meter shorter and half its weight, with no claws or teeth to speak of, and yet it feared me. Much of their conference, I thought, had been about persuading Wary to stay with me while the other two went away. How long would they be gone?
Watching the Draconean from my nest, I realized something else. All this time, I had been observing them with a naturalist’s eye, noting conformation, coloration, behaviour. We had begun to communicate … but not yet to treat one another as people.
I caught the Draconean’s attention and pointed at myself. “Isabella.”
It stared mutely. Confused? Or too wary to speak?
To clarify, I went through the words we had established so far, naming the fire, the stones, my blanket, and more. Then I pointed at myself again. “Isabella.” This I repeated, several more times, with slow and careful enunciation. Then it was time to point at the Draconean and make an inquisitive noise.