It is difficult to tell the story of that winter among the Draconeans. I kept no journal during my time there (lacking a notebook to keep it in, or a pen with which to write). Even if I had, I could not tell you when and how I learned everything; too much of it seeped into my head by some osmotic process, assembled from a hundred little clues until one day I knew a thing, without ever quite having been told it. Even when my education was more overt, it is difficult to recall the sequence and cause. Certain details are vital enough to this tale that I will keep them in their proper places; but for the rest, I shall let them fall where they may, without undue concern for chronology.
My progress often felt painfully slow—in part because it was, and in part because it came not in grand leaps, but by small degrees. There was no moment at which I began having conversations with Ruzt. We started with the vocabulary of my immediate environment, progressed to basic verbs, muddled through the fundamentals of grammar by a great deal of trial and even more error, and by the end could tackle some abstract concepts through extensive circumlocution—all of which was great progress over where I began, but it happened so slowly that at times I doubted it was happening at all.
That I achieved so much success I largely attribute to my husband’s brilliant deduction, connecting Draconean to the languages of southern Anthiope. Familiar though I was with the concept of evolution, I was not in the habit of applying it to languages; and on my own, I do not know if I would have looked for the patterns that would allow me to extrapolate from the tongue I knew to the tongue I did not. (There is, of course, a hazard in leaning too heavily upon such analogies: I spoke very Akhian-flavored Draconean, as I instinctively defaulted to the grammar of the more familiar language whenever my attention wandered.) But with that theory in hand, I could apply my naturalist’s mind to the problem, and after a while I was able to make educated guesses as to Draconean words I had not yet learned. These were rarely correct, but they often led me toward the proper word by a faster road.
The remainder of my success is due to Ruzt. If we, analogizing to biological evolution, think of Lashon and Akhian as the domestic housecat and the lion—differing in a variety of respects, but obviously near relations—then the modern Draconean tongue is like a dog: still derived from a common ancestor, from whom all three languages have inherited some important characteristics, but much more widely separated by millennia of change. Fortunately for me, Ruzt spoke what I eventually recognized as an older, religious form of the language, comparable to Scriptural Lashon; this lay much closer to the ancient roots than their modern tongue. The language she spoke with Kahhe and Zam contained a vast number of words that I suspect derived from another tongue entirely—perhaps a human language, though it did not, to my amateur ear, appear to be Nying or Tser-zhag.
Despite this, I learned a few things, beginning with the shift my alert readers may have noticed already: my hosts were in fact hostesses. Ruzt, Kahhe, and Zam were three sisters, which is the typical household arrangement among the Draconeans. Males are fewer in number, but rather than following the polygamous structure a human society might assume, the Draconeans practice no real marriage at all. Their males live together, in several larger buildings where they are sorted according to their age group, while sister-groups maintain independent houses. They consider the sibling bond to be much more significant than the parental one, and the sororal more significant than the fraternal.
Imsali was not the only village in the region. On a clear day I could see smoke arising in other places around the Sanctuary—for that was how I came to think of the basin that encircled the great central peak, known to the Draconeans as Anshakkar. The ring of mountains surrounding it (of which Gyaptse and Cheja are but two) is nearly impassible; the col by which I entered is one of the lowest points in that ring, and as you have seen, it is not easy to traverse. Mountaineers may scale it, of course—but it is only in recent history that mountaineers have begun to frequent the region, people well equipped for the climbing of ridges and peaks, and motivated less by the search for new pastures or arable land or even trading routes than by the desire to conquer untrammeled terrain. For the inhabitants on all sides, the way is too forbidding to be worthwhile. What good would it do to enter such a place? Departure is too difficult; anyone who lived within would be isolated from the world without.
But the land inside is hospitable—at least by Mrtyahaiman standards of hospitality. The valleys are quite deep, and at most times of year the surrounding mountains block enough of the wind to make the interior relatively pleasant. Farming is possible, and the herding of yaks; and while humans would find it quite hard going, the Draconeans, with the advantage of their adaptable biology, made do quite well.
How had they come to be there? Speculation alone could not tell me, but my command of the language did not yet suffice to address such abstract, complex topics. I had a strong suspicion that, as I had theorized before, folk memory in Tser-nga preserved knowledge of the Draconeans—for surely these were the “ice demons” feared by the people of Hlamtse Rong. Had they dwelt here since ancient times? Nothing in their architecture reminded me of the ruins I had seen in other parts of the world … but of course it would be absurdly difficult to build such things in a place like this. For one mad moment, I wondered if the inhabitants of the Sanctuary even knew that the larger Draconean civilization had fallen thousands of years before, far outside their isolated home.
Had I been able to explore, I might have learned more, and more rapidly. Three things, however, militated against my departing from Imsali. First, of course, was my own weakness and injury, though in time I overcame that issue. The second was that although it does not snow as heavily in the winter as during the monsoon, it does still snow; and winter is the primary season for the wind to come howling through.
The third is that we were not alone in that place.
In our village, yes. (If I may be permitted to term it “our village,” when I was only a temporary guest there.) But as it transpired, each of the villages within the Sanctuary had its own set of yak caretakers. This I discovered one day when Kahhe swooped down and bundled me straight back into the barn, without so much as a by-your-leave.
I do mean swooped. On that day I discovered that, while Draconean wings cannot support full flight, they are sufficient for a degree of gliding. Kahhe landed before me in the snow, clapped one scaled hand over my mouth, and hauled me bodily through the doorway. It is a mark of how much I had come to trust the sisters that after my first, muffled yelp of surprise, I made no protest at all. If she felt I needed to be removed from sight, I assumed it was for my own protection—and so it was.