CHAPTER EIGHTY

Tone

T HE NEXT DAY MARTEN left with Hespe and Dedan while Tempi and I remained behind to keep an eye on the camp.

With nothing else to occupy my time, I started gathering extra firewood. Then I searched for useful herbs in the undergrowth and brought water from the nearby spring. Then I busied myself by unpacking, sorting, and rearranging everything in my travelsack.

Tempi disassembled his sword, meticulously cleaning and oiling all the pieces. He didn’t look bored, but then again, he never looked like anything.

By midday I was nearly mad with boredom. I would have read, but I hadn’t brought a book. I would have sewn pockets into my threadbare cloak, but I didn’t have any spare cloth. I would have played my lute, but a trouper’s lute is designed to carry music through a noisy taproom. Out here, the sound of it could carry for miles.

I would have chatted with Tempi, but trying to have a conversation with him was like playing catch with a well.

Still, it seemed to be my only option. I walked over to where Tempi sat. He had finished cleaning his sword and was making small adjustments to the leather grip. “Tempi?”

Tempi lay aside his sword and came to his feet. He stood uncomfortably close to me, with barely more than eight inches of space between us. Then he hesitated and frowned. It wasn’t much of a frown, barely a thinning of the lips and a slight line between his eyebrows, but on Tempi’s blank sheet of a face, it stood out like a word written in red ink.

He backed away from me by two good paces, then eyed the ground between us and stepped forward slightly.

Understanding dawned on me. “Tempi, how close do Adem stand?”

Tempi looked at me blankly for a second, then burst out laughing. A shy smile flickered onto his face, making him look very young. It left his mouth quickly, but lingered around his eyes. “Smart. Yes. Different in Adem. For you, close.” He stepped uncomfortably close, then backed away.

“For me?” I asked. “Is it different for different people?”

He nodded. “Yes.”

“How close for Dedan?”

He fidgeted. “Complicated.”

I felt a familiar curiosity flicker up inside me. “Tempi,” I asked. “Would you teach me these things? Teach me your language?”

“Yes,” he said. And though his face betrayed none of it, I could hear a great weight of relief in his voice. “Yes. Please. Yes.”

* * *

By the end of the afternoon, I had learned a wild, useless scattering of Ademic words. The grammar was still a mystery, but that is how it always begins. Luckily, languages are like musical instruments: the more you know, the easier it is to pick up new ones. Ademic was my fourth.

Our major problem was that Tempi’s Aturan was not very good, which gave us little common ground. So we drew in the dirt, pointed, and waved our hands quite a bit. Several times, when mere gestures were not enough, we ended up performing something close to pantomime or little mummer’s plays in order to get our meaning across. It was more entertaining than I had expected.

There was one stumbling block the first day. I had learned a dozen words and thought of another that would be useful. I made a fist and pretended to throw a punch at Tempi.

“Freaht,” he said.

“Freaht,” I repeated.

He shook his head. “No. Freaht .”

“Freaht,” I said carefully.

“No,” he said firmly. “Freaht is . . .” He bared his teeth and worked his jaw as if he were biting something. “Freaht .” He punched his fist into his palm.

“Freaht,” I said.

“No.” I was amazed at the weight of condescension in his voice. “Freaht.”

My face got hot. “That’s what I’m saying. Freaht! Freaht! Fre—”

Tempi reached out and smacked me in the side of the head with the flat of his hand. It was the same way he had struck Dedan last night, the way my father had cuffed me when I was being troublesome in public. It wasn’t hard enough to hurt, it was just startling. No one had done that to me in years.

Even more startling was that I hardly saw it. The motion was smooth and lazy and faster than snapping your fingers. He didn’t seem to mean anything insulting by it. He was merely getting my attention.

He lifted his sandy hair and pointed to his ear. “Hear,” he said firmly. “Freaht.” He bared his teeth again, making a biting motion. “Freaht.” Raised fist. “Freaht . Freaht.”

And I did hear it. It wasn’t the sound of the word itself, it was the cadence of the word. “Freaht?” I said.

He favored me with a small, rare smile. “Yes. Good.”

Then I had to go back and relearn all the words, making note of their rhythm. I hadn’t really heard it before, just mimicked it. Slowly, I discovered each word could have several different meanings depending on cadence of the sound that composed them.

I learned the all-important phrases “What does that mean?” and “Explain that more slowly,” in addition to a couple dozen words: Fight. Look. Sword. Hand. Dance. The dumbshow I had to perform to get him to understand the last of these left both of us laughing.

It was fascinating. The differing cadences of each word meant the language itself had a sort of music to it. I couldn’t help but wonder . . .

“Tempi?” I asked. “What are your songs like?” He looked at me blankly for a moment, and I thought he might not understand the abstract question. “Could you sing me an Adem song?”

“What is song?” he asked. In the last hour, Tempi had learned twice as many words as I had.

I cleared my throat and sang:

Little Jenny no-shoes went a-walking with the wind.

She was looking for a bonny boy to laugh and make her grin.

Upon her head a feather cap, upon her lips a whistle.

Her lips were wet and honey sweet. Her tongue was sharp as thistle.

Tempi’s eyes went wide as I sang. He practically gaped.

“You?” I prompted, pointing to his chest. “Can you sing an Adem song?”

His face flushed a burning red, and a dozen emotions ran wild and undisguised over his face: astonishment, horror, embarrassment, shock, disgust. He got to his feet, turning away and chattering something in Ademic far too quickly for me to follow. He looked for all the world as if I’d just asked him to strip naked and dance for me.

“No,” he said, managing to collect himself somewhat. His face was composed again, but his fair skin was still flushed a violent red. “No.” Looking down at the ground, he touched his chest, shaking his head. “No song. No Adem song.”

I got to my feet as well, not knowing what I’d done wrong. “Tempi. I’m sorry.”

Tempi shook his head. “No. Nothing sorry.” He drew a deep breath and shook his head as he turned and started to walk away. “Complicated.”

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 610