Broken Crescent (15 page)

Yerith started pacing. She shook her head and chattered in her language too fast for Nate to pick up on the words he did know. She seemed to be debating something with herself. After a few moments, she looked at him, then at the shirt. She looked as if she had come to a decision.

“I bring,” she said.

Yerith did bring.

And she brought a lot.

First, she brought a worn wooden case three inches wide and about a foot long. Inside it were a pair of brushes and a small black oval that had a depression worn in the center. The set was very well used and completely unadorned.

Then she brought him a journal. It was a foot square, with a cracked leather binding, and had about a hundred pages. Except for handwritten notes on the first two pages, the rest of it was blank. The paper was thick and brown, but still seemed flexible enough that Nate wasn’t afraid to turn the pages.

Finally, she brought him books. So many books that for the first time Nate saw one of the aliens helping her with her burden. The creature didn’t enter the room, it just stood there holding the volumes in its arms as Yerith started piling books into the room.

There must have been twenty volumes of various sizes.

“I bring, you can read,” she announced.

Nate started keeping notes in the journal. Diary entries mixed with notes on the language mixed with speculations concrete and theoretical. He came up with a rough estimate that it had been between two and three months since he had arrived in this world. He was pretty certain that he was into his second month under Yerith’s charge.

Yerith’s schedule was regular for the most part. A “morning” visit and an “evening” visit. She brought him food, linens, water, took away the used chamber pots, and helped him with his language.

He occupied his days, outside the half hour or so that Yerith spent with him, continuing to exercise—running in place, doing sit-ups, chinning himself with the chains holding the lamps.

When his body was worn out, he would take the journal and one of the books, and try to read. The attempt was taxing. Trying to figure out the written language was worse, in some sense, than the physical exercise. But, unlike the spoken lessons with Yerith, his time with the text was unlimited.

He was fortunate in that the written language was phonetic, not ideographic. That meant he could tinker with it and get some idea what a novel word might sound like. Armed with that information, he could have a list of questions ready for Yerith when she came, which made the process go much more efficiently. Instead of getting one or two words a day, Nate was picking up maybe half a dozen.

He also learned that the language was tonal. The way you said a word—rising, falling, the accent—changed the word’s meaning. That was the reason behind all the strange flourishes he saw connecting distant characters in the written text. They were guides that showed how to intone the basic syllable, word, sentence, or paragraph.

Fortunately for Nate’s learning curve, the language wasn’t like Asian languages where a different tone on a syllable could give a word a completely different meaning. This language used tone to indicate the tense of a statement—which explained a number of misunderstandings he had had with Yerith. Whenever he had been asking a question, the rising tone at the end—which meant a question in English—placed the whole sentence in the historical past tense.

That was going to be a hard habit to break.

By the middle of his third month as Yerith’s charge, Nate could honestly say, “I can read.” Even if it only meant one sentence every five to fifteen minutes while referring to his growing crib sheets on Yerith’s language. He had, so far, bulled through a quarter of the first of Yerith’s books, a gardening textbook.

That was also the point where he started seriously examining the latch on the door that kept him prisoner.

When Nate felt adept enough, he asked, “Why am I kept here?”

“We keep you safe,” Yerith said. “You are not safe out there,” Yerith pointed toward the door.

“How long?” Being sequestered here was fine enough while he was recovering, but he was back to normal physically. In fact, since he had kept up with the physical regimen, he was probably in better shape now than when he had come here.

“I am waiting,” she said.

“You wait for what?” Every sentence was a struggle. He could come so close to what was in his mind, and still have to dance around it.

“A man.”

“Who?”

“His name is Arthiz.”
Godot by any other name.

“Why do you wait for him?”

“He . . .” Nate watched her struggle for a common word, before she came up with, “He leads.”

Nate frowned. In reality the only thing that made his current captivity tolerable was how it fared in comparison with the bastards who got their paws on him first. He was still a prisoner, and objectively, if it hadn’t been for his horrific initial experience, he wouldn’t be nearly as sanguine about being kept here.

However, he was becoming less inclined to wait for Yerith’s leader to come to some decision about him.

“Why do I wait for him?” Nate asked.

Yerith took a long time to respond.

“He needs you,” she finally said.

How nice.
“Why do I need him?”

She looked at him in a way that made him realize he had sacrificed a bit of mutual goodwill with that question. Nate couldn’t help it. He was stir-crazy. He needed to see the sky, smell the air.

Yerith obviously had the same frustrating time with language that Nate was having. Whatever she wanted to say couldn’t be easily put in their common vocabulary. She finally repeated, “You are not safe out there.”

It wasn’t a very satisfying answer, and she knew it. She looked at his face, then she stood up and grabbed one of the volumes that still sat by the foot of Nate’s bed.

“Read this,” she said.

That day, Nate switched from the gardening textbook to the volume that Yerith had handed him. That day, he also figured how to jimmy the door latch from the inside.

T
HE BOOK WAS local mythology, at least that’s how Nate interpreted it . . .

Yerith was obviously not an experienced jailer. Either that, or she never examined his clothing very closely.

The mechanism of the door was very simple, just a hinged iron bar that fell across the front of the door. The belt from his jeans provided Nate with the means to lift it from the inside. He just needed to loop the end of the belt and dangle it out the small window in the doorway. It took a toss or two, but he could catch the end of the bar and lift it out of its cradle.

If anything—once he decided that it wasn’t time to cut and run just yet—the mechanics of closing the thing from the inside were more difficult.

However, he managed.

After one dry run, opening and closing the door, he waited for Yerith to notice something amiss. She didn’t.