Rift in the Races (11 page)

“Look what one magician could do. Imagine nearly two thousand.”

“Well, I hope that’s how it goes. They were idiots to leave. I can’t believe how stupid my people are sometimes.”

“They certainly are willing to spend years of life in flight.”

“They’re not
all
willing,” she said. “Some are stuck. Like me. Or like I was. Which is why I’m not going back. I have no duty to those people. I never asked to be on that ship.” She didn’t like how some of that statement felt as the words settled in her heart.

Altin said nothing and stared out across the sea, letting her ruminate.

“I do have friends that I care about,” she amended after a while. “And my father, obviously. I still wish they’d just left him in charge of Little Earth. He is a ground commander after all.”

“They will need a ground commander when they reach the Hostile world,” Altin pointed out, which, of course, she already knew.

“Well, we’ll see,” she said, dismissing it. “Hopefully the Hostiles won’t find them halfway out there. Hopefully we won’t encounter them at all. Ever. Maybe there is no Hostile world. Maybe they’re space creatures and we killed them all, or scared them off. That would be best. I don’t care what the admiral thinks. The idea that keeping all eighty-nine ships together is the game-changing strategy is ridiculous. He and his war buddies, Asad the worst of them, are willing to play a numbers game with so many lives. How do they know the Hostiles can’t come up with bigger numbers too?”

“They don’t,” Altin agreed. “But even Captain Asad said your computers have worked out better cooperative strategies for managing missile flights and coordinating laser fire between ships. The wisdom gained from your battles with them before you came to Prosperion combined with the larger numbers of ships gives them a pretty good chance. Not to mention they only have to get word back to your people here, who can get word to us. We can send help.”

“That’s true. Assuming they’re not too proud and stupid to ask for it, of course.” She put her chin onto her knees. “I just wish it was done. I just want to stay here with you. And with Kettle and Nipper and little Pernie too.”

“They are good people,” Altin agreed.

“Speaking of them,” she blurted suddenly. “I almost forgot. I have a surprise for you.” She jumped to her feet then with a rather excited look upon her face. “Get up.”

He complied, looking somewhat bewildered. She reached up and pulled the gold chain he wore up and over his head.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Just watch,” she said as she unpinned her com badge. She held the two together, his golden amulet and her silvery badge. Both were enchanted with a fabulously effective spell called Greater Common Tongue which allowed the people of Prosperion and the people of Earth to understand one another. More than half the fleet officers had enchanted communicators now, and all the officers and crew of the ships being repaired at Tinpoa Base did. The magic did cause a bit of static in the com badges, but so little that everyone had soon become used to it and most never gave it a second thought.

She grinned at him as she closed her slender-fingered fist around both enchanted objects. “Wait here.”

She ran down the beach for roughly forty yards and set them on a large rock. Then she came running back, her heart pounding in her chest—not from the exercise, for she ran every day, but from nervousness. She hoped she didn’t sound a fool, or worse, like some crude, croaking old hag, for her surprise was to reveal to him that she’d taught herself to speak the common tongue of Kurr.

She’d been very careful about trying to learn as much as she could before she finally sprung it on him, and Kettle and Pernie had been a big part of teaching her. The original plan had been to reveal her secret when he finally proposed, but she’d grown impatient waiting for that, and for whatever reason the mood struck just right this day. Besides, keeping the secret was agony now that she had developed considerable mastery. And not just the words, but the accents. Or, at least, the local one, the accent of the northern parts of Kurr. She was dying to try it on him.

Learning the language challenged her far more than she’d thought it would when she’d first made up her mind to do it for herself. The difficulty was not because it was harder than any other language might have been to learn, but because learning it was made more difficult by the same magic that was making it easy to understand everyone. Everything was rendered into the language of the listener, so no one really heard the words that the other spoke. Inflection, syntax, even dialects were impossible to detect within the radius of the translation spell. Only the pitch and rhythm, the essence of the speaker’s voice, were conveyed. In Crown City and even in Calico Castle, it was impossible to escape the effects of the translation spell at all. Every officer of the Queen’s court, every officer in her military, every noble and lord had been ordered to wear a ring or a locket with the spell on it, and even that was not enough for Her Majesty. The Enchanters Guild had covered every square inch of the city with the spell, casting it on lampposts, sconces, and, on some streets, the very cobblestones. Even the parks had seen enchanters climbing about enchanting trees. The Queen was nothing if not obsessive, and when she took a mind to have a thing done thoroughly, she saw that it got done. And of course Altin and Tytamon had seen to it just as thoroughly in their home at Calico Castle as well.

Further complicating the task, she couldn’t find an unenchanted spot on Tinpoa either, because she couldn’t get any of the blank laborers they’d contracted to stop planting the Prosperion-made lamps and torches every ten feet they dug. Each oil lamp and reedy torch came to the moon already enchanted in an ongoing display of modern Prosperion efficiency, and that efficiency frustrated her to no end. Her plan to secretly learn the language should have been made simple with the benefit of so many Prosperion miners around. A pretty young woman couldn’t possibly have had difficulty finding plenty of laborers willing to share a lunch break or two speaking quietly with her, but between the mercilessly efficient production of enchanted mine supplies and a general fear of crossing the ironclad dictates of Ilbei Spadebreaker, the master miner who had been sent to supervise them, none of the miners had been willing or able to comply with her requests. So, in that, her simple plan for making at least something good come of her torturous time on Tinpoa had fallen apart.

However, clever girl that Orli was, she’d found allies in Kettle and young Pernie, the latter having helped her in secret on more than one walk taken beyond Calico Castle’s gates, and the former having dug out and given Orli a stack of Pernie’s earliest reading scrolls and children’s books. Orli picked up the sounds quickly from her two co-conspirators, if accented—though she hardly knew that herself—and from that had been able to do a great deal of work on her own.

But now it was time to try it for real. She was so nervous, her palms began to sweat.

“Hello,” she said, shaping the word carefully in her mouth. “I am Orli, and I taught myself your language.” She laughed a self-conscious laugh, then added, “I think.”

Speaking it was much harder with him standing there than it had been sitting by the creek with Pernie giggling at her mistakes. Definitely more difficult than doing it alone. She’d been practicing for this moment for months, even risking disciplinary action by leaving her com badge in her quarters and sneaking off to the bathrooms on the base to practice sheepishly in the mirror. She’d felt really comfortable with the words only just a few days ago. She watched for his reaction anxiously.

For a moment he looked confused. She thought her accent must be terrible. But then his eyes flickered off to the distant rock and back. The smile that followed brimmed with pride, and tears of joy began to glimmer in his eyes.

“You have, you have!” he proclaimed. “You speak beautifully. Speak again. Say something else, I beg of you.”

“What?” she asked, suddenly unable to think of a thing to say.

“Anything.”

“How about, I love you.”

The great chasm in the Sandsea Desert could not have contained the rhapsody that filled him then. Forgetting himself, he hugged her to him, uncaring of propriety. But then, excitedly, he pushed her away and held her back at arm’s length again. “And I love you. You are magnificent. Your words are magnificent. Listen to you. You must never stop talking.”

She laughed, and said, “Don’t be silly. Of course I can’t talk forever.” Or at least that’s what she thought she said. But not quite.

His eyes narrowed and his grin went sideways some as he repeated back what she had said. “I stocking. Don’t be a dog bait?” His grin grew, looking as if it might break free and wrap clear around his head. His throat flashed white like the belly of a fish as his head tipped back in laughter. “I’ll certainly try not to be.”

She realized she’d said something wrong and blushed.

Seeing the color come upon her sweet face, the laughter died upon his tongue, his expression somewhere between horror and shame. “No! No! Please, don’t be embarrassed. It’s brilliant what you’ve done. And somehow your voice is even more beautiful than it already was. I’m not sure how that can even be possible, but it is.” He held her firmly in his hands, stared deeply into her eyes. “You must never be ashamed. And I will help you learn the words from now on.”

She smiled, reluctantly at first, but then happily, the giddiness of the whole day returning now that the scary part of trying this had passed. She was still embarrassed, but differently, embarrassed at having thought he might judge her or laugh at her. She drew in a breath of courage and tried again, taking her time to concentrate and shape each sound. Many words in the common tongue were spelled similarly but made different by the slight changing of a sound—an emphasis on a middle syllable rather than the first and you had the difference between goat milk and a woman’s breast. Such were the things of nightmares when it came to speaking in polite company.

“It’s a beautiful language,” she said. “It’s so musical. It’s so much different when I can catch a few phrases without my com badge on. It’s wonderful when I actually understand.”

His smile continued to challenge his cheeks for acreage. “You see,” he declared. “You got that all entirely correct.” He couldn’t hide his teeth if he had tried. “How did you manage it?”

She blushed again, this time with happiness. “I scanned as much as I could into our language banks on the ship. I had Pernie’s lessons and a few books Kettle found for me. That helped get me started. Pernie and Kettle did the rest.”

“It’s wonderful. How much do you know?”

“Based on what I scanned in and entered verbally, our ship’s computer modeled a vocabulary test that estimates me to be at around twenty-eight hundred words. It calculates I will probably only miss out on about twenty percent of what you say. But the program is still creating itself at this point, so without a native speaker to go through it, it’s hard to say how accurate that is.” The words came more smoothly now as her initial nervousness gave way, though the laughter she emitted as she spoke was not without some remnant jitteriness.

“Your voice gives this old language a new melody I didn’t know it needed,” he said, piecing together the gist of what she said and unwilling to comment on a few incorrectly spoken words. He knew close enough what she meant, and she’d gotten all the numbers right, even if he didn’t quite know what they added up to. “It’s as if I’ve been walking through Great Forest all my life and only now can I hear the wind blowing through the leaves.”

That made her smile as wide as his, but she said nothing.

“And your accent is unbelievable. And here I was, sure you couldn’t possibly be any more incredible, and now you have surpassed yourself once again. Will you continue this onslaught on my heart until I burst inside?”

“Yes,” she said. “That is my plan. To burst you from within with the mass of your yeast for me.”

At least that’s what he heard. A bit farther off than her last attempt had been, this time he could not stay the puzzlement before she saw it in his eyes. She thought about what she’d said and frowned, thinking hard on what she could have missed.

“I think you meant adoration,” he coached, gently. “Our word for adoration sounds a lot like yeast if you don’t stress the first hard consonant.”

She looked as if she might pout. “I can see romance and humor are going to be hard to pull off in this language for a while.”

“Perhaps,” he said. “But if you intend to burst me from within with the mass of my adoration for you, I believe I must succumb any day, regardless of what you say.”

“Well hurry up then,” she said. “I’m looking forward to picking up all the meaty parts after you explode and feeding them to Taot. Then I will steal him and keep him for myself, my very own dragon to ride whenever I want.”

“See,” he said, hands out, palms up as if presenting her with an award. “You said that perfectly.” He paused, then added, “And, for what it’s worth, you can have that dirty old lizard right now if you’d like him.” He laughed and added, “If you only knew.”

“Only knew what?”

“I’ll be drawn and quartered before I utter aloud the things that beast’s mind conjures. And there’s no point asking me again; I shan’t tell you. Ever.”

“But what about the sweet melody of my voice? Surely that must have some power to pry it out of you.”