Listening
I dreamed of my teeth gnashing of their own accord, of creeping madness rising up through my throat until it came hissing out like a puffer snake’s venom. The awful creature that had once been me still held a sword in her hand, and though sanity had long fled, still my technique was precise and smooth as I extended my arm, raised my front foot and stretched my entire body out into a long lunge that drove the point of my sword through linen shirt, past skin and muscle, slipping between ribs and deep into –
My own scream woke me. Instincts honed from a childhood of misery that had stuck with me even through those precious eighteen months I’d lived with Durral and Enna sent me springing onto my hands and feet. I rose quickly and glanced in all directions to take in the world from which sleep had briefly released me.
The corpses of the man and the woman were where I’d left them. My own body ached, both from my exertions and from the cuts and scrapes I’d taken in the fight. But I hadn’t turned into a shrieking monster.
Quadlopo stood about fifteen feet away, apparently performing an autopsy with his nose on the remains of a dried-brown shrub. A little beyond him the boy sat cross-legged, staring at me.
‘Hey, kid,’ I said. ‘How’s it goin’?’
‘Hey, kid’? What, am I turning into Durral now?
The boy gave no reply, nor did he answer when I asked his name, where he was from, or if he could understand me at all.
Maybe he’s in shock, I thought. Wouldn’t blame him if he was.
Quadlopo produced a loud whinny, which gave me my own shock. I dived to the ground to grab my grizzly sword that was sticky with the dead man’s blood and a decent dose of his brain matter. But when I got back to my feet, there were no attackers or dangers that I could see. The boy hadn’t even moved an inch.
He didn’t react to Quadlopo’s whinny at all. Is he deaf?
I knelt down and scrubbed the blade clean with sand. When it was safely back in the mapmaker’s case that I’d retrieved and slung across my back, I found the steel card I’d thrown into the crazy man’s mouth and scoured the dried blood from that too. I held it up to the sun to check that the metal was still perfectly flat and hadn’t gotten bent or warped from the dead man’s teeth. The balance on these things can be finicky.
When I was done, I walked over to Quadlopo and took some cheese and bread from the saddlebag. I then approached the boy, slowly, patiently, expecting him to jump up and try to bolt.
He didn’t.
‘Hungry?’ I asked, and offered him the bread and cheese.
He took both, sniffing the cheese awhile before deciding to gnaw on the bread instead. I sat down in front of him, crossing my legs to match his posture. I tried speaking to him in a few different languages. Pretty much nobody speaks Mahdek any more, which is my own people’s tongue. The Seven Sands borders Darome, so most folk in these parts speak a simplified version of that. Having lived as a refugee most of my life, I’d picked up a little Zhuban, some Gitabrian and just enough Jan’Tep to remind me how much I hated hearing their language. None of my attempts got a reaction.
After a few more minutes, the boy handed me back the bread. When I took it from him, he tapped a finger once on the soiled blue tunic over his heart and then on his belly.
Is that some sort of fingertongue? I thought.
A few silent languages were spoken across the continent. Most are pretty rudimentary though. Daroman soldiers learn one in order to communicate with each other when they’re trapped in enemy territory or need to avoid alerting people to their presence. Professional pickpockets have their own finger chatter that’s barely noticeable unless you watch for it. One will use it to signal the other to make a move while the first distracts the mark. The more sophisticated fingertongues are rare, and the only one I’d ever heard much about was created by an order of monks who take a vow of silence.
I glanced back at the bodies of the dead man and woman. Could they have been monks, driven to madness somehow? But what would a child too young to become a novice be doing in a monastery in the first place?
I turned back to him and offered him the cheese a second time. He declined again. I offered it to him a third time, then a fourth, until he got frustrated and tapped his forefinger first to the centre of his chest, then twice to his lips, and ended by slapping it cross-wise against the forefinger of his other hand.
Okay, I thought. Centre of the chest must mean ‘I’, lips means ‘speak’, or in this case, with the double-tap, ‘said’, and the crossed fingers means ‘no’.
I nodded to let him know I’d gotten the message, then pointed my index finger at him, then tapped my lips once, then touched the centre of my chest.
He watched closely, but did nothing at first, so I tried again. His eyes narrowed, but finally he held out his left hand palm up, rubbed a circle on it with his right hand and then spread them both apart questioningly.
‘“About what?” Is that what you’re asking?’ I signed by double-tapping my lips, then repeating the gesture of one palm rubbing a circle on the other and finishing by pointing to him.
He pursed his lips for a second, then tapped his chest, wiggled two fingers briefly – which I interpreted to mean either ‘am’ or ‘living’ or something like it – and followed it with a series of finger shapes too fast for me to follow.
I wasn’t sure how to communicate the idea that I needed him to repeat what he’d said, so instead I performed a terribly mangled version of his finger motions back at him. After a moment of staring at me like I was an idiot, he went through the set of gestures once more. I made him do it a third time, and then surprised him by signing his name back to him perfectly.
Arta loquit is the Argosi talent for eloquence. It’s not so much learning a bunch of languages as learning how to learn what other people are trying to say and how they say it. Of all the Argosi talents, it was the only one Durral admitted to not being particularly good at, and even Enna – who was good at everything – claimed to have never mastered it.
Maybe it’s because of my Mahdek heritage, and the fact that our survival depended on travelling from place to place, begging for help from anyone who would give it to us – which meant learning how to follow every subtle signal, from ‘Maybe we should help this filthy urchin’ to ‘Hey, you know what would be fun? Hanging a dirty Mahdek from a rope!’ – but I took to arta loquit much more naturally than the other talents.
In the end, it’s about listening. Listening with the ears, the eyes, and above all else, the heart.
‘Say more at me about you,’ I signed to him.
I’d had to guess at what ‘more’ might be as a hand gesture, and got it wrong, but he understood my meaning and showed me the correct sign, which was tapping first one finger, then two, then three all in quick succession against the forearm.
As the sun made its journey overhead from morning to evening, I badgered him with poorly worded questions to get him to keep signing, and gradually I picked up more and more of what I was now sure was monks’ fingertongue. By moonrise I could make some sense of most of what he said, and speak to him in short, clumsy sentences.
‘You say me your name?’ he asked. I was still having trouble making sense of how his finger gestures conveyed the subtleties of grammar.
Since the word ‘Ferius’ would’ve meant nothing to him, I tried my best to use the signs I knew to get as close as I could. After he’d made me show him three times, he laughed. It was a nice laugh, musical almost, and made me wonder if he really was deaf at all, or perhaps hadn’t always been so.
‘What –’ not knowing the word for ‘funny’ I just made a show of laughing, then signed – ‘about me name?’
Took us nearly half an hour before he was able to tell me that the signs I’d used before meant ‘good dog’. Which really was kind of funny, considering who I’d stolen my name from in the first place.
The boy’s name turned out to mean ‘Bluebird’ – which he was able to make me understand because his soiled and ragged tunic had once been blue, and it’s not hard to communicate the idea of a bird. There’s a particular species of finch, with indigo feathers, called a ‘binta’. Scholars study it because it sings only when there are no other creatures about, when it feels completely safe.
So I used the sign he’d shown me, but decided to call him Binta to myself, since it suited him, and because I hoped that maybe, if I could get him someplace secure, it might turn out that he wasn’t mute after all, but just waiting for the right time to talk.
‘Where is your mother?’ I asked.
I was discovering that there were tiny variations in the gestures allowed for communicating ideas such as ‘is’ instead of ‘was’ or ‘will be’.
Binta replied with, ‘She has gone to . . .’
I didn’t recognise the next gesture, which took a while to sort out as meaning ‘the embrace of the gods’.
‘Where is your father?’ I tried next.
Binta got to his feet and walked past me. I followed him over to the dead man. He pointed to the corpse and signed, ‘You killed him.’