New Novel
Chapter 13: A Language Without Words

Chapter 13: A Language Without Words

The blood trail ended under a roof made of reeds.

The shelter had been built against a fallen trunk and dressed with living fronds. Leon would have walked past it from two metres away, and he was looking for it.

Tala went in first.

A young man was sitting inside with his back to the wood, holding a short spear across his lap despite the blood soaking through the woven wrap around his left calf.

When he saw Leon, the spear moved toward Leon before the injured leg moved away.

Pain won that argument. He hissed and nearly went over sideways.

Tala caught his shoulder. They exchanged rapid words, and Leon recognised exactly one sound.

"Aru."

The injured man replied with what was almost certainly a complaint.

Tala pointed at Leon’s medical pouch. Aru looked at the pouch, then at Leon, and said something that made her mouth go flat.

Leon did not need a translation to recognise scepticism delivered as an insult.

"Reasonable," he said.

He crouched down outside spear range and pointed at the bloodied wrap.

Aru pulled the leg closer.

So Leon opened the pouch slowly and laid the contents out on a clean fold of cloth where both of them could see it. Gloves. Saline. Gauze. Antiseptic. Elastic wrap. Splinting material. Pain relief. A small flashlight.

Tala picked up the sealed saline bottle, squeezed it once, was visibly startled by flexible plastic, and held it out toward him with a question in her face.

Leon mimed washing the wound.

Aru shook his head.

So Leon pointed at the blood, drew a tiny creature in the dirt, multiplied it into a dozen, and drew them going into the cut.

The result looked like an army of angry potatoes.

Tala understood danger, if not microbiology, and knelt beside Aru and spoke to him in a tone that did not invite democratic review.

Aru surrendered the leg.

Leon put on gloves.

It was a deep laceration along the outer calf, not a bite — two roughly parallel cuts that had opened skin and muscle without exposing bone. Plant fragments and dark mud in the wound bed. Steady bleeding, not arterial. The foot was warm. Colour came back fast when he pressed the toenail. Sensation was present all the way to the toes.

"Good," Leon said.

Aru misread the tone and relaxed.

"This will still hurt."

That part translated itself.

He took off the dirty wrap and irrigated under pressure. Aru’s hands closed white around the spear shaft. Tala pinned his thigh with one forearm and kept talking to him in the same unhurried voice she had used to tell him he was wrong.

The first rinse carried out mud, plant fibre, and a small black thorn.

Leon examined the wound edges with the flashlight. Irregular. Contaminated. Everything in him wanted to close it, because a closed wound looks finished, and a packed wound looks like a job half done — and closing a contaminated field wound would seal the bacteria inside and produce precisely the confidence-driven disaster the emergency physician in Munich had spent an entire evening warning him about.

He irrigated again, put antiseptic around the wound rather than deep into the tissue, packed it lightly with sterile gauze, and dressed it to drain.

Before the dressing went on, Tala offered him a dark green paste in a bone container. Leon smelled resin, bitter leaves, and a sulphurous note he could not place. She touched a little to an old scar on her own forearm and mimed skin closing.

He was not going to put an unknown compound deep into a contaminated wound because it was traditional. He was also not going to wave it away, because the woman offering it had kept people alive here for her entire life and he had been on this continent for four hours.

So he put a small sample into a sterile container, labelled it with her pronunciation, and used the paste only on an intact patch of skin nearby, where he could watch for an immediate reaction.

Tala accepted the compromise after a long stare.

It was the first scientific collaboration of Leon’s new life. It was conducted without a single shared sentence, under the supervision of an injured man who kept pointing at the paste as though he expected somebody to feed it to him.

Local materials. Local expert. Written down.

Leon cut two straight reed lengths for a splint. Tala rejected the first pair, pulled stronger stems out of the shelter frame, and showed him where they flexed naturally and where they would snap. He padded it, fixed it either side of the calf, and left the knee and the ankle where he could see them.

Aru attempted to stand.

He failed before Leon needed any language to tell him not to.

Tala said one word twice. Aru answered with a whole sentence. Tala said the word a third time.

Aru lay back down.

Leon wrote the sound in his notebook. Na.

No. Possibly no, or stop, or lie down, or Tala has spoken and civilisation is over.

He held up the saline bottle. "Kesh?"

Tala shook her head. She touched the bottle and made a pouring motion.

"Aru."

Water.

Then she touched the filter hanging off his pack. "Keth."

He wrote both down, and wrote the second one the way he had been saying it since the ledge.

Leon looked at the injured young man lying two feet away, and then back at the bottle, and then at Tala.

"Aru?" he said, pointing at the water.

"Ei."

He pointed at the young man with the splinted leg. "Aru?"

"Ei."

Aru raised one hand and waved it cheerfully.

Leon wrote in his notebook: aru = water. Also Aru = Aru. Resolve later.

Half the children born on this stretch of river probably carried some form of it. The boy whose calf he had just packed with sterile gauze had been named for the thing that fed the settlement and occasionally tried to drown it.

Aru watched the pencil with open fascination. He pointed at the mark, then at the water bottle, then at his own chest, and looked extremely satisfied with himself.

Leon nodded.

Aru pointed at a blank part of the page and said a word.

Leon drew the spear.

Aru laughed, and then immediately regretted what laughing did to his leg.

The lesson went on. Spear. Hand. Fire. Blood. Foot. Eat. Danger. Wait.

Leon was not learning grammar. He was collecting handles.

By the time the sunlight had moved across the reed roof they had thirty-two shared sounds and six gestures that worked without context. Tala corrected his pronunciation without mercy. Aru invented false words whenever he got bored, which Leon only detected by watching Tala hit his shoulder.

Humour had survived prehistory. Leon found that more encouraging than he could easily justify.

He offered them both a ration bar.

Tala smelled hers, broke off a fragment, and waited until Leon had eaten first. Aru bit off far too much, discovered the density, and spent a full minute chewing with the expression of a man reconsidering his rescue.

He said something.

Tala translated it with one of their new gestures. Bad.

"It was designed by nutritionists," Leon said. "Flavour would have compromised the data."

Aru pointed at the bar and said the word for made-thing.

"Close enough," Leon said.

The blood had stopped. The larger problem had not.

Aru could not walk quickly. The Utahraptor had gone south, and nobody in the shelter behaved as though that guaranteed anything.

Tala drew a map in the dirt. A curved line for the river. A circle of upright marks beside it — Reed River, Leon assumed, or whatever it was actually called. Their shelter to the west. And between them and the river, she drew a long shape with jaws.

Leon pointed at it.

She touched two fingers to her eyes, then flattened her hand at water level.

Something that watches from the water. Crocodilian. Given the length she had drawn, a large one, and he decided not to trust the drawing’s scale in either direction.

Aru pointed north instead. Tala rejected that route with the gesture for danger and drew three hooked toes in the dirt.

So. The direct route crossed water. The northern route crossed the predator’s ground. And Aru could not move fast enough for either of them.

Leon pointed at the shelter, then put a hand over his closed eyes.

Tala nodded once. They would stay until morning.

He did not like the drainage. The shelter sat in a shallow depression behind the fallen trunk, cloud was building over the western ridge, and the humidity had changed in the last hour. The air had gone sharper.

In Germany the slope would have been a minor runoff concern. In a world whose rainfall he had been observing for one afternoon, minor was an adjective waiting to become past tense.

He pointed at the ground and mimed water rising.

Tala went and looked outside. She touched the soil. She turned over a leaf and studied the underside. She watched the small flying insects moving under the canopy for a while.

Then she shook her head.

Not rain. Or not enough rain to matter.

Leon trusted atmospheric reasoning. Tala trusted a lifetime of local signs. On the balance of available evidence, local signs got priority — and he cut a shallow diversion trench uphill with the entrenching tool anyway, because trusting somebody is not the same as removing your own hedge.

Tala reinforced the roof edge with overlapping broad leaves. Aru took responsibility for advice nobody had requested.

While they worked, Leon pointed at her. "Tala."

Then at the braided cord on her arm. "Reth Aru."

She corrected him. "Retha."

Leon stopped with the pencil above the page.

Reth. Aru. He had heard two words on a limestone ledge and guessed Reed River out of nothing but the cord on her arm and the direction of her hand, and he had been right, and he had been right for entirely the wrong reasons.

He wrote both forms down and put a mark beside the guess, because a correct answer arrived at by accident is not knowledge. It is only luck wearing knowledge’s coat, and he had spent two years of his life learning to tell the difference.

She drew water, then tall reeds, then several people.

Reed River people.

Leon pointed at the young man. "Aru. Retha?"

Aru nodded, then touched his own chest. "Aru." He put two fingers together, drew the outline of a woman, and said, "Nara." Then he touched his chest again. "Aru Nara."

Aru, child of Nara.

Leon looked at Tala with the question on his face.

She gave him her name and the word for the river people, and nothing else. No parent. No second fixed name.

He touched his own chest. "Leon."

Then he drew two adults and a child, pointed at the adults, used their new words for mother and father, and wrote FALKNER underneath all three figures.

Tala watched the pencil.

He tapped each figure in turn, then the written word. "Falkner."

Aru frowned. He pointed at the three figures and made the gesture for one.

"One people," Leon said. "One name, carried down."

It did not cross.

And why would it? Their identities already carried everything that mattered here — the individual, the parent, the tribe, the place, the thing you had done. A permanent inherited label has no obvious function in a society where everybody already knows who your mother is.

Leon shut the notebook.

It would matter later. When villages became towns. When property crossed a generation. When records had to outlive the people who remembered. When two men called Aru turned up at the same grain store on the same morning with the same claim.

Today a surname was worth considerably less than a dry place to sleep.

A horn sounded from the direction of the river.

One long note. Two short.

Tala went completely still.

Aru stopped being amused.

The horn repeated.

She pointed toward the river and used three words Leon already had.

People.

Water.

Danger.