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Chapter 22: What He Could Not Say

Chapter 22: What He Could Not Say

They let him sleep, which was how he knew it was serious.

Leon woke on the fourth morning to grey light through a reed roof and the particular silence of people who have been waiting a while and have decided not to wake you. Tala sat against the doorframe with her spear across her knees. Kharun stood outside with his arm still bound to his chest, watching the eastern trail.

Neither of them had come to accuse him of anything.

That was considerably worse than if they had.

His left palm had stiffened overnight. He opened and closed the hand twice, felt the thorn cuts pull under Nayra’s dressing, and got up.

Tala pointed at the cube on his belt. Then she touched her own face, eyes then mouth, and produced an expression that was recognisably, insultingly, an imitation of his.

You looked like that. Explain.

"Right," Leon said, and went to get the charcoal.

He drew on a board, because paper was finite and this was going to take several attempts.

A man. Then a machine, crude and boxy, with the cube inside it. Then the sun crossing the sky many times. He drew twelve arcs, gave up, and drew a long line with marks along it instead. Then the man again, standing on the far side of that line, in the middle of the marks.

Then the eastern horizon.

Then a question mark, which meant nothing to either of them, so he rubbed it out and drew the man with both hands open and empty.

Kharun looked at the board for a long time. Then he pointed at the first figure, and at Leon, and made the sign for the same.

"Na," Leon said. No.

He drew the two men side by side with a line between them. Then he touched the cube, and touched both figures, and drew a line from the machine to each of them.

The same machine. Two men.

Tala understood first, and he watched it land — not as information, but as the answer to a question she had been carrying since a limestone ledge four days ago. She had asked him where his people were. He had put a hand flat over his heart and pointed behind himself, and she had decided that meant they were dead.

She said something short to Kharun.

Kharun’s expression did not move at all, which by now Leon recognised as the man thinking hard.

Then he asked the only question that mattered, and he asked it in four words and one gesture, and Leon understood every part of it.

He pointed east. Then at Leon. Then he made the walking sign.

Do you go?

And there it was, in charcoal, in front of two people who had fed him and pulled a predator off his trail and set his hand and put him behind a wall.

East, there was a man who had built the machine. Who knew what an anchor lattice was. Who had been here for decades and had built something with schools in it, if that pulse on the map meant anything at all. Every question Leon had was sitting in one place out there, and he had a working body, forty words and a direction.

Behind him there was an opened palisade, eleven days of missing grain, a retaining wall lying in the mud, a man who would not walk until the dry season, and a hundred and seventy people who had absorbed a stranger during the worst week of their year and had never once made him sleep outside the wall.

He was aware, with some irritation, that a year ago he would already have been walking.

"Na," he said.

Tala’s eyebrows went up.

Kharun did not react, so Leon said it again, louder, and pointed at the settlement. The platforms. The smoke racks. The broken northern slope, and the test frame still standing on its legs.

"Na. Here."

Then he pointed east and held up one hand, palm out.

Later. Not now.

Kharun looked at him for a while. Then he came over, took the charcoal out of Leon’s hand, and drew one more thing on the board.

A figure walking east. Alone. At night.

He scrubbed it out with his thumb, pointed at Leon, and said one word Leon did not know and did not need.

Don’t.

"I won’t."

Kharun nodded once, gave back the charcoal, and went to inspect the frame across the palisade gap.

Tala stayed where she was.

"You did not say," she said, or something that shape, four words and a flat hand turned over.

"I could not say."

He opened the notebook to the vocabulary page and turned it toward her so she could see the length of the list. Thirty-eight words. Six gestures. Two of the words were insults.

Tala looked at the page. Then she took the charcoal, drew a very small mark on the board, and beside it a much larger one.

This is what you can say. This is what you know.

"Yes."

She tapped the small mark twice, hard, and pointed at herself.

Then we fix this one first.

It was the most useful sentence anybody had said to him since he arrived, and neither of them had spoken a word of it.

The council took the middle of the day, and it went badly, which he had not expected.

It began well enough. Veya ran it from the platform with the cord already carrying nine new knots. Kharun took defence. The grey-haired builder took the northern slope. His name turned out to be Oren, delivered with an impatient gesture suggesting Leon should have asked three days ago. Two fishing crews had gone out before dawn to start making up the grain.

The modules were straightforward. Everything stayed on the raised platform under the pottery-and-token system, and nothing left a case without Veya’s cord recording it. Leon proposed one change and she took it: dangerous items got a deep cross cut into the shard rather than a scratch, so a person could tell by touch in the dark whether they were holding something that would kill them. The quarantined cell got three crosses, a stake fence, and a child assigned to shout at anybody who went near it, which Leon privately judged the most effective safety system in the settlement.

Then Veya put her hand flat on the closed laptop case and asked a question of about nine words, of which he understood see, who, and choose.

He had been thinking about it since the lamp came on, so he drew instead of arguing.

He drew the archive as a store platform, because a store was the only container these people already had rules about. Then the four things you do with a store: put in, take out, count, and decide who holds the key.

Veya tapped the fourth one with the end of her staff. "Ei."

The rules they built were crude and Leon would have been embarrassed to show them to anybody from his own century, which was probably why they worked. Nothing opened for entertainment. Anything shown to more than three people at once went to the council first. Anyone could ask for a thing to be looked up, and the asking was recorded whether the answer arrived or not — That was Nayra’s condition, and the one he had not thought of, because a record of what people want to know is a different and more dangerous document than a record of what they were told.

Then Kharun added his.

Nothing from the archive was to be shown to anyone from outside Retharu without the full council sitting.

Leon said yes before he understood it, and then, because it had been an unusually honest morning, asked why.

He did it badly. He pointed at the archive, then out past the palisade, then turned both hands up.

Veya answered.

She said four sentences, and the only word he caught was one he had never heard before, and she said it twice.

Rothen.

He did not know it. He knew what it did to the platform.

Oren stopped moving. One of the storage keepers looked at the ground. The woman from the children’s platforms said something very fast and very short, and Veya let it stand without answering.

Kharun’s hand had gone to the strap of the sling, not the spear, which somehow made it worse.

"Rothen," Leon repeated.

Nobody corrected his pronunciation, and Luma corrected everybody’s pronunciation.

Tala made a gesture he had seen twice before, the flat hand pushed away, the one for a route not taken. Then, when he kept looking at her, she added a second one he had not seen at all. She held up four fingers, closed them, and opened them again as five.

More than there were.

Leon looked around the platform at eleven adults who between them ran the water, the food, the defence, the record, the sick and the dead, and understood that he had just walked into the middle of a conversation these people had been having since before he fell out of the sky.

He wrote the word down.

Underneath it he wrote: ask nobody. wait until somebody says it again.

Then he closed the notebook, because Veya was watching his hand, and had been watching it for some time.

He started the register in the afternoon, in the shade of the council platform, with Tala and Aru and eventually half the settlement’s children.

One page per animal. Native name at the top, in the sounds he could manage, checked twice with Tala. A drawing. Then behaviour, in the words he had. Where it goes, what it eats, when it is dangerous, how you know it is close.

And at the bottom, small, in a corner he marked off with a single line, the name his own world had given to a shape in a rock.

Dorkesh. And beneath it, half the size: Styracosaurus?

Tala pointed at the small writing and asked what it was.

Leon thought about how to say it with thirty-eight words.

He pointed at the drawing, then at his own head, then made the gesture for far, the one from the ledge, the one that meant a place she could not see.

Then he turned his hand over, the way she had that morning.

Maybe. I was told. I did not see.

Tala considered the small writing for a while. Then she reached over, took the charcoal, and drew a mark beside his. A short curved line, the one the scouts used on a trail when a track had gone old enough that they were no longer certain what had made it.

Leon looked at it.

The Retha already had a symbol for this is a guess.

He had been about to invent one.

He copied her mark onto every Earth name in the register, and then, after a moment, onto four of the behaviours he had written that morning from memory rather than from watching, and the page became more honest and considerably less impressive.

Aru pointed at the marked entries and laughed at him.

"Yes," Leon said. "Thank you. That is the entire point."

Nayra came for him as the light was going.

She did not say anything. She took his sleeve, which she had never done, and he was on his feet before he finished registering it.

The child was four years old and belonged to one of the storage families, and she was lying on a mat with her knees drawn up and her eyes half closed, and Leon had seen that exact posture three days ago on a riverbank.

He crouched. The skin on the back of her hand went down slowly. Her mouth was dry.

"Aru," he said. Water. He looked round for the storage jar.

Nayra was already shaking her head. She was holding out the marked jar with the pale clay stripe on it, and her other hand was making the sign for fire.

Esh-aru.

The child had been drinking the boiled water. Only the boiled water. Nayra had been counting her cups for two days.

Leon looked at the jar in her hands, and at the child on the mat, and understood that his method was wrong, or incomplete, or being defeated by a route he had not thought to close.

Outside, somebody at the smoke racks began to cough.