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Chapter 30: Who Taught You

Chapter 30: Who Taught You

Boro repeated the formula.

He did it the way a man repeats something to a foreigner who has interrupted his morning: slower, louder, with the same faint irritation Leon’s own mother used on people who asked her to say her name again.

The whole thing took about twenty seconds. Most of it was in his own dialect and Leon understood four words of it.

And in the middle, unchanged, in the same rhythm, in the same breath, with the same hand movement attached:

"Wa-ta ess safe. Do no ope-na do-ah. Wai fo da light."

The vowels had been walking for a very long time. The consonants had lost their edges. The word water had gone soft in the middle the way words do when they have been passed from a mouth to an ear to a mouth for a hundred years without ever once being written down.

It was English.

Leon sat down on the trail.

He did it without deciding to. His legs took the decision at some level below the one he was operating on, and the ground came up, and he sat in the mud of a river path two hundred million years from the nearest place anybody had agreed what those sounds meant, and he could not get his breathing to do the thing it was supposed to do.

Boro looked down at him with mild concern and considerable impatience.

Tala arrived at a run and stopped when she saw that nobody was bleeding.

"Again," Leon said. In Rethari. To an old man he had asked to stop on a path.

Boro said it again.

It came out identical. Not similar. Identical — the same eleven syllables, the same stress pattern, the same tiny pause before the last three words. He was not translating anything. He was not thinking about it. He was reciting, exactly the way Leon’s grandmother had recited a prayer she had learned at six and had never once considered the grammar of.

"Again."

Boro said something to Tala that Leon did not catch, and Tala said something back that was clearly a defence of him, and Boro sighed and said it a third time.

Leon wrote it down.

He wrote it phonetically first, in the notation he used for Rethari, because that was the only honest way to record a sound. Then he wrote what he thought it was underneath. Then, after a moment, he wrote a fourth line under that, which was what it meant, and he looked at all four lines together on a bark sheet in the mud.

Water is safe.

Do not open the door.

Wait for the light.

Understand what he had.

Not a language. Boro did not speak English. Boro did not know it was a language. Leon established that in about four minutes, using Luma, who came down the trail with the look of a woman who has been told the foreigner is having an incident.

The formula was a crossing-word. You said it at a particular kind of place, before a particular kind of trade, and it meant I come in the proper way and I am not a danger to you. Boro’s people had said it for as long as anybody could count. It had no parts. You did not say half of it. It was one thing, like a knot.

Leon asked what the sounds meant.

Boro’s answer, through Luma, was the most frustrating sentence he had heard on this continent: it means the thing it does.

And that was correct. That was exactly what it meant, to him, and had always meant, and it was the same answer a European would give if a stranger asked what how do you do was literally asking about.

"Does he know the words are separate?"

Luma tried it three ways. Boro looked at her as if she had asked whether the individual bristles in a broom had names.

Then Leon made his mistake, and it was the good kind.

He said the formula back.

He said it in his own accent, in modern English, cleanly, the way it had been said by whoever taught it first — water is safe, do not open the door, wait for the light — and he watched it hit an old trader on a river path like a thrown stone.

Boro went white around the mouth.

He stepped back, and put his staff between them, and said three words very fast, and Tala’s spear came off her shoulder in the same second, and Leon put both hands out flat with his heart going.

"Na. Na. Friend. Na."

It took Luma five minutes.

The problem was not that Leon had said the words. The problem was that he had said them correctly, in the sense that Boro’s people had a tradition about that: the formula belongs to the crossings, and there is a saying attached to it, and the saying is that if you ever hear it said the old way you are speaking to somebody who came from the place it came from.

Nobody had ever heard it said the old way.

It was, Luma explained carefully, a thing you told children.

Leon sat with that for a while.

Somewhere in the chain, a hundred years back, somebody had taught these words to somebody who did not speak the language, and had known they would be mangled, and had built a rule around them anyway. If you ever meet a man who says this properly, he is one of ours.

That was not a prayer. That was a password.

And somebody had designed it.

"Who taught you?"

He had the words for that now. He had had them since the twenty-sixth day. Who and teach, with the ending that asks for a chain rather than a single answer, which Luma had drilled into him because Rethari cared about that distinction and he had kept getting it wrong.

Boro answered.

He answered at length, without hesitation, in the flat rhythm of a man reciting something he has recited before — and Leon, who had been in this world for thirty days and owned fifty-two words, understood almost none of it.

He caught mother. He caught mother again. He caught a place-name he did not know, and a second place-name, and a word that might have been river or might have been the name of a river, and then a long run of syllables with the inherited-tradition marker on every third one, which meant Boro was reporting a chain and marking each link as told, not seen.

It went on for perhaps ninety seconds.

Leon stood in front of the answer to the largest question of his life and let it go past him like weather.

He got four words in ninety seconds. He wrote them all down and they told him nothing. He tried to interrupt twice, to slow it, to get one name at a time, and both times Boro simply started again from the beginning, because it was a recitation and recitations do not stop in the middle.

This was the thing.

This was the actual thing, the whole of it, the reason the last thirty days had felt like a man swimming in a coat: he had been standing in front of the answer, and the answer had been freely and patiently given, and he could not hold it.

Not because anyone was hiding it. Because he was thirty days old.

Luma wrote it down.

Not on bark. She did not need bark.

Leon realised what she was doing about forty seconds in — she had gone very still, and her lips were moving slightly, and she was not translating, she was taking it, the way she took a song, in the order it arrived, with the endings intact.

When Boro finished, Luma repeated the entire thing back to him.

Ninety seconds. In order. With the evidential markers correct.

Boro corrected her twice, on two names, and the second correction was of a single vowel.

Then he nodded, and said something that meant approximately that is now yours as well, and it was the first time in two days that the old man had looked at anybody with anything like warmth.

Leon watched his settlement’s oral historian download a hundred years of genealogy off a trader in one pass and store it in a skull.

"How long can you hold that?" he asked, when Boro had gone.

Luma had to have the question three times. When she understood it she looked genuinely puzzled, and answered with the tradition-marker on the verb, which is the one you use for things that do not change.

Until she taught it to somebody.

Leon thought about a rugged laptop with a finite battery on a raised platform under a ceramic cover.

"Teach me," he said. "Slow. Every day. Until I have it."

"Ei."

"How long?"

Luma looked at his mouth for a moment, the way she did when she was assessing his consonants.

Then she held up both hands, closed them, and opened them again.

Many.

They walked back to the settlement in the late afternoon and Leon did not say anything for the first kilometre.

He had four things.

A stamped metal tag that had come up this river between fifty and sixty summers ago, from the east.

Eleven words of English, transmitted as a password down a chain of people who did not know it was a language, with a rule attached that identified anybody who said it properly.

A ninety-second genealogy that he could not read and Luma could.

And a machine, wrapped in cut tarp, with thirty-seven questions left in it, and one line it had shown him once for less than a second.

None of it was proof. All of it pointed east.

And the arithmetic still did not work, and he still could not make it work, and he had spent three days trying: a man arrives, a man is fifty-nine, sixty years pass, a man is dead. That was not a mystery. That was subtraction.

Unless.

He stopped walking.

Tala walked another six paces before she noticed and turned around.

He was thinking about a password.

Not about the words. About the rule. About a man standing somewhere on a trade route a very long time ago, teaching eleven syllables to people who would mangle them, and attaching a condition to them, and the condition was not if you hear this, come to me.

The condition was: if you ever hear it said correctly, that person is one of ours.

You do not build that for your own lifetime. You build it for after.

You build it because you expect somebody else to come, later, and you want the network to recognise them when they do, and you want them to be told — by a stranger on a path, in a language you never learned — that somebody was here first and had thought about their arrival.

"Tala," Leon said. "The words. Old. Very old."

"Ei."

"For me." He put his hand flat on his own chest, and then made the sign for given, and then, because he did not have the grammar, said the rest of it in English, to himself, on a river path, in a world that had no idea what he was saying.

"He didn’t leave a message for his grandson. He left one for whoever came next."

Tala waited.

Leon looked east, at a ridge going gold, and did the only honest thing available to him, which was to take out the book with the observations in it and write down four words and mark them with the slash.

Somebody is expecting me.