Ariah (19 page)

“
Yes, thank you.”

“
You do look like you need help staying awake,” she said as she poured the boiling water over the tea leaves. It was fragrant, good-quality tea, I could tell by the smell alone. I was still mired in thoughts of Dirva, which by then had turned into thoughts of myself and the reasons why I’d returned to the Empire. I barely registered her jab. My apparent lack of reaction irked her. “If you have something more pressing to attend to, professor, don’t let me keep you.”

“
What?”

“
You seem distracted.”

“
Oh.” I let out a nervous laugh. She sat on the floor, and I sat down across from her. “Oh, it’s nothing. So. Would you like to start with Athenorkos or Lothic?”

She narrowed her eyes at me and handed me my cup of tea. “You don’t even look thirty-nine. You look like you just finished school.”

“
I finished my training!”

“
You can’t even grow a beard, professor.”

“
I can. I shave.”

“
Why?” She said it with disgust and impatience. She leaned forward slightly. “Are you about to grow your hair long and wear a hood? Do you think they’ll take you in?”

“
You are very judgmental, you know.”

She smirked. “Yes, I know. That’s not an answer.”

“
I’m not here to answer personal questions. I’m here to teach you Athenorkos and Lothic. Let’s start with Athenorkos,” I said quickly. She smirked wider. It was maddening. “Why are you learning these languages?”

“
Oh, who’s asking personal questions now?”

“
It’s not a personal question! It would help to know what kind of vocabulary to teach you.”

“
Mercantile reasons. Caravaner reasons,” she said.

“
Fine. Good. We’ll start with that.”

Even in that first session, I could see how bright she was. Languages did not come easily to her. She struggled with pronunciation, and she had no patience with her own mind. She grew more and more frustrated with herself. In one sentence, she had the grammar right but not the vocabulary. In another attempt, the tenses were wrong. There was always something wrong with the phonemes. That she got anything right at all, frankly, was impressive, but she quickly became as disgusted with her own limitations as she was with anything and everything about me. And since languages came so easily to me, and since I was still a little distracted, I found it easy to be patient with her. About an hour in, she growled halfway through a sentence when I reminded her about word order. “Stop correcting me!”

“
I’m teaching you.”

“
Just stop.” She sighed and leaned back on her hands. Her shoulders arced up toward her ears, and her mouth formed a hard, bitter line. She looked over at me. “It must be strange, teaching them.”

“
Strange how?”

“
A whole room of Qin, and you’re in charge.”

I laughed. “In charge of what? I’m in charge of the roster, that’s all. The class is a formality.”

“
Still,” she said. “They’re there to listen. To listen to an elf.” She leaned forward again. “Can I ask you something?”

I didn’t want her to. Whatever it was, I knew instinctively it was something I wouldn’t want to answer. Still, it seemed rude to refuse. “Yes?”

She grinned. I had hoped that she would notice my resistance and think twice. The fact of it was she had noticed my resistance, and it likely sparked a hundred more invasive questions. “Just how red are you, professor?”

“
What?” It came out a croak. The blood rushed to my face.

“
Don’t be like that,” she said. “You’re begging the question, the way you dress. You probably don’t even need to shave.”

“
Just say it.”

“
Say what?”

“
Really? You’re going to mention everything but my eyes?”

She glanced away; she carried in her a sullen, irritable incrimination.

“
Just say it. Ask me if I’m nahsiyya.”

She was quiet for a second. “Professor, I…”

“
Am I even really Semadran? What am I even doing here? Who in the district would rent a man like me a room, anyway?”

“
Professor…”

“
And you’re here alone with me. The neighborhood will talk.”

She held up her hands. “All right! All right. I was rude. I’m sorry.”

“
The hell you are,” I said, pulling myself up. “From now on keep your questions to yourself or the lessons are off.”

Two days later, she sat in the center of the first row. She started the first class half-conciliatory, but by the time the second class rolled around, it had hardened into a mocking irritation. She continued to sit right there, right in front of me, and the crackling tension between us made me remote and cold during the classes. I took no questions from students. I lectured until I was hoarse, wrote endless lines of text, and took refuge in the patterns of foreign languages. I didn’t even bother coming up with notes; I simply showed up and started talking. The lectures were elaborate academic cold shoulders. The Saturday tutoring sessions were strained, awkward affairs. She met me downstairs in her father’s shop, though occasionally he would have a customer and we’d be forced out. She always took us outside rather than back up to the privacy of her room. I took a vindictive pleasure in knowing I’d struck a nerve with her. She was not young, after all. I wondered if she’d seen a matchmaker. There was probably gossip about it, which more than once I resolved to ferret out but somehow never got around to.

One Saturday, about two months into the class, Parvi forced us out. He had, by then, finished one set of clothes for me, which I was wearing that day. He was then working on a second set of impeccable City-style clothes for me, on the house—I suspect to make up for the inherent rudeness of his daughter. Shayat and I stood on the stoop of her father’s shop, glaring at each other. “Well?” I asked. “Are we done for the day?”

“
No. We’re not. I need more work on counting in Lothic,” she said. I could have wrung her neck. “Are you hungry?” she asked. I looked at her like it was a trick. “I am hungry, professor. I can’t deal with this on an empty stomach. Let’s go to the markets.”

“
Deal with what?”

“
With you!” she said. “With this stupid language! With any of it.” She sighed and dropped her hands to her hips. “Look, can we call a truce? I don’t care where you’re from or who you are or whatever it is you think you’re hiding. I don’t. I’m curious, but who isn’t? I just want you to teach me these awful languages so I can get out of this place. All right? I’ll buy you something to eat.”

And I laughed. I laughed so hard, delirious in it, drunk in it. Gales of laughter shook me so hard I was sore the next day. Tears squeezed out of my eyes and blurred my vision. Distantly, I heard Shayat badgering me.

“
What?
What?
”
she demanded.

“
I just realized,” I said when the spasms finally subsided. I wiped the tears from my eyes, staring at her like I’d never seen her before. And she was beautiful then, truly beautiful. Wild hair kicked every which way by the winter wind. Black skin that drank in the light. “I just realized you’re to be a caravaner. A merchant! You! You know if you’re going to make a go of it, Shayat, people will have to like you enough to buy from you.”

She grinned a canny, cat-like grin at me. “Maybe if you had two coins to rub together, professor, I’d turn the charm on for you.”

“
What charm?”

“
Oh, who’s the rude one now?”

I laughed again. “Let’s get something to eat.”

* * *

It was an ungainly, unlikely friendship that developed between Shayat and me. I think the truth of it was that neither of us was particularly adept at building a friendship. It was a clumsy thing, a blunt thing, that stumbled more often than not, but somehow the stumbles became amusing instead of offensive. She stopped asking me personal questions. I could not bring myself to ask her personal questions. We muddled through a weird and welcome friendship that was, in retrospect, anchored to nothing in particular.

The weeks passed, and the classes ended, and the Qin students retreated for a month of reflection. Shayat lingered in Rabatha. She was not as proficient in the southern languages as she wanted to be. She had ambitions, and she was a careful, thorough person, and her pride was such that she could not bear to start a route when she was not yet fluent. Her ambitions intrigued me: an elf-run, elf-led caravan. Maybe even elf-only. She had separatist leanings. She flirted with divulging them, dropping a reference here or a dig at the Qin there, then gauging my reaction.

It was because of Shayat that I learned Droma. She favored the Qin markets. I rarely ventured out of the borough on my own. The sting of the border still lingered, and any time there were more of them than there were of us, a panic rose in my chest. Shayat, peculiarly, managed to keep that panic at bay when I was with her. Shayat dragged me to the Qin markets week after week. She practiced her Athenorkos and Lothic by conversing with me about prices of this and that, and marking those prices down in small notebooks. She tracked anything and everything but the live goods. And it was the live goods that drew my interest.

She was there the first time I saw a slave auction. It was a lively thing, voices cresting like waves. What drew my attention was the tone of it: it had a crazed character; it sounded malevolent and broken, like the screech of a train felled by a loose wheel. “What is that?” I asked.

“
Oh, professor, that’s a slave stage. Come on, I know a man who’ll give us good pomegranates for cheap.” She started off, east, I think, and only noticed I hadn’t followed when she was some distance away. “It’s a slave stage!” she called out.

But I couldn’t turn away. The first one I saw was nahsiyya, probably whore-born, and probably sold back into a brothel while I watched. The next was a gold elf. Now, I’d heard of them, but I had never seen one. We don’t have enough gentry Qin in Ardijan to warrant exotic house slaves; that’s a game for the urbanite wealthy to play. The gold elf had skin the color of mahogany and a thick mane of yellow hair. The gold elf sang as the slavers led him up to the stage. And I felt it. By virtue of the gift I felt the fatalism, the loss, the bleakness of it. Shayat appeared next to me. She sighed. “I hate it when they sing.”

“
Do they usually sing?”

“
I don’t know. I swear it feels like they sing every time. Come on.”

I followed her away, but two days later I wound up in the Qin markets again after my classes ended. It was a strange detour, one that took me an hour’s walk out of the way, but the song had lodged itself in me and refused to leave. The gift nagged me, needled me, whipped me into a frenzy to seek it out to understand it all the way. There were no slavers that day. I wandered the markets, aimless, listening. Auditory gifts can be demanding. And then I heard it. It wasn’t a song, it was speech this time. A soft patter of words, and more words in a different voice. It led me around a corner, and there I found a clutch of three gold elvish house girls congregated around a public water pump. One filled a jar that held orchids. The other two conversed.

They didn’t seem to notice me, and for that I am glad, because I would have looked a deranged fool or worse standing there like that. The language hooked into me; there was a richness in it that I could feel before I even understood it. Premonitions crept through my bones. It was one of those horrifying moments where your life changes, where suddenly the course you’ve tendered veers in a new and dangerous direction.

It was after curfew when I got home. When I slipped in the door, Dirva let out a sigh of relief and hugged me. It caught me off guard. “Do not tempt fate, Ariah,” he said, and his voice was hard and tender at the same time.

“
It was the gift.”

“
What was?”

“
I have to learn Droma.”

And then he understood. “I’ll help,” he said, even though he was no longer my mentor. “Meet me here after your class tomorrow.”