5. N #3
which Marag reacted to with glowers and small slights.
On the morning of the carefully counted ninth day, the lock turned. Instead of the servant Triana expected, she saw a slim and tallish woman (tall at least for here … at home the woman’s height would have been a … disappointment to any family of decent breeding).
“Am I healthy?” she asked dryly.
“It would appear so,” the woman replied, “my simple name is Nora.”
Triana blinked and smiled. “That is the first thing that anyone has said to me since I arrived here that I have clearly understood.”
“Yes,” Nora replied, “it took me a while to deduce where your form of proper language came from, and then learn to speak it myself. An old philological study commissioned on the street slang of low-birth workers in Tourmaline.
All washed through what feels like a thousand years of dedicated linguistic butchery. You really don’t like the nominative or declarative cases, do you?”
Triana felt her smile slip. Well, those were words. And they were in a row, forming a sentence. But the sentence itself made no sense at all. She grabbed the first words she clearly understood. “Low-birth workers?” “Tourmaline?” What could she possibly be talking about?
“Who are you, again?” she asked, still feeling lost.
“I am your tutor,” Nora replied. “My job is to make your speech presentable, so you don’t sound like you just rolled out of a gutter.”
Triana drew herself up, offended. She worked to keep her voice steady …
a lord speaking to an upper servant on another’s estate.
“I am V’dann Triana er-Lord Falcion, master of mine own estates, and ennobled to the fourth degree … and I do not consort with … ‘tutors.’ I will have speech with whatever passes for nobility here, that I be rightfully reinstated to mine own world and mine own lands.
I demand to be treated according to my station.”
Her attempt at a calm voice eroded as her speech progressed, and by the end her voice had risen and her anger had gained free rein.
Nora shrugged, unimpressed. “A pretty speech ruined by the bad grammar, mushy pronunciation, and the syntax of a guttersnipe. But, your message was clear enough. Given that you don’t consort with my kind, I’ll leave you to it. Good day.”
With that, Nora departed, pulling the door shut afterwards. Triana shouted, and swore and raged for a while, but a proper tantrum requires an audience. She soon slumped back on the bed, and looked up, counting the bumps on the ceiling and seething.
The day passed with dreary slowness, made worse by the brief glimmer of novelty. She still chewed on what little she understood of the woman’s words … low birth. Tourmaline? Was that a place? Low birth.
Triana, given a very long day to consider her situation, came to the obvious, if unpalatable conclusion: if the tutor held the keys to her room, then she needed to play along. Sweet as cream.
The next morning Triana stood, ready, when the lock opened. She managed a friendly smile.
Nora entered. “Good morning. I am Nora, I am to be your tutor.” She paused, her hand on the door. Triana got that message very clearly and moved to head it off. A few words of courtesy in exchange for something, anything that didn’t involve staring at the walls. Cheap at the price.
She dipped her head in greeting. “Good morning, Nora. My simple name is Triana.”
Nora replied with a hint of a smile. “Good morning Triana … I hear it now. Tri-ana as in trip, not as in tray. Depending on how you inflect it … it sounds like our word for a sort of fairy, a lesser creature of the forests here, a wood-sprite. Pretty, but with a nasty bite. I will remember that.”
Another smile, professional but with a hint of warmth.
“I will be supplying you with books in the future, but for now, we’ll concentrate on the fundamentals.”
She waved at the guard, who brought in two stools.
Triana sat first, a small rebelling, a tiny nonverbal clue to show this woman who outranked whom, here.
The stool was surprisingly comfortable, something she had not expected.
Nora gave her a slightly larger smile, suggesting she knew exactly what Triana was about, and acknowledging it … which diminished the gesture a bit .
“The best way for us to proceed is in natural conversation. We’ll start with a verb, move to more complicated forms, and then weave in the declensions as we go? Paying very close attention to pronunciation, of course. Don’t worry, your ear will attune quickly.
You’ll be able to understand us much faster than you will be able to make yourself understood by us.”
“De-what?” Triana asked, completely lost.
Nora nodded, answering without sounding condescending. In Triana’s experience, a skill few could manage “Word inflections that change how the word is used in a sentence.” Nora smiled. “We’ll take it as slow as we can, and start with fundamentals.”
Triana took a deep breath. “All right, what do we talk about?”
“Let’s start with something easy. We’ll do the words for everyday things. Listen to how I shape my vowels. My name is Kilfenora. My birthplace is the Alla-lily Quarter of the city of Amethyst. What is your full name and your birthplace?”
Triana had once watched her father’s slaves washing clothes, then squeezing them through a mangle to force the water out.
At the end of the first day she felt exactly the same way.
Nora proved to be a gentle, yet implacable, taskmistress.
Triana wasn’t used to having to work at much of anything, and while she could manage brief bursts of intense activity, the sustained work of having to think about what she was saying, left her little room to consider what they discussed. It also exhausted her.
She also saw that, with a few notable exceptions, the tutors her father used had been lazy sods.
To be fair, she had little interest in what they taught, but still …
they had earned good coin to do very little.
She scanned the book Nora left for her to study.
Nursery rhymes, naming things that ate you.
How quaint. She flipped through it. A pretty long list, done in a tum-tap rhythm to learn how nouns and verbs sat next to each other.
This came from Nora’s dry observation that sentences generally liked having at least one of each, and not one or the other.
She flipped to the next page …. Lots of things that eat you.
Gro-mi-ched. Eats your head.
She yawned, and wiped at her eyes. What the hell is a Gro-mi-ched?
Spike flies, in your eyes.
That sounded unpleasant, as well. She flipped ahead, looking for something like a pillow monster. Ideally, setting a trap involving soft sheets. The words remained heavy going as well, and she found herself sounding out a lot more then she would have expected. Lazy sods.
At some point she dozed at her table, snoring, until the lock snapped.
Nora came in, carrying a tray
Triana stared up blearily at her, her neck popping as she tried to work out the kinks.
“Oh, dear,” Nora said sympathetically. “A bit through the mill, I think.”
Triana nodded. “A bit.”
Nora leaned in a bit. “You’ve got some print on your cheek, my dear. I think it came off the page.”
She squinted at Triana’s cheek. “Ky-bit-cha. Through the jaw.”
She gave a little laugh. “Well, that’s one way to absorb it.”
She laughed again. “Go wash your face, and have a little breakfast. I think we’ll have mercy on you and take a walk around the garden, just naming things today. How does that sound?”
Part of Triana understood this was a little bit of petting, a small reward for the previous day’s hard work, but at the same time … she had earned a bit of reprieve. Once she had cleaned herself up and eaten, Nora made a gesture for Triana to precede her. The guard stood, uncertain.
“Erthrine, yes?” Nora said, speaking slowly and clearly so that Triana could understand (and applying words from the previous day’s vocabulary …
a nice touch). “There is no place where she can go. We will walk around the courtyard and into the walled garden, and stay inside the flower fences. You may follow if you wish.”
Triana watched the exchange with interest.
She had learned from her father to give subordinates little latitude, particularly the sentries.
Even the smallest infractions yielded stern punishment.
The Hearthmaster’s guard looked uncertain, before nodding his head unhappily.
He followed some distance behind, just out of earshot.
Triana looked back and frowned.
“You don’t approve?” Nora asked. “We can go back.”
“No,” replied Triana hastily, “Please, let’s not. It’s a beautiful day, even if the sky’s the wrong color.”
She used her head to gesture towards the guard.
“It’s just that the guard had his instructions, and went against his lord’s orders. He’s not doing what he was told, but he’s trying to make it right by following.”
Nora looked down at the small stones that lined the path. “And so?”
“Poor discipline. My slaves know to do my bidding exactly as instructed. Exactly.”
Nora stopped, using the toe of her not-very-practical shoe to push some of the stones around. “Your slaves. Slavery. What happens if something happens that your slaves didn’t expect? That you didn’t expect, rather. What then?”
Triana felt on safe ground this time. “From superior to inferior. I give the orders, they follow. The moment that slaves are allowed to think for themselves in one regard, they will do so in others. Better a hundred dead slaves, than one thinking one. As an elven lord, my decisions are infallible.”
Triana could not see past Nora’s carefully neutral expression. “What if you give a bad order, and their work is wasted, or someone gets killed?”
Triana thought about that one. “We … because we have slaves, and they breed quickly and readily, we can afford some measure of waste,” she said, finally.
She gave Nora a small smile. “Besides, if there are misunderstandings and mistakes, it is because they did not hear correctly … not because I gave a poor instruction. Depending on my mood, they may be punished to teach them a lesson,