Fourteen #2
The soldier-thing gestured toward the back of the cave and let out a string of syllables that could have been orders or excoriation.
Either way, one of the children started sobbing.
And like an optical illusion shifting, everything in the cave changed.
The enemy soldier, the man, the woman, the children.
Garral looked at them and saw refugees. A handful of survivors of the battle that had scoured their world, lost and left behind and afraid.
He heard the calm in the woman’s voice, and he remembered what it was like to try to reassure a child by seeming calm even if he was on the edge of panic.
Even through the black armor he could see the exhaustion in the soldier’s stance, the rage and impotence and fear in the man with the knife.
Even the blade—more than enough to kill him and Jessyn both—became pitiable when he saw it as the only protection the man had against Rak-hund and Soft Lothark and the broad killing arms of the Carryx.
“Well,” he said, then didn’t know what more to say.
The soldier snapped the fingers of its good left hand and gestured. The children scattered, each of them running back to a bedroll or a pack. The man stood in front of the soldier. The heat had gone out of their conversation.
“What are they doing?” Garral asked.
“Breaking camp, I’d guess,” Jessyn said. “Before you came, the guy was teaching lessons, but I think they’ve figured out that their security’s been compromised.”
“They probably won’t go until after dark,” Garral said. “You think they’ll take us with them?”
“I don’t know. Might be more efficient to slit our throats and leave us in the back of the cave,” Jessyn said. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have pulled you into this. I was just scared and…”
“No, that’s good. I’m glad that I’m someone you’d reach for when you’re scared. Speaks well of me.”
“Getting killed seems like a pretty thin reward.”
Garral shrugged. “Our lives ended the day the Carryx came. We’ve just been sort of… lingering.”
He waited for her to disagree, but Jessyn stayed silent.
The woman from the cave had started folding her own things into a brown backpack.
The man had gone back to talk with one of the kids who was sitting beside his bedroll, eyes glazed and unmoving.
Hiding in the wilds with a group of emotionally traumatized children while the enemy who’d burned your cities paced outside the door was a rough job.
Garral guessed the man wasn’t getting paid enough for it.
The soldier limped over to them. It had picked up a length of rope from someplace—thin, pale, and tight-woven.
It held out its arms with its wrists together and said something.
Even without the words, the meaning was clear enough.
Garral considered what his chances would be to overpower the soldier and take its gun away.
The black thing stood motionless, empty faceplate staring at him like it was reading his thoughts.
Instead, Garral stood up and put out his hands.
The soldier looped the rope around his wrists and cinched them together with a knot that only bit into his skin a little.
Jessyn rose up behind him, and the soldier turned its attention to her.
Across the cave, the woman was handing out canteens to the taller kids.
Balancing the load they had to carry between the people best able to carry it.
The soldier nudged Garral’s shoulder, urging him forward.
Garral walked with Jessyn following behind, both of them on the same leash.
The soldier guided them to a spot near the center of the space and brought them to a halt.
It said something, gestured to the two of them, and waited.
The kids started lining up behind them, faces blank or angry or streaked with silent tears.
The tally marks on the ground where their math lesson had been interrupted were like little trees.
The man was still sitting with the glazed boy, cajoling the child back into the world.
He would have thought that he’d get better at losing everything.
At the universe treating him like a seed on the wind, whipped from one life into the next without so much as a moment to say goodbye to everything he had known.
And maybe he was improving. Maybe being leashed to the dark soldier was easier than being in the neck-to-neck lead with the Soft Lothark guards had been.
Or maybe it was that being at the mercy of a cruel and indifferent universe could only be a surprise once. Every time after the first profound loss of innocence was just an echo, a reminder. His wife. Their children. The world that had been the only world once, when he was young.
Garral looked down.
He frowned.
“Wait,” he said.
“What’s the matter?” Jessyn answered, but she was a long way away.
Garral was in the cave looking down at the abandoned tally marks, and he was also ten years old in his uncle’s library writing secret messages to send to the girl in the next apartment over.
Ancient writing as the natural tool of preadolescent flirtation.
“Wait,” he said again, louder this time, and sank to his knees. The soldier yanked on the lead, but Garral ignored it. The central structure of the tree, then units and tens on the right, hundreds and thousands on the left, with the bend in the branches…
“That’s four hundred and eighty-five,” he said, pointing to one of them. “And that one’s six hundred twelve. I know this system. I know this. ”
The soldier growled again, hauling at the rope.
“Hold on!” Garral snapped. The woman had come now, and she stood beside the dark soldier. Garral smoothed away the marks in the dirt and drew a simple sequence. The first four numbers. He looked up at the woman. Her amber eyes were exhausted, but he had her attention.
“What are you doing?” Jessyn asked, but he didn’t answer. He pointed to the first three numbers in turn, and said, “Atche, hoon, cup?”
The woman didn’t respond. He tried again.
“Hoy, au-hoy, lep? No? All right, how about this. Dan, tenan, sip?”
The woman’s eyes went wide. She looked up, searching the cave, and shouted something.
The knife man, still beside the child, looked up.
She gestured him over. The soldier might have been a statue, it had grown so still.
As the man approached, the woman pointed back at the tally marks and circled her finger in a gesture that meant do it again .
Garral pointed at the first figure. “Dan,” he said. Then, “Tenan. Sip.”
The man knelt, pointing at the first mark. “Daum. Teya. Sé.”
Garral pointed to four . The man said, “Int-hey.”
The glee that bubbled up in Garral’s throat came out in laughter like a champagne bottle opening.
“Heint,” he said. “But that’s just a simple inversion.
That’s easy. That means… all right. Um. Hold on.
” He closed his eyes, pushing his mind into the past. Becoming a boy he hadn’t been in decades.
“Surut-te Garral,” he said, then shifted, pointing toward Jessyn with his two bound hands together. “Surut-sej Jessyn.”
The knife man rubbed his cheeks with open palms and said something that might have been Sauda-dje Omco . Then he pointed to the amber-eyed woman. Sauda-sey Manta . The dark soldier. Sauda-ut Corvall. Khata?
“Yes,” Garral said. “I understand. Um… Shit. Bo! Bo, cauda-te. Omco. Manta. Corvall. Garral. Jessyn.”
A slow grin pulled at the knife man’s—at Omco’s—lips, and the two of them were left giggling at each other like idiots or new lovers. The woman—Manta—said something, and Omco replied, pointing to the marks on the ground. Jessyn cleared her throat. It was as good as a question. He looked up at her.
“This is a first-generation math notation system,” he said.
“You find these in the oldest settlements on Anjiin. It’s great for certain kinds of math functions, so they still teach it in engineering programs. But it’s old.
Really old. I tried a few first-generation languages, and it seems like this guy knows something that’s close to but not quite proto-Darsin… You don’t care about that.”
“Not specifically,” Jessyn said.
“These guys aren’t just other human beings. This isn’t just common descent. There’s a cultural connection. These people are part of the same language system as the first humans on Anjiin. These are literally our cousins.”
“And you can understand what they’re saying?”
“Oh God, no,” Garral said through his smile. “But give me some time and I will.”