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“This is instructive,” Laurent said, with his golden head propped one hand, body spilled like moonlight over the Vaskian tent’s furs. “I’ve seen you put half a dozen men in the dirt without breaking a sweat.”
Damen, delightedly drowsy and likely still quite drunk, waved him off with a hoarse laugh.
Kashel and the other girls hadn’t minded at all, was the thing. Not his lack of a tongue, not his damnable inability to do more than grunt. They hadn’t spoken Akielon, anyways. And he still had his lips, and his teeth, and his hands, and-- other parts. He’d made them feel good, and when they’d kissed him, open-mouthed, teasing his mouth open in return, none of them had been inclined to pull away. They’d pressed closer against him.
“You’re relieved of your duties in the morning, of course,” Laurent said. “Try to wake up before I leave.”
Laurent was looking at him, eyes bright. Damen made the gesture Kashel had shown him, touching the tips of his fingers to his lower lip, his hand gently cupped, then pulling them away.
Laurent’s eyes grew noticeably brighter.
“What was that?” he said, curling his body closer to the edge of the low bed, carefully balanced. Damen made the gesture again. “Is that Vaskian hand-sign?”
Of course Laurent would know what it was. This thought did not fill Damen with the irritation it once had. Thank you, he mouthed, when Laurent asked him what it meant. The light was low, so when Laurent asked again, leaning so close now that Damen felt with an unworried certainty that a royal Veretian elbow was going to be landing in his sternum at any moment, he spoke it. As best he could. “ ‘A ‘oo.” The humiliation that normally accompanied his fumbling, childish attempts at speech didn’t come. The fox fur against his skin was warm and Laurent had a look on his face that reminded Damen vividly of Nesson-Eloy, of Laurent tipping a roof tile up with his shoe and smiling.
Laurent touched his fingers to his lips and pulled them away. Damen grinned. Laurent, some odd whim seeming to have him firmly in its grip, smiled back.
You’re welcome , Damen mouthed, and that Laurent saw. Damen drifted off to the soft, fur-muffled noises of his amusement.
They ended up spending another two days with the Vaskians, for reasons Laurent did not disclose. Damen gave up trying to ask. He didn’t have paper and ink, anyways, and there was only so many times he could step in Laurent’s path about the camp, point back down the mountain slope, and raise a pointed eyebrow. Laurent’s good humor, though it had not completely dissipated since the night of their arrival, did absolutely nothing for his stubbornness.
So Damen, left to his own devices, got lessons in hand-sign from Kashel. She and the other young women of the clan seemed delighted to teach him, and if they were occasionally distracted from their studies by more active pleasures, well, it was apparently Damen’s time to waste.
The women showed him the signs for horse, bow, cliff, valley. Rock slope, gravel slope, sun, sword, tack, and saddle. Their vocabulary was overwhelmingly utilitarian. Hand-sign may have been the language of priests and acolytes in Ver-Tan, but among the clan it was used almost entirely to coordinate mountain raids, when the smallest sound might carry as clear and strong as any horn among the rocks.
Two of the women, sisters who had lived for a time with their aunt in the shadow of Ver-Tan’s great plateau, taught him pieces of grammar. It was simple stuff, how to make the signs for “yesterday” and “tomorrow” and attach them to verbs, how to shrug his shoulder to mean ‘or,’ or purse his lips and narrow his eyes to make a question. There was much they didn’t know, but Damen caught glimpses of the language’s complexity, how it could be used by monasteries full of tongueless men to describe the works of gods.
He liked that, deeply. That there was a true language in the world he could speak, even if he never spoke again.
Two more nights on the furs beside Laurent’s bed, and then on the morning of their third day in the mountains he awoke with a grunt to Laurent’s boot digging into his calf.
“Rise and shine,” Laurent said, his pale hair uncombed and tumbling about his face. “We return to the fort today, as I know you have so desperately desired. Were Halvik’s girls that unsatisfying?”
Damen didn’t bother with a rude gesture. Laurent could read his features just fine.
It was slow-going back down the mountain. Rain had loosened the earth the previous day, and the horses picked carefully among the wobbling rocks. As the trail broadened down the slope and they were able to ride abreast, Laurent cleared his throat, twisted in his saddle, and said, “You snore like a wild boar.”
With his hands moving fluidly before his chest as he spoke.
Damen couldn’t help but stare. The signs weren’t an exact translation of Laurent’s words. They’d been something like YOU BAD SLEEP with the sign for “bad,” Laurent’s fingers pressed to his full mouth then swung sharply down, repeated twice, presumably for emphasis. Certainly no mention of wild boars. Halvik’s vocabulary must have been as limited as Kashel’s.
Damen’s grin felt like it would tear apart every old stitch in his cheek. SORRY, he signed, meaning it not at all. WOMAN LEARN SIGN YOU? It was the best he could manage for, Halvik taught you to sign? Kashel and her friends hadn’t instructed him on names.
Laurent, of course, saw the problem right away. “We’re going to need to come up with an alphabet,” he said, in part to himself, his hands still. Too complex a sentence even for his quick mind. “There’s little point in learning to talk to my strategist if he can’t describe for me a map.”
The happiness in Damen’s chest was almost painful, unlike anything he’d felt since Jokaste had put her knife to his mouth. An alphabet. What a problem to have.
Laurent’s glance at Damen was sidelong, as if his horse were somehow in need of supervision as it trotted confidently through what were quickly becoming the rolling foothills of Vere. “Of course I asked Halvik to teach me sign,” he said. “You’re useless to me as soon as I run out of paper. And I should have learned years ago, besides.”
His tone was dismissive. Damen’s grin, seemingly impossible, widened further. THANK YOU, he said, signing it twice, for emphasis.