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I speak their language, but I never know if I am understood. Their words, fully comprehensible, shift meaning with their movements in ways I am still learning. In their camp, the swift separates into individuals. Two of the band that has taken me in are mothers. They do not permit me to approach the youngest offspring, who dwell entirely guarded within the covered dens at the heart of the camp, but the youths nearly grown wander freely wherever their curiosity might take them. These juveniles prowl around my shelter, too shy to speak to me alone, still too young to be part of a swift of their own.
One of them has a pet, a lithe creature with five flexible limbs. Into my shelter's doorway it dances on two, looking almost like a monkey, with another two limbs held like arms and the fifth like a prehensile tail. I stand and face the pet, then bring my hands together in greeting. As I hoped, the pet imitates my actions. There is a commonality between myself and this creature. We have both been adopted by the Ebrekti, welcomed to live among them, yet never truly one of them. The fellow-feeling only grows over time.
The juvenile to whom the pet belongs does not seem to mind the relationship, which relieves me of some worry. I consult her mother on the subject, only to have it waved off. "It is fed as the close associate of our child," she says, taking the mode of status-claim for this explanation, proud that her swift is so easily able to provide for extranumeraries. "It is a lesser animal that cannot speak," she adds in the mode of well-established-fact, and her body leans to the side, a limb stretching casually out, making a gouge in the smoothness of the sand. Across the fire pit, her alternate self in the swift mirrors the gesture. If the alternate speaks, I cannot hear it. This mother is often the leader of the swift. She has been indicated as the best hunter of clever prey, the one to follow when the swift is taking down food creatures known more for wisdom than for speed or strength or loyalty.
One cannot help but understand what it says about their judgment of me, that she is the one who most often speaks to me. Her alternate self invariably leads when they course after the largest prey, the ones who seem to think themselves inviolable, who never expect to be taken down by a group when no single individual could pose a threat. If I were a better representative of Teixcalaan, I sometimes wonder, would I not have been speaking to her instead?
They have met an Emperor. I must seem negligible by comparison. Then again, must not an Emperor wish to be seen as wise?
It became a stroke of good fortune that the pet and I formed such a strong bond. No other Ebrekti but that juvenile knows it as well. There was a great upset among the swift, and they formed in a way I had never seen before, with Center-Rear-Positioned in the lead. She told me they sought their lost juvenile. There were four with the swift at that time old enough to be out of the dens, and I easily spotted three. The pet bounded up to me and, as it never had done before, leapt onto my shoulder as I had often seen it do with the juvenile who was missing.
Of course I cannot join a swift. But this was clearly no ordinary hunt, no usual formation. "The pet and I may hunt alongside," I said, in the form of a suggestion-asking-assent.
My usual interlocutor, Left-Front-Positioned by usual name but left-flanking at the moment, said "The pet and human form a swift," in the form of an impossible-fact-assertion, an Ebrekti form of humor.
"Assent to hunt alongside," Center-Rear-Positioned said, speaking for the swift. Thus it was that we were at the empty plain where the swift was convinced the juvenile had gone, having followed her scent trail here, yet failed to find her herself. The pet hopped off my shoulder and bounced itself around in what looked like play. I followed, mindful of the joke that I was sure had been intended as a hint from Left-Front-Positioned. My role here was primarily as the minder of the pet, who had, I thought, been deemed to deserve inclusion as the juvenile we were looking for was its closest companion.
I tripped over a hole and fell flat. The pet hopped into the hole I had tripped over and vanished. I looked down. "Over here," I said to the swift in the mode of suggestion-offering-information. Below us, I could see the juvenile lying on the floor of a small cave. The pet crept close, but she did not awaken. A stab of not quite parental anxiety pierced my heart with worry for her, this alien youth on a faraway world from the City, her home, caught in a trap of earth; astonishing that in so little time as I have been here, this depth of fellow-feeling for such alien beings has blossomed within me. I felt for her as I would for the daughter of my dearest friend.
It took some time to find the entrance, but once the swift did so, they followed my voice calling into the small hole above the juvenile, and the sound of the pet moving around, right to her. She was not in the best of health, but we had found her in time that she would recover. Her mother was most relieved and grateful, and this became a turning point in my acceptance among the swift. I was no longer a burden they bore for the novelty of my presence. Now I was a valued ally to whom a debt of assistance was owed. It was the same sort of status the Ebrekti had claimed from the Emperor when they aided her.