“What now?” he muttered. “Don’t tell me, bruther, that you can talk to even so lowly a creature as this? Big as it is, it is still only a crab, a creature that spends all its life grubbing in the muck and ooze at the bottom of the sea.”
“You have many good qualities, friend Simna, but you also have an unfortunate tendency to underestimate all manner of living things based upon their lifestyle. I know of men who abide at rarefied heights yet who cannot be trusted to tend to their own children, while others who live in the depths of poverty and homeliness I would charge with the safekeeping of my own wife.”
Simna was not so easily rebuked. “Then if I underestimate, you overtrust, my friend.”
Ehomba smiled. “Perhaps between us, then, we may make one sensible human being.” He turned away as long, clawed legs came clambering over the side of the ship. “You are right to say that I cannot ‘talk’ to a crab. But there are numerous manners of speaking, Simna, of which the Naumkib know more than many other peoples. It is what comes of living in a lonely country. You learn to make yourself known to whatever inhabits the same land as yourself, however many legs it happens to walk upon.”
The prodigious crustacean finally clambered over the railing to settle on the deck with a waterlogged thunk. Stalks swiveled bulbous eyes to right and then to left. Behind it, a captivated Stanager Rose spoke to Ehomba without taking her eyes off the visitor.
“If this is what your weedy man meant when he told you he would try to implore a king to come calling on us, then he must have believed you could communicate with it. I certainly can’t. I would know how to boil it, but not talk to it. I certainly don’t see what other use it can be of to us.”