The thieves don’t talk to the murderers, the whores don’t talk to the
beggars and nobody talks to the swindlers. I can’t for the life of me see
how they survive.’ That’s bad news,’ Ulath noted. ‘We were counting on the
thieves to serve as our spy-network.’ leCs hope that Caalador can fix it,’
Stragen said. ‘The fact that there’s no central intelligence-gathering
apparatus in the government makes those thieves crucial to our plans.’
‘Caalador will be able to talk some sense into them,’ Ehlana said. ‘I have
every confidence in him.’ That’s probably because you like to hear him
talk,’ Sparhawk told her. , ‘Speaking of talking,’ Sephrenia said, ‘I think
our efforts here are going to be limited by the fact that most of you don’t
speak Tamul. we’re going to have to do ~something about that.’ Kalten
groaned. It won’t be nearly as painful this time, dear one,’ she said. ‘We
don’t really have the time for you to actually learn the language, so
Zalasta and I are going to cheat.’
‘Could you clarify that a bit for me, Sephrenia?’ Emban said, looking
Puzzled. ‘We’ll cast a spell,’ she shrugged. ‘Are you trying to say that
you can teach somebody a foreign language by magic?’ he asked. ‘Oh, yes,’
Sparhawk assured him. ‘She taught me to speak Troll in about five seconds
in Ghwerig’s cave, and I’d imagine that Troll’s a lot harder to learn than
Tamul. At least Tamuls are human.’
‘We’ll have to be careful, though,’ the small Styric woman cautioned. ‘if
you all appear to be linguistic geniuses, it’s going to look very curious.
We’ll do it a bit at a time – a basic vocabulary and a rudimentary grammar
right at first, and then we’ll expand on that.’
‘I could send you instructors, Lady Sephrenia,’ Oscagne offered. ‘Ah – no,
thanks all the same, your Excellency. Your instructors would be startled and
suspicious – if they suddenly found a whole platoon of extraordinarily
gifted students. We’ll do it ourselves in order to conceal what we’re up
to. I’ll give our pupils here abominable accents right at first, and then
we’ll smooth things out as we go along.’
‘Sephrenia?’ Kalten said in a slightly resentful tone. ‘Yes, dear one?’
‘You can teach people languages by magic?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then why did you spend all those years trying to teach me Styric? When
you saw that it wasn’t going to work, why didn’t you just wiggle your
fingers at me?’
‘Kalten dear,’ she said gently, ‘why was I trying to teach you Styric?’
‘So that I could perform magic tricks, I guess,’ he shrugged. ‘That’s
unless you just enjoy making people suffer.’
‘No, dear one. It was just as painful for me as it was for you.’ She
shuddered. ‘More painful, probably. You were in fact, trying to learn
Styric so that you could work the spells, but in order to do that, you have
to be able to think in Styric. You can’t just mouth the words and make them
come off the way you want them to.’
‘Wait a minute,’ he objected. ‘Are you saying that people who speak other
languages don’t think the same way we do?’
‘They may think the same way but they don’t think in the same words.’
‘Do you mean to say that we actually think in words?’
‘Of course we do. What did you think thoughts were?’
‘I don’t know. But we’re all human. Wouldn’t we all think the same way and
in the same language?’ She blinked. ‘And which language would that be, dear
one?’
‘Elenic, naturally. That’s why foreigners aren’t as clever as we are. They
have to stop and translate their thoughts from Elenic into that barbarian
gabble they call language. They do it just to be stubborn, of course.’ She
stared at him suspiciously. ‘You’re actually serious, aren’t you?’
‘Of course. I thought everybody knew that’s why Elenes are smarter than
everybody else.’ His face shone with blinding sincerity. ‘Oh, dear,’ she
sighed in near-despair.
Melidere put on a lavender gown and swished off to the emperors private
apartments bearing a blue satin Elene doublet over one arm. Mirtai followed
her.. Mirtai did not swish. Melidere’s eyes were ingenuously wide. Her
expression was vapid. Her lower lip was adorably taught between her teeth
as if she were breathless with excitement. Emperor Sarabian’s courtiers
watched the swishing with great interest. Nobody paid the slightest
attention to what she did with her hands. She delivered the gift to the
emperor with a breathy little speech, which Mirtai translated. The emperor
responded quite formally. Melidere curtseyed and then swished back to the
Elene castle. The courtiers still concentrated on the swishing – even
though they had already had plenty of opportunity to observe the process.
‘It went off without a hitch,’ the Baroness reported smugly. ‘Did they
enjoy the swishing?’ Stragen asked her.
‘I turned the entire court to stone, Milord Stragen,’ she laughed. ‘Did she
really?’ he asked Mirtai. ‘Not entirely,’ the Atana replied. ‘A number of
them followed her so that they could see more. Melidere’s a very good
swisher. What was going on inside her gown looked much like two cats
fighting inside a burlap sack.’
‘We should use the talents God gave us, wouldn’t you say, your Grace?’ the
blonde girl asked Emban with mock piety. ‘Absolutely, my child,’ he agreed
without so much as cracking a smile. Ambassador Oscagne arrived about
fifteen minutes later bearing an alabaster box on a blue velvet cushion.
Ehlana took the emperor’s note out of the box and read aloud:
Ehlana, Your message arrived safely. I get the impression that the members
of my court will not merely refrain from interfering with the Baroness as
she moves through the halls but will passionately defend her right to do
so. How does the girl manage to move so many things all at the same time? Sarabian. ‘W
ell,’ Stragen asked the honey-blonde girl, ‘how do you?’
‘It’s a gift, Milord Stragen.
The visiting Elenes made some show of receiving instruction in the Tamul
language for the next few weeks, and Oscagne helped their subterfuge along
by casually advising various members of the government that he had been
teaching the visitors the language during their long journey. Ehlana made a
brief speech in Tamul at one of the banquets the prime minister had
arranged for the guests in order to establish the fact that she and her
party had already achieved a certain level of proficiency. There were
awkward moments, of course. On one occasion Kalten grossly offended a
courtier when he smilingly delivered what he thought to be a well-turned
compliment. ‘What’s the matter with him?’ the blond Pandion asked, looking
puzzl’ed as the courtier stalked away. ‘What were you tryin’g to say to
him?’ Mirtai asked, stifling a laugh. ‘I told him that I was pleased to see
that he was smiling,’ Kalten replied. ‘That’s not what you said. ‘Well,
what did I say?’ you said, ‘May all of your teeth fall out.’
‘
‘I used the wrong word for ‘smiling’, right?’
‘i’d say so, yes.’ The pretense of teaming a new language provided the
queen and her entourage with a great deal of leisure time. The official
functions and entertainments they were obliged to attend usually took place
in the evening, and that left the days generally free. They passed those
hours in idle conversation – conducted for the most part in Tamul. The
spell Sephrenia and Zalasta had woven gave them all a fairly complete
understanding of vocabulary and syntax, but the smoothing out of
pronunciation took somewhat longer. As Oscagne had predicted he would, the
prime minister threw obstacles in their paths at every turn. Insofar as he
could, he filled their days with tedious and largely meaningless
activities. They attended the openings of cattle-shows. They were awarded
honorary degrees at the university. They visited model farms. He provided
them with huge escorts whenever they left the imperial compound – escorts
that usually took several hours to form up. Pondia Subat’s agents put that
time to good use, clearing the streets of precisely the people the visitors
wanted to see. Most troublesome, however, was the fact that he severely
restricted there access to Emperor Sarabian. Subat made himself as
inconvenient as he possibly could, but he was unprepared for Elene
ingenuity and the fact that many in their party were not entirely what they
seemed to be. Talen in particular seemed to completely baffle the prime
ministers agents. As Sparhawk had noticed long ago, it was quite nearly
impossible to follow Talen in any city in the world. The young man had a
great deal of fun and gathered a great deal of information. On one drowsy
afternoon, ) Ehlana and the ladies were in the royal apartments, and the
queen’s maid, Alcan, was speaking as Kalten and Sparhawk quietly entered.
‘It’s not uncommon,’ the doe-eyed girl was saying quietly. ‘It’s one of the
inconveniences of being a servant.’ As usual, Alcan wore a severe dress of