The town was called Varath.
He learned this on the second morning, when Bren pressed a coin into his hand and said a word that meant, as far as he could determine, something in the vicinity of market, and pointed south toward the center of town. He understood the gesture clearly: go, look, come back. The coin was a small flat disc of dark metal, slightly irregular at the edges in the way of handmade things, with a stamped image on each side — one side showed a stylized bird or creature in flight, the other a symbol he didn't recognize, all angles and crossing lines that might have been a letter in their alphabet.
He went.
The market was a wide open square at the center of Varath where the main road split into four branches, and it occupied the square and overflowed into the mouths of those branches with a density of people and objects and sound that was, after three days in open fields, nearly overwhelming. He stood at the edge of it for a moment and let himself adjust.
The stalls were temporary structures, posts and boards and stretched cloth, each displaying some category of goods. He walked slowly along the edge and looked. Produce, first: vegetables and fruits he couldn't name, many of them deeply unfamiliar in color or shape, though a few were close enough to things he knew to be tentatively categorized. There were root vegetables, long and dark-skinned, with a smell that was sharp and slightly spicy. There were round things the size of his fist, greenish-grey, that smelled sweet when he leaned in. There were leafy things and bunched things and dried things hung from cords.
He stopped at a stall and looked at the produce and the person running the stall looked at him.
"How much?" he said, in English, for the practice of saying it, because he had decided he would practice speaking at every opportunity even when there was no possibility of being understood.
The person — middle-aged, with a calm, unhurried manner that he would later come to understand was characteristic of market vendors in Varath — said a phrase. He looked at them. They said it again. He looked at the things in the stall and then looked back at them and said, in their language, one of his forty words: the word for the coin, which he had learned from Bren's gesture that morning.
The vendor's expression shifted very slightly, and they picked up one of the root vegetables and held it toward him. He shook his head. He picked up one of the round sweet-smelling things and held it toward them.
The vendor said a word.
He repeated it. He pointed to himself. "Kael." He pointed to the vendor and waited.
"Maret," the vendor said.
He nodded. He held up the round thing. He said the word for coin. He looked at Maret.
Maret held up two fingers.
He took out the coin Bren had given him. Maret looked at it and shook his head and held up the coin and said something and gave it back, and took the round thing and put it in Kael's hand instead.
He understood: wrong currency, or wrong denomination, or wrong type of exchange — something about the transaction had been incorrect in a way that resulted in the fruit being given to him for free, and he wasn't sure whether this was generosity or contempt or simply a practical resolution.
He said the word he had stored the night before, the one Yisse's inflection had suggested meant something like: good, thank you, acknowledged.
Maret blinked. He said the word again.
Maret's expression did something complicated. Then Maret said something rapid and short, and looked away, and resumed their work.
He ate the round thing as he walked. It tasted like the cross between a pear and something he had no comparison for — mineral-sweet, with a firmness that gave way cleanly under his teeth, and a slight cooling sensation that lingered. He ate it entirely, core and seeds and all, and felt marginally less hungry.
He spent the morning in the market, not trying to buy anything, because he had no currency of this world, but listening. He stood near conversations and listened. He did not understand words yet, but he listened for structure: the patterns of question and response, the rhythm of negotiation, the different cadences of greeting versus argument versus direction. The language was tonal in ways he was beginning to perceive more clearly — certain words changed meaning based on pitch contour, he was nearly sure of it, though he could only confirm this by observing what happened before and after the word was spoken.
He found a spot near a crossroads where several vendors were talking amongst themselves between customers and he stood slightly to the side and listened for almost an hour, long enough that one of the vendors eventually looked at him and said something with the friendly directness of someone addressing an eccentric but harmless stranger, and he said, in their language, the forty words he had available in various combinations, none of which were a response to what she'd said but which clearly communicated something, because she turned to the other vendor and said something and the other vendor looked at him and there was a brief exchange and then she turned back to him and said, slowly and clearly, a short sentence, gesturing at the space around them.
He listened. He repeated it back.
She made the sound that might mean better, or good.
He was, he realized, being helped. She had understood, somehow, that he was learning, and she had shifted into the mode of someone who teaches.
He spent another hour with them, and by the time the midday sun was overhead he had thirty more words, including the word for Varath, which she had said while gesturing broadly at the town around them, and the word for market, and the word for the road, and several words he wasn't sure about yet but filed carefully for later examination.
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The town of Varath, as he came to understand it over the following days, was a trading town. It sat at the intersection of two major roads — the north-south road he had found in the fields, and an east-west road that connected the flatlands he had crossed to the foothill regions further east — and its existence was organized around the movement of goods between those regions. The wagons that came and went from the yard behind the tavern were trading wagons, carrying goods in both directions: grain and dried produce from the eastern hills, raw materials and manufactured items from somewhere further north, cloth and worked metal from the south.
He learned this slowly, assembled from fragments. A word here. A gesture there. The way Bren spoke to people who came to the yard with the specific fluency of someone comfortable in commercial negotiation. The way the coin he'd seen was only one of at least three types of currency in circulation, each apparently representing a different region or authority, and all apparently accepted in Varath at varying rates of exchange.
Bren let him stay. He wasn't sure exactly what arrangement had been made or why, but Bren fed him and let him sleep in the small room and did not ask him to leave. He suspected Torvel, the older man from the first night, had something to do with this — Torvel had come back on the second morning and spoken with Bren at length, and Bren had glanced at Kael several times during this conversation with an expression that might have been consideration. After Torvel left, Bren had put him to work.
The work was loading and unloading.
He was strong enough for it. The sacks were heavy but not beyond him, and the crates required two people most of the time, and there was always someone available to take the other end. He couldn't ask questions, couldn't negotiate, couldn't participate in the commercial aspect of the operation, but he could lift and carry, and he did, and after the first day Bren began paying him in food, which was what he needed anyway.
He worked in the mornings and learned language in the afternoons.
He learned it from whoever would teach him, and in Varath, as he came to understand, there was a tolerance for the unusual that he suspected was born of the town's function as a trading hub. People came through Varath from many places, and not all of them spoke the same dialect or the same variant of the language, and the residents of Varath had developed a pragmatic openness to people who communicated differently. He was odd — he was clearly, profoundly odd, his clothing strange and his language nonexistent and his ignorance of basic things occasionally staggering — but odd people passed through Varath with some regularity, and he was polite and clearly trying, and that seemed to be sufficient.
Yisse was his most willing teacher.
Yisse was perhaps twenty, he thought, or close to it, though he was finding it difficult to calibrate ages in this world where the conventions of dress and manner that served as age markers at home were all different. Yisse had a methodical mind and found his ignorance interesting in the way that a well-calibrated mind finds a puzzle interesting — not with condescension but with the genuine curiosity of someone encountering something they haven't seen before. In the evenings, when the work was done and the tavern was full, Yisse would sit across from him at a table and they would conduct their strange vocabulary exchanges, Yisse naming objects and actions and Kael repeating them, and then Kael trying to construct simple sentences and Yisse correcting him.
The corrections were the most valuable part. Not just the correction itself but the way Yisse corrected — the specific sound made when the mistake was grammatical versus the specific sound made when the mistake was in tone or in pronunciation. He filed these sounds carefully. He needed to know not just what was correct but what kind of wrong he was being, because different kinds of wrong would require different kinds of attention.
On the fifth day he managed his first complete sentence in their language.
He had been trying to ask for more water, and what he produced — after three failed attempts that Yisse had corrected — was something that meant, approximately, I want more of the water-thing, please, which was not grammatically perfect and used the wrong register of please (apparently there were at least three registers of please in this language, differentiated by degree of formality and degree of urgency, and he had used the one that implied mild desperation, which was not quite right for asking for water at a table) — but it was a complete sentence and it communicated and Yisse understood it and fetched the water.
He sat with the cup in his hands and felt something that he took a moment to identify.
Pride. A small, quiet pride, the pride of a very specific and very hard-won step forward.
He had not felt much of it in his life before, or he had felt it rarely, and almost always for things that turned out, in retrospect, to be unimportant. The seven years of careful professional work, the small promotions and the positive reviews and the sense of being competent at something — none of it had felt like this. This felt like the beginning of something real, and what made it real was that there was no one here to approve of it except himself, and he found, somewhat to his surprise, that his own approval was sufficient.
Yisse said something. He thought it was something like: you're improving.
He said, in their language: "Thank you, Yisse."
The tone was wrong — he used the wrong register again — and Yisse made the correction sound, and he filed it and tried again, and this time Yisse made the good sound, the nod, the small confirmation.
He drank the water.
Outside, the town of Varath went on doing what it had always done, indifferent to the strange small victories occurring inside the tavern, moving its goods along its roads, building its fires, living its life that had nothing to do with him.
He found he didn't mind. He was a part of it, or the beginning of a part. That was enough for now.
The name of the language, he had learned, was Verath — or at least that was what the people of Varath called it, and he didn't know yet whether this was a regional name or a universal one, but it was what he had. Verath. He practiced it under his breath in the dark sometimes, a reminder: the language is Verath. You are learning Verath. One word at a time.
He had sixty-seven words now.
He kept counting.