Chapter 8 - Part I

As the buttes of eastern Eirdred Province grew, so did the stones and cobbles on the road. Onion had become increasingly displeased in her role as sickly leper girl,and her bottom was woefully abused by the road while her sturdy, well-traveled legs went neglected.

The idle boredom did give Vren the opportunity to leaf through the first anthology of paper and ink she ever owned. If nothing else, it was an attractive book, though a little worn from use. Dog-eared pages produced hairline cracks between sheets of paper so thin they otherwise seemed glued together.

Cedric covered a yawn with one hand while the other clung tightly to the wéhkàu leading their cart at the tail end of the caravan.  Onion shifted uncomfortably in her wrappings while sitting in the wagon.   Leprosy, long since cured by the Scholar Emperor Pren during the Age of Medicine, often brought pilgrimages from the outer states of Yibouh to Pho-Boteth for healing.  Few doctors desired to travel outside of civilization to help the barbarians of the empire, though they welcomed the sick without discrimination.

Yet although it was an easy cure, throughout the empire old fears and superstitions seemed to be more contagious than the disease itself.  The two of them remained at the end of the caravan and camped just outside of the main Soa group, with their fanciful and colored covered wagons.  Though the Eirdren who traveled with the Soa formed their own group, their companions did not bother Cedric or Vren.  This was somewhat a boon to the former chef as he was not confident of his ability to repeat his story and Vren was completely useless in that area as well.

The Soa they traveled with were mostly merchants, but a couple of wéhkàu yak breeders joined along to care for the beasts of burden.  Horegrel, the guide and father figure of the main Soa family called himself a gemmer, and had made a small fortune bringing useless colored rocks to rich Eirdren nobility.  He loved the deepness of the Eirdren pockets, and how he could use their shiny metal to acquire furniture, skins and foodstuffs to bring back home.  Regarding the Eirdren themselves, he felt bemused antipathy.  His kindness to the city-dwelling Cedric was simply to spark the amusements of his fellow Soa travelers at the expense of of the former chef.  Of course, Cedric could not understand their japes, but nonetheless, he understood the folly of inciting even stronger passions from his Soa traveling companions.

Cedric had taken notice of Onion's physical molestation of a small brown book, lined with silver in her gauzed hands.

Curious.

She had never once opened it.  She just stared at it, gently cradling it in her hands as if it were a dear treasure, but too afraid to look upon it lest it fly away.

Gregor had been queerly kind to the woman, and while somewhere he could feel in his gut that this was natural of the Bei'thal, his mind nagged at him with sprouts of questions.  True, they were questions that were instinctively crushed underfoot, but lately it was becoming harder and harder to suppress curiosity.

Still, since their incarceration and escape, she had been docile, perhaps even pathetic looking.  A lost sheep with nowhere to go.  Or maybe that was just the gauze.

Extending a pale, reddened hand recently blistered by wéhkàu reigns, he pointed to the Nü's recent leather-bound acquisition and exercised his poor and atrophied language skills.

"Tözjak vru'poh (LINGUISTIC NOTES: töz-give jak-you (implied 'to me') vru-grown from, poh-word, vru'poh = book)" he motioned with his hands and Onion complied by handing over the book to him.  She even seemed relieved to be free of it, strangely enough.

"Gregor's dictionary." he muttered, not entirely sure how he knew.  He quickly flipped through the pages, looking for the words, "Read" "Understand" and "Dictionary" to fashion a sentence to inquire about Onion's level of comprehension of the text.

"Zuo." was the response; no, a word he understood well in Nüish.  He flipped more pages and pointed to a rock. "pai'vik (LINGUISTIC NOTES: pai - part of, vik - mountain, pai'vik = rock)" he ventured in Nüish then followed shortly with the Lithenese, "folth" for boulder.  It was Onion's turn now, and strange as it sounds felt to her lips, she reproduced his word with a level of success she did not realize she was capable of.

"Folth."

Cedric smiled.  He was getting somewhere.

In this way the two passed the time.  The changing landscape from broken plateau to foothills provided more opportunities for the acquisition of nouns and verbs.  At camp, Cedric tried his hand at teaching her the phonetic alphabet of the eastern coast of the empire, codified when Eirdred, Lithen and Sandor were still the Chosen Empire.  Yibouhese glyphs that were used regularly in administration and in the education of the nobility, but were only occasionally peppered in daily correspondence, could come later.

It was a trying task, especially since the Nü refused to learn the phonetic alphabet to write down her own language.  The dictionary, both the Nüish and Lithenese sides had been written entirely in Chosen script.  There existed a script for the tribes of the Outer Crest developed largely by the northern Nü, who had ended their nomadic lifestyles and gravitated towards population centers generations before the southern part of the archipelago.  Few southerners understood this script, but Onion vowed that if she were ever to gain literacy in her native tongue, it would be with that writing style.  She may have begun learning Lithenese to interact on the continent, but she would become literate to one day interact again with her people.