Naamah's Kiss - Jacqueline Carey [178]
"Master Lo speak seven different language from Ch'in. Me, only three." Bao took pity on me. "All right, all right! Stop look like you going to spit! I teach you Shuntian official language. All the scholars speak it."
"Thank you." I was mollified.
Learning Ch'in—or at least the official tongue of Shuntian, which I learned was the capitol city where the Emperor's court resided—was a good deal more difficult than I anticipated. One of the first things Bao told me was that I regularly mispronounced his name in a manner that meant anything from womb to cooking pan to rain shower. He said it for me four different ways, with four different intonations. I could hear the difference, but I struggled to emulate it, let alone retain it.
"What does it mean your way?" I asked after half an hour's worth of repeating the same syllable. "Your name?"
He was silent a moment. "Treasure," he said reluctantly. "Is a common baby-name for a boy."
"Oh." I waited.
"My mother call me Bao." His mouth quirked. "Only thing I keep from those day."
"Before they sold you to the circus," I said softly.
Bao nodded. "When I born after the Tatar raid, they wait to see. Maybe I look like my father or my mother." He shook his head. "I look like the Tatar who"—he made the lewd gesture—"my mother. She want to keep me," he added, his back stiff and upright, shoulders squared. "But it is too great shame for my father. She cry when the contract is stamped and the circus take me, tell me I always her treasure. I remember."
It was an old hurt and a deep one, and I very much wanted to put my arms around him—but his posture warned me not to.
"My mother said something much the same to me, once," I said instead. "And I will never forget it."
"Did she send you away?" he asked. "Across the sea?"
"No." It was my turn to be quiet. "No, it was the Maghuin Dhonn Herself who sent me. The Great Bear my people follow."
Bao understood. "She who make the earth shake when you shout that day."
I nodded. "Aye."
"Why?"
I gazed past him at the unbroken horizon. Sunlight sparkled on the endless rippling waves. Sea, and sea, and sea. Somewhere on the far side of it waited a young woman blindfolded behind iron bars, a young woman who had torn her bridegroom apart limb from limb. What it had to do with me, I couldn't begin to guess. "I would by all that's sacred that I knew. But I reckon I'll find out one day."
He smiled a little. "I think so, too."
* * *
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
Slowly, slowly, I learned to speak Ch'in. For a mercy, the strange intonations were the worst of it. Once I developed a rudimentary grasp of them and began calling Bao "treasure" more often than I did "cooking pan," it got easier. The structure of the grammar was actually simpler in some ways than Alban or D'Angeline, without a multitude of conjugations to master.
"That how I learn to speak different language while we travel," Bao explained. "Make it simple like Ch'in language. Master Lo, he study D'Angeline until it perfect. I learn just enough of the others."
"What others?" I asked.
He shrugged. "Tatar, Akkadian, Ephesian, some Bhodistani… many." I was impressed. Bao eyed me shrewdly. "Smarter than you think, huh?"
"To be sure," I agreed.
I learned other things on our journey, too. I learned that Master Lo Feng had served three emperors and claimed to be a hundred and seventy years old.
"That's not possible!" I said in shock.
Master Lo's eyelids crinkled. "There is a reason why my old knees creak," he said tranquilly. "Practice your breathing and contemplate the Way."
During our language lessons, Bao told me more in hushed tones. "Master Lo, he do alchemy once like Black Sleeve. Try to make elixir of immortality." He shook his head. "One day he see is all false. Only the Way is true."
"Is that when you met him?" I asked.
"No." His voice was curt. "That happen much, much later."
As our greatship sailed farther south into warmer climes, I learned that thanks to Bao's acrobatic training, he