Broken Crescent (13 page)

His groin itched so badly with the hair growing in that he would have scratched it until it bled if he was up to that kind of exertion.

His new home had walls of yellowing plaster, revealing carved stone underneath a few major cracks. Light came from a brass oil lamp that hung from a wrought-iron hook by the door. Soot from the lamp had cast permanent shadows on the wall behind it and the high-arched ceiling above. The bed was long and narrow, and still seemed to fill more than half the width of the room.

He was not yet strong enough to get up and try the massive iron door and see if it was locked.

The question had worn such a deep groove in his psyche that it was nearly meaningless. The words were little more than an arcane incantation that might have been chanted by Scarface behind his demonic red mask.

A forever ago Nate had decided that he had permanently left what he had known as the real world. The place he occupied was no more a part of the planet Earth of the twenty-first century than was the land of Oz. The darkness he had fallen through had been some sort of rift, some portal or transition between his world and someplace else.

A few times Nate tried to decide exactly how “real” this world was, but ended up tying himself in the kind of solipsistic knots that had made him drop the one philosophy course he had tried to take in college.

He had no end of theories that could deny the reality around him; he could postulate his own hallucinatory madness; he could invent some entity trying to manipulate his perceptions; he could even pretend that he was embedded in the ultimate virtual reality role-playing game. The problem with all of that was the fact that he had nearly died in that black pit where they had kept him. Reality itched. Reality made him smell his own shit. Reality was a painful bite of hunger burrowing in his nonexistent stomach.

Pretty much, reality sucked.

In a way, it was even worse here than in the pit he’d been rescued from. Up until now he’d been too sick and delirious to really contemplate what was happening. Now he was well enough to think, and to brood.

He wondered how long he had been here. He wondered what was happening to his family. He wondered if Thanksgiving had come and gone yet. And he wondered if all his speculation meant anything when he had so clearly and completely left his own reality.

If there was anything open to question, it was the world he had come from. The only proof he had that his memory of another world had any validity at all was his physical appearance. Racially, he was so different from the people who lived here, he
had
to come from somewhere else.

His nursemaid came in twice a “day.” She would examine him, and feed him a bowl of thick, bland broth. When Nate seemed to have regained his senses, if not his strength, she left him a chamber pot.

Each time, Nate would ask her, “Who are you?”

Each time she’d mutter something in her incomprehensible language and get down to her business.

On the eighth visit after Nate regained the ability to count, she did something new. After helping him eat, she took his left leg and bent the knee upward. She held it there and gave Nate a meaningful look.

Nate stared back.

She put his leg down and repeated the motion. Nate could feel unused muscles tightening in his thighs. She looked at him again, and appeared frustrated that Nate didn’t get it right away.

She sighed and started doing it repeatedly, chanting,
“Phi. Ghno. Ka. Lek. Dho. Shin.”

It took a moment, but Nate got the idea. Physical therapy. He had been sick and immobile for so long that he probably would have to exercise at least as long to get back to where he had been. Maybe longer.

“Okay, sister. I get it.”

Nate shook his leg free and did the bending motion himself, raising the knee above the bed. It was harder than it looked, and he couldn’t hold it up as far as she’d been raising it, but he managed.

Keeping time, he imitated her.
“Phi. Ghno. Ka. Lek. Dho. Shin.”

She stared at him as he dropped the first leg and started on the other.
“Phi. Ghno. Ka. Lek. Dho. Shin.”

By the end, he was covered in sweat. “Okay, how many reps am I supposed to do before I lose consciousness?”

She still stared at him, a look of fascination on her face.

“What?”

She held up a finger and said tentatively,
“Phi.”

Nate held up his left index finger and repeated,
“Phi.”

The look of surprise on her face was comical, as if she had just run across a Shetland pony that quoted Shakespeare. She held up a second finger and said,
“Ghno.”

Nate repeated it with his own finger.

“Ghno.”
Nate smiled at her reaction. “You like that? You’ll love this.” Nate went through the fingers of that hand.
“Ka. Lek. Dho.”

“Ka. Lek. Dho,”
she repeated.

Nate held up the thumb on his right hand,
“Shin.”

She laughed. He liked her laugh.

He held up his right index finger and wagged it, arching his eyebrows in what he hoped was a quizzical expression.

“Phishin,”
she told him.

“Phishin,”
Nate repeated.
Phi Shin? A base six counting system? Why not, it’s as weird as anything else here.

Nate held up his right middle finger and, before she could prompt him, he said,
“Ghnoshin?”
Looking quizzical again.

Her eyes widened and she said,
“Ghnoshin”
as if she was correcting him. As far as Nate could tell, it was the same word.

“Ghnoshin,”
Nate repeated.

She clapped her hands together and laughed again. Nate used up the rest of his fingers on
“Kashin,”
and
“Lekshin.”

Conan goes to Sesame Street,
Nate thought.

His keeper was mighty pleased with him. It was as if the possibility he might pick up on part of her language never occurred to her. Nate was happy he managed to correct that idea, because if he was going to survive once he left this bed, he had better be able to understand the natives.

“Let’s see just how far your mathematics has gotten,” Nate told her. He held up both hands toward her, and started lowering fingers, the reverse of what they’d been doing. He counted backward, stumbling a little when he confused
“Ka”
and
“Lek.”

With both his hands curled into fists, Nate gave her the quizzical expression again. Her face looked blank, so Nate repeated counting down,
“Ka, Ghno, Phi . . .”
This time she slapped her forehead and said,
“Tga.”
She held out her hand and counted down the last three fingers,
“Ka, Ghno, Phi, Tga.”

Nate tried to pronounce it, but
“Tga”
seemed more phlegm than word. It came out sounding more like
“Ka”
than anything else, which amused his nurse.

“Yeah,” Nate said to her, laughing himself. “Let me see what your learning curve in C++ is, huh?”

She shook her head and came over and, business-like, started showing him exercises for his arms.

Though, for practice, and out of a perverse hacker’s sense of humor, when he counted the reps he started with
“Tga.”

Over the days, as Nate recovered, he thanked God for the diversion of his exercises and the task of learning a new language. Deep in his soul Nate was a problem solver, and having something to keep his mind occupied held at bay the slow rot of depression.

During visit
“Dhoshin”
Nate discovered his nurse’s name was Yerith. He was also able to get across his own name, Nate. While she was obviously fascinated and pleased that Nate was picking up words in her language, her ability to teach was strained by time. Nate could have kept her at his side for hours, pulling words into his vocabulary, but she was obviously worried about staying too long.

Nate tried to be gallant about it, but it was frustrating when she could only stay fifteen minutes or so, though now that he could feed and clean himself, most of that time was devoted to language and keeping tabs on how well his recovery was going.

During the time between visits, Nate would push his body as far as he could manage, while chanting foreign words to himself, trying to make sense of things. He had a goal of being able to speak a complete sentence by the time he was ambulatory.

His recuperative powers exceeded his linguistic ability.

By the middle of his second week of lucidity he managed to struggle out of bed, but he was barely at the “Me Tarzan, You Jane,” stage.

Again, he seemed to have surprised his angel of mercy. They both startled each other when she pushed in the door while he was pacing next to the bed, supporting himself on the wall. He fell on his ass on the bed, and she spilled his dinner—which by this point consisted of pieces identifiable as meat, bread, and a tankard of some weak beverage that in a previous life might have been warm beer.

“I walk.”
Nate said, using what parts of the alien tongue he had learned so far. He felt as if it still sounded as if he was trying to cough up a hairball. He knew his accent was absolutely horrible.

Yerith understood him. “I see,” she responded in kind. She knelt to retrieve the items she had dropped. The floor was piled with threadbare carpets, and the broth along with about half the grog had soaked into them. She managed to save the bread, and a hunk of meat. She looked at him and he saw concern in her face. She pointed to the door and said, “No.”

It wasn’t harsh, the way she said it, and her eyes looked at him to see that he understood.

Nate understood, and he wished he had the ability to explain it to her. He wanted to leave, but he also knew that on the other side of that door lived a group of men with masks who seemed bent on making him disappear. The most he could manage at his level of comprehension was, “I hear you.”

He smiled and hoped she knew what he meant. He was okay staying here until . . .

He didn’t try to explain that he had already tested her goodwill. Of course he had tried the door. While it was latched, he could see a dark corridor beyond the small barred window. He had stared out there for a long time, reminding himself that there was a world beyond the four walls he saw every day.

Yerith did appear relieved as she set what was left of his dinner on the table. Then she sat down, waiting for Nate to start the lesson.

Probably because Yerith wasn’t trained to be a teacher, she let Nate lead. That was okay. Of anyone, Nate was the best judge of how quickly he was picking things up. He still wished that she could give him some guidance. He was certain that he didn’t know what questions he should ask.

He decided that, now that he was upright, he would attack a subject that had been a pet peeve since he had gained consciousness down here. While he had long outgrown any shyness—he couldn’t really feel embarrassed being naked in front of a woman who had wiped diarrhea from his ass and who’d shaved his lice-infested pubic hair—being naked 24/7 was getting kind of old.

He started by reaching over and taking her sleeve. Her clothes were a little more normal-looking to Nate as far as style went. Probably because they were more utilitarian. She had a blouse and a bodice that fit close at the waist and then fell into a skirt. The colors were somber. It was only rarely that he’d see a hint of color peek out from the grays and browns.

Today there was a little color. She had a patterned blue scarf around her neck.

He rubbed the fabric of her sleeve and said, “You have.” Then he slapped the skin of his arm. “No have.”