The wayward Baroness Kekszemu turned her head and eyes from the gathered folk of the camp…hamlet…village. She struggled to put it into human terms. There were a dozen individuals, who, to her eyes, all looked alike except for their sizes. They were male and female—they were physically gendered like most Terran mammals—but the similarity from individual to individual was striking.
With the footprints, Etelka’s theory was confirmed. They indeed looked like a hybrid of wolf and gorilla. Bigger than the chimpanzee, upright, possessed of opposable thumbs on both hands and feet. Sharp and long canine teeth, and long snouts compared to the flat faces of apes. Pointed canine ears. Forward facing eyes suggested predator. They were also entirely hairless. Etelka wondered what they wore in winter.
The size of the chief—if we can call him that—was the most unusual thing. Indeed, looking around, it appeared to Etelka that the group pecking order was entirely based on size: this being based on a rather tiny sample size of a species she had virtually no experience with, of course.
“Do you have him somewhere here? My manservant who was rudely and inappropriately taken from my tent in the pre-dawn hours?” Perhaps they would respond to our human pecking-order, she thought.
The typical experience with the Rakshasan artifact translation ring had always been one of hearing the other speak fluent words in one’s own language, without accent or region other than that of the hearer. It was completely subjective. Speakers of two different tongues would each hear their own spoken.
This was different. The answer the Chief gave to her was not in Kekszemu Etelka’s native Hunnish, but instead, she was forced, her mind was forced to comprehend this creature’s own language.
It was very guttural, highly tonal and seemed to her to be the language of the foundation of Terra itself, even the Universe itself, so reflective of the relationships of nature to nature that it all made sense.
Had it even been Hunnish or any other language of the Empire or the world that she was familiar with, the Chief’s voice was many octaves deeper than hers, so much that Etelka felt that her bones vibrated with his speech.
“Your servant is alive. We have even fed and watered him. He is an object of curiosity for my people,” he said. “And to answer your next question: no, you will not leave here.”
Etelka, still wrapping her head around the unexpected manner of translation, after moment of rapid thought disguised as catching her breath, responded, “Why is it we will not be permitted to leave? There is so much for my species to learn about yours…” Her heart was racing more than she would have anticipated.
“I came here with the very mission to meet your people and your obviously potent self…”
“You speak as a warthog’s ass.” Chief was not going for flattery. Etelka recoiled somewhat as he stood even taller and seemed to grow in stature before her.
“Chief, sir, do you have a preferred title or name I may address you by?”
“I am Perpiscuitous Dream.”
Work in progress. Mistakes and misspellings are present. This is a very rough draft. Copyright 2021 Ion Fyr ionfyr.net
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Ion Fyr 