The town appeared first as a smell.
Kael had dozed, briefly and without intention, lulled by the rhythm of the wagon, and he came awake to the smell before anything else registered: wood smoke, and animal, and something being cooked, and something else underneath those things, organic and complicated and human in the broadest sense of the word, the smell of many people living in a place for a long time and leaving their evidence in the air.
He shifted and looked through the gap at the rear of the canvas. The road was different now. Wider, its surface more compacted, the verges on either side cut back further. Other tracks joined it at intervals — footpaths, narrower roads, the pressed remains of regular foot traffic. The grass had given way to something cultivated, broad flat fields in which he could see plants he didn't recognize growing in the regular rows that everywhere marked the difference between nature and intention.
And then buildings.
They appeared first as shapes against the sky — low, peaked roofs, the dark lines of walls, the occasional higher shape of something taller. The architecture was nothing he could place in any tradition he knew. The buildings were constructed of a pale stone that looked almost white in the afternoon light, their rooflines steeply pitched and ending in carved wooden peaks that rose to decorative points. The windows were small and numerous, often arranged in pairs, and framed with wood that had been painted or stained in dark, contrasting colors. There were no glass windows that he could see, but many had coverings of what looked like thin translucent material pulled taut over frames.
The road became a street. The wagon slowed as traffic increased around them.
Kael sat very still and watched through the canvas gap.
People. Actual people. He could see them now — in the street, in doorways, crossing between buildings, carrying things, talking in groups. He studied them carefully, the way he had always studied things, with the specific attention of someone who has learned that details contain information that the general impression omits.
They were human. That was his first and most important conclusion, and he examined it. Two legs, two arms, upright posture, bilateral symmetry, faces arranged in the configuration he knew: eyes forward, nose below, mouth below that, ears on the sides. The proportions varied, as proportions always vary — some taller, some shorter, some broader, some lean — but the range of variation fell within what he would have called human. There was nothing about any individual that, seen separately, he would have described as inhuman.
But taken together, the population of this street had certain tendencies that differed from anything he was used to. The hair colors leaned toward darker tones — blacks and deep browns and occasional deep reds, with some lighter variations — and the hair itself seemed thicker and more structured than what he was used to, worn in elaborate arrangements of braids and wrapped sections and folded shapes that had clearly been given careful thought. The skin tones ranged widely but without the specific racial groupings he was used to from Earth. The eyes were larger on average, with irises that could be very dark or unexpectedly light — he spotted one woman through the gap whose irises were a pale gold-green that was striking even from a distance.
Their clothes were layered. Everyone seemed to wear multiple garments, even in what was to him relatively warm weather: undershorts and overlayers and outer wraps in various configurations, the colors muted and earthy but coordinated in ways that suggested intentionality. He saw no bright colors, nothing that would have been called primary. Everything was the color of things found in the world: earth and bark and leaf and stone and sky.
The wagon came to a stop.
Bren's voice came from the front, saying something short and directed, and then the canvas was pulled aside and Bren was looking at him, not unkindly, and gestured for him to come out.
Kael climbed down.
He was in a yard of packed earth behind a long building. Other wagons were parked here, two of them larger than Bren's, one smaller. Men and women were moving around the yard, unloading or inspecting or talking in groups, and they looked at Kael in the specific way people look at something unusual — without rudeness, but without concealment of their interest.
Bren spoke to him, slowly and with the deliberate articulation of someone trying to be understood, and pointed at the building.
Kael nodded, understanding the gesture if not the words, and followed Bren inside.
The building was a tavern, or the equivalent of one. He understood this immediately — the smell of cooked food and drink and accumulated human presence was universal — and he felt something ease in him that he hadn't known was tight. A tavern meant a relatively understood social context. People in taverns, in his experience, wanted certain things and nothing unexpected: food, drink, rest, conversation, occasionally commerce. He understood what a tavern was for.
Bren spoke to the person behind the long wooden counter, a woman of middle age with the same elaborate braided hair as everyone else, dressed in a dark apron over layered clothes. The woman glanced at Kael, and something brief passed across her face — assessment, conclusion — and she nodded and called to someone in the back.
She set two heavy clay cups on the counter. Bren picked one up and placed it in front of Kael. He picked it up and smelled it. It smelled of something fermented and slightly sour, like a very dry cider. He took a small sip. The flavor was complex and not unpleasant, sharp on the front of the tongue and warmer at the back.
He set the cup down.
"Thank you," he said. "Bren."
Bren looked at him. Bren said something that had the sound of a question.
Kael took a breath. He pointed at the cup. He looked at Bren with a particular expression he hoped conveyed his intention. Then he said, in English, "Cup."
Bren blinked.
Kael pointed again. He waited.
Bren said something — a single word. Kael did not know if it was the word for cup or for drink or for clay or for yours or for something he had no reference for. But he took the word and held it in his mind, the shape of the sound, and filed it under cup, drink, clay, holding it lightly until he had more context to anchor it.
He pointed at the counter. He looked at Bren. He waited.
There was a long pause. Then Bren said a word.
He filed it. Counter, wood, surface, long thing.
He pointed at himself. "Kael."
Bren made a sound that might have been amusement, or might have been something else entirely, and said, very deliberately, "Bren."
Kael nodded. He pointed at Bren, then at himself. He pointed at the woman behind the counter. He looked at Bren.
Bren understood. Bren said a word.
The woman looked up. Bren said the word again, distinctly, and she looked at Kael. He pointed to her. He said the word Bren had given him.
The woman's expression shifted slightly, into something that was not quite a smile but was adjacent to it, and she said a longer phrase that he could not unpack, and went back to her work.
This was how it started.
-----
Bren paid for a room.
Kael understood this — the exchange of coins, the key produced, the direction indicated — and he followed Yisse, who had appeared again after the wagon was unloaded, up a narrow stair to a room on the second floor. The room was small and clean and contained a bed, a low table, a ceramic washbasin filled with water, and a window covered with the translucent material he had noticed from the street. The bed was a low frame with a mattress filled with something that compressed under his weight like fine grain — not feathers, not foam, something dry and slightly granular that settled around him without springs or resistance.
Yisse stood in the doorway and said something, looking at Kael with the very direct gaze he was beginning to associate with people in this world — less conscious avoidance of eye contact than he was used to — and then held up both hands and displayed ten fingers. Then one hand, five fingers. Then touched the window.
He understood this too: fifteen minutes, or some unit of time equivalent to fifteen of something, and then — he looked at the window, at the angle of light — before dark.
He nodded.
Yisse left.
Kael sat on the edge of the bed and let himself breathe for a full minute without doing anything else. Then he took off his shoes and socks and shirt and washed himself with the cold water in the basin. He washed his face and his arms and the back of his neck and his feet. The water turned grey with three days of walking. He dried himself with the cloth that had been left folded beside the basin and put his shirt back on.
He looked at himself in the small metal mirror fixed to the wall above the basin.
He looked approximately as he expected: tired, slightly thinner than he'd been three days ago, with the particular unfocused quality in the eyes of a person whose sleep has been insufficient and interrupted. He had dark hair that was beginning to need a cut, a face he had always considered unremarkable in its regularity, a body that was fit by accident of habit — he walked a great deal, for reasons that had more to do with a dislike of crowded transit than any deliberate exercise program.
He looked ordinary. He felt ordinary. There was nothing about him that explained why he was here or what he was supposed to do about it.
He put his socks in his shoes and set them by the door and went downstairs.
Bren and Yisse were at a table. A third person was with them — an older man, shorter than Bren and dressed more formally, with the kind of bearing that suggested professional expertise of some kind. He was talking with Bren with the focused attention of a business conversation.
Kael settled at the end of the table, which was the only space, and kept quiet. Food arrived — brought by a young person of indeterminate gender, efficient and expressionless — and he looked at it.
The plate held three things: something that was clearly bread, darker and denser than what he was used to, formed into a flat round; something he couldn't identify, a pile of cooked material that might have been grain or root vegetable or some combination, golden-brown and smelling of herbs; and something that was clearly meat, sliced and layered on the side of the plate, dark and very tender-looking, with a sauce over it the color of dark amber.
He ate carefully and with attention. The bread was heavier than he expected, with a slight sourness and a chew that suggested fermentation in the dough. The golden thing was grain, definitely grain, cooked in fat or oil with herbs that had no equivalent taste he could pin down — something between rosemary and something else, something darker and warmer. The meat was rich and unlike anything he'd tasted, very finely textured, the sauce intensely savory.
He ate everything.
The older man had been watching him with contained curiosity, and when Kael set down his utensil — a wide, shallow spoon that seemed to serve all the functions of cutlery — the man spoke to him directly, in the same language as everyone else.
Kael looked at him steadily. He said, in English, "I don't understand you."
The man blinked. He said something else, a different construction.
"I still don't understand," Kael said. Then, because he wanted to be useful, he picked up the spoon and said clearly, "I don't know what this is called." He set it down and picked up the bread. "I don't know what this is called." He set it down. He pointed to himself. "I don't know any words in your language." He spread his hands. "I want to learn."
None of this was understood. But something in his tone or his gestures or the very deliberate way he said it seemed to communicate something, because the older man looked at Bren and said something, and Bren said something back, short and definitive, and the older man nodded slowly.
The older man picked up his own spoon. He held it up. He said a word.
Kael looked at him. He said the word back.
The man nodded. He pointed to the bread. He said a word.
Kael repeated it.
The man pointed to the table itself. He said a word.
Kael repeated it.
It went on like this for a while, the man pointing at objects within reach and naming them, Kael repeating each name and holding it in the place in his mind he was already constructing for this purpose — a kind of mental map, organized not by alphabetical order or by category but by context, the words he learned at this table anchored to this table, to the specific objects and the specific moment of learning. He had always remembered things this way, spatially and contextually rather than in lists, and he suspected it would continue to serve him.
Yisse was watching with the expression of someone watching a moderately interesting thing unfold. Bren had returned to conversation with the older man. The room filled up around them as evening came on, and the level of noise rose, and Kael continued his small accumulation of words, pointing and repeating and filing, building a vocabulary of perhaps forty words by the time the lamps were lit.
Forty words was nothing. Forty words was less than a first day of the most basic language course. But forty words was forty more than he'd had that morning, and each one was a small light in a very large dark, and he held them carefully.
The older man, whose name Kael had caught during introductions as Torvel, left after a while with the air of someone concluding professional business. Bren spoke briefly to Yisse and then to Kael — Kael understood nothing, but nodded — and then Bren, too, left the table, heading toward the counter with the air of someone with more business to conduct.
Yisse looked at Kael.
Kael looked at Yisse.
Yisse picked up a cup. They said a word — the same word Kael had heard Bren use earlier, and which he had filed under cup.
"Cup," Kael said. In English.
Yisse repeated it. "Cup." The vowel was slightly different, the p crisper, but it was recognizable. Then Yisse said the word again in their language.
Kael repeated the word in their language.
Yisse's mouth curved. It was the first clear smile he had seen on this world, and it was entirely human, a curve of the lips and a lift of the eyes and a quality in it that communicated genuine amusement, and he felt something loosen in his chest in a way he hadn't anticipated.
He thought: I can do this.
He picked up the bread. He looked at Yisse. He said, in Yisse's language, the word Torvel had given him.
Yisse nodded. Then held up one finger, and said the word again, with a slightly different emphasis on the second syllable.
He repeated it. The emphasis was wrong.
Yisse held up the finger again, said it again.
He tried again. The emphasis shifted.
Yisse nodded, and the nod had in it the quality of a teacher watching a student cross a threshold, and said something else, something that from its tone might have been something like: better.
He stored that inflection too. The sound of better, or good, or something like that. He would need it.
-----
That night he lay in the small room on the second floor with the two moons coming through the translucent window covering and casting double shadows across the low ceiling, and he thought about what he was doing.
He was building a life. He didn't know how long a life, or what shape it would take, or whether anything from his previous life would ever be recovered. He had not allowed himself to think carefully about his previous life yet — about the people in it, the apartment, the job he had had for seven years, the familiarity of streets he had walked until they were automatic — because thinking about those things carefully would take him somewhere that would not help him.
He would think about them eventually. He was sure of that. But not yet.
What he thought about instead was the language. He went through his forty words one by one in the dark, hearing them in the voice of Torvel or Bren or Yisse, placing each one in the context in which he had learned it. He tried to find patterns in the sounds — and he thought he could, a little. Certain sounds seemed to cluster. Certain endings seemed to repeat in ways that might be grammatical rather than coincidental. He had no way to test his hypotheses yet, but he had them, and they gave him something to work with.
He thought about writing. He had no paper and no pen, and even if he had, he didn't know what the writing system of this world looked like, whether it was alphabetic or syllabic or logographic, whether it moved left to right or right to left or top to bottom, whether this world had a single writing system or many. All of this was to be discovered.
He was thirty-one years old. He had a degree in economics that he had used in a professional capacity for seven years and which was, in this context, completely useless. He had no special skills, no particular gifts, no hidden reserves of strength or courage or arcane ability. He was moderately fit, moderately intelligent, and moderately good at paying attention to things.
He had, on reflection, exactly what he needed to do what he had to do.
Not more. Not less.
He closed his eyes, and the double-shadow of the moons moved slowly across the ceiling, and eventually he slept.