Much of her knowledge, of course, lacked clarity. She knew names for things she had never seen; she knew it was insulting and vulgar to call someone a scottu, but had no idea why. Worse of all were the noumena, the words expressing the concepts by which the culture defined itself, the world it saw, the sociological universe into which each individual fit himself... The noumena expressed not thought or action but concepts untranslatable into Fiona’s own language, understandable only from context if at all.
The noumena beat at Fiona’s brain, demanding understanding: she had absorbed two languages, Abessas and Gostu, the language of the locals and of the military Brodaini; and they warred in her mind, mutually contradictory when they were not being maddeningly vague. Demmin, a Gostu word: it translated as “honor,” but why was “honor” inadequate? There were other contexts where “honor” had not seemed to work, contexts involving correctness, initiative, advantage, esteem, place, self-worth. Hostu, another Gostu word, seemed to have two referents in Fiona’s own language, “stasis” one, “perfection” the other. Was stasis necessary for perfection in Brodaini society? Or was the word a homonym? Or was there a larger meaning encompassing both these definitions, the meaning incomprehensible to the literal-minded language computer on board the mother ship?
Abessas was a little better; she understood the wide-traveled, practical merchant culture better than she did the military caste of the Brodaini, but the words still had implications that puzzled her. The most-used term of respect, the equivalent of “mister,” was cenors-stannan, literally “most fortunate,” but there was a subtle emphasis on the word stannan that seemed to imply that “fortune” was to be taken more as an indicator of wealth than of luck— though, as in Fiona’s own language, it contained both meanings.
There were dozens of noumena in each language, stumbling blocks that hampered her mastery of the tongues. For everyday use she did well enough; but did not her mission demand utter confidence, perhaps even eloquence? Her lack of fluency, her lack of understanding, fretted her as the days went by and Arrandal approached.
One afternoon of brilliant sun she sat forward on the hatches, watching as a landing-stage approached and the crew competently set about the process of getting the clumsy barge to the pier while the passengers tried simultaneously to watch the sights and keep out of the way. A crowd of townsmen gathered on the wharf. The tillermen, because of the cabin built forward of their station, could not see forward, so the grandmother stood up on the roof of the cabin barking orders. The pier approached. The square sail came down on the run as startled passengers jumped clear, and a bowman, with a show-off grin, roped a bollard on the first try. Passengers tailed onto the line and the barge was hauled to its place on the wharf. A family leaped aboard to welcome some long-absent relatives; the bowman was bursting with profane orders to get a hatch raised; and suddenly alarms were buzzing.
Fiona blinked in surprise and glanced around in apprehension at the electronic roar, then saw no one else had heard it: it was her private signal. Her baggage was being tampered with.
Certain of her nerves had been rewired to grant this knowledge. She alternately prolated and oblated the muscles of her left forearm, which shut off the alarm and allowed her to think. Unnoticed in the bustle, unknown to anyone present, she slipped through the crowd to her cabin door, pulled her hood over her head and face, prepared herself mentally for violence, and snatched open the door.
Two young men, deck passengers for the last two days, were wrestling with one of her two chests, the one that contained her magic show and her offplanet technology. The other chest, which contained her clothing, was already upended and its contents scattered. No doubt the thieves intended, if they found anything valuable, to walk off the barge with it in the general confusion of landing, but the fact they hadn’t stationed a lookout spoke for their amateurishness, and, unknown to them, it was going to take a more forceful technology than this world had ever possessed to open the chest.
They were amateurs at violence as well. Fiona, though unblooded, was not. Her training in self-defense had been thorough; certain pre-programmed reactions were triggered automatically as the nearest thief, his eyes wide at the sight of her smooth, blank-featured face mask, came for her with the dagger he’d been using on the chest’s offplanet lock.
He came up from the deck, the knife rising with him, striking for her belly to rip up to the lungs and heart. Fiona let the knife do its worst, ignoring it; the badly-tempered blade shattered on her privy-coat and in the meantime a strike with stiffened knuckles had crushed the thief’s windpipe. He staggered, clawing at his throat, the remains of his dagger clattering to the deck; Fiona’s booted foot lashed out, doubling the other thief over as he stood. She reached for him, twisting his arm back before he could draw a weapon; she snapped the arm and threw him into the bulkhead in the same movement.
There was a sudden stillness, an end to motion. The dying thief had fallen half out of the cabin, thrashing as he strangled. The other lay crumpled against the bulkhead, too terrified to move. Fiona pulled her hood back and began to gulp air, feeling the thunder of her heart begin to slow as the crisis-reaction passed, as passengers and crew began to gather in silence at the door. She clasped her hands, trying to restrain the instincts that had been built into her, that were clamoring for her to attack once more, lunge at the astonished crowd outside the cabin door...
The passengers parted and two Brodaini, the two women, came striding arrogantly into view. One of them stationed herself at the door as a guard — no amateurs, these — and the other looked at Fiona with appraising pale eyes.
“What occurred?” she said in badly-accented Abessas.
“These men are thieves, ban-demmin,” Fiona answered in the Brodaini’s own tongue, aware her voice was uncontrolled, near breaking. “I caught them in my cabin, trying to loot my possessions.”
“Indeed,” said the Brodaini. Her eyes had widened slightly at Fiona’s use of her own language, including the honorific ban-demmin, “honored” or “respected,” one of the word-combinations most often used in Gostu polite address. A non-Brodainu who spoke the language was fairly rare; rarer still, presumably, was a woman who, slight though she was, could crush two bigger men in such fashion that neither had a chance to cry out.
The Brodainu’s eyes cut to the man sprawled in the doorway. The man’s limbs, deprived of oxygen, were beginning to convulse; there was foam on his lips, and his broken windpipe rattled as his lungs tried frantically to draw air. With a strangely withdrawn tenderness — there was compassion in the Brodainu’s look, but it was almost an unearthly compassion, like a painted angel or saint — the warrior drew her straight, double-edged sword and drove the point into the thief’s heart. Fiona felt as if her own heart had stopped; she wrung her hands — oddly the only gesture that seemed possible — and tried to control the feeling of horror and the simultaneous mad impulse, triggered by the unsheathing of weapons, that urged her to strike out against danger.