The pilot had removed his goggles now, revealing the lined face of an older man, his grey-white beard and whiskers stark against ruddy, weatherworn skin. For a moment Merlin felt as if he was looking in the mirror at an older version of himself.
'Greetings from the Cohort,' Merlin said. 'I'm the man who saved your life.'
'Gecko,' the red-faced man said, pushing the wooden box into Merlin's chest. 'Forlorn gecko!'
Now that Merlin had a chance to examine it properly, he saw that the box was damaged, its sides caved in and its lid ripped off. Inside was a matrix of straw padding and a great many shattered glass vials. The pilot took one of these smashed vials and held it up before Merlin's face, honey-coloured fluid draining down his fingers.
'What is it?' Merlin asked.
Leaving Merlin to hold the box and flowers, the red-faced pilot pointed angrily towards the wreckage of his aircraft, and in particular at the cylindrical attachment Merlin had taken for a fuel-tank. He saw now that the cylinder was the repository for dozens more of these wooden boxes, most of which must have been smashed when Merlin had nudged the aircraft with Tyrant.
'Did I do something wrong?' Merlin asked.
In a flash the man's anger turned to despair. He was crying, the tears smudging the soot on his cheeks. 'Tangible,' he said, softer now. 'All tangible inkwells. Gecko.'
Merlin reached into the box and retrieved one of the few intact vials. He held the delicate thing to his eyes. 'Medicine?'
'Plastrum,' the man said, taking the box back from Merlin.
'Show me what you do with this,' Merlin said, as he motioned drinking the vial. The man shook his head, narrowing his wrinkled ice-blue eyes at him as if he thought Merlin was either stupid or making fun. Merlin rolled up the sleeve of his arm and motioned injecting himself. The pilot nodded tentatively.
'Plastrum,' he said again. 'Vestibule plastrum.'
'You have some kind of medical crisis? Is that what you were doing, bringing medicines?'
'Tangible,' the man repeated.
'You need to come with me,' Merlin said. 'Whatever that stuff is, we can synthesise it aboard Tyrant.' He held up the intact vial and then placed his index finger next to it. Then he pointed to the parked form of his ship and spread his fingers wide, hoping the pilot got the message that he could multiply the medicine. 'One sample,' he said. 'That's all we need.'
Suddenly there was a commotion. Merlin looked around in time to see a girl running across the apron, towards the two of them. In Cohort terms she could only have been six or seven years old. She wore a child's version of the same greatcoat everyone else wore, buckled black boots and gloves, no hat, goggles or breathing mask. The pilot shouted, 'Minla,' at her approach, a single word that conveyed both warning and something more intimate, as if the older man might have been her father or grandfather. 'Minla oak trefoil,' the man added, firmly but not without kindness. He sounded pleased to see her, but somewhat less than pleased that she had chosen this exact moment to run outside.
'Spelter Malkoha,' the girl said, and hugged the pilot around the waist, which was as high as she could reach. 'Spelter Malkoha, ursine Malkoha.'
The red-faced man knelt down - his eyes were still damp - and ran a gloved finger through the girl's unruly fringe of black hair. She had a small, monkey-like face, one that conveyed both mischief and cleverness.
'Minla,' he said tenderly. 'Minla, Minla, Minla.' Then what was clearly a rhetorical question: 'Gastric spar oxen, fey legible, Minla?'
'Gorse spelter,' she said, sounding contrite. And then, perhaps for the first time, she noticed Merlin. For an anxious moment her expression was frozen somewhere between surprise and suspicion, as if he was some kind of puzzle that had just intruded into her world.
'You wouldn't be called Minla, by any chance?' Merlin asked.
'Minla,' she said, in barely a whisper.
'Merlin. Pleased to meet you, Minla.' And then on a whim, before any of the adults could stop him, he passed her one of the indigo hyacinths that Tyrant had just spun for him, woven from the ancient molecular templates in its biolibrary. 'Yours,' he said. 'A pretty flower for a pretty little girl.'
'Oxen spray, Minla,' the red-faced man said, pointing back to one of the buildings on the edge of the apron. A soldier walked over and extended a hand to the girl, ready to escort her back inside. She moved to hand the flower back to Merlin.
'No,' he said, 'you can keep it, Minla. It's for you.'
She opened the collar of her coat and pushed the flower inside for safe keeping, until only its head was jutting out. The vivid indigo seemed to throw something of its hue onto her face.
'Mer-lin?' asked the older man.
'Yes.'
The man tapped a fist against his own chest. 'Malkoha.' And then he indicated the vial Merlin was still carrying. 'Plastrum,' he said again. Then a question, accompanied by a nod towards Tyrant. 'Risible plastrum?'
'Yes,' Merlin said. 'I can make you more medicine. Risible plastrum.'
The red-faced man studied him for what felt like many minutes. Merlin opted to say nothing: if the pilot hadn't got the message by now, no further persuasion was going to help. Then the pilot reached down to his belt and unbuttoned the leather holster of a pistol. He removed the weapon and allowed Merlin sufficient time to examine it by eye. The low sun gleamed off an oiled black barrel, inlaid with florid white ornamentation carved from something like whalebone.
'Mer-lin risible plastrum,' Malkoha said. Then he waved the gun for emphasis. 'Spar apostle.'
'Spar apostle,' Merlin repeated, as they walked up the boarding ramp. 'No tricks.'
Even before Tyrant had made progress in the cracking of the local language, Merlin had managed to hammer out a deal with Malkoha. The medicine had turned out to be a very simple drug, easily synthesised. A narrow-spectrum b-lactam antibiotic, according to the ship: exactly the sort of thing the locals might use to treat a gram-positive bacterial infection - something like bacterial meningitis, for instance - if they didn't have anything better.
Tyrant could pump out antibiotic medicine by the hundreds of litres, or synthesise something vastly more effective in equally large quantities. But Merlin saw no sense in playing his most valuable card so early in the game. He chose instead to give Malkoha supplies of the drug in approximately the same dosage and quantity as he must have been carrying when his aircraft was damaged, packaged in similar-looking glass vials. He gave the first two consignments as a gift, in recompense for the harm he was presumed to have done when attempting to save Malkoha, and let Malkoha think that it was all that Tyrant could do to make drugs at that strength and quantity. It was only when he handed over the third consignment, on the third day, that he mentioned the materials he needed to repair his ship.
He didn't say anything, of course, or at least nothing that the locals could have understood. But there were enough examples lying around of the materials Merlin needed - metals and organic compounds, principally, as well as water that could be used to replenish Tyrant's hydrogen-fusion tanks - that Merlin was able to make considerable progress just by pointing and miming. He kept talking all the while, even in Main, and did all that he could to encourage the locals to talk back in their own tongue. Even when he was inside the compound, Tyrant was observing every exchange, thanks to the microscopic surveillance devices Merlin carried on his person. Through this process, the ship was constantly testing and rejecting language models, employing its knowledge of both the general principles of human grammar and its compendious database of ancient languages recorded by the Cohort, many of which were antecedents of Main itself. Lecythus might have been isolated for tens of thousands of years, but languages older than that had been cracked by brute computation, and Merlin had no doubt that Tyrant would get there in the end, provided he gave it enough material to work with.