He brought you to an alien hospital and helped you pee and drew you a bath, didn’t he?
I sighed, putting a hold on the examination of my captor/guardian/whatever-he-was and observed the backs of my feet. I was too tired to lift up my legs and hunch over to inspect them, but with some gentle prodding and staring through the water I could tell the blisters that had festered back there were healing well. There was still some residual redness and tenderness, but it was nothing like the horrible, infected mess that had been there before. And the pain now was nothing like the fire I’d felt burning through my fever sleep.
That must have been some kind of medical procedure, I thought. That agonizing burn hadn’t exactly felt like antiseptic being poured onto a wound, but then again I’d barely been conscious, so who really knew? In my delirious panic, I’d imagined that I was being tortured, but in reality it was clear now that my infected wounds were being treated somehow. The flesh was pink and healing. My fever was gone. I was weak, sure, but I’d probably recover my strength eventually.
I was going to be alright. Apart from the whole abducted-by-an-alien thing, anyway.
“Thank you,” I said quietly. For the moment, I ignored the rising hackles, ignored the fact that the only reason I was here and had gotten sick was because of him. And honestly, maybe even that wasn’t entirely fair. I could have removed my boots before the blisters got so bad. I definitely should have taken them off and not slept in them all night. He didn’t force me to keep my alien microbe-soaked boots on open wounds all night. That was, honestly, on me.
Clearly, he had helped me. He hadn’t let me die. And he very well could have. Because who was I to him, really?
We were strangers.
I was no one. A human he wouldn’t even deign to tell his name.
Maybe the stress of illness had left me weepy, but that stung more than it should have.
“Will you tell me now?” I whispered, squeezing my eyes shut against stupid tears. I huffed a steadying breath then opened them again. “Your name?” I pointed at my own face. “Suvi. You understand that. I know you do because you call me by my name all the time. I’m Suvi. You are...?”
I didn’t really expect him to answer, because he hadn’t before so why should he have bothered now?
But his eye brightened with alertness and he suddenly straightened up, like a pupil in class who’d just realized with a surprised sort of pleasure that he actually knew the answer to the teacher’s question. For the first time since we’d been outside, his snout pulled into that fang-toothed grin of his. He bumped a scaly fist against his chest and with his rumbling voice, he answered me.
“Skallagrim.”
And just like that, he ceased to be the alien or the dragon dude.
He had a name, and he’d finally shared it with me.
Skallagrim...
It was something.
A start, at least.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Suvi
Ididn’t let things start and end with learning Skallagrim’s name. My next goal was to learn the alien language. There was only so long I could be hurt and angry about my situation and try to wall myself off from everyone. I was the only human here, and being able to communicate with the dominant species was becoming more and more pressing. That, and I honestly just needed something to occupy my time while I recovered in bed. There was no TV, no internet (as far as I knew anyway, though the room I was in did seem to be powered with something like electricity). There was no small indoor garden to tend to like I’d kept back in Helsinki, no books to read, no socks or scarves to knit. Nothing to do except try to wrap my human brain around the language I came to learn was called Bohnebregg.
At first, the task tired me quickly, even though all I did was listen and try to parse whatever Skallagrim said to me, or to understand what he said to the other alien, Jolakaia, who came each day bringing food and checking on my legs before leaving again. I’d sit up and watch the two of them and struggle along, my mind like sludge as it tried to catch a word here or there. Often, when Skallagrim and Jolakaia had had a particularly long conversation, I’d drop like a rock off a cliff into sleep immediately after. But even in sleep, I kept at it, Bohnebregg words ghosting through my head, echoing on the outskirts of my dreams.
It was something to focus on. A goal to propel me forward when, for the moment, I really had nothing else to look forward to or work on. And boy, was it something to work on. Learning Bohnebregg was no easy feat. Unlike Finnish, the alien language was very gendered. Nouns were gendered (masculine, feminine, and neuter/plural) which affected not only the way articles and adjectives interacted with them but also verb conjugation. This was how I learned that Jolakaia was a Bohnebregg female. Luckily, I had some experience with gendered language constructs from the Swedish I was fluent in and the smattering of French and German I’d learned in school, but it was still tricky for my muddled brain to take on.
It was a lot, so I spent seven full days barely speaking, only listening. But there came a point where simply listening only got me so far.
So then I started asking questions. I’d point at the floor, at my bed, at my face, requesting that Skallagrim rattle off the Bohnebregg counterparts.
I mainly spoke to him in English, and I did this for two reasons.
The first reason was that my human mouth and throat struggled to form a huge portion of the Bohnebregg sounds and syllables. I couldn’t force out the guttural hiss that accompanied male adjective endings or verb conjugations, nor did I have a split tongue to make words practically vibrate in my mouth in order to indicate something in the plural form. The first time I tried to say something in Bohnebregg, Skallagrim had tensed, concern swallowing his face like a storm, before walloping me on the back with his massive hand. I’d tried to speak to him in his own language and he’d apparently interpreted that as his frail little star choking to death on her own saliva. Which, to be fair, I may have actually done. Not to death, of course, but the attempted hiss had definitely created a bit of an awkward spit-in-the-windpipe situation.
The second reason I stuck with English was the more foolish of the two, but I couldn’t shake it, no matter how ridiculous I knew it was. English was the common language spoken among the humans on the mission Skallagrim had taken me away from. Part of me still held onto the absurd hope that one day, Skallagrim would take me back to them. And if that happened, I wanted him to be able to understand what other people were saying.
So, English it was. I narrated nearly everything I did out loud in English – I am sitting; I am walking; I am wearing a white robe like yours; I am drinking water; yes, I like the fish; no, I do not like it when you watch me pee. Pee! You know, urinate, pass water, piss... Oh for fuck’s sake.
Maybe Skallagrim was just as bored and needing stimulation as I was, because he threw himself into the process with gusto. He did just as bad a job trying to speak English as I did Bohnebregg, but he was an enthusiastic participant nonetheless. When I’d mime something at him and say the words – I close the door, I open the door – he’d usually repeat the action himself and then translate it into Bohnebregg so I could become familiar with more and more sentence compositions. The result wasn’t anywhere near perfect, but after three weeks of convalescence and intense, immersive language study, we’d managed to cobble together a somewhat decent understanding of each other.