The coffin, smothered in flowers, was, like all coffins in Vinland, shaped like a Viking longboat. It was also filled with pine planks. Some people were weeping a bit. Even Callahan, in the front row, was appropriately solemn.
“Friends, we have gathered here to pay a last gild to one who has passed from among us…”
The Pugnacious Peacemaker
Harry Turtledove
“Aka,” the wire recorder said. “Aka, aka, aka.”
“Aka,” Eric Dunedin repeated. “Aka, aka, aka.”
Dunedin’s boss, Judge Ib Scoglund, burst out laughing. The thane’s pinched, rather simian face twisted into a reproachful frown. Scoglund could guess what he was thinking: you didn’t act like this back in the days when you were a bishop.
The judge knew Dunedin was right. He hadn’t acted this way when he was a bishop, not up until the very end. Of course, the mind of an up-and-coming New York assistant DA named Allister Park hadn’t come to inhabit this body till then, either.
“I beg forgiveness, Eric,” he said, more or less sincerely. “But you have to say forth that twoth wordpart down in the back of the throat, like this: aka. Do you hear the otherness?”
“Nay, Hallow, er, Judge,” Dunedin said.
Allister Park breathed through Ib Scoglund’s nose in exasperation. “Well, you’re going to have to learn to hear it if you ever aim at speak Ketjwa. The way you spoke it, the way the letters look on paper to someone who’s used to English, aka doesn’t mean ‘corn beer.’ It means”-at the last moment, he decided to have mercy on his servant’s sensibilities-“ ‘dung.’ ”
Dunedin looked ready to burst into tears. “I never wanted to learn to speak Ketjwa, or aught save English. All these Skrelling tongues tie my wits up in knots.”
Privately, Scoglund, or rather Park, agreed with him. But he said, “I’m learning it, so that shows you can. And you’ll have to, for no one in Kuuskoo but a few men of letters and spokesfolk to the Bretwaldate knows even one word of our speech. How will you keep us in meat and potatoes — to say naught of aka — if you can’t talk with the folk who sell them?”
“I’ll — try, Judge,” Dunedin said. “Aka.” He pronounced it wrong again.
Park sighed. Nobody could make his thane a linguist, not in the couple of days before their steamship docked at Uuraba on the northern coast of the landstrait of Panama, not in the new sea journey down from the land-strait’s southern coast to Ookonja, the port nearest Kuuskoo — and not with twenty years to work, either. A talent for languages simply wasn’t in Monkey-face. The most to hope for was that he would learn more with Park bullying him than without.
“I’m going up on deck for some fresh air,” Park announced. “You stay here till you’ve played that record two more times.” Dunedin gave him a martyred look, which he ignored. The cabin was hot and stuffy; no one in this world had thought of air conditioning.
Park grabbed a hat and a couple of books and climbed the narrow iron staircase to the deck. The air there was no less humid than it had been inside, and hardly cooler: summer on the Westmiddle Sea (Park still thought of it as the Caribbean, no matter what the map said) was bound to be tropical. But here, at least, the air was moving.
The deck chairs were deck chairs, right down to their gaudy canvas webbing. Park threw himself into one. It complained about his weight. He sighed again. All the alter egos on his wheel of if seemed to run to portliness. They were all losing their hair, too; he put on the hat in a hurry, before the sun seared his scalp.
Soon he forgot sun, humidity, everything: when he studied, he studied hard. And he had a lot of studying to do. He felt like a student dropped into a class the week before exams. Ever since his — actually, Ib Scoglund’s — appointment to the International Court for the continent of Skrelleland the year before, he’d done little but study this world’s languages, history, and legal systems. They were still strange to him, but as soon as he got to Kuuskoo he would have to start using them.
He wished he’d been assigned a case involving the Bretwaldate of Vinland. Its customs were recognizably similar to the ones he’d grown up with. But assigning legal actions to disinterested outsiders made a certain amount of sense. Disinterested, Allister Park certainly was. Nothing like either country involved in this dispute existed in the world he knew.
Tawantiinsuuju was, he gathered from the text in his lap, what the Inca Empire might have become had Spaniards not strangled it in infancy. In this world, though, Arabs and Berbers still ruled Spain. Among other places, Park thought. That was part of the problem he’d have to deal with…
A shadow fell on the book. After a moment, Park looked up. A man was standing by his chair. “You are Judge Scoglund?” he asked in Ketjwa.
“Yes, I am,” Park answered slowly, using the same language. He was just glad he was talking with a man. Men and women used different words for kin and for other things in Ketjwa, and he wasn’t any too familiar with the distaff side of the vocabulary. “Who are you, sir?”
“I am called Ankowaljuu,” the fellow answered. He was in his late thirties, close to Park’s own age, with red-brown skin, straight black hair cut a little below his ears, and a high-cheekboned face dominated by a nose of nearly Roman impressiveness. He wore sandals, a wool tunic, and a black derby hat. “I am tukuuii riikook to the Son of the Sun, Maita Kapak.” At the mention of his ruler’s name, he shaded his eyes with one hand for a moment, as if to shield them from the monarch’s glory.
“Tukuuii riikook, eh?” Park looked at him with more interest than he’d felt before: Ankowaljuu was no ordinary passenger.
“You understand what it means, then?”
“Aye,” Park said. A tukuuii riikook was an imperial inspector, of the secret sort outside the usual chain of command. Most empires had them under one name or another, so the rulers could make sure their regular functionaries were performing as they should. Frowning, the judge went on, “I do not understand why you tell me, though.”
Ankowaljuu smiled, displaying large white teeth. “Shall I speak English, to make sure I am clear?”
“Please do,” Park said with relief. “I am working to learn your tongue, but I am not yet flowing in it.”
“You have the back-of-the-throat sounds, which are most often hardest for Vinlanders to gain,” Ankowaljuu said.
“But to go on: I tell you because I want you to know you may count on me — I speak for myself now, mind you, not for the Son of the Sun — for as long as you have a hand in judging this dealing between my folk and the Emirate of the Dar al-Harb.”
“Oh? Why is that?” Park hoped his voice did not show his sudden hard suspicion. His years in the DA’s office told him no one ever offered anything for nothing. “You must understand I cannot talk with you about this dealing — all the more so because you are a tukuuii riikook, a thane of your emperor.”
“Yes, of course I understand, That you naysay shows your honesty. I must tell you, the Son of the Sun was sorry he gave our quarrel with the Emir to the International Court when he learned the judge would be from Vinland.”
“Why is that?” Park asked again, this time out of genuine curiosity. “My country has little to do with either yours or the Emirate.”
“Because so many Vinlanders are forejudged against Skrellings,” Ankowaljuu said grimly. “But when I came up to New Belfast to find out what sort of man you are, I found his mistrusts were misplaced. No one who has swinked so hard for the ricks of the Skrellings in Vinland could be anything but fair in his judgments.”