Chapter 3: The Demon's Tongue

The morning after his first full night as a god, Jim woke to the sound of his own name being murdered.

It came to him not as words but as a savage music — all vowels and hard stops, a woman's voice lifted into some working song beyond the longhouse wall while the first grey leaked in around the smoke hole — and buried inside the melody were the two ruined syllables of "speaks-the-sun," forced through a mouth that had never in all its life made an English sound. He lay very still and let it wash over him and over the roof of the hundred low houses below, and he understood, with a cold clarity that had nothing theatrical in it, that he did not know one single word anyone had said to him since the altar.

That was the danger. Not the knife — he had turned that into a name. Not the hunger, not the cold, not the slow certain weight of a whole civilization deciding what to make of him. The danger was that every face that looked at him with wonder might also be the face that had just decided to kill him, and his only warning would be the instant the blade entered, because he would be the last man in the whole valley to understand what they were saying about him.

He learned that lesson in the first hour of daylight, and it nearly cost him his life in the second.

It began with the boy. Somewhere between the longhouse and the tank-garden a thin dark child materialized at his elbow, no taller than his navel, holding out a spare hafted stone axe as though it were a crown, and said — Jim was certain of the shape of it, if not the sound — something that riffed on the word give. He took the axe. That was his mistake. He nodded, which was the wrong answer to a question he had not understood, and the boy's face went from eager to frightened in a single blink, and the boy turned and fled into the yard, and behind the boy, sudden as a cat, rose the shaman.

The falcon crown had been set aside. In the full light the shaman was simply a man — lean, watchful, the painted mask scrubbed to show a long, careful face and eyes that moved over everything and rested on nothing. He walked around Jim once, slowly, the way a man circles a rope he means to test.

"You do not know what the boy said," the shaman said.

Jim understood not the words but the shape of them, and the cold came back up out of his gut. He had thrown his whole hand on not flinching, and here was a man holding up his open palm to show him the empty fist.

Jim went to his knees. It was undignified for a god. It was the only honest thing he had. He laid the axe flat on the earth between them and spread his hands over it, and he looked up at the shaman and let him see everything — that he was a man, that he was afraid, that he knew the name they had given him was a rope and a crown and a leash all braided into one.

"You have me," Jim said slowly, giving the syllables weight. "I do not speak your tongue. Teach me, and I will learn as fast as any man born here. That is all I have to give you in earnest of a bargain."

The shaman watched him a long, weighing moment. Then, unbidden, an odd thing moved behind the careful eyes — something that was almost, unlikely as it seemed, respect. He squatted on his heels in the dirt so that their faces were level, and he pointed at the axe.

"Stone," he said.

Jim got it on the first try. This was a game now, a test that was also a gift, and he understood the rules of that breed of contest better than he understood anything else alive. He tapped the smooth haft.

"Stone," he repeated.

"They — no." The shaman's hand corrected him, landing on the tool with a gesture of distinction. "Axe." He said the word in his own tongue, twice, patient as a man feeding a fire.

Axe.

They went on like that until the light moved up the yard, and then up the slope, and into the branches of the long-leaning trees: stone, axe, water, fire, give, take, eat, sun, jump, run, house, I, you, yes, no. The shaman sang him one word after another the way a tracker reads a spoor, and Jim caught them and stacked them, and the boy crept back, drawn by the strangeness, and offered words too, and an old woman at a cooking-fire added more from a distance without ever quite turning, so that by noon Jim had the thin, trembling scaffolding of a lexicon — maybe thirty words, hard-won, each one a handhold on the face of a cliff.

He took the grafted words out into the daylight and tried to stitch them into something he could actually stand behind, and that was where the real fear lived. A man can be forgiven for not knowing; he cannot be forgiven for knowing wrongly. A word used wrong in this valley was not a small grammar error — it was a man asking for water when he should have asked for nothing, insisting on a thing no one is permitted to insist on, speaking possession where the people hear only gift. Jim counted his missteps: the time he pointed at a man's bow and said give when he meant how, and watched the man's hand go to the weapon; the time he reached for the word he thought meant help and found, from the shaman's sudden stillness, that he had reached for the word that meant command.

The shaman watched all of it without mercy and without malice, and at the height of the afternoon, over a stringy river fish they shared, he asked Jim the question that sat at the bottom of every other question he had been circling all day.

"The demon's tongue," Takawa said, and Jim caught the shape of the two words even through the unfamiliar grammar, because they were the words he and the whole valley were living under. "You speak the demon's tongue. It is a strange, broken, half-a-hundred-tongue thing, a mouth full of one cold people. I have never heard it in a dream and I cannot make it sit still for me." He looked across the fish at Jim with the flat, weighing patience of a man reading a scar. "The sun answered a demon. Is that the thing you are telling me with your silence — that in your own tongue even a god talks like a ruin?"

Jim held very still. Under his palms the good stone axe lay cold, and he felt the whole weight of the town's theology pressing down on the single admission he had been hiding in his handful of words. To answer honestly was to confess that the tongue that had stopped the sun was not of this valley and not of any god the valley would ever recognize. To lie was to hand the shaman the one lie he was already half-expecting, the proof he wanted that the stranger was a thing to be contained.

He chose the truth, because a truth a man is forced to concede is the only one the shaman will ever believe.

"Yes," Jim said. And then, slowly, with the ruined syllables given their full weight: "The sky spoke to me in our tongue, and every other tongue is silence to it. I am not of this valley. I do not know what I am or where I came from or whether I will ever be returned there." And he let the confession sit, and watched the shaman decide what to do with a god who had just admitted that the god was a stranger even to himself.

Takawa looked at him for a long moment, and then he did the least godly, most human thing Jim had seen him do. He laughed — a short, dry, rueful sound, almost kind. "Then you are the most honest god this ridge has ever housed," he said, "or the cleverest. I will spend the winter learning which, and I will not let you rest in the making of it." He handed Jim back a piece of the fish. "Speaks-the-sun. Strange god. Demon-tongued man. You will not be an easy thing to hold, and I am not certain I want to hold you, and that," he said, gathering his legs and rising, "is precisely why I will go on watching you instead of praying to you."

The watching never stopped, and Jim saw it in the way the shaman's questions doubled back — never how do you say this but how did you do it, never what is your name but what is the sun to you, truly, never where do you come from but where is the place you come from, and is it walking toward us down the water. The man prodded at the mystery of the dark sky the way a man prods a healed scar, and he never once looked satisfied with the answers he did not get.

The rigidity of it came home to Jim in the afternoon, at the water's edge.

They had gone down to the great river — everyone had, it was a task of the town, the young and the old lining up with clay pots to haul the water up the slope — and Jim, dutiful god, went down with them and bent to help. He took a pot from the hands of a girl, and he did the thing that a lifetime of clean, chlorinated, endlessly available water had never once taught him to think about: he filled it and lifted it to his mouth and drank.

The sound that went up around him had no words in it. It was a tide of shock. The girl snatched the pot back as though it held fire, and an old woman by the bank made a sign so fast she blurred, and somewhere behind him the boy who had brought him the axe began to cry.

The shaman came down the slope at a run.

"You do not drink the river," he said. Jim caught the no. "The river is the mouth of the spirit. The water must be given to you — carried, held, offered — or the river takes your throat. You drank it. You will sicken, and the people will say the river consumed a god." He crouched, and his voice dropped. "And you will understand, then, why I watched them give you water in a bowl with two hands. You are not to take anything here. Not fire, not water, not a tool, not one word. You are to be given it. Do you understand the difference?"

Jim understood. He had been raised on a century of rivers that had learned to be quiet, of water that arrived by pipe and answered to a tap. Nothing here was dead. Everything here had a voice and a will and a throat, and every gift was a small treaty and every taking was a wound. He had drunk from the throat of their god without leave, and the town had seen a god take water, and in that one thoughtless act he had handed the shaman a piece of the story by which the town would be allowed, at last, to be finished with him.

"I understand," Jim said, and gave the ruined syllables their weight. "I will learn. Everything will be given to me, and I will learn to ask, and I will learn what is safe."

The shaman looked at him a long time, and then, slowly, the mask of wariness cracked along one corner into something Jim had not expected and did not trust — a smile. "You are a strange god, speaks-the-sun," the shaman said, and for a moment it almost sounded like an address and not a judgment. "You do not know how to eat the valley. I will teach you how to eat it, the way I teach the children. And I will learn," and here the man's eyes went flat and old again, "how to believe that what I saw in the sky was not a lie."

Jim opened his mouth to answer, but the shaman was already walking away up the slope toward the longhouses, and the boy had taken his hand, and Jim stood at the edge of the great river with a clay pot at his feet and thirty hard-won words in his chest and the whole enormous silence of a civilization roaring past him in a language that was not his own.

That, he thought, watching the shaman's back vanish among the smoke, was the closest to being finished I have come today. And the man who nearly did it wants me to believe he is teaching me out of kindness.

He looked down at his own two hands, stained with the river, and understood the arithmetic of survival with a sudden, plunging certainty he would carry all his days: a meal was a lesson, a word was a treaty, a gift of water was a thread by which a people held a god — and held a god they could take water from, they could unmake. The tongue was the real weapon in this valley, and he had been walking around for a day and a night without one, terrified and covered in a god's name that meant nothing to anyone who could not be asked, and could not be believed, and could not be beguiled into staying.

At the top of the slope, where the path doubled back into the longhouse's lee, the shaman stopped, and turned, and looked down at him through the smoke. He did not smile. He lifted one hand and, with a slow, deliberate, unmistakable gesture, dragged a finger across his own throat, and then lowered it and pointed, with terrible patience, at Jim.

Not a threat. A question, and a promise.

Jim stood at the water's edge and let the whole of it settle on him like the evening falling, and he began, for the first time since the altar, to count his words instead of his enemies.