Other Words for Human — Three
Chapter Three: In Which All Parties Are Very Wrong About Many Things
The vermillion Long stepped forward, padding lightly but with unmistakable power across the scant lengths that separated them. It paused so close to Kyrokh that he could have reached out to stroke the heaving, leathery skin of its snout — and was briefly overwhelmed with the urge to do just that. However, the lingering smell of conflagration and charred hair surrounded both Kyrokh and the visitors, sobering him sharply and freezing him into perfect stillness. He watched the Long as it watched him back, its golden eyes shrewd and every bit as intelligent as a human’s.
The tense silence was broken only by the sullen flailing of wind through the grass. Everyone was waiting, and no one wished to speak.
Kyrokh let out a short whimper in the back of his throat. Then he heaved a huge breath and hummed: “Well met, and blessings on your dens.”
The Long before him did not look surprised as those the night before had. It only stared at him, unblinking in a distinctly reptilian way. Kyrokh was faintly disappointed that his words hadn’t produced a single reaction — at least not from this Long leader. The others, behind the vermillion, shuffled restlessly. Behind Kyrokh, although he could not focus on it, the whispers of humans dogged him.
“Thank you for halting your fire,” Kyrokh murmured, not sure if his language was courtly or common but knowing no other words. More than seven years of study, and only now was Kyrokh realizing how little he truly knew of Long-Hua. He didn’t even know how to speak in a formal setting — and, suddenly, that knowledge was life or death.
The vermillion Long huffed a long, putrid breath of smoke, then opened their mouth.
“Why come you with claws and talons, when you knew that we would be here to meet you?” they thrummed, their voice rich and low. “We told you of the date at which we would parlay, and yet you stand before us with killing-tools and malice.”
Kyrokh resisted the urge to hang his head in the shame of it, because he knew and he had tried to warn them but some humans would face the new with tooth and claw, and that was the way of it. Instead, he gestured behind himself.
“We were not aware — “ he faltered, because the sentence could have ended there, “ — of your form and fierceness. We did not expect you to come dashing out of the air with death in your mouths.” It was the only excuse he could offer. They had been afraid.
“It is unlike a leader to be so ill-prepared,” the vermilion Long thrummed, like judgement being passed down.
Kyrokh’s head shook wildly, and his eyes flicked backward again, although his peripheral vision did not extend far enough. “No, I am not — “
“You wish to speak to the Khan of Nazva?”
Kyrokh whipped around to see Hroz, half-sheilded by Sul and another two guards with drawn weapons, standing on the edge of the line of tents. The man’s visage was dusty-pale and shell-shocked, but he stood firmly, if far away from the line of Long.
The vermillion Long’s head crooked askance.
Immediately, Kyrokh fumbled for his translation duties. “He — this — this is the Khan of Nazva. Our leader,” he clarified when the Long’s eyes narrowed as they tried to understand.
“Fascinating,” murmured the Long, although their voice inflection was so different from humans’ that Kyrokh could not tell if there was a sarcasm to the words or not.
The Long’s gaze flicked to the Khan, sweeping him up and down, but then returned carelessly to Kyrokh. “I am Sigr Toth, matriarch of the Sigr Long.”
This, at last, was somewhat firmer ground for Kyrokh, who knew that the Long were governed — or had been, at the time of the writings of his research — by a strong matriarchy. Truly, he had been worried to think how the insufferable Khan would react to parlaying with a powerful woman. Clearly, however, that was no longer a particular concern that need be had.
Kyrokh nodded his understanding and turned around in preparation to translate, but Sigur Toth stopped him with an inclination of her head. Kyrokh found the command more effective and arresting than any shout. He stared at her, not sure of the expression on his face, waiting.
“Then how do you explain his shockingly offensive responses to our presence? Did we not invite you here ourselves? Why do you attack?”
Kyrokh could not be sure, but he felt there was something particularly leading about Sigur Toth’s inquisition. Perhaps, though, he was doubting the earnestness of her question because of the struggle he was having with the translation of it. There were new words here and there, and scattered ancient writings did little, he felt, to keep up with modern vernacular.
At least, he assumed it was specialized vernacular, or linguistic mutability. It could just as easily be that Kyrokh knew less Long-Hua than he had conservatively assumed. It was that frustration — and maybe the momentary fear of being superfluous in his floundering ability — that prompted him to answer truthfully and sharply rather than wisely hedging.
“They are afraid,” he blurted, and then snapped his jaw shut. He knew immediately that he should not have admitted to his own people’s insecurity, but he was not wrong and they could not hide it.
Sigur Toth inclined her head upward at an angle. Kyrokh didn’t know what that meant, if anything at all.
“I didn’t expect a diplomatic meeting to begin with death.”
Finally, Kyrokh could distinguish a clear tone in the Long’s words. Censure.
An uncomfortable tide of emotions bloomed like bloat, low in his stomach. He was, foremost, angry. He was angry at the Khan and his people, the way they responded to threat with weapons and fury. He was angry with himself, for not being fast enough, capable enough to convince the others that he was right and they should not fight back.
He was angry with Sigur Toth, that she judged them so lacking for their fear.
The anger in Kyrokh burned away some of his truth. For a moment, the fear was buried beneath his righteousness between the two camps that stood to do him harm.
“Then let the dead lie, and let us both not invite more,” he told her, voice low and deadly calm, dully surprising himself. “The loss is on our side. We take it as our due for our actions.”
It was a good exchange, a fair one, and Kyrokh felt ill that it was so. His mouth still stung with the remnants of his earlier vomiting. Sigur Toth’s expression did not change, her body did not move. He hadn’t a clue as to whether his words impressed her.
They did not impress Khan Hroz. The man screamed from where he stood, safely behind terrified archers with their bows drawn but their strings going slack without them noticing.
“What monster are you, that you kill unprovoked?!” the Khan demanded. “Where are the cowards who send their pet monsters to do their bidding of death against a diplomatic envoy?”
Kyrokh startled hard and whipped around, having all but forgotten Hroz. The very monsters at his back, Kyrokh rode his high of terror and shouted back. “Look upon them! These are the Long! I warned you, and yet you attacked!”
The low grumble of the Long at his back was only half a distraction.
“If you are their voice, then do your duty and translate my words,” Sigur Toth told Kyrokh, and so Kyrokh did.
“They ask why our first meeting must end in death!” he told the Khan, hating him for a moment, wondering the same thing himself.
Handfuls of archers dropped their bows to the ground, hands shaking. The Khan’s eyes were open wide. “We were attacked,” the man said, his voice dropping abruptly from shrill to disbelieving.
Kyrokh relayed what he said, word for word, without turning to look at the Long. Sigur Toth made a hissing noise that may have been disdainful.
“Not before we were,” she said softly, almost to herself and her flanking court. Then her voice rose in pitch once more. “Now are we to parley, or did you arrive to injure my flock and then cower?”
Kyrokh asked the Khan the same with no small amount of satisfaction. The petty joy lasted as long as the silence between them did, the Khan’s mouth dropping open and the man unable to respond.
Finally, Sigur Toth spoke at Kyrokh’s back once more.
“Your fear makes you rash,” she said, not making apology but neither with venom that Kyrokh could detect. “We came to speak to you as equals, but I see that you were not ready. We will return, and perhaps we may begin again.”
Kyrokh finally turned around as he finished translating, the meaning of the words catching up to him. He opened his mouth, but was not sure what he was to say. He knew he had to stop searching the Long’s face for answers, however, because he could not read them if they were there. Sigur Toth’s body was expressive, but her meaning was alien. Flanking her, the other two Long who had spat droplets of fire were no more helpful. They stood still, tails erect, tongues tasting the air like an adder’s. Their pupils narrowed and widened with heartbeat regularity, their irises huge and green-yellow.
“You will go?” he asked, trying to pretend he was clarifying and not inviting them to change their minds.
The silence took up several heartbeats before Sigur Toth answered. “Clearly no good will come of lingering.”
“What do you want from us?” Kyrokh’s voice was smaller, softer than he had wanted it to be as Sigur Toth stared down at him.
“What do your masters want of us?” The Khan yelled across the empty grass between them.
Kyrokh flinched and Sigur Toth flicked her long, sinewy tail.
“To know the neighbors that have strayed into our homes!”
The roar came from behind Sigur Toth, from a Long the deepest blue color of a long and narrow well. Its bulk mad Sigur Toth look slim in comparison, but Kyrokh had never assumed until that moment that he could have thought of the creatures as anything but Incomprehensibly Large.
The whip-crack tenor of that yet-larger beast shattered the fragile stillness of the last few minutes of parlay. The archers, who had been made immutable by fear, now used that fear to snap to battle again.
Kyrokh had been trying to watch both sides at once and almost missed it: one of the boldest or most foolhardy of the archers took aim for the chest of Sigur Toth.
Kyrokh did not know much about these creatures. He could not tell the thickness of the skin and the scales upon it, nor how quickly the Long could summon their defensive fire. He could see, however, that the arrow would travel true, and if it landed then it might destroy them all.
The Khan still believed the Long before him pets or followers of their human masters, tools to be fought against and destroyed.
His error would cost lives. The Long were their own race, powerful, intelligent, with — Kyrokh truly believed — the power to destroy them and perhaps all of Nazva if the humans were seen as a threat.
It took him no more than a single step to angle himself to take the arrow. Kyrokh flinched at the last moment, and it almost missed him, but in the end it bit harshly and with an accompanying blinding agony into Kyrokh’s left shoulder.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, Kyrokh had meant to stand heroically wounded and ward off any other attacks. Those fantasies flew from his mind and he dropped to his knees, yelling. “Stop!” the shout twisted out from between clenched teeth, but the steppe was alight with chaos that clamored over him.
The air shivered, a tangible thing, as the Long took to the air. Below them, the Khan’s forces screamed. Archers fired at the monsters above them. The blue Long, and one that shone tawny grass-gold, spat fire in dribbles as they hovered. They bared their teeth, animals ready to attack.
With a vibrating thrum of air, Sigur Toth sucked air and hissed a great tongue of deep-white fire. It incinerated the strip of land between where the Long had just before stood, and where the menace of violently frightened humans milled. The fire missed a prostrate Kyrokh by a handspan, singeing the hair on the back of his neck.
“Think of the consequences of your aggression. We will return,” Sigur Toth warned. She turned and flew toward the horizon, flanked by her court, while the grass burned in their wake.
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