“What are they talking about?” Umbo asked Loaf. “I can’t understand them.”
Loaf named a language; Umbo instantly forgot the name. “It’s spoken in the east, not far from the Wall,” Loaf explained.
“But why?” asked Umbo. “Why don’t they just speak Common so people can understand them?”
“People do understand them,” said Loaf. “Just not you. Who would ever learn a language nobody speaks? The thing’s impossible.”
And when Loaf told him that there were hundreds of known languages within the wallfold, each of them spoken by thousands of people, Umbo laughed out loud.
“Why are you laughing?” asked Loaf amiably.
“Because they sound funny,” said Umbo. “And because even the people who want to make themselves so ridiculous as to speak an unknown tongue can’t agree on what tongue to use!”
“Before they were conquered by the Sessamoto, why should the people of other nations have learned to speak the language of another? What we call Common is just the trading language of the Stashik River. Everyone speaks some version of it because it makes business easier. But it’s not the language Leaky and I learned when we were growing up.”
“Say something in your language, then,” said Umbo, his curiosity stirred.
“Mm eh keuno oidionectopafala,” said Loaf.
“What did that mean?”
“If it could be said in Common, I wouldn’t need to say it in Mo’onohonoi.”
“It was really obscene, wasn’t it,” said Umbo.
“If you spoke my language, you would have had to kill me,” said Loaf.
“Why don’t you and Leaky ever speak Mohononono or whatever it is at home?”
“Sometimes we do. But nobody speaks it where we live, and when you speak a language around people who don’t speak it, they usually assume you’re saying something you don’t want them to hear, so it annoys them.”
For a while, passing through a neighborhood market near a six-road crossroads with a well, the noise was so great they couldn’t hear each other, and conversation died. It seemed that every stall competed with every other for how much noise and stink they could raise, and all the mules and oxen and horses and asses could only be controlled by screaming long strings of extraordinarily offensive language. Even the beggars had given up competing with the noise—they jumped up and down in order to attract attention. They looked like ebbecks in tall grass, they jumped so high, and Umbo was tempted to give one of them a ping for his athletic ability. But Loaf clapped a hand on Umbo’s arm to stop him from reaching for it.
Loaf leaned down so his mouth was directly at Umbo’s ear, and shouted, “If you give anything, a boy your size will be rolled, trampled, stripped, and skinned in five seconds.”
It was late in the day when they came to a section of the city with wider paved streets and larger buildings made of better materials, where mounted police kept some kind of order. People were more nicely dressed, and there was far less noise—but this also meant that Loaf’s and Umbo’s clothing marked them as being out of place.
“We don’t belong here,” said Umbo.
“Exactly,” said Loaf. Whereupon he took Umbo by the hand and walked right up to one of the mounted policemen. “Sir,” he said, “my son and I are new in the city and looking for lodging. This is surely not the place where we’ll find what we can afford—can you tell me where we might . . .”
But the policeman, after looking them both slowly up and down, gave his horse some kind of invisible command and the horse clopped on, its iron shoes ringing on the cobblestones.
“I guess he doesn’t like giving directions,” said Umbo.
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“Oh, I didn’t expect him to speak to us,” said Loaf. “By asking him directions, I proved that I really was from out of town, and a harmless idiot on top of it. If I was up to no good, I’d never have walked right up to him, especially not with my second-story boy in tow.”
“Second-story boy?”
“That’s what he had to assume we were at first—a burglar, with you as the boy I lift up to balconies or roofs so you can squirm in through some chimney or skylight or vent and then come down and let me into the house.”
“He couldn’t have thought we were father and son?”
“In this neighborhood? Dressed as we are? I think not!”
“Then why are we here?”