It was early in the month of Sambul, what we would call May, and the Ivasitas still haven't gotten used to us. It wasn't that our skin color or hair was different from the Ivasitas, it was our manner of dress and how we spoke and didn't speak their language. I was in the central market of the town, on a shopping mission. The sun hung high in the sky and beat down on the cobblestones like an oven.
Geographically speaking, we were in the Fertile Crescent, along the Euphrates River, near what would be the city As Samawah on our timeline. Here the river was known as the Eucrates, and the city was known as Mujhard. The language was a mix of Indo-European and Proto-European, and came out sounding like gibberish to my ears. Cosgrove said it sounded familiar to him, with words at the edge of comprehension. Cosgrove speaks about forty different languages, including Guipuzcoan, a dialect of Basque. I, on the other hand, know only about twenty languages, but one of these includes Gilyak, a language isolate from Russia. Between the two of us, we've pieced enough of the language's ancestry to know it is as much a bastard language as English is.
Ivar, is what they call their language and it took about a week of constant questioning to find this out. Though we're not certain Ivar is the name of the language or the equivalent of the word "talk" or the phrase "to speak". At the moment, I'm using my pidgin knowledge of Ivar to buy some vegetables for our dinner table.
"Ano, one!" I hold up my index finger, indicating the quantity of lettuce heads I wanted.
The woman, her face creased with the signs of wind, weather, and age, smiles, and holds out two heads of lettuce. She rambles off something in rapid fire Ivar, and I catch the word "nundi" or two, and the phrase "special for you", or something like that. We have found that people treat us special, and they were constantly giving us better treatment, always saying the phrase "Hirti du Yos". Cosgrove determined that "Hirti du Yos" was either a blessing of sorts or a saying like, "for you, I give you something special".
Rather than turn her down, I take the two heads of lettuce, the squashes, and the carrot like roots, and place them in my carryall. Ours was a strictly vegetarian diet, as the Ivasitas considered dog to be a staple dish and it's on the menu everywhere.
With our dinner under my arm, I went back to the headman/mayor's house. The idea of traveling for pleasure is an alien one to the Ivasitas, but they do on occasion get visitors from the capital. These are usually put up at the headman/mayor's house. (His status is something between a headman and a mayor. His title is Pistu, and goes by the name of Dhra.) Pistu Dhra's home is a humble one. Made from mudbrick and wattle, it has several rooms, a meeting hall, a sleeping room for guests, a "kitchen", indoor privy, and family area, where he entertains his guests. Entertaining, however, doesn't include meals, so Cosgrove and I learned to live off of the economy, so to speak.
When the ITA sent us to this alternate world, the primary reason was to scout out the local conditions, and make contact with the local government. Pistu Dhra is the local government's representative. Which was run along the lines of a satrapy-feudal system, but with the bureaucracy of China. Of course, what the government is called, we haven't the faintest idea, as the concept is too complex for the level of communication we were currently at. As far as we could tell, there were no common languages between our two worlds.
The streets are well maintained, paved with cobblestones and a form of asphalt. Houses lining the street were made from a mudbrick and wattle combination, whitewashed to help reduce the heat of the midday sun. There were suprisingly few shops, as most of the merchants operated out the central market. The exceptions were for things like woven cloth and forged metal objects. The level of technology here was still in the hand made stage, but the objects they made all had that superior hand finished gleam to them.
As I walked back to Pistu Dhra's house, little children gathered around me, giggling and screaming in joy. I was "Dhrana gi mushu ta" which we took to mean either "Dhra's guests" or "Dhra's pet monkeys". I had some sweets in my pockets, chocolate and butterscotch treats, and passed them out to the children. The sweets were from our small, but necessary cache of trade goods. Since we could never know what passed for legal tender on an alternate world, we carried a collection of trade goods with us in our steam tram. Interestingly enough, the majority of the adults we encountered here didn't care for the sweets, but the children clamored for them. I theorized that something akin to the lactose intolerance of North American Indian adults was at work here, but so far, I have not been able to prove it.
With my gaggle of children following me, sing-songing my name, "Jonsu-eh! Jonsu-hi!" I walked back towards Dhra's house. What looks like unforgivable poverty to my eyes, is middle class splendor to the Ivasitas. The mudbrick houses gleam under the yellow sun of the Eucrates valley, the people sit outside under thatched roofs in the shade, sipping beer through straws from clay vessels. The beer is very sweet, as it is brewed in the traditional manner from thousands of years ago. Just about everybody is a brewer, at least those with wheat and barley crops. Cosgrove and I make do with the beer that Dhra has at his place, which is somewhat thin and dry, though Grhana, a man who lives next to Dhra, makes some very potent brews, mixing them with dates and honey.
Grhana has invited us over several times, with us bringing our own food to cook, and entertained us with songs and stories. We were also entertained by his potent brew. Grhana is something of an outsider in Mujhard. He was from somewhere north, though by his crude maps he drew for us, he may been from New York as well as northern Europe.
While the spoken language is presenting many barriers, the written one is actually becoming easier to breach. Like some cultures, the written language has frozen an older style of speech into stone so to speak. The language it was frozen into was something akin to early Sumerian, which is bedeviling Cosgrove to no end.
"There is a theory," he said one night as we downed our ration of Dhra's beer, "that an elder culture introduced writing to the Sumerians early in their history. Now subsequent investigations and digs have provided enough evidence that they did develop their written language, so the old theory is now dead. Except for this world." He took a might sip through his straw, "This is Sumerian cuneiform. Now the language isn't Sumerian, but I can read all the characters and glyphs, and piece together a rough syllabary that we might be able to piece together a guide to the Ivar language."
That was a month ago, and it is beginning to look like the Ivar language bears no resemblance to its written form. Still his work won't be for naught, the syllabary he is creating will aid others in deciphering this language.
Anyway, tomorrow the Gridney Conduit is due to open up, and our relief will come in and replace us. I'm looking forward to walk the streets of London, and not have to worry about stepping in something an ox has discharged.
fin
Interdimensional Transit Authority. The ITA governs the many connections between the various alternate worlds and realities the Gridney Dimensional Conduit has opened up. As part of our job, we are to determine the viability of having trade with the locals at the otherside of the conduit. Sometimes this is easy, other times, such as ours with the Ivasitas, very difficult indeed.