His face!
Jump-touch was still laughing about it as they packed up the next morning. She had never, ever seen anyone go so red before! She hadn't known humans could do that!
A lot of the kobolds lacked a strong sense of taste, so spices were their main trade good, but they got some of those spices from humans! She'd thought he'd be used to it!
She giggled again, and he shot her a look from across the clearing.
He was obviously anything but! Poor My-he-kal! He'd taken one unsuspecting bite of the jerky, frozen up, and then turned slowly towards her, tears streaming down his face. She'd thought he was upset, until he'd taken off towards the spring.
She span around, hands behind her head, awaiting the slowpokes and making little divots in the ground with her heels. Poor My-he-kal! He'd kept his head under the water until she'd been a touch afraid he might drown. Even after that he'd kept panting and swearing, accusing her of poison.
What a sight!
Once he'd somewhat recovered he'd gone in for a second bite, determined it was exactly as bad as the first, and returned to dunking his head in the water.
Jump-touch laughed, and he looked up at her over Roo-set's back, rolling his eyes.
Was it possible he only ate a diet of sweet things? The cake and pas-trie certainly had fit the bill there. It had been very brave of him to try a second time, if so! Her only regret was that it was the last of her rations, she'd have to hunt now if she wanted to eat and the human village couldn't provide.
"So where are we going today?" she asked as he finally managed to get the last of his bags buckled onto Roo-set.
She tried to suppress the giggles, she should be serious, and grown up.
His face had gone so red and puffy, though!
He squinted at her, rattled something off, and then shrugged a long sigh. Communication coming along great. That had almost been a real conversation!
Depending on how long it took them to get to the next village, she would try and wheedle a few more useful words out of him. Different types of trees maybe, or if she was lucky, the name of their destination.
Kobolds didn't tend to name places, not like humans did. Their names were all practical things. The Lower Village was the Lower Village to those who lived on the Mountain, but to others it might have been the Upper Village, or Trading Place or The Place with the Red Tree, depending.
It was all about context, she thought as they set off.
Jump-touch shook her head, feet warm against the dusty stone of the road.
"Who maintains this?" she asked Roo-set, getting only a baleful look from the huge goat.
"Do you understand me if I talk Given Tongue, maybe?" she gave him the same look back. "We don't have any goats as fancy as you back home."
The end of the sentence ended on a high pitch, and by the way he shot his ears back, she wasn't sure he was into it, so she decided to give Lower Tongue a try. Her dialect was two years or so out of date, and she'd only refreshed a part of it during her stay there with Sweep-claw, but it would do.
"I don't think this is a real language," she hedged, having to think through it first. "It changes all the time. I'd have to spend the whole Summer there to really pick it up again."
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
My-he-kal shouted suddenly, from where he'd been sulking on the other side of the goat. He'd stopped speaking to her at some point late morning; when she'd tried to teach him the names of the different spices in the jerky.
"Summer?" he asked. His accent was atrocious, but it was clear enough. She stared at him,
"Yes? I spent a whole summer there once, learning to trade."
He sucked his lips in and squinted at her, before rattling off a lot of words she didn't recognise. "Jabber jabber yammer Winter jabber Alcohol yammer yammer."
"Ah, Alcohol. I speak-" She struggled for a moment, okay, she could dredge this out of her memory. "Alcohol. Yes, we make it from bad fruit, in the valleys. The Lower Village trades it with the Humans and gives us back spices. The spices I was trying to teach you the names of."
It was slow going. Everyone who came through to trade changed the language just a touch, and it was too close to Given Tongue to stick in her mind long-term.
Jump-touch cycled around in front of Roo-set, walking backwards and looking at My-he-kal as he rattled off more words she didn't understand, her arms stretched out beside her, feeling the sun on her skin. What did he want? More languages?
"Shriek?" she asked, doubtfully, and extremely carefully in the Lower Tongue, and then again in Given Tongue, and then again in Other, just to be sure. "I speak a little Shriek. The Harpies trade with us sometimes. Do they also trade at human villages?"
He looked alarmed for a moment, but probably not for the right reason. Shriek was a mess of a language, relying more on volume than anything else, and most places would have (correctly) taken her offer to speak it as a threat.
My-he-kal yammered something at her rapid-fire, the most incomprehensible rattle so far. More so than when they'd first met, even, and he had thought her able to understand him.
With a sigh she decided to give up, spinning around to face the road again. Shriek would scare the goat anyway.
"Whatever you're yammering on about, I'm getting none of it."
He sighed and shook his head, black hair flying loose as he walked up beside her, dodging her still outstretched arms. He had been picking at the sleeve of his beautiful coat, she noticed as they relaxed into walking together. One of the threads was coming loose, and his shirt had sweat stains around the collar.
I guess he would be home by now, if he hadn't stopped for you. Such fancy clothes they were too. I wonder if he was on his way somewhere special?
But she couldn't ask him. The first human she had ever met, and she had no way to talk to him. Maybe she should try Shriek after all.
They walked on together, in silence.
****
Around mid-day, My-he-kal made a happy noise, and a moment later they were being pulled off onto a side road. The offshoots had become more common as they'd walked, from none the day before to one or two now every span.
None of them were paved like the straight monster they'd been walking on all morning, but this new one was at least trying its best. It was lined with familiar-looking slates, which looked like they'd been harvested from the slips at the base of the Mountain.
"This path is smaller than the previous path," she whistled to him. She was trying out something she'd learnt a few years before, when the Mud-people had passed through. They had been ousted from their home, and they'd stayed with the kobolds for a season before moving on with the summer march.
The Mud-people had no... No insides? Yeah, that was the best way to put it, but they were masterful craftspeople, so they had worked out a system of communication with the kobolds using clay-fired slide-whistles, instruments, and hand gestures. She had been fascinated with it, watching as the language evolved, but only a few of the sounds and movements had stuck with her in the years since.
"They were good people." she told My-he-kal.
By the time they'd left, every kobold in the village had new water jugs, plates and bowls. The objects had shimmered with a touch of magic when new, but it had faded in the years since. She hoped that was just something that happened, and it didn't mean the people had run into something bad on their journey.
"I hope they got a home," she whistled, making the appropriate signs for context. Or at least she hoped that was what she'd said. It'd been such a long time, that she may have instead wished they were waiting in his home, or that they were sitting in somebody's house right now, she wasn't quite sure.
My-he-kal paused for a moment in his sulk to stare at her, then with another toss of his head, he carried on, refusing to even look in her direction. The whistling has surprised him? That was interesting. There was enough of it in Given Tongue that she wasn't sure he'd even have noticed the difference.
He didn't seem to understand it either way, so it wasn't that. If he did understand it then he'd have known all the terrible names she was making up for him.
He grumbled something at her, still marching ahead and dragging Roo-set behind him, but she didn't hear what he said, because approaching them, there was another human!