As soon as the group settled into their room after getting a late lunch, Ilika jumped right into language studies, first reviewing the consonant stops, then adding the fricative and the nasal sounds. Toli grumbled that TH could be two different sounds. Mati felt it unfair that one of the voiced fricatives didn’t have a letter. Every sound deserved a letter, she asserted.
After they all practiced the sounds, Ilika brought out a large sheet of paper with many words on it, all made from the letters they had studied. It kept them busy for the next two hours.
“Can I tell my story now?” Buna asked as they splashed and frolicked in the bathing pool later that afternoon.
“Sure,” Ilika said, “unless you want the privacy of our room.”
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“No, I want to do it while I’m in a good mood. If I let myself get gloomy about it, I might throw things or kill someone.”
Ilika and the other students sensed she was at least half-serious, so they gave her their complete attention.
The story began with a very poor family who lived in one small room somewhere in Rumble Town. Buna remembered clearly the day, sometime during the winter of her seventh year, when her mother, tears streaming down her face, explained that her father was dead, and there was only one way they could both survive the winter. A strange man handed her mother a coin and took Buna, kicking and screaming, to the slave compound.
As the years passed, Buna saw how the pretty girls were used by men, so she hardened herself and did everything possible to make herself ugly and crude.
“I guess it worked. I know it made me kind of . . . rough. It was just what I had to do. I don’t blame Neti for doing it differently. And if I’m ever rough with any of you . . . it’s not because I want to be . . . it’s just a habit.”
Many voices assured her they understood, and soon everyone was splashing and laughing again.
Ilika looked at his nine charges. Kibi was combing Neti’s wet hair, while Rini blew bubbles underwater. Sata and Mati were busy splashing each other.
As comfortable as they were bathing together, they were also very respectful of each other. He never saw any of the boys, other than Miko, touch or bump into Neti, and it appeared that Toli and Buna might be developing the same status.
Soon the students began climbing out of the pool, chatting excitedly about their new clothes.
Ilika asked Mati to walk with him. As they moved slowly along, he observed how she gripped the shaft of her crutch tightly.
“Tomorrow, you and I shall visit the woodworker. I think we can get some improvements made to your crutch.”
Mati smiled. “Are captains always as nice as you?”
Ilika cleared his throat and spoke in a stern voice. “I’ve heard stories of crusty old pirates with peg legs who shoot their crew members if they don’t work hard enough.”
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Mati looked at him with a grin. “If you were like that, you wouldn’t have picked me.”
Ilika smiled, then called ahead to the lead couple. “Buna and Toli! Would you poke around the marketplace and find some dessert for us?”
“Sure!”
When Buna and Toli returned, they proudly set a wooden plate in the middle of the table that bore ten little pastries.
Ilika, however, took the next hour teaching them the difference between addition and multiplication. Most of the students were sorely tested by the need to keep their attention on their teacher’s words and the sheet of paper, instead of the pastries.
But slowly, student by student, they all came to a clear understanding of the difference between ten plus ten, and ten times ten. Toli and Sata led the way, and Boro brought up the rear.
After dinner, they all gathered around the plate of pastries once again.
“There are many ways to divide up something valuable. I’ll propose a method, you tell me what you think.”
“This is a lesson, isn’t it?” Buna asked.
“Yes, an ethics lesson about right and wrong ways to treat each other.”
Many serious looks surrounded the table. Rini wore his usual contented smile.
“First method,” Ilika began. “I get them all because I’m the captain.”
Ilika could feel the anger in the looks that flashed his direction from nearly everyone. “Kibi?”
“That would make you like most of the masters we’ve had.”
“Ouch. Toli?”
“Me and Buna bought them for everybody!”
“Good point. Sata?”
“I wouldn’t want to be on a crew with a captain like that.”
“Me neither. Do we all agree that method stinks?”
Everyone
nodded.
“Good, because where I come from, a captain doesn’t get any special
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privileges. Method two. We fight, and the winner gets all the pastries, maybe sharing them with friends.”
Mati pouted. “I’ll never get any.”
“I wouldn’t want any,” Rini said flatly.
Miko spread his arms. “Nobody here is a fighter!”
“True. But we must remember,” Ilika said, “that’s how it’s done in most places, even though the fighting may be with money or words instead of fists.
“Method three. Since it’s food, bigger people get more. Slender people like Mati and Rini only get half a piece.”
Many thoughtful faces struggled with the notion. Boro’s hand crept up.
“Boro?”
“Well, I’m the biggest, but I don’t like the idea. If it was regular food, and I was working more than the others, I could almost see it. But this is dessert!”
Ilika smiled and nodded at Boro. “I noticed that Mati and Rini stayed very quiet.”
Kibi raised her eyebrows. “Slaves get a lot of practice at being quiet about things they can’t change, which is just about everything.”
“Method four. Boys get most of them, girls get the crumbs.”
“That’s stupid!” Buna blurted out. “Girls are just as good as boys.”
Miko raised his hand. “I think it should be the other way around. Girls have to have the babies. That’s not easy. Sometimes they die when something goes wrong. I think girls should always get the best of everything.”
Neti was glowing.
Ilika nodded. “I made sure, from your test answers, that all of the boys I picked were capable of respecting girls.”
Kibi smiled to herself.
“Method five. We are all members of a team, and we share the pastries equally, even if we have to cut them.”
“Yes!”
“Hooray!”
“Yeah!”
But since they had ten pieces, no cutting was necessary. Miko proposed, and everyone agreed, that the girls get first choice.
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Ilika finished the day by talking about the last three letters that made a unique sound. Then he listed several odds and ends that made one or two sounds they had already studied. Toli nearly pulled out his hair with frustration, and proposed they never, ever use those letters. The other students smiled.
To indicate lessons were over, Ilika blew out one of the candles and stacked the sheets of paper. Without a word, his nine students got out ointments, oils, and combs.
Ilika watched as Sata cleaned Boro’s wound. The pain was minimal, and it appeared to be healing.
Next, he glanced at Buna’s rashes, now almost completely gone. He also saw the trust she was building with Toli.
Tonight, instead of Rini working on Mati’s knee, she massaged his slender shoulders with her little hands, and he wore a blissful smile.
Ilika didn’t take too long checking on the others. Someone was sitting on the hearth waiting for him, someone who had never before in her life trusted anyone else to comb her hair.
Deep Learning Notes
Can you make a consonant stop or a nasal sound with just your tongue and teeth?
The sound with no letter has a symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet, of course. It is sometimes represented by the letter pair ZH, but is never
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spelled that way in any English word. Also, it is represented by X in transliterated Chinese. Another example of it is the Z in “azure.”
Buna’s mother made a decision so hard that it is usually considered to be outside of human ability. It is, for most people, far harder than simply sacrificing oneself for one’s child. If there had been a self-sacrificing option, Buna’s mother probably would have taken it, but there was not.
Buna and Neti, who dealt with sexual abuse very differently, chose to respect each other. How would you have dealt with the same problem? How would you feel about someone who dealt with it the opposite way?
Ilika glimpsed, in the bathing pool, the operation of a fully-developed set of social rules that kept the boys from touching the girls, unless already in a relationship. These rules seem to be innate, are fully developed by puberty, and strongly enforced during adolescence even if no adults are around.
The sense of “fairness” that can operate in a small, cohesive group of young adults, and showed clearly in the ethics lesson about the pastries, unfortunately does not seem to carry over into general adult society. The author can only begin to speculate why. Every general society contains certain personalities that no captain would allow on his crew. Also, there seems to be something about the size of the group that changes the values that become dominant.
In your opinion, are altruistic attitudes, such as Miko’s respect for women, possible in a general society, or only in a small, select group?
The phonetic charts in this chapter are a little different from the ones you probably learned in school because they deal with the actual sounds of the letters. They do not take into account any cultural conventions because Ilika would not have known those conventions, even if they existed. For example, we have the convention that W is a separate letter from one of the sounds of U
(TUBE), but in reality it makes the same sound. The word “water” could just
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as easily be spelled “uater.”
Can you hear the consonant stops and fricatives in the complex sounds made by CH and J?
