“You mean French?” she asked.
“Yes.” He nodded. “I hear hardly any accent at all.”
“I have always had a gift for languages.”
“You speak other languages?”
“Yes,” she replied. “And you?”
Michel typically kept his knowledge close to his chest, but he wanted to astound her, dazzle her. “I speak five languages,” he boasted.
“Oh,” was all she replied.
Michel continued, holding out his hand to tick them off. “English, French of course, Latin, Spanish, Mongolian. Some Turkic.”
“You don’t really speak Mongolian,” she said, her green eyes playful.
The comment struck him in the chest. Of all the insults she’d thrown at him, playful or not, this barb stung. “Indeed, I do,” he insisted. “I speak it. I speak it well. You have seen me interact with the tradesmen.”
“Yes, but they barely speak it either,” she laughed. “You communicate well enough, but you don’t speak it.”
“If I communicate, then I believe I speak it,” he said resolutely as his horse picked over a large rock.
Eve shrugged and turned away, a small smile on her lips. Then she continued, “For example,” she said. “You use the phrasemal miniincorrectly.”
“No, I don’t,” he said. “It’s ‘your animals.’ I say it to trade the herd animals.”
“Yes,mal minirefers to animals. But you don’t use it correctly.” She cocked her head at him. “It’s an insult.”
“An insult?” Michel blustered, a window suddenly blowing open in his brain. “How?”
“I don’t knowhow.” She shrugged. “It’s idiomatic. The words are what you say, but we use it to call someone a dirty animal if they are acting poorly.”
“So, I have been calling all the merchants along the road dirty herd animals?”
“Yes, you have,” she said, grinning. “They don’t care. You have good products, and you are generous. They will trade with you no matter what you call them, and then they will laugh at you later.”
They were silent for a moment, Michel feeling stupid. This wasn’t his intention for the conversation. They were coming to the end of the open valley with low cliffs now in view, and he had learned nothing more about her, only that he was an idiot. “So how many languages do you speak?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she replied.
“How can you not know? That is silly.”
“I learn languages easily,” she continued. “I hear a language, and I find myself speaking it not long after.”
“That sounds like you speak dialects, not languages.”
“I speak the languages you mention. I read and write in all the romance languages. I speak many dialects, too.”
“I wasn’t counting dialects,” Michel said. He tallied in his head. “I speak seven French dialects.”
“Seven,” she mocked.
“And you?”
“There are twelve in my region alone and many more beyond that. I haven’t found one I couldn’t learn.”
Michel watched her, blinking stupidly. He spoke five languages, seven dialects, and had absolutely nothing in his head to say.
