Page 50 of The Salt King

She paused. “That was a little bit Saint Sebastiany, wasn’t it,” she admitted.

They had come out close to the bridge over the lake. For him, the water had its own violet-gold luminescence. Under the surface, the eels swung to follow them as they made their way across the bridge; they hunted by salt light, and they could see Annunciata. Annunciata herself must not have been able to see much at all. The great chandeliers were lit, sometimes dripping wax into the lake with what would have sounded like raindrop plinks if they hadn’t hissed, but that light was barely enough to go by. To her, the water must have looked eerie and black, swimming with the reflections from An El’s windows. Maybe she wouldn’t even be able to make out the gleam of the salt-encrusted rocks along the lake shore. To Avelyn, they glowed only a little less than the candles.

“I walk around the lake every day,” she said when he asked if she needed a lamp. “I’m grand. It’s nice, it’s so warm.”

“That’s the salt light,” Avelyn agreed. “It is nice.” It was warmer now than he had ever known it as a child.

“Avelyn,” she said. “I’ve been meaning to ask you. Do you still speak Hreod pretty well?”

“It’s not great now, but . . . I didn’t really speak English till I was sixteen. Why?”

“Well, it would be brilliant if you’d let me ask you a few questions about it—once you’re feeling better obviously, I can’t be torturing a sick man. But before I have to leave?”

“No, ask me now, I’m fine. Although . . . why . . . Hreod?” he asked, trying not to wrinkle his nose.

She smiled. “Hreod is the linguistic mystery of the twenty-first century. Oh: you’re going to have to tell me what you’re doing with your face, I don’t know many expressions yet . . .”

“It’s my that’s-obviously-a-lie face.”

“It’s not! I mean it. Hreod shouldn’t exist. Or not anymore.”

“Sorry?”

“Do you want me to do this to you?” she said, giving him an assessing look. “Probably we should have a code word for when you need to stop.”

He laughed. “Candlestick.”

“Sound,” she said. They were walking along the shore, just under the path that the miners took to the soaring archway leading down into the deep, and the working pit faces. That archway was so bright now that it looked as if it led into a winter sunrise. As Jericho had said, though, a sign across the gates said the tours had been suspended until further notice. “Okay, well. So you know how languages are connected to each other? Languages change over time until they’re not the same language anymore. Italian and Spanish used to be Latin, English is a mix of a very old kind of German and Norse and some French . . .”

“Right?”

“Anyway, this change is usually quick if a country is invaded a lot or if loads of people from different countries end up speaking a language for trade. So a normal English speaker can’t read English from a thousand years ago, it’s a different language. But if a language is left well alone, it only changes slowly. If you’re Icelandic, you can still read sagas from a thousand years ago because only a few words have changed; that slow, natural change is called ‘linguistic drift.’”

“Hreod is like that,” he said. “It’s the same now as it was ages ago.”

“Exactly,” she said. “Even more so than Icelandic, actually. We’re pretty sure that if you met a Hreod person from about four thousand years ago, you’d be grand, you could have an almost normal conversation. But that shouldn’t be possible.”

“Why? You said about Iceland.”

“Because Hreodwater is in England. England has been invaded and resettled, and the language has changed, again and again and again. Everyone probably started out speaking something that was Celtic-sounding, you know, like Gaelic and Welsh. The Romans came, dumped a load of Latin in it. The Romans left: what follows is almost complete population replacement. The newcomers bring their language, which is Germanic. Then the Vikings come: they bring Norse. Then the French invade. The Enlightenment happens, and we decide everything academic should happen in Greek. And on and on and on, right?”

“Right . . .”

“But not Hreod. Hreodwater never had to incorporate anything but a few words, and those words are only around trade. Weird, so? Gets weirder. A while ago, scholars started to notice that English links to unexpected languages, like Sanskrit. All of them must have a common ancestor, everything from here to the Himalayas. It’s not recorded, but if you do a bit of linguistic skullduggery, you can get back to a good guess at about . . . five hundred words or so of that language. It’s called Proto-Indo European.”

“Do you call it Pie?” said Avelyn, who was still seventeen inside and being thrown out of class for making zombie flickerbooks when Father Singh was trying to explain Lazarus.

“Of course we do, we’re not psychopaths. But guess what happened when those scholars visited Hreodwater?”

“Do we speak Pie?”

“You speak delicious apple and blackberry Pie, Avelyn. Which is a great big problem, because . . . how come? The rest of England is buggered if it can read anything from even six or seven hundred years ago. Hreodwater has natural defences, sure, but a few determined people and a boat could get across the fen. And you’re on the most valuable salt mine in Europe. Anyone passing by would have tried to take it off you. They did. Romans, Vikings, Normans. Never worked. Not once. Even though there’s about twelve of you. You’ve been doing this for longer than most languages have been alive. And the cherry on the cake: do you know why Hreoda don’t look like other people in Western Europe?”

“I know some Victorian naturalist thought Hreoda were the Lost Tribe of Israel once.”

She laughed. “He did. But really it’s because Hreodwater is the only permanent human settlement in Britain that survived the Ice Age: everyone else went back to Europe, it was too cold here. They only came back once it was warmer, but not you. So probably you’ve been here for . . . at least ten thousand years. How have you managed to preserve your language and your culture for that long? That never happens unless you’re away on a glacier somewhere or in a jungle and nobody knows you exist. Riddle me that, and you’ll get some kind of scholarly award.”

Avelyn let that roll around for a little while. “You’re saying . . . something kept us safe. Something else.”