“I am not sure I understand siltway travel,” Ulín says, but I worry that her hesitation is about something else.
I say, “Or you can stay here without me. Now that you won’t choose your contract, you can simply leave, if Ladder allows it. You heard his song, after all, but I think you’ll have choices.”
“No, I—I don’t understand how this will work, but I want this to work. I want to travel with you. I trust you, and . . .” Ulín laughs. “I always want to travel.”
I, too, want for this to work. I want Old Song to be in the wood, where she can reject or accept me. I want her to accept me. I want to leave the Court of Despair behind, for Ladder to solve his own problems. For the story not to end, but to go on.
Ulín is putting away her notebook. "If this doesn’t work, I want you to know—we can travel my way, all the long way back to Lysinar.”
I nod at her, oddly encouraged. We have exchanged yearning and pain, but we can be free together, free of the yoke of the devouring stars. Traveling—not away from, but toward.
I tell Ulín, “Hold my hand.”
Neither pain nor yearning now
The room on the third terrace is empty. The shallow water in the pool is dull and lifeless. There is no need to refill it again.
Afterword
Motion is central not just to human experience, but to our cognition. Even if we cannot physically walk or run, we process the world through motion metaphors. Business is hopping, time really crawls, you ran out of pasta. We do not physically sprint out of the gates of pasta, but how we talk about this is meaningful. Even when we sleep, the neurons responsible for motion are firing, producing dreams of chases and abrupt relocations.
Human languages describe motion in many ways, but most commonly through verbs; verbs are ubiquitous in human languages. How exactly motion events are coded varies, sometimes greatly, from language to language, and is a robust area in linguistic research. I’ve done some of this research myself. As a linguist in graduate school, I began wondering about an idea of a verbless language—the existence of such a language would imply a completely different way of moving, of thinking, and of interacting with the world. (Much later, I discovered that there is a constructed language, Kēlen, built to engage with this question—but I do not know anything else about it. I wanted to continue thinking my own thoughts.)
The idea of a verbless language compelled me to write my first short story, in which an exile ends up at the school of assassins. That first story was never published, and it’s a good thing—I did not have the tools, or know my own mind back then. But the story continued to percolate in my mind. I realized I wanted to write not just about a community with a very different way of thinking, but about bilingualism. And it wasn’t just about bilingualism (that is, about knowing and speaking two languages)—but about exile, about translating oneself away not just from one’s culture, but from one’s language and community.
Stone Orphan is an exile. They wanted to leave, and they were also kicked out. This happens to some of us. When I was fourteen, my family fled the Soviet Union during the last months of its existence, among hundreds of thousands of other Soviet Jews. As an out queer, nonbinary person born in Soviet Ukraine who came out in the U.S., I felt unrooted and disconnected from my often heteronormative diasporic and birth communities.
But while I was in the West, things evolved for both Ukraine and Russia, where I had also lived as a child. Queer and trans people gained freedoms and recognition in both countries, and both Russian and Ukrainian developed language innovations for nonbinary people. During Russia’s genocidal war against Ukraine, Putin’s regime cranked down on the LGBTQIA+ community, with overwhelming and total persecution of queer expression and outlawing of gender transition. My birth country, Ukraine, is perhaps moving the other way. Just a few months before writing this, my poem cycle, “Stone Listening,” was translated into Ukrainian by Mykhailo Zharzhailo and published in Litcentr. My correct gender pronouns were used in the bio; just a few years ago, I would not believe it would be possible.
Diasporic and migrant experiences of LGBTQIA+ people are also a special interest of mine and a topic in my linguistic research. It’s a painful thing. Migrating from country to country is difficult to begin with, but queer and trans people are often liminal—both within their birth and host communities. The new country we enter may seem welcoming at first, but that can be deceptive and temporary. Stone Orphan discovers this the hard way when they come to the school of assassins. Their sense of liberation does not last just because they migrated; but the hope for liberation persists. For a long time, the U.S. seemed like a haven to me in terms of my queerness, but now the wave of discrimination is rising again. My home state of Kansas just passed cissexist legislation that we are resisting as a community. Is any place safe? Is any place good? I don’t know, but what we can find is each other.
When Ulín and Stone Orphan connect, they are speaking Burrashti, a language which both of them learned in adulthood. Both of them are translating, and both of them are hiding parts of their stories. Stone Orphan does not want to reveal everything to a person they just met, and even at the end, their friendship with Ulín is still tentative. Ulín is driven by her curiosity. She is traumatized, but through all this she is propelled forward by her special interest in languages and the people who speak them.
Language is not disembodied—it exists in communities, and it is learned and spoken by people. Both Ulín and Stone Orphan want to understand. This is the bridge they can build together, even though bridges do not always exist, or are unhelpful or inaccessible, or are destroyed. The necessity of bridges is that we cannot always flicker from one person to another; often, crossing requires difficult and careful labor. Perhaps we must meet each other first, before travel can become instantaneous.
Just before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, I was working on translation theory research—looking at how gender was translated in the works of Cold War era science fiction, from English to Russian and from Russian to English. When Russia’s war against Ukraine broke out, I became involved in translating war poetry from Ukrainian to English, and had many opportunities to connect and collaborate with poets writing about their experiences of war. You can find some of these translations and many others in Chytomo Magazine’s English-language issues of Ukrainian war poetry. There are so many vital and necessary things yet to discover and discuss about language, and cultures, and translation. I believe that the work of translation and of linguistic research remains vital and necessary, even as technology gains traction—and minority languages continue to be endangered as hegemonic languages expand.
I am a person who can think about a single thing for decades, turning and turning it around. I’ve been rotating this story in my mind for as long as I’ve been writing. Now you have read it—thank you. I hope you can come away from this book with my hope for the world, and for us: that we are not prisoners of our hurts, that we can be together and yet free.
Concepts and further reading:
Many ideas about the collectivist society in this book were inspired by my lived experience as an ex-Soviet person (as well as by my academic research into this history). Stone Orphan’s and Old Song’s judgment harkens back to Soviet-era comrades’ courts.
For the concept of Figure and Ground, take a look at Leonard Talmy’s theories. Talmy, L. (2000). Toward a Cognitive Semantics, Vol. 1: Concept Structuring Systems. Cambridge (MA), Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
For motion verbs and motion events research—begin with the work of Dan Slobin; I recommend his chapter, “The Many Ways to Search for a Frog: Linguistic Typology and the Expression of Motion Events.” Slobin, D. I. (2004). In S. Strömqvist, & L. Verhoeven (eds.), Relating Events in Narrative, Vol. 2: Typological and Contextual Perspectives (pp. 219-257). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers.
There are many excellent articles and books about encoding motion events in the languages of the world: search Google Scholar for “motion events” or “motion verbs” and your language of interest.
For cognition and space, I recommend Levinson’s work: Levinson, S. C. (2003). Space in Language and Cognition: Explorations in Cognitive Diversity (Vol. 5). Cambridge University Press.
Finally, a lot of Ulín’s research and my worldbuilding reflects my special interest in etymologies and in the Nostratic theory research during the Soviet regime. Roughly speaking, the Nostratic theory postulates that the major language families of the Eurasian continent and of North Africa (the Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, and Finno-Ugric language families, as well as other languages and language families) all had a common ancestor, the Nostratic proto-language. I find the theory itself problematic and unprovable (at least, at this stage of our knowledge and documentation), but the research done under the Soviet regime is deeply valuable. Because universities were governmentally funded and because historical linguistics research was often carried out in teams, Soviet-era scholars had unprecedented opportunities to work on topics which are perceived as “useless” and not “commercially viable” in the Western academy. These scholars include Soviet Jewish historical linguists V.M. Illich-Svitych and Aharon Dolgopolsky, both of whom worked on Nostratic theory and dictionaries. Dolgopolsky taught at first at the Moscow State University and then in Haifa University, and his monumental Nostratic Dictionary was published by Cambridge University Press in 2008. You can download a free pdf from Cambridge: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/1302376.pdf
I’ve spent a lot of time with this book, looking at Dolgopolsky’s endless and massive word comparisons (again, this is a special interest, the core of my own research is elsewhere). You see some of this reflected in just a single word that appears in the book. Dolgopolsky reconstructs *kälû as a Nostratic word for woman, or more precisely a woman of the opposite exogamous moiety within an exogamic cultural system. This is reflected in geographically far-flung languages such as Semitic kall-at- ‘bride,’ Old Georgian kal-i ‘daughter, maid,’ Finnish käly ‘sister-in-law,’ and many others (Dolgopolsky 2008: 817-818).
In a different, yet to be published fantasy book of mine, Ulín proposes a unity of dreamway languages, which later comes to be disproven—but the research is still meaningful. This is my overarching take on Nostratic theory. We arrive at knowledge despite past and ongoing injustices of political systems, and the failures and controversies around the conclusions we might reach. Our processes may be flawed and the conclusions may be wrong, but the words and connections are there.
Acknowledgements
