Language Barrier

I’d like to say I wasn’t looking for trouble that day.  I’d like to say I just went to that grotto, nestled into the sand-caked, sunburned rocks off the coast of that wretched little port city, because I was melancholy and at a loss as to what to do with my time while I waited for my caravan to return.  I’d like to say that.
The truth is, I’m getting older and I should be wiser.  But half a lifetime in the ring doesn’t do much to ground a man’s passions or temper.  The fire in my belly is what got me through my time in servitude, and it’s why I’m alive now.  I’ve managed to find my calm when it mattered most – my frustrations with my family.  In particular, my sister.  Ultimately, the reason I’m here.  I came halfway across the desert to find a tonic for her ailment, only to find instead . . . a real physician who shattered all my hopes with cold truth.  The disease she has will ultimately kill her.  And soon.
So maybe I hadn’t gone there, amongst the dregs and port refuse, to take in the culture.  Maybe I was there to find a fight.  It’s not that I went looking for one.  I’m just excessively good at finding fights, wherever I go.  It is, after all, what I was trained to do.
I was angry, too.  That didn’t help.  Angry, frustrated, at a loss as to what I should do with my life now that the only person left in the world who really meant anything to me had gotten a death sentence.  And she didn’t even know it yet.  I had to go back to her at that miserable brothel and tell her.  She probably wouldn’t even care, that’s the truly frustrating thing.  Her mind went to the drug a long time ago.  She might have seen death as a release.
Gods, I wanted to hit something.  Someone.  And I found my opportunity quickly.
The grotto was little more than a natural cave off the coast, carved by the tides.  It was probably a beautiful natural wonder at some point, but it had become the refuge for the worst the port town had to offer over the years, and now it was more a place for the locals to dump their garbage – people and actual trash alike.  There were fragments of glass and entire bottles littered across and pushed into the sand by the lapping waves, broken and rotting crates and barrels, and towards the dryer end of the cave, the remnants of some ancient stone walls that were probably part of a building back before this place went to hell.  The hyenas and the lions had marked all the stone with rough graffiti both carved and painted into the rocks, with symbols that were too local to make any sense to me.  Probably gangs.  
Judging by the shouting and jeering as I approached, and the loose circle of men near one of the enormous bonfires, there actually were fights for money going on.  I could smell blood and other even less appealing bodily fluids, and I briefly considered getting in on the action and showing all these dumb young fools what real combat looks like, but I wasn’t in need of coin and I really didn’t want to get pissed on.  Or even . . . rubbed up against . . . by some of these men.
It’s hard to believe that even with the ocean a few paces away, bathing could be such a foreign concept to so many.
So I made my way towards the cave, where the people thinned out into less of a mob and more of an eclectic collection of unfortunate, lost souls.  Many of them clearly lived here, judging by the ramshackle shelters and how many of them were already sleeping.
Or dead.  Some of them certainly smelled like it.
Again, I wasn’t really certain what I was looking for.  But I knew it the moment I saw him.  The dog.
For one, his coat put him woefully out of place here.  It’s not that canines were rare here, I’d seen at least three jackals and two thin wolves on my way towards the grotto.  But the Dog Lords – the Amurescans – are different.  Their coats are like patterned paper, or the sorts of fancy sarees a woman might wear.  Too shiny, or long, or speckled and spotted.  They look like childish imitations of a canine, to the point that it’s almost laughable.  
Until they shoot you, and then you get to remembering they own most of the known world, and why.
This one wasn’t too bad.  His coat was mottled and looked almost natural in places, sort of grey from a distance, with black over his eyes and, I’d imagine, other darker spots elsewhere.  He had a sharper face than some I’ve seen, with attentive, pointed ears that reminded me somewhat of a jackal’s, and gold eyes like a wolf that would’ve probably been considerably fiercer were it not for one thing.
He was shitfaced.
He was sitting on a crate, mostly slumped over, bobbing now and again in that way drunks do when they’re trying not to fall asleep.  The cause of his woes was held loosely in his right hand, half-empty and smelling from here like good rum.  Expensive rum.  Which emphatically did not suit the man – he was dressed in a thin, old, ragged shirt and what may have been grey britches at some point, but they looked like he’d been wearing them for months.  He had the remnant of a red sash around his waist, which I knew from experience marked him as a navy man from one of their warships, but it looked more like he’d been using it for a belt than wearing it as any badge of patriotism or honor.
Did I say man?  A better term might be ‘boy’.  Or ‘young man’, at best.  I’m not sure how old he was – old enough, clearly, to somehow end up halfway across the world from his native lands in a shitty little port town, apparently separated from the rest of his kin.  
But he was sitting on a crate of good rum.  In a nearly dry port.  I’d been trying to get a drink since I came here, but apparently something went awry with the chain of supply in this area recently, and there was a shortage of alcohol.  Some of the vendors carried it, but I refused to pay five times market rate for what was likely the worst swill they had left.  
He must have stolen it, or something.  He was probably trying to sell it here to stay beneath the hyenas’ notice, but he was about to lose his entire supply once the inevitable happened and he passed out.  I could’ve just waited for that to happen.  But that could’ve taken hours.
So I figured it was time to get him in a sharing mood.
“You,” I said as I approached him.  He didn’t even look up, save to flick an ear dismissively, so I raised my voice just a bit.  “Amurescan.”
He did look up at that, and I nodded at him.  “Yes, you.”  I was about to say more, when something in his eyes caught me off-guard.  He wasn’t just drunk.  He was . . . destitute.  The sheer sadness there made me second-guess myself.  I don’t know why it surprised me, honestly.  This isn’t the sort of place happy, fulfilled people come to.  It’s a resting place for the desperate.  Even desperate foreigners, I suppose.
My silent pause apparently convinced him I had no more to say, because he turned away at that.  So I spoke up again, a few moments later.
“Look, can I just pay you for some of that?”  I asked, my desire to pick a fight boiling away into something a bit more charitable.  I still wanted his alcohol, but maybe, I figured, I shouldn’t be such a damn bully about it.  Like I said, it’s not like I was hurting for coin.  Not since I’d gotten got my manor job.  I could pay for booze.
“How much?”  I pressed.
He didn’t answer.  He didn’t even look up again.  I think he sighed, but I didn’t get so much as an ear flick that he might be listening to me.  And that started to irritate me.  I don’t like being ignored.
“I said I’d pay,” I growled out.  “What’s your problem?”
Still no answer.  He gave me a look for a few moments, but then he went right back to ignoring me.
“Look, I’m not in the mood for this,” I snuffed, moving forward towards him and reaching into the belt pouch that was behind my hip.  “I’m gonna give you what one of those bottles is worth, and you’re going to take it and be glad for it-“
For some reason, my reaching for my coin purse got his attention in a way nothing else I’d said had.  His ears went from nearly flat to rapt in a second, and his whole body went stiff.  With a far more certain motion than I’d thought him capable of in his current state, he sprang to his paws and smashed the bottle in his palm against the edge of the crate, spilling its precious contents and bringing the jagged edge up, pointed at me.
The way he went from nearly unconscious to alert and dangerous in a few short seconds might have surprised me, but I’m used to being surprised by men with weapons, and it didn’t take me long to recover.  I abandoned the idea of going for the scimitar on my hip right from the start, because I honestly didn’t think this situation warranted it and, despite what some men seem to think, there aren’t actually a lot of ways to use a sword that don’t end fatally or with serious maiming.
He was just a kid, fast reflexes or no.  So all it took was one well-timed motion, and I’d gotten his forearm locked with one hand, while the other twisted his wrist until he cried out and released the broken bottle.  I’m pretty certain I didn’t break anything, but he’d be feeling that tomorrow.
He surprised me again when he didn’t immediately give in.  What he did instead was flash fangs, and level a kick at my gut, actually connecting hard enough to knock the wind out of me.  I released his forearm and he got this look like he thought he was home-free . . . until he tried to twist away from me and realized I still had his wrist.
It was . . . actually no easy task to wrestle him to the ground . . . and I’m very good at wrestling.  What the kid lacked in skill he made up for in raw energy and defiance.  Even when I’d gotten him beneath me, thoroughly pinned, he was cursing me out in Amurescan and thrashing against me.  
“Stop insulting my parents or my . . . ‘lineage’,” I muttered, switching to his own tongue simply to use the same words he was using.  “I know bloodline’s a big thing to you dogs, but I promise you, I’ve got no love for the people who sold me as a pup.”
He abruptly stopped fighting at that, so suddenly I almost fell into him.  And then he stared me straight in the eyes, his jaw hanging slack open for a few moments.  When he at last spoke again, he sounded shocked.
“You speak our language?”
I patted his cheek with a chuckle.  “ ‘Our’ language in these parts is Huudari, pup.”
“Amurescan,” he clarified.  “You speak Amurescan.”
“I’ve fought a lot of swordsman from your parts who thought they were big and bad enough to survive a few rounds in a Huudari gladiator pen,” I snorted.  “After the third or fourth, I decided I wanted to know what they were saying when they were bleeding out in the sand.”
He seemed no less hopeful or jubilant after that, and his lack of fear was honestly starting to impress me.  Then again, could’ve just been the liquid courage.
“I can barely curse in Huudari,” he said, a tinge of desperation in his tone.  “I’m marooned here, and I’ve never been in Mataa before.  Please . . . I’m begging you.  Help me.  You’re the first canine I’ve met who can understand me.”
“Plenty of the hyenas around here speak your tongue,” I pointed out.  
“Well . . . yes . . . but they’re hyenas.”
I had to laugh at that.  “Point.”
And then I let him up, and offered him a paw to pull him to his feet.  Those lightning quick reflexes from before didn’t avail him much once he was standing, and very soon he was tipping back over to collapse on his rear into the sand.  
“What is it exactly you need help with?”  I asked, crossing my arms over my chest.  “Besides remaining vertical.”
“You’ve sort of got me over a barrel here,” he sighs, running a paw over the dark fur around his eyes.  I was good enough not to say something suggestive at his comment, and I think I should be commended for that.
“Look, I’m talking to you . . . canine to canine,” he stressed, looking up at me.  “If you kill me for this, I’ll haunt you.”
“Spit it out,” I pushed.  “Whatever it is, it can’t be worth all this time.”
“I know where the recent rum shipment went,” he said, patting the crate next to him.  “Twenty two more like this.  The Captain cached them down the coast a-ways, to get around paying the outrageous taxes to the local clans.  I relocated the cache, after. . . .”  He paused at that, clearing his throat.  “Well, we had a falling out.”
“You and your Captain?”  I ask, amused.
“More . . .  me and my whole ship,” he said with a frown.  “Look, the point is, I know where all the missing alcohol is.  And selling it might be my only way home.  If the hyenas don’t kill me for it, first.”
“That is definitely worth my time,” I murmured thoughtfully, glancing around.  There was a sleeping cheetah a few paces away, but judging by his even breaths, he was really asleep.  And it didn’t seem like anyone else was close enough within earshot to have heard the Amurescan.  Despite the fact that he was talking at a higher volume than I would have been, were I discussing a stolen cache of booze.
Then again, he was also sitting on an entire crate of booze, in a den of scum and poor thieves, so he clearly had some stones on him, or had made something of an impression on these people when he first arrived, because everyone was giving him a wide berth.  
“Is that why you’re here?”  I asked.  “To find someone to buy the cache off of you?”
“That was the plan,” he said with an exhausted sigh.  “But it sort of . . . fell short when I realized I couldn’t stray too far from the crate, or . . . really talk to anyone here.”
I chuckled again.  “Not much of a planner, are you?”
He glared at me.  “I have a sharper head when I’m somewhere I know the lay of the land, and can bloody communicate with people.”
“The rum isn’t helping either, I’d imagine.”
“There wasn’t much else to do,” he said dejectedly.  “And it’s been a rough few days.”
“Yeah, I’ve walked that road,” I snuff.  “Well, I suppose I could lend a hand.  For half the take, that is.”
His ears twisted back and he bristled for a moment, but then he just dropped his muzzle and looked resigned.  “It’s not like I have much of a choice,” he agreed.  Then his eyes came up to mine again, demanding.  “But you’re not just going to translate for me.  You’re going to teach me enough of your tongue that I can broker this deal myself.”
“Oh-ho, the lad is sharp,” I commended him with a smirk.  “You know, I wasn’t actually planning on selling you out or fleecing you, but . . . good thinking.  Trust no one in this world, boy.  Always make sure the one you can rely on in the end is yourself.”
He flashed his canines when he smiled.  “I’ve never had anyone else.”