What Moves the Dead (7)
Va and van are what children use before puberty, and also priests and nuns, although they’re var instead of van. We have the equivalent of boy and girl and so forth, too, but using ta or tha to refer to a child is in incredibly poor taste. (If you are attempting to learn Gallacian and accidentally do this, immediately express that you are bad at the language and that you did not mean it, or else expect mothers to snatch their children up and look at you like a pervert.)
You can usually catch a Gallacian native speaker out by the way that they will hesitate before using he or she, él or ella, or whatever the linguistic equivalent is, on a minor or a priest. At least one of our spies got caught that way during the war. And it’s not unheard of for siblings to refer to each other as va for their entire lives.
And then there’s ka and kan.
I mentioned that we were a fierce warrior people, right? Even though we were bad at it? But we were proud of our warriors. Someone had to be, I guess, and this recognition extends to the linguistic fact that when you’re a warrior, you get to use ka and kan instead of ta and tan. You show up to basic training and they hand you a sword and a new set of pronouns. (It’s extremely rude to address a soldier as ta. It won’t get you labeled as a pervert, but it might get you punched in the mouth.)
None of this might have mattered, except for two or three wars before this one. We had entered into various alliances and suddenly they were getting invaded and we had to send our soldiers to defend them. And then one day it looked like we might get invaded ourselves, and we were running low on soldiers, and a woman named Marlia Saavendotter walked down to the army base and informed them that she was now a soldier.
All the official forms, you see, said nothing about whether you were male or female. They just said ka. Now, everybody knew that women were not allowed to be warriors, never had been, but this wasn’t written down on the forms anywhere and an army runs on bureaucracy. They couldn’t find a form to tell her that she couldn’t sign up. A hundred years earlier, they would have just laughed kan out of the barracks, but they were incredibly shorthanded and here was a tough-looking person who could use a matchlock, and so the officer in charge decided that they would absolutely send Saavendotter home, but maybe not until after they had some more recruits to fill out the ranks. Except the other recruits never arrived and Saavendotter told kan friends and suddenly the Gallacian home army was about a third folks who had previously not been considered eligible but who were now kan through and through, and stayed that way until the war was over.
By that point, it would have been extremely difficult to tell everyone to go home, although people certainly tried. A bunch of arguments were had about it, and some very dramatic speeches were made on the steps of the capitol, including the famous “I am not a woman, I am a soldier!” speech that you’ve probably read about even if you know nothing else about Gallacian history. Inheritance laws were also involved in some fashion—I’m hazy on that bit—and after the dust settled, Gallacia had sworn soldiers. Now you walk in and take an oath that you’re a soldier, they stamp a form, give you a pin so that people know to address you as ka, and then hand you a rifle and send you to the drill sergeant. And that’s pretty much it. You get your head shaved, same as everybody. The uniform’s the same as everyone else’s. (There was a very brief attempt to make dress uniform an actual dress. It didn’t end well.) The system still has a lot of blind spots and translating anything into another language gets complicated, but it works about as well as anything in the army, which is to say, despite everything.
People join for all reasons. There are people who really, really don’t want to be women and this is the best option. There are people who want to get out of the mountains and this way you get a bed and a meat meal twice a week. And then there’s me.
“Eh,” I said, shrugging. “Someone had to send money home for my family. And my father, before he died, was a soldier, so it was in the blood, I suppose.”
“But the war,” said Denton. “Weren’t you frightened?”
Sometimes it’s hard to know if someone is insulting or just an American. Fortunately at that moment the door opened as Roderick returned, and I was able to turn it back. “Frightened? Hey, Roderick, were we frightened in Belgium?”
“Scared witless,” said Roderick. He had been looking pensive when he entered the room, but the question seemed to cheer him. “Except when we were bored, which was most of the time.”
“You served together, then?” said Denton.
I grinned. “Yes, and quite a shock it was to Roderick to show up and discover he’d been assigned to my unit. Though he hid it well enough.”
“I figured I’d save all the sordid details of our youth for blackmail material. Though I wound up not needing it.” He nodded to Denton. “I was only in for a year or two. Then Father died and I had to sell out. Easton stayed in a great deal longer.”
“You were the smart one,” I said. The war had been hard on my feet and my knees and my faith in humanity. But then my sister married a kind soul and was doing well, and I didn’t need to send money home any longer, so I sold my commission. (Once you leave, incidentally, it’s up to you what anyone calls you. Roderick went back to using he. After fifteen years in uniform, though, ka was just who I was.) “What did those extra years get me, except a bad shoulder and a good horse?”