“Teach us more of your language,” Hamnet said.

Dashru sighed and nodded again. “I do that. You not learn well, though.”

“We try,” Hamnet said. “You don’t learn the Bizogots’ tongue easily, either.”

“Grunting of deer. Squawking of geese,” Dashru said disdainfully.

“We think the same of your speech,” Hamnet told him. Dashru made a horrible face, as if he’d smelled something nasty.

The trouble was, the Bizogot language and Raumsdalian on the one hand and the Rulers’ tongue on the other were as different as chalk and tobacco. Bizogots and Raumsdalians spoke related languages. The vocabulary wasn’t the same, but here and there words in the one tongue sounded something like those in the other. The Bizogots had more complicated noun declensions than people in the Empire used, while Raumsdalian had a battery of verb tenses the mammoth-herders lacked. But the basic principles underlying both languages were similar.

All the words in the Rulers’ language were different. That was bad enough, but not unexpected: why believe a language that had grown up beyond the Glacier would have familiar vocabulary? The grammar, though . . . Whoever put together the grammar in the Rulers’ language had to be twisted. So Hamnet Thyssen thought, anyhow. He knew Dashru felt the same way about the Bizogot speech, but he didn’t care.

When the Rulers talked to one another, they used a word order Hamnet found perverse. They slapped pieces of words together to make bigger, more complicated ones. They used particles to show how the pieces fit together. Why anyone would want to talk like that, Hamnet had no idea. But the invaders found it as natural as he found Raumsdalian.