Ha'x mibli Kao-a so su-Yilakili : The Sound of a Few Words Ringing

The Memoirs of Kilomela-Jann Urmonaxi

A Saiyan Among The Korud-Jin

I.

Din Tuku'si Erd : Someplace to Begin

Six days a week, I lecture on selected works of poetry to packed halls of students at King Korudo Public College for Practical Arts and Agriculture. Other trades are more profitable for an educated man, but my adopted people are in great need of learning after the darkness of too many wars. A short time ago, I used words as weapons. Today, I heal with them.

The school was once the king's armory, and it was later a detention center for captured militia during the period of civil strife. The students bring a new energy to this dark place, their questions burning brighter than the flouresecent tubes that flicker overhead. The ghosts are now few and silent. We have paid our debts to the dead.

My students are not at all alarmed to see a Saiyan standing before them, tough and weathered like an old stone. Like theirs, my face and hands are tattooed in the traditional manner. I speak without an accent, and claim a through and complete knowledge of Korud'go, a language that was once strange to me. My hair is short and neat, the tangled mane of my childhood shorn and buried long ago. Indeed, I might be mistaken for an ordinary citizen, for all the marks of my heritage have been erased by decades of pretending.The truth is hidden in plain sight.

Of my students, about half are working men, between twenty and thirty, who provide the manpower for the manufacturing industries that have flourished since the dissolution of the monarchy. One quarter are young men raised in the country, the sons of farmers and fishermen. They are second, third, and fourth sons sent forth to rebuild what their parents destroyed. One eighth are women, who study with limitless courage and enthusiasm. It is difficult to challenge tradition, but they are often my strongest students, eager to prove themselves in a realm once forbidden to them. The rest are older men, who have spent most of their adult lives fighting and working to no particular end. They write in a wobbly, childish hand, long out of practice.

One afternoon, I read a poem written more than five hundred years ago by the Saiyan, Makadamia. I found that I could not understand the original text better than my students could. After many years, I had forgotten my mother tongue, once a source of comfort. I read the poem phonetically, and then, a loose translation in familiar Korud'go.

Where I go, my tail does follow me,

And all of my troubles follow it,

And so my tail does burden me,

But yet, I would not sever it!

Like most anything that remains from Vegetasei, it has an obvious crudeness. Its rhythm is simple, its rhymes abrasive, yet it has a casual humor, the echo of a drinking song.

A murmur spread throughout the room , like a rustling of dry leaves, then settled.

A wiry young man, about twenty, who had been sitting on a window ledge, stood up defiantly.

" Teacher, sir. Why have you no tail?" he asked, mockingly. The class laughed uneasily. The choice of a poem in a long-dead language seemed absurd to the younger students, an unwelcome reminder of their parents' and grandparents' misdeeds and suffering. Unware of my orgins, the young man only intended to insult my politics and perhaps, to gently ridicule my constant emphasis on literary obscurities.

Just then, the great victory bell at the center of the old capital rang loudly, signaling the end of the day. The sun had already set, and the students cleared the hall, heading for home in the dim light of evening.

I read the words of Makadamia aloud, again and again into the night. I imagined that I still understood. There was a chance that I had heard these words once before, when I was small. Or perhaps I only wished it to be so.

And so the school, which was once an armory, which was once a prison, fell into darkness again. The bell rang to mark the midnight hour, but I did not hear it. I had fallen into a deep sleep, lulled by the sound of a few words ringing.

When I awoke at the dawn of the next day, I began to write all down of the things I could remember.

At the top of a clean sheet of paper, I wrote my forgotten name.

Rutabaga Vegeta.