“Well, Saint Cyril and Methodius did base it half in Latin and half in Greek.”
“You’re a nerd. I love it.” He shouldered the bag. “Okay, well, you lead the way. I know the plan, but I don’t know the letters.”
We were suddenly in a crush of people, being swept along toward the Metro entrance and there was no hope for us to stop at the ticket booth. I didn’t know why there were suddenly so many people moving at once toward the Metro, but we were going with them—which was a problem because we hadn’t grabbed tickets.
“Hell,” I mumbled and looked around. The ticket machines were way on the other side of the stairs and there was no way the press of people was going to open up and let us through.
Time for a little skilled hunting.
I tripped and slammed into the man and woman next to me. They grabbed me at the same time Maddox realized I wasn’t there. I stumbled and finally righted myself.
“I’m sorry.” The man said something in Russian and I shrugged. “Just tripped. I’m sorry.”
“Oy,Americansky.” He rolled his eyes and we were pushed apart by the people in the crowd.
Subtly, I pushed us further and further to the right, away from the ticket booths and away from the couple I had crashed into.
“We need tickets,” Maddox whispered. I held one out for him. He snatched out of my hand and stared at it. “What the hell, Aaron?”
“Trip and dip.” I grinned. “Got me many a decent meal on the streets. More effective than the homeless can.”
“You stole them?”
Blinking, I shrugged. “Permanently borrowed?”
“How did you…Never mind.”
Maddox slipped the paper card into the reader and passed through the gate ahead of me. I did the same and followed right behind. I heard the guy who’s pocket I’d picked for them yelling and probably swearing on the other side of the gate.
“Nice.” Maddox bumped his shoulder on mine. “Where are we going here, Magellan?”
We need to go to the city center. The brown line, number five. Koltzevaya.” I probably murdered the word trying to pronounce it. “This way. The train that heads toward Kotelniki We have to switch at Barrikadnaya, and head up to the Belorusskya station. Our bags will be there.”
“You memorized that.”
“I forced myself to remember the stations and what the words looked like,” I answered. “It’s a singing thing. You don’t have to speak Italian to sing Italian.”
“What does Russian sound like singing?”
I peered at him as we stepped into the train and found a place to stand. “It’s actually a gorgeously lyrical language. Most times, you’ll never find two consonants together. It looks terrible when you transliterate because some of the letters represent sounds we show as clustered consonants.”
“What?”
“Sounds are one of my favorite things. The physics of sound. In English, we show the ‘tz’ sound as a t and an z. In Russian, and Greek, and a lot of the far East Asian languages, that sound has a single symbol. So when you translate something like ‘tzar’ it has four letters instead of the three it would have in Russian. Also works in Chinese, with Sun Tzu.
“So, when you sing something like Eugene Onegin and you’re singing by sound, not letter or word, you have to learn that clusters are a single sound in that other language.”
“Do you sing in Russian a lot?”
“Just a few bits of Tchaikovsky.”
He stared at his hand on the support he was clutching. “Maybe I should get that languages degree. It’s not like speaking Welsh is good for much else.”
“You’re one of the few native speakers outside Wales, you should work on preserving the language.”
“Preserving…” He looked thoughtful. “Weren’t there a few languages that we only just managed to save from extinctions.”
“Not as many as have gone extinct.” My answer was sad. We had lost a lot of Native American and South American languages.
