Chapter III Names

"Alexey"

The shaved man I saw at first pointed at himself, then looked at me with inquiring eyes and pointed at me

In fact, I can understand what he means, he said his name, and now I want to know my name, my head is a mess, people are most likely to forget what should be familiar with a lot of words in my head, I seem to be able to say a lot of words in a row, but I don't dare to say it directly, are these words correct, or are they wildly imagined in my head?

Someone told me that when I write, I suddenly look at a word and feel very strange and don't care about it, but I can write very well, and if I stare at it, I don't have a clue Thinking about this, my head began to hurt again, I frowned, and suddenly began to shake

Alexei was a little surprised by my sudden reaction, he stretched out his hands and wrenched my face, and tried to calm me down in a calm voice, and after a few moments, I regained my composure, he nodded, and sat up straight unhurriedly

Then he pointed to himself again, "Alexey"

It seems that he feels that this is the first step, and that communication must begin here

But I really don't understand anything they say, and now I finally know that 'Alexei' is his name, and some people call him 'Alyosha', and these names sound strange, I hear 'Ivan' or 'Ivan', but sometimes, I think they are saying 'John', maybe these are all names?

The word 'sailor' came to my head

When I looked out through the door of the cabin and saw the people who were washing the decks with mops and running around the ship and pulling the ropes, the word 'sailor' appeared in my head, and I tried to look at everything I could see, and then some words appeared in my head, and I tried to whisper them out of my mouth, and these things appeared in my head as they were, but they sounded completely different, and I was startled by what I whispered out several times

"Sailor"

I whispered

Alex had a delighted expression, he didn't seem to know I was talking about someone outside, and he pointed at me, "'Sailor? ’”

Then he pointed at himself again, 'Alexey', and then pointed at me with a smile, and in an inquiring tone, "Sailor"?

I shook my head

He grimaced in frustration

It was only when I later learned that Alexei aspired to become a bachelor and hoped to one day enter the prince's palace as a teacher to the future king, I realized how frustrated he had been because of a boy who was completely unable to communicate

I saw his frustration, so I pointed to the busy people outside, who were brushing the ropes with oil, carrying a jar of black, sticky oil in their left hand, and using a brush in their right hand to dip the oil into the rope evenly as thick as an arm

"Sailor" I said, looking at Alexei, pointing to those outside

Alexei frowned, then showed a skeptical expression, he poked his face out, and then pointed to a sailor who was doing a different job and said, "Sailor? ”

I also walked to the door, looked at it, and nodded affirmatively to him, "Sailor"

Under his gaze, I pointed to all the people on deck who were doing their work and said, "Sailor, sailor, sailor."

He looked abruptly surprised, and then, in his words, he said, "'Sailor'"

If nothing else, this is probably the second WikiAsian word I've learned, after the word 'wikia'

I nodded, following his words, "'Sailor'"

This is the first step, crucial with this form, and I heard almost everything I could see in Wiki in an afternoon or something

The river, the waves, the trout, the soup, the apples, the sausages, the kvass wine, the hats, some of these things have words in my head, some of them I don't remember, but now, they all have a Wiki name, I can't learn much, and after barely remembering dozens of things, I can't continue, because I often get the words I've learned, or just forget them, and only say them when Alexei reminds me to do so

Although I felt a bit of a failure, Alexei seemed pleased with the progress of this afternoon, and I guess if I hadn't finally spoken, they would have taken me for a dumb person

Alexei seemed to spend most of his time idle, he just went into the hold every day to check the cargo, and then chatted with some senior sailors, most of the time he was writing random things, talking to me, trying to talk to me, or running to the stern of the boat with a fishing rod and a bucket of water

At the end of the afternoon, he pulled out an apple and pointed to himself one last time, "Alexey"

Then he pointed at me, tossed the apple in his hand, and motioned for me to give me the apple as soon as I said what my name was

I thought carefully about what I should be called, and I thought of the word 'child', but I had a vague sense that it was being used by others, and that every word I knew was different from Wiki

I could only look at him helplessly, "Vecchia"

This is the only word I knew before he taught me, if possible, it may be the closest to my own name, I can only tell him what I already know in my head, and I think of many, many words, but I am not sure which one of them is my name, I even want to tell him the word 'name', but it is no longer a simple communication, I can't express such a complex meaning

I looked at him again and shook my head, the apple didn't seem to be edible, "Vicchia"

Alexei pursed his lips, tossed the apple in his hand, and finally threw it to me

He touched my head and muttered a lot of things, and finally he pointed at me, "Victor"

This became the name I used for a long time after that because it was easy to remember, and auspicious, it means victory, of course, the main thing is that the word has a slight resemblance to Vicchia I was thinking, if Alexei had called me 'Vecchia' in the first place, I guess I would have gotten used to being called that

People often ask me if I deliberately chose such a name for good luck, and I can only shake my head, and if I tell people why I am called by this name, and tell people that it is because I can only say one word 'Vicchia' at the beginning, so I am named Victoria, I guess no one will believe it

I became reticent

Or rather, I haven't spoken much since I was rescued from the water by Alexei's sailors

When he went below deck to inspect the cargo, he would take me down to the deck and it was dark, but he walked with ease, he played his fingers on the barrels full of wine, listened to the sounds, and then muttered, and when he had passed through the wine storage area, he would write it down in a small notebook, and then we would go and look at the piles of cloth, the cheese on the shelves, the dried dates in the bags, the small barrels of pickled pigs, or preserves

He would point to an object as he passed by and say what they called in Wiki, and asked me to name it shortly before I could name everything below the deck in Wiki at once

On one occasion, on a whim, Alexei wanted to see if I could write, so he put a piece of paper and a quill tube dipped in ink in front of me, tapped the paper with his fingers, and told me to try to write something

The way I held the pen made it clear to him that I knew how to hold the quill tube with my fingers: I could move my hand smoothly without getting dirty with the ink handle

But the good fortune ended here, and I couldn't write anything, and suddenly there was an insurmountable bottleneck in what seemed so easy, and my fingers froze, and I couldn't write anything at all

He wrote a row of letters, but I didn't recognize any of them, I remembered that there were some characters in them, but they weren't quite like these things, he muttered something, and then wrote a row of writhing consecutive characters from right to left, which were even weirder than the ones just now, like tadpoles, and I shook my head again

He gently bit the end of the quill pen into his mouth, then raised his eyebrows, and as if to reproach himself for the worst mistake, he took a thick copy from the shelf, opened a page at random, and after carefully examining its contents, he began to write a row of letters

From the moment he wrote the first letter, I knew I knew these things

I've seen them before, on an oak barrel with a white dove on it in a cellar, on a battle flag, on a silk with a family motto on the fireplace, on the hem of a shirt

Looking at my expression, Alexei stopped writing and fell into a thoughtful demeanor, it was obvious that he was convinced that he knew my approximate identity

He handed me the quill tube and asked me to pick and choose if there were any familiar letters, or better yet, to be able to spell something out on my own

Without hesitation, I circled the two letters that I remembered

“”

He took the book and barely came up with the pronunciation of the two letters, and I immediately responded to him by pronouncing the two letters at the same time

It seems that he may have mistaken me for a Zenda, because I did not recognize the simplified alphabet used by the Svadia and Rhodok civilians, nor did I know the Salander script, but he immediately recognized the Zenda alphabet that only scholars use, which made Alexei think of me as a child of a Zenda

Of course, there is also a possibility, that is, I grew up in a family that uses the Zenda script, so it means that I am a descendant of a wealthy merchant or even a nobleman, Alexei once had this doubt, after all, taking away the descendants of a certain nobleman is likely to form a hatred between the two families, which is a very important matter, but will a descendant of a nobleman wear tattered clothes and float on a small boat to die? Now that the war in the south is almost over, and all the countries on both sides of the Blue Ice River are not at war, how can there be such a thing?

Perhaps, even if he had really thought so, but because he was worried about being implicated, he would rather believe that my family background was very simple, as long as I could take me to the east of the mountains with peace of mind, nothing else would have to be cared about, a child would soon forget his past, not to mention, for a child like me, it seemed that the possibility of forgetting was great

He read

After that, he took out a copy of it, the name, and asked me to listen to it

It's a pity that I didn't show familiarity with any of them

After trying for more than an hour, he gave up

He patted me on the head, smiled compromisedly, and said:

"Victor"