The Dove (Prophecy Series) Read Online Free Page B

language of the New Ones, teaching them how to count, and the letters that made the words, and then how to read and write them. Of all the things the New Ones had brought with them, knowing the strangers’ languages and how they did business would be the one thing that would put them on an equal footing with the people who would come to take their lands.
    Two days a week volunteers from the New Ones came in and taught the students other languages as well. The older students were already fluent in French, Spanish, and English, and Singing Bird had been working on creating an alphabet that would be universal for all Native languages, and in return, teaching it to the New Ones so that the traditional languages of their tribes would not be lost.
    Adam and Evan had created a process to make a kind of paper from the pulp of several jungle plants, and the paper had been bound together to form books.
    There were books with the alphabet and books with stories. There were books with history as far back as anyone in Naaki Chava could recall and books of stories from the future. There were how-to books that had pictures and directions on everything from metal working to ceiling fans and dug wells. There were books about the precious metals that the strangers would be seeking, and the lands they would covet.
    If the New Ones knew how to do it, they wrote about it, even to the point of explaining electricity and all kinds of inventions from the future. The books weren’t large, but they were many according to subjects and were made over and over in duplicate so that wherever people parted ways, they took a bundle of these books with them to teach others. It was Singing Bird’s dream that within five or ten years, every tribe on what she’d known as North and South America would know these stories and the languages, and know the urgency of teaching them to the ensuing generations.
     
    ****
     
    Two months later:
     
    It was the rainy season. Even when it wasn’t raining, water dripped from every leaf, every tree, every roof, and onto the ground. The jungle growth was so thick the sun rarely made it through the canopy and walking on the leaf-littered ground beneath it was often slippery.
    The first time Singing Bird mentioned that walking on the ground was as slick as walking on ice, everyone but Yuma and the twins looked at her in confusion.
    Cayetano laid down the food he was eating and stared.
    “What is ice?”
    Singing bird looked up, a little startled she’d used a phrase from the past. That past belonged to Layla Birdsong, the woman she’d been in the time of Firewalker, and she rarely thought like that anymore.
    “Uh... ice. Ice is, well, it’s when...”
    “Frozen water,” Adam said, then realized he’d only added to the confusion.
    Now Tyhen was frowning. “What word is frozen? What does it mean?”
    Singing Bird shifted into her teacher voice. “Okay, you know how I teach the young ones about other parts of the world and what happens in our future?”
    Tyhen nodded.
    “So some places are very dry and have no rain. Some places have different kinds of weather and some are only cold. We know cold. It’s how we feel when we get sick with a fever. Remember how you shake and want to be covered? So frozen is colder than cold. When we say it’s going to freeze, that means the weather is going to get so cold it turns the water into ice. When the water is ice, it’s very hard like a rock and will not pour out of a jug. That’s when we use the word frozen. The water is frozen. When it is like that, it hurts to hold a piece of ice on your tongue, and if the ground is icy, it’s so slippery that you cannot stand up and you fall down. If you get too cold in this kind of weather, your body loses feeling and sometimes people die from being too cold.”
    “I do not like slick as ice,” Cayetano stated.
    “I do not like frozen,” Tyhen added.
    Singing Bird sighed. “And yet you, my daughter, will see all of this and more