by Chloe Garner
It was comforting. Familiar.
There were smells. Fish, bread, beer. The people were simple, mostly green-skinned, but a few with different body types, wearing home-cut clothing and industrious hairstyles.
“I don’t think we’re from here,” he said to her and she shook her head.
“No, but they don’t look hostile.”
That was true. He still felt ill-at-ease, without any place that he knew for sure was safe, but this was not a bad place, from what he could see.
They continued walking, fingers woven together, and no one really looked at them very much. They got the off-handed greeting, and there was nothing antagonistic about it, but it seemed evident that no one there thought it was special that two pale-skinned people, strangers, were walking through the village.
There was language, around them, but he didn’t understand it.
“Do you speak this language?” he asked her and she shook her head.
“No, but I can translate it.”
“Is that normal?” he asked.
“It is for me,” she said. “You don’t understand them?”
As he focused, he realized that he could pick out some of the simple greetings, the simple phrases, the tone and the emotion of the words.
“I guess I can,” he said. “Maybe.”
She nodded, the look of concern passing.
“I think we need to talk to someone,” she said.
“It’s risky,” he told her and she shrugged.
“They don’t look that bad.”
“That doesn’t prove anything.”
“Nothing proves anything,” she observed dryly, then approached a man with a line of fish hung over his shoulder.
“Excuse me,” she said. “We’re lost.”
The fisherman looked at her casually, then behind her.
“Go talk to Whalk he said. “General store.”
He pointed, then went on. She came back and nodded.
“That’s where we go.”
“Could be a trap.”
She snorted.
“No one has so much as blinked at us funny. We’ve been walking for hours, and didn’t run into anyone. If it’s a trap, it’s the worst one I’ve ever heard of.”
And so they followed the fisherman’s directions, going through a swinging wood door into a store full of wooden shelves and boxes.
“Help you?” the green man with the thick arms behind the counter asked.
“We’re lost and looking for a little help,” she said and the man crossed his arms.
“You don’t remember a thing,” he said. “Just opened your eyes and were in the middle of nowhere.”
“Does that happen a lot around here?” she asked.
“Can’t even remember your own name,” Whalk said. “Yeah, we get a few of you guys through here every year. You’re Starn, he’s Palk. Saves time.”
Palk.
He could live with Palk.
Maybe he didn’t feel like a Palk, but he didn’t know what he did feel like. Starn turned to look at him and they shrugged at each other. Could be worse. Maybe.
“So what do people normally do, when they turn up here?” Palk asked.
Whalk moved his bulk in a shrugging motion and looked around the store.
“Unless you want to be a fisherman and she wants to make skirts, you move on.”
“Is that advice or a threat?” Palk asked. Starn frowned at him and he shrugged. Whalk laughed.
“It’s fact. Folk like you might be common enough around here, but no one’s going to take care of you. You need to find a way to make a living and support yourself.”
“What about who we were?” Starn asked. Whalk shook his head.
“Never heard of anyone ever going back to it, or even figuring it out. Mind, they don’t stay around here for very long, any more, but you think you’d hear about it, if it ever happened.”
“Where would we go?” Palk asked.
“The city, most likely,” Whalk said. “Though it’s tough going in the city, these days. Probably too many unskilled folks like yourselves turning up, rosy-cheeked and hoping for the best.”
“Is there a better plan?” Palk asked.
“I’d go work a ranch, were I you,” Whalk said. “They’re always looking for men like yourself who can handle a critter well enough, and the ladies do a lot of the home-tending, when they’re around. Hear all the time about how they can’t find enough people to fill the boots.”
“What do… people like us… do in the city?” Palk asked.
“There’s some cleaning work that the city pays for,” Whalk said, scratching his chin with stubby fingers. “There are low-level tasks that even people like yourselves can do, writing things down, carrying them from place to place, and the like. You can read, can’t you?”
“Yes,” Starn said. Palk looked around recognizing now that the characters on the shelves were language of some sort. He focused harder, determined not to jump to conclusions like with spoken language, but they stayed stray sticks of shape, rather than forming into letters or ideas.
“No,” Palk said. She frowned at him again.
“Why can’t you read?”
“Just can’t,” he told her.
“Now that one’s odd. Usually they can or they can’t. Not often you get those who have both, with ‘em,” Whalk said. “I’d look long and hard at the ranching thing. Not having letters is a hard way to go in the city.”
“No one is trying to figure out why this happens?” Starn asked. Whalk shook his head.
“Not that I know of. Don’t hear about it, at least.”
“Where are we?” Palk asked.
“Hamlet of King’s Path, district of Allenwood, nation of Yunt. We call the planet Home.”
Palk looked at his hands.
They were his hands. None of the rest of it felt familiar at all, save Starn’s hand in his.
“So we just… give up on whatever we were before?” Palk asked.
“You ask me, it isn’t so much a curse as it looks, right now,” Whalk said. “Sure, you lose where you were in life, but you get a chance to do anything you want. Be anyone you want. Every mistake you ever made is gone. You got each other, sure enough, and you got the time and the space to figure out what that means.”
Starn was looking at her feet.
“I’m not sure that’s good enough,” she said.
“Lot of happiness comes out of making what is into what’s good enough,” Whalk said. “Friendly advice. I’ve seen people let this eat them up. Don’t leave the hamlet for months, keep wandering back up there in the hills like some magic fairy is going to come down and wave a wand at ‘em and make ‘em into something they aren’t any more. Those are awfully unhappy folk.”
That was extortion, Palk recognized immediately. Trying to force him into making a specific decision by threatening that the other outcome would be bad for him, without any verifiable proof. He didn’t like it.
“So how do we get to the city from here?” Starn asked.
Whalk nodded.
“Now there’s why you’re actually here,” he said. “There’s sort of a tradition around here. I take in the wanderers, give ‘em a job for a few days, pay ‘em fair, and then we point you at the train station and wish you luck. You can earn enough for a ticket and food enough for a few weeks, if you’re careful, in that time. All I ask is that if you land on your feet, you send me the money back. I don’t need the help, see. It’s our form of charity that doesn’t involve a right handout.”
“That sounds fair,” Starn said. Palk wanted to pull her out of the store and talk to her before she agreed to anything, but it seemed like it was already done.
“Good,” Whalk said. “The illiterate one can push a broom. I need you on sorting shelves. You do a good job, I may have you do a day of orders for me tomorrow.”
Whalk came around the counter, grabbing a sweeping instrument from against the wall and handed it to Palk.
�
�Sorry, mate,” he said to Palk as he walked away. “I know it’s not what you hoped for in life, no matter how little you know about life or what you hope.”
Palk looked at the broom incredulously.
It was just a couple of days.
On the other hand, what if the storekeeper was lying and the answer to who they had been was out there, slipping away?
He pulled Starn aside.
“I don’t trust him,” he said.
“Why not?” she asked.
“He could be lying,” Palk told her, feeling like it was a statement of the obvious.
“He isn’t,” she said, sounding just as concerned that Palk was missing the obvious.
“How do you know that?” Palk asked.
“Why don’t you?” she replied. “It’s obvious, just looking at him.”
“That he never lies?” Palk asked. “He just has an honest look to him?”
“No,” Starn said, her brow furrowing hard. “No, it’s in how he talks and how he moves when he talks. I’m certain he lies. A lot. No big lies or important lies, but he practices. But he wasn’t lying to us.”
“How do you know that?” Palk asked.
“I don’t know,” she said helplessly. “I thought you did, too.”
“Why can you read and I can’t?” Palk asked.
“I’ve got no more idea than you do,” she said. “Maybe it will come to you.”
It didn’t feel like it was just going to come to him, but he tried to relax. Forcing it certainly wasn’t helping anything.
“It’s not so bad, right?” she asked. “Pushing a broom for a few days?”
“It’s patronizing,” he said.
“Better than just handing us money,” she told him and he nodded agreement.
“Just wish I were more helpful. I don’t like being this…”
“Blind,” she said quietly. He nodded. Helpless, blind, like a newborn animal.
“We’ll get better fast,” she said. “Promise.”
“You think we really have lost everything we were?” he asked her. She thought about it for a minute, then shook her head.
“I can’t accept it,” she said. “Even if it’s true, I can’t accept it. Right now, we don’t have anything, and we need to fix that. After that, we’ll worry about what we can do to get back what we lost.”
He could live with that.
Even if it meant pushing a broom.
She squeezed his hand, then quickly kissed his cheek and left, going to read shelf labels that looked like random geometric patterns to Palk, starting her new job.
*********
Whalk was true to his word. At the end of the day he handed them both a small stack of worn coins and pointed them at the tavern across the open space from the general store where they could get a meal.
“You can sleep here, tonight,” he said. “Just come in the back door and go upstairs. There are accommodations enough for one night.”
Starn sat down at a small wooden table across from him and read the menu that the young woman put on the table. It was hand-written and stained, but showed pride, and gave Palk hope that the food would be decent. Starn read to him out of the menu, but neither of them recognized anything, so they just took the waitress’ recommendation on what to have.
“I can’t believe I can’t read,” Palk said. “I know I know how to read.”
“I know,” Starn told him. “This isn’t my native language, either. I think I may have a gift with languages, or something. It’s just too easy for me.”
“Maybe,” he said grudgingly. “So what do you think? City or ranch?”
“Ranch sounds like the better plan if we’re going to stick around and just try to make a life,” she said. “I think our chances of figuring out what happened to us are probably better in the city, though.”
He nodded, looking around.
“You can tell that times are hard, here,” he said. She nodded.
“You can.”
“I would say that we should stay here a while longer, try to go back up where we started, but…”
“Whalk can’t afford to employ us, and we’d run out of money,” she said. “Unless you think you can catch fish.”
“I don’t know anything about fish,” he said.
“Neither do I,” she told him. “I could catch them, but I don’t think they’d take that very well, here.”
“Because you’re a woman?”
“You probably can’t see it, but yes. There are rules.”
He didn’t have any context to compare it against. Maybe that was normal.
“So what do you want to do?” he asked, dropping his voice. “If things are hard here, they won’t be a lot easier in the city.”
“How do you figure?” she asked.
“Everyone here is a fisherman or a seamstress,” he said. “They’ve got to have kids that grow up wanting to do other things. I mean, how many people really grow up wanting to fish or sew? And if there were a lot of opportunities in the city, they’d all leave. The people working would all be old.”
“But they aren’t,” Starn agreed. “No, I think you’re right. The city would mean working hard and competing for a very few jobs with no skills to prove that we deserve them.”
He looked hard at her.
He was so torn.
He wanted to know who he was.
He wanted to know what he was good at - because he had to believe he was good at something.
He wanted to know his history with this woman. He felt like he’d been robbed of more than just himself, but of half of himself that had simply been stripped away and not replaced, in the form of the relationship they’d had.
There was determination underneath of that that he didn’t think was going to fade any time soon.
But.
He didn’t like the idea of scrounging to make enough money to live, scrambling from job to job and never knowing whether or not they had enough money for food or a place to live.
He wanted to be somewhere where they were comfortable and settled and, if they really had lost everything that they were, where they could start building something completely new as soon and as fast as possible.
A little house, just the two of them, and all the time in the world.
He wasn’t sure he could think of anything he wanted more.
What if they wasted years, miserable and unhappy, to never turn up anything about who or what they’d been, and missed out on the chance to just start something without anger or misery or mistakes?
What if Whalk really did have the right view of things?
There was risk either way, big risk, the risk of missing out on things that were really important.
“I know,” she said.
“What?” he asked. She frowned.
“Sorry, was just following your thoughts. It’s what I want, too, but if we just walk away from everything, we’ll never know what happened to us.”
“You can hear me thinking?” he asked. She hesitated, then drew a breath.
“No,” she said. “I can see it. That’s… that’s just me?”
“I have no idea what you’re thinking until you tell me,” he said.
“Oh,” she said, looking at her hands. “I’m sorry.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe it isn’t bad.”
She could tell when people were lying, and she could read his thoughts off of his face. It was frightening, but he’d learned to live with it before. Maybe it was a good thing. Maybe it was how they communicated. Never being able to lie to her might make things easier.
“I don’t mean to,” she said. “But it’s like you say them out loud, they’re so clear.”
“Do you think it’s something I could learn to keep hidden?” he asked.
She rested her chin on her fist.
“Maybe,” she said. “I think so, actually, but I don’t want you to.”
He smiled.
“That’s okay.”
She smiled
back, and it made his heart jump.
“So,” he said. “Do we flip a coin?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I think we need to sleep on it tonight and talk about it tomorrow. I can see how both of them look like the right thing, and I don’t know which one we should do. And I don’t think I normally have a hard time deciding on things.”
“Neither do I,” he said, finding that he believed it even more after he said it.
A little house with some land and some animals, save up a little money…
The food was good. Foreign, but Palk wasn’t sure that it was ever going to be anything else. He didn’t know what would have been familiar. Starn paid for it out of the coins Whalk had given them, then they went back across the commons, in through the back of the general store, and up the dusty back steps into a loft where he kept long-term durable goods.
There was dry grass bound in a fishing net, there, with several layers of thick, if worn, quilts on top of it.
They lay together, facing each other, breathing the same air.
“I love you,” he whispered.
“I love you, too,” she answered. “We’re going to be okay.”
*********
He still couldn’t read in the morning.
Whalk set him to work cleaning the windows and sealing the wood against the weather while Starn sat in his office and ran numbers. Palk was pretty sure he was good at math, but the stuff she was doing was solid mystery to him.
Whalk’s wife came in around midday with a great big basket of food and told them that it was for them.
“I don’t know what I would do, if I were in your place,” she told them. “Frightens me to death, the idea of one day not knowing who I was. I hope you find your way.”
Whalk sent them upstairs to eat, giving them a few minutes alone.
“I think I want to go ranching,” Palk said as he chewed slowly. The food was better than the tavern, but it was possible that it was because he was hungrier.
“We can always change our minds,” Starn agreed. “If we decide that it doesn’t have enough opportunity, we can look somewhere else. It isn’t the last decision we’ll ever make.”
He nodded. He hadn’t thought of it like that.