by Chloe Garner
It was like he had been forgetting to breathe.
“Wow,” he said. “So. That’s it, huh?”
She nodded, chewing.
“I think so.”
It was simple. It was what he wanted. And that was it.
When do we go?” he asked.
“Whalk can’t keep us on for very long,” Starn told him. “His finances are really stretched. He can’t afford any more inventory than he keeps, really, and he’s putting his profit from the next few weeks into our pockets out of what basically amounts to charity.”
“How much money do we need?” Palk asked. She shook her head. “I’ll talk to Whalk tonight and see how much he can tell me. We can’t stay more than tomorrow, though, and ask him to pay us. No one around here has very much money to spare, I don’t think.”
Palk frowned, looking at the plate of food in front of him.
“What a strange place,” he said.
“How is that?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe it isn’t. It just seems odd to me that they would think it was normal for people to show up here without any memories. There’s nothing to support them, there’s no plan, really, for dealing with them, because everyone’s too broke and too busy to do anything about tomorrow, anyway. So they just…”
“Wander,” she supplied. “That’s it exactly. Maybe that’s why they have all of these people with no memories.”
“You think we did this on purpose?” he asked.
“Maybe it was easier than where we were,” she said. “Maybe becoming one of the wanderers looked like a better solution than being stuck where we were, doing what we’d always done, and never having any other opportunities.”
He hadn’t thought about that.
“It kind of makes sense,” he said. “Except that we don’t look like them. We don’t belong here, and if we did, they’d know us.”
“That’s true,” she said thoughtfully, taking a bite of her bread. “But it doesn’t make any less sense than any other explanation of how we got here.”
That was true.
“We should get back to work,” he said. “Whalk has some handyman stuff he wants me to try. Maybe I’ll be good at it.”
“You know how to do repair stuff?” Starn asked.
“I think I can figure it out,” Palk told her. “You done?”
She brushed her fingers off and stood.
“Yeah. Tomorrow, then? I’ll see if I can get a train schedule and… we’ll go.”
She shrugged.
It was a huge risk. That was so obvious. But at the same time, nothing was safe. It was the best plan Palk could think of. He nodded.
“We’ll go.”
*********
Dawn.
It was pretty, here.
He didn’t have any sense of context for it, no way of describing it compared to anything else he’d ever seen or felt, but waking up in the loft of the little general store, in the cool air that drifted vaguely with the fresh scents of fish and the clean water that they came with, before the sun had cooked the health out of the smell and made it into the sort of pungent aroma that seemed to seep everywhere, in the dry of the storage space, warm with blankets and with the touch of body against body in those blankets, he could imagine that he’d never been this happy.
The light was soft, compared to midday, gentle tones and shadows that blurred into each other. Starn smelled of flour and some kind of fruit, from the work she’d been doing the night before.
They got up, and did their best to be straight and presentable before they went downstairs, given that they only had the clothes that they were wearing. Whalk was a few minutes later than them, humming to himself as he let himself into the shop.
“Did you sleep well?” he asked.
“Yes, thank you,” Starn said. He nodded.
“I wish you luck, then. You’ll need to be on your way as quick as you can, but I have breakfast for you to split on the road.”
“Tell your wife thank you for us,” Starn said.
“She has such a sensitivity for the wanderers,” Whalk said. “Just send it back, if you ever can.”
“We’ll make it,” Palk said. “Thank you.”
The two men clasped hands, and then Palk took the light canvas bag from Whalk and they waved as they started down the road.
The train didn’t make it to King’s Path, so the two of them would have to walk to the next town in time to catch the daily train.
They would buy tickets that went straight through the city; cheaper, Whalk said, than buying them to the city and then back out. They would be going to a small town called Transit, where a vast territory of ranches sent their livestock and came to look for seasonal and permanent help.
Whalk didn’t know if they got wanderers there or not, but he did know that several of the wanderers he’d sent that way had eventually sent him back the money he’d given them, so there were good chances of success there.
Which was the best Palk and Starn could really hope for.
They walked the path to King’s Through hand in hand, mostly silent but happy and optimistic.
“It’s going to be good,” he told her once. “We can do anything we want to. If this isn’t where we want to go, we’ll go somewhere else. Until we’re happy.”
“I’m happy now,” she’d told him, making him smile.
They passed a few people with carts and their easy-going livestock, meandering their way down the road toward a destination - a market? home? something else? Palk couldn’t name any of them.
“I don’t think we’re from around here,” he observed at one point, looking at a short, squatty animal that was pulling a cart. The cart had a very low set of poles that formed solid hooks to fit around the animal’s broad, flat shoulders as it moved along the road in a motion that better resembled crawling or climbing than it did walking.
“You don’t say,” Starn teased.
“No,” he said. “It’s not that we don’t look like them. It’s that I don’t recognize anything.”
She gave him an amused look and he sighed.
“Look, name the parts of my hand,” he said, holding his hand out in front of her. “I know the name of every bone in my hand.”
“So do I,” she said, her voice containing a smile.
“Tell me how a fish moves through water,” he said. “The parts of his body.”
She shrugged. She knew where he was going with this, he knew it, but he had to say it out loud.
“I’ve got no clue what that thing is.”
“Neither do I,” she said, relieving him. “I know we aren’t local, and it’s possible that we’ve been transplanted a long way, ending up here. Maybe we were very sheltered. I don’t know.”
“Why would someone do that?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know if we’ll ever know. Does it matter?”
“It does if we want to fix it,” he told her.
“What if we did it on purpose?” she suggested again.
“We should have left ourselves a note,” he said. She laughed.
“I know. Because if we knew ourselves at all, we’d both know that neither of us would be able to leave it alone.”
“No,” he said.
“Maybe we thought it would be different. That we’d be naive and innocent and not worry about it.”
“How could we not worry about it?” Palk asked. “We have no memory. There’s nothing else to think about.”
She laughed.
“Maybe we were hasty and rash and a little stupid.”
“Maybe we were different people entirely.”
She looked at him curiously.
“Do you believe that?”
He frowned.
“What?”
“That we could be completely different, just by erasing our memories?”
“I don’t know what I believe,” he said.
“I think I was always like this,” she said. “Not
hing is going to change it. Specific stuff, sure, that’s a part of my memories, but the really deep-down stuff? That’s me, no matter what you do to it.”
He liked that she saw herself as that strong, but it was the same fearsomeness that had intimidated him from the start. There was no self-doubt in her at all.
Maybe it just meant she was right. Hadn’t he seen it from the very beginning?
He squeezed her hand, and she smiled at him.
“You don’t have to be afraid,” she said. “I’m always going to be on your side.”
And he laughed.
*********
King’s Through really was just a crossroads with a sign on it.
There was a train stop at one corner, the end of the line, with a great big loop for the train to turn around, a large market on another corner, a set of tents and small wooden buildings on the third, and an open space for the fourth. There was no sense of a township to it, no claimed space for living in, just the small and largely temporary residences of the people who worked there.
Starn bought the tickets while Palk looked up at the sign, willing his mind to make sense of the shapes. Starn found him there, and pointed up at the various pieces of the words.
“King’s Path is that way,” she said, pointing the way they’d come. The first two shapes together mean the highest leader, the king, and the next three shapes are direction, intent, and physical space. A path.”
“Why wouldn’t that mean road?” Palk asked.
“It’s the kind of physical space. This is a small, low one. You would be using a larger, more elevated physical space for it to be a road.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Write your name,” she said. He frowned, then sounded it out and squatted to scratch out letters in the hard dirt. P-a-l-k. Palk.
He stood.
He knew how to write.
He could read and write, it just wasn’t what they read or wrote, here. It was comforting to him, though, to prove it to Starn, as simple as it was.
“They would say that that’s ridiculous,” she said, looking down at the letters. “That they have no meaning, that they’re just shapes that go with sounds.”
“Isn’t that all a word is?” Palk asked.
She looked up at him.
“Is a word just a set of sounds, like an instrument?”
She looked up at the sign.
“Those are things that mean things, put together to mean new things. Which is what a word is. It’s a concept.”
“It’s inefficient,” Palk said, surprising himself with an unanticipated opinion. He pounced on it, wondering if he was remembering… something. There was nothing left. Starn laughed.
“It’s soulful,” she said. “Come on. The train is already getting turned around. We should go get in line.”
She handed him a ticket and they walked across the crossroads, stopping for people and livestock here and there, walking up onto the station walkway and standing among other, milling people. Down from them, industrious men were stacking goods to go onto the other cars of the train. Palk strained to see the train, but what he saw didn’t match what he’d expected.
“That’s not a train,” he said.
“It is,” Starn said. “It’s a series of boxes used for transportation.”
“It isn’t,” Palk said. He knew there was something missing to it, something that he understood and could have explained, if he’d been able to see it, but it wasn’t supposed to be something pulled by fuzzy blue animals. That had another name.
Except the fuzzy blue animals part. Those, he’d never seen before.
“I’m so confused,” he murmured, and Starn took his hand.
“It’s going to be okay,” she said.
The train pulled even with the platform and they boarded, taking a pair of reasonably comfortable seats next to a window. She smiled at him, drawing a smile in return.
“It’s going to be okay,” he agreed. She nodded.
“We have a little bit of money, we have a destination, and we’re smart. The more time I spend around other people, the more I can see that we are.”
“Even though I’m illiterate?” he asked. She laughed.
“You are not,” she told him. “You just aren’t in the right region to find the language you know.”
He shrugged, and she leaned in against him, letting him put his arm around her as they watched the country go by.
It was such an odd experience. His mind kept expecting to see things he recognized or understood, but it never did. Everything was strange and new and without catalogue or explanation. Starn napped, but he kept watch, both of the world outside and inside of the traveling box. The inside was easily more interesting.
There were miscreants at work, of some nature, and he couldn’t decide what. He didn’t have the biological eye to tell if they were young, or if they were older and more intentional in their strange behaviors, the eyes that took in too much, the limbs that fidgeted and rehearsed.
He checked Starn’s posture to be sure that her pockets weren’t exposed, then glanced around the train car, looking for likely targets.
They would either be wealthy or naive. That was where the greatest rewards would be, wealthy because they simply had the most to lose, and naive because they’d be the least likely to see it coming or react in time for there to be trouble.
Palk knew he didn’t want to look like one of the naive ones, but he couldn’t spot the wealthy ones. King’s Through was too meager a town to have anyone with means leaving it.
Which left them, the wanderers, the ones who would be the least suspicious and the least sophisticated. And he and Starn needed what little money they had, if they were going to make it to Transit with enough to get them by until they found work.
The men moved gently along the train, switching seats to talk to each other, or riding a curve standing and sitting down across the aisle. The train car was only about half-full, which left them plenty of room to work.
Palk watched.
And then he saw the hand dip.
It was a clean motion. A good one. One that suggested, to him, more of an adult level of experience and emotional distance, but he had no idea how well-rooted that idea was. Was it true where he came from but not here? Was it likely to be true at all, or was he making guesses based on almost no knowledge of any use, and filling in gaps to make himself feel better?
All the same, he didn’t like it.
The woman whose pocket had emptied continued to talk to her companion, unaware, and the man moved on. Palk eased Starn off of him and stood, evaluating the pickpocket.
Palk probably outweighed him by twenty to thirty percent, and while the pickpocket had a wiry, experienced look to him, Palk was instinctively looking for places that broke easily. He decided to trust himself, trust the signals his body was giving him about how capable it was, and go for it.
He clasped the man’s wrist and looked down into his greenish eyes hiding behind thick black lashes.
“She’s going to miss that more than you are,” Palk said quietly.
There was a shuffle behind him and Palk re-counted where all of them had been. There should be two behind him and three in front.
“You don’t know me,” the pickpocket said.
“No, I don’t,” Palk answered. “You can probably tell that I don’t know much of anything. But I know what I saw and I know what I’m willing to do about it.”
There was a whistling noise and Palk dodged to the side as the pipe breezed past his head. The individual behind him grunted, and Palk turned his head to find the even-shorter man sitting on the ground, clutching his stomach.
“I don’t like fighting,” Starn said cheerfully, standing next to Palk. “But it looks like I’m good at it.”
Palk looked back at the man whose wrist he held. The train had gone quiet and Palk saw the woman grasp at her pocket quickly and look up at him with panicked eyes. He nodded.
“Open your
hand, then move on,” Palk said quietly. “They all know, now.”
There were several seconds as the miscreants silently communicated among themselves, then the man’s hand opened and a pouch dropped out, making a metallic noise as it hit the ground. Palk waited another second, then let him go, taking a step to the side to let the rest of them past. They went through a door at the front of the traincar and disappeared. Palk glanced at Starn, who shrugged and went back to her seat with a knowing smile, then he stooped to gather the changepurse and handed it to the woman.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” she hissed.
“Why not?” he asked.
“They keep grudges,” she warned. “You just got both of us into trouble.”
“You’re welcome to go give them your money, if you want,” Palk said. “I have more important uses for mine.”
She looked at the bag in her fist and after the hoodlums, then stuffed it into her pocket. Palk went to sit back down next to Starn.
“Mistake?” he murmured to her. She shook her head, resting her chin on her fist and looking out the window.
“No, it’s who you are. Doing anything else would be a falsehood and you’d regret it.”
He wondered at that, that she was so confident at his core identity, where he felt so naked of it. He nudged her with his shoulder.
“Thanks for the backup.”
“You had it under control,” she answered with a smile. He tipped his head back and tried to relax. In all, he wasn’t unhappy with the start.
*********
They left the train in King’s Bounty, warned by the staff that it would only be stopped for a short time before they would continue on, and that Palk and Starn needed to be back in time for that, or else they would have to take the train tomorrow.
King’s Bounty was a more prosperous town, one where the road was paved with cobble and the people wore clothes that had more color and style variation. Palk noted the pickpockets on the platform but he didn’t pay any attention to them. Well, he didn’t pay any visible attention to them. He kept track of where they were and made sure they didn’t get too close as Palk and Starn ventured out in search of food.
They found, a short walk from the station, a market, again more bustling and colorful one than the one at King’s Through, and they bought a small amount of produce and a pair of bowls of soup in paper that they carried back to the train with them. It would make it until nightfall, at which point they would either decline the food on the train and be very hungry by morning, or get off at another stop to find something else to eat.