Charlinder's Walk

by Alyson Miers

  Chapter Nineteen

  China

  At first he kept inland and slept in the woods. It made sense; if he went too near the coast, he risked getting sidetracked on a peninsula and losing time. In a forest, the trees cut down on the winds and kept the snow from drifting, which appeared at first to be an unambiguous good, as anything that shielded him from the worst of the winter only made his life easier. In daytime, the sunlight filtered down through the bare trees and lit up the forest floor, whereas the unbroken light on flat snow was blinding. In the denser parts of the forest, there were some patches of ground dry enough to take a cooking fire.

  On a night in late October, he spread out his blankets under the shelter of a low, dense-needled pine tree and covered himself and Lacey under the coat he'd acquired after the fire. As usual, he was so tired from walking all day and carrying his sheep in the late afternoon after she refused to walk any further that he became dead to the world as soon as Lacey settled into a comfortable position. Next thing he knew, he was jolted awake by his sheep jumping away from him while the moon was still a brilliant crescent in the sky. It was far too early and she was bleating very differently from the way she did when she needed to be milked. Charlinder sat up and looked around for the source of her distress. It only took a quick turn of the head before he was face to face with a pair of wide amber eyes reflecting the moonlight.

  He jumped to his feet with his heart pounding so hard he didn't notice the freezing air. There was a large, pale gray canine animal peering up at him, about the size of a large ram of Lacey's breed but with the musculature and teeth of a species that was accustomed to killing its food. It made a derisive snort in Charlinder's direction and began padding around him to where Lacey had run off.

  Charlinder stepped in the wolf's path and flailed his arms around, shouting, "OH NO YOU DON'T! YOU GO FIND YOUR OWN MEAL, YOU CAN'T HAVE MINE!"

  The wolf stopped and gave a low growl in answer to Charlinder's yelling. He might have been a beautiful animal in daylight and at a distance, but in such close proximity, Charlinder could tell the winter was not treating him well. His teeth appeared uneven in the weak light and his midsection was concave between his ribcage and narrow hips. Lacey was not the most well-marbled of ruminants, but she was big enough for an excellent meal and had no defense except to hide in her flock, which at the moment consisted of a singular tall, 21-year-old primate with a pathetic excuse for claws, teeth and pelt.

  "ARE YOU NOT LISTENING?! GET OUT OF HERE!" he continued to shout at the wolf, which now appeared to be considering whether Charlinder would taste better than his smaller, woollier companion. He looked a lot bigger and fleshier than he was under his clothes, but the wolf would not discover how little meat was on him until he was torn open. "LISTEN YOU IDIOT CANINE, I AM BIGGER THAN YOU, AND I HAVE BETTER DEPTH PERCEPTION! NOW WE CAN DO THIS THE EASY WAY OR THE HARD WAY!"

  The wolf gave a final, annoyed huff and stalked away. Charlinder stood in the same place and raised his arms in a threatening fashion when the wolf looked over his shoulder. Once the predator was nearly out of sight, Charlinder caught his breath and checked his trousers to make sure he hadn't soiled himself. "LACEY, WHERE THE HELL ARE YOU?!"

  He stumbled off in the opposite direction from the wolf until he found Lacey hiding under the low boughs of another evergreen. "Don't you ever walk away from me!" he yelled at his sheep, grabbing her jaw and forcing her to look him in the face. "Bad girl, very bad girl! You're lucky that wolf was all alone, or else you'd be raw mutton! We're not sleeping in here!"

  He walked her back to their abandoned sleeping spot, rolled up his blankets, and led her out of the forest. He took a break to milk her but otherwise kept moving until the sun was out. There would be no more sleeping under the trees. He would just have to get comfortable with the blinding light on the snow and cope with the wind. It took several days before he slept a regular night again.

  The coast was still more time-consuming than the interior, but there were fishing villages. He periodically visited to check his progress, and the villagers offered him shelter, which he happily accepted, just as long as no one tried to separate him from Lacey. He would not bring his defenseless ovine into a stronghold of large predatory animals, and he would not risk leaving her closed off in a wooden structure full of dry kindling again.

  Someone had more to say about his route than merely to note where he was. When asked to do the honors, an elderly Russian man took Charlinder's pencil and sketched some peaks along the coast just beyond where they were, and another set of peaks briefly inland, then pointed out the corridor of flatter land between the ranges. Charlinder therefore turned westward in from the coastline and kept a close eye on Lacey to take the path of least topographical resistance through southeastern Russia.

  When he'd reached a time of year at which he was afraid the lack of daylight would make him go crazy, he received a strange reaction to the usually uncomplicated step of documenting his progress. He was showing his path to the patriarch of the family hosting him at the time, and the old man was just about to press the point to paper, when instead he called over his wife to see what Charlinder was doing. Soon the whole family had come over and all were engaged in a tense discussion surrounding him and his map. It was one of those moments that left him immensely frustrated that he could not understand their language, as he felt he had a right to know what they were saying about him. The family seemed to be worried--he wasn't sure how he managed to piece that much out--about the direction his route was taking. But what was wrong with him continuing south?, he wanted to know. Would they prefer that he turn around and march back into the Arctic Circle in the middle of winter? Though he had to tolerate much fretting over him from the family for the next several hours before he left their home, the map was marked and ultimately no one tried to hold him back.

  Several more days passed before he found another village. The people there looked little different from the Russians he'd been meeting since he crossed the Bering Strait, but they spoke a different language, something musical and expressive and wholly removed from anything resembling English. The people dressed differently from the Russians and North Americans, lived in different houses, and had very different foods on the table. He had left Siberia and reached China.

  His first village visit in China did not go very well. It started out perfectly; he stepped around the perimeter with Lacey, and someone spotted him. Soon he had at least half a dozen cheerful, curious villagers around him, examining him up and down, but not so intrusive that he couldn't pull out his world map for the routine introduction. He did the usual itinerary pantomime, and a nearby woman, an older and very attractive one, grabbed him by the arm and yanked him in the direction of her house. This was just fine with him, especially when she penned Lacey in with the goats behind the house. The family lived in a flexible, lightweight structure constructed mainly of felted wool, which was promisingly warm inside. She beckoned him inside and showed him around to the rest of the family, who were similarly curious. It was soon time for lunch, which involved a pair of perplexing little sticks in place of utensils but his hosts allowed him to eat with his hands, and it was delicious. He was indescribably grateful to his uncle for advising him to go through the southern half of Asia rather than cut straight through Russia.

  This euphoria lasted until the evening. His hosts had a stunningly beautiful daughter, and Charlinder couldn't keep his eyes off her for more than a minute or so at a time. Of course he didn't intend to do anything with her, but he could look at her just the same. He caught himself staring, and managed to look at the fascinating embroidery work in the opposite wall. That kept him entertained for...seconds, before he looked at her again, and then she caught his eye, so he quickly looked away. He still couldn't keep his eyes averted for very long, and the next time he looked at her, she was smiling sidelong back at him.

  That much, he could not pretend to ignore. He smiled back, and was enjoying his evening very much until something
exploded at the head of the table. His host had stood up and was now raging at the girl, and there was no confusion over his frequent gesticulating in Charlinder's direction. While the rest of the family sat stricken, the girl crawled backwards into the wall, cowering under her father's anger. She looked over long enough to signal something to Charlinder that he took as "get out," which became clearer when a relative that he guessed as the father's brother sprang up and hurried him out of the house. He was forced outside, where he could only listen to the father continue to rage at his daughter, punctuated only by the timid bleating from the nearby goats. His personal effects were soon dropped outside the door.

  Shivering from cold and nerves, Charlinder retrieved Lacey from amongst the goats and continued south out of the village. He kept marching for hours in the dark and cold until his sheep refused to walk any more and yelled at him to settle down for the night.

  He was sufficiently shaken by this experience that he walked for as many hours a day as possible, which wasn't very many at that time of year, until he ate through all his solid food again. When he was afraid he would gag if he had to wake up to one more morning with nothing but sheep's milk, he took a deep breath and entered the next village.

  He spent the first several hours commanding himself not to do anything stupid like look at any pretty girls. This would be much like not looking at any soil in the middle of a soybean field, but he had to restrain himself somehow.

  The family that brought him inside this time actually had two beautiful daughters. Charlinder started to wonder if the Faithful were right, and there really was a God, and He was reaching out to kick Charlinder for his arrogance. He gritted his teeth and willed himself to make this work. He offered the family some of Lacey's fleece as a gift for their hospitality, and they were happy to accept it. He was still determined not to make eye contact with either of the girls, so he did what he usually did to make himself unobtrusive: took out his latest knitting assignment and hid in a corner. The girls grabbed their textile chores and joined him. He managed to work with them until dinnertime without offending anyone. Then the girls began to teach him how to use the eating-stick-things. Conceding defeat while the girls touched his hands and encouraged him to look at how they put things in their mouths, Charlinder looked over at his host, who smiled encouragingly back at him, chuckling slightly at his daughters' efforts. The rest of the visit, running until the following afternoon, passed very amicably.

  The next several visits were equally agreeable. As he marched around the mountains spreading up from the Korean peninsula, he confided in Lacey that he was glad that China was turning out so helpfully, because he would be walking around it for a very long time.

  The valley led down to the coastline again and Charlinder continued south. The season changed and the weather became warmer. He turned inland again to follow another valley between mountain ranges. He was having a very good day of walking in the springtime when he smelled something unusual. There were no city remains nearby, and this was a smell of a different type; something smoky and perhaps flowery coming from the other side of a wall of trees. He could have ignored the trees and the smell and kept on going in the same direction, but his curiosity reared its head again and he needed to know. He started towards the trees, trying to puzzle out the smell. Was it a species of flower he hadn’t seen before? Was it the musk of some interesting animal? Was it a fire for a human sacrifice? Or maybe it was the musky animal getting sacrificed? If there was a human sacrifice going on, then he would definitely want to steer clear of any area where he smelled the same thing in the future. He was so absorbed in these questions that he didn’t notice the mud just ahead until his left foot slipped and twisted out from under him, sending him to the ground with a vicious snapping noise and sharp pain shooting up his leg.

  As if that wasn’t bad enough, Lacey began making a lot of noise while he tried to figure out how to get up and walk away. He growled at her to be quiet while he struggled to his feet by pushing on her meager back for support. Lacey ignored his admonitions, continued to bleat up a storm, and refused to accept his weight pressing through his hands on her back.

  Of course, he had never sprained his ankle while at home in Paleola. There, he could have gone to Darrell for a splint and crutch and recruited a few of his helpful older students to keep the kids in line while he taught lessons sitting down. No, it had to be in the middle of a strange country where he lacked the hunting and gathering skills to procure food aside from sheep’s milk, and where he had no defense from violence except to get up on his two feet and walk away, that he sustained an injury that wrecked his freedom of movement. All that, and his sheep was making a racket that would surely attract the attention of some lucky carnivore with a litter of cubs back at the cave, while Charlinder lacked the physical stability to use his impressive height to intimidate the hungry animal away. He heard something walking through the trees, and the footfalls were too big to be an ungulate’s hooves. He looked at the ground for a rock he could pick up and throw, until a couple of men emerged from the trees and briefly paused at the sight of Charlinder trying and failing to carry his weight forward on only one foot.

  They laughed sympathetically at the sight of the domesticated animal bellowing about her injured human. One of them took Charlinder’s left arm and hooked it around his shoulders and began half-carrying him through the trees. The other one relieved him of his baggage and encouraged Lacey to follow. On the other side of the trees was a village.

  They carried him to the house of an older man in their village who was immediately apparent as their equivalent of Darrell. He wrapped Charlinder's ankle in a cloth stuffed with interesting-smelling herbs and then recruited his next-door neighbor to take Lacey and tether her up to the side of his house where she could graze on the property’s grass. Once he was set up in a bed, he noticed a small plate of some powdery substance burning on a shelf by the window, and there was the interesting smell again. He nearly laughed with relief when he figured out that the aroma was coming from a lot of tiny, harmless ritual burnings around the village.

  From the window, he could see the neighbor’s small grandchildren come over and introduce themselves to Lacey, and all was well just then. These people seemed very nice and decent and had no interest in harming or abusing him or his animal, but he had learned by then that being around a lot of nice people was no guarantee of safety, and the fact remained that his usual activity of walking for sixteen hours a day was out of the question. If he offended someone by smiling at the wrong pretty young woman, he would not be able to make himself scarce. He was at the mercy of the nice old medic and his family, and thus would have to be on his best behavior until his ankle was in perfect working condition again. This would take several days, and it was the first time he had stayed at any one village for nearly that long.

  During that time, Charlinder had nothing to do but watch the people around him. The family brought in visitors from several families, who wanted to meet the odd-looking convalescent who couldn’t talk to anyone, or offer their well-wishes for his healing, or something else he couldn't understand, while visiting with the family. He simply observed while they did whatever it was they needed to do. The householder’s grandchildren sometimes came over and climbed on Charlinder’s immobile lap and poked his overlarge nose, and that much was fine by him. If the cost of his stay was to let children play on him, he would cooperate. He didn’t worry about the purpose of their visits to him. He became far more intrigued with how they related to each other.

  He soon learned that there was no confusion about who deferred to whom. The older clearly held sway over the younger, first. Children responded to their grandparents much more favorably than to their parents, and younger adults were visibly obedient to older ones. This much was no surprise to Charlinder, as such was the custom in most of the cultures he'd seen, and he thought it was only proper. Anyone who endured that many years of work for mere survival and kept their spirits up, he felt deserved their co
mmunities' appreciation. The factor that most captured his attention was how the women were so answerable to the men.

  The men who visited the house usually brought their wives, but no woman ever came alone. If Charlinder's host was present when they arrived, they would first greet him, but only the male guest would speak directly to the host. The wife would stand behind her husband and wait for the host to ask after her. The guests never exchanged such greetings with the hostess. The only interactions with her were when the wife in the visiting couple went to help her in the kitchen. The husband would only occasionally look in her direction.

  The dynamic was most obvious, perhaps because he had the most time around them, within the hosting family. His host liked to spend time with Charlinder, as the inoffensive sounding board he was, but it was mainly his daughter-in-law who brought his meals, checked under the wrappings on his ankle and helped him limp to the nearest latrine. If some disturbed individual decided to attack the injured foreigner by, say, setting the house on fire, it would probably be the daughter-in-law (if anyone) who made sure Charlinder got outside. It was the young woman who did most of the actual work, yet she received little recognition that Charlinder could discern from the rest of the family.