by Alyson Miers
Thus unburdened, he continued northwest through the valley with Lacey. His next visit began with a surprising encounter. Someone must have heard him talking to Lacey, because a young man later accosted Charlinder as he passed behind a row of huts.
"You, are, Eeng-leesh?" he said slowly.
Charlinder took a second to wonder what this guy wanted before he realized he'd just heard someone speak in his own language.
"No, actually, I'm from North America," he said in surprise. "Wow, so you speak English, then?"
The young man started yelling for others in the village, and it appeared that he had demonstrated the extent of his English vocabulary. Several more people of varying ages emerged from the brush and surrounded Charlinder, chattering excitedly with the first guy, who was obviously bent on investigating him further. Charlinder, meanwhile, tried to excuse himself from the crowd, but he was soon whisked into the village. All he could do was encourage Lacey to follow.
Charlinder was promptly deposited into someone's modest thatched-roof house while everyone started investigating him. Someone separated him from his pack, and someone else forced him onto a low wooden bench. The family went about emptying his luggage and examining his belongings in detail. He tried to put a stop to this, but he only got pushed aside again. The practical goods were looked at and then put down, but the real interest began when they found Eileen's journals.
The guy who'd first buttonholed Charlinder was especially enthusiastic with the written materials. His reaction was somewhere between fascination and bloodthirst; all Charlinder could reliably grasp was that he kept saying, "Eeng-leesh, Eeng-leesh!" to his family. An older woman dug out and unfolded the map, and the family went promptly quiet. The English-speaking guy pulled Charlinder into their circle again and demanded his explanation. Before them lay Charlinder's crude sketch and labelings of the world's geographical features, annotated with rivers and mountains he encountered along the way, and a railroad of tiny X marks on all the places where he'd accepted hospitality. The guy making the inquiry was demanding something of Charlinder which entailed a lot of pointing at the island of Great Britain.
"No, I've never been there. I started here, you see?" he explained while pointing at the east coast of North America. The start of the village markings was not far away.
Apparently satisfied that he was not English, whatever that would have implied, the family and especially his accoster became much warmer to him. The accoster was a man only slightly older than Charlinder, there was a woman possibly his wife, his parents, a younger woman who may have been his sister. There were three more people of his parents' age, but they left the house shortly thereafter and Charlinder never found out whether they were relations. In the meantime, whether he liked it or not, Charlinder had landed himself another village stay.
The accoster soon decided he was Charlinder's new best friend. He introduced himself as Ravi, his sister was called Rachana, and he introduced his wife by name but Charlinder didn’t catch it, and Ravi did not understand the request to repeat himself. If he ever stopped long enough to introduce his parents by name, Charlinder missed it in the flux of prying hands and curious faces. Ravi spent the rest of the morning dragging his new guest around the village to meet people in the middle of their agrarian chores. These neighbors sometimes brought Charlinder and his new host inside and served them tea, allowing Charlinder to sit quietly to the side while Ravi did enough talking for both of them. Others appeared just as bewildered by the encounter as Charlinder, merely pausing in their work to answer their neighbor's questions in the middle of their garden plots. This went on until they encountered his wife, who yelled at him in front of their neighbors. After she finished her tirade and walked away, Ravi grumblingly bowed his head and took Charlinder back to his house.
The wife was beginning preparation of her family's midday meal, while her husband went to offer his explanation. The first person in the family that Charlinder saw, however, was Rachana, who caught his eye and smiled through the window while she worked in the back garden between her parents. Ravi being occupied, Charlinder escaped to the garden. He signed to Rachana that he wanted to join in her work. She exchanged a few words with her parents and gestured for him to stay there and wait a moment. After a run into the house, she emerged with a pile of laundry in her arms and beckoned for Charlinder to follow her.
In the much shadier and quieter area of a nearby stream, Charlinder let Rachana show him how she washed clothes on the rocks, helping her where he could, while Lacey grazed on the bordering grass. It was the first time that day that Charlinder could participate at his own pace. His hostess managed to explain to him that her sister-in-law was pregnant, and--this was the best impression he could gather from the following communication--that she, Rachana, was promised to a man in another village. Regardless of whether that was what she actually meant to say, Charlinder also got the impression that she was less than excited about this. Nonetheless, she was very enjoyable company to him, not least because she understood that Charlinder could not understand her language, which he could not say of everyone who hosted him on his journey.
The rest of the day alternated between the peaceful and the tedious. A few times Ravi tried to tow him along on some other adventure, but his wife caught him. Charlinder was otherwise uninterrupted in helping the parents in their garden work and Rachana in her household chores, but was more than a little grateful when nighttime fell and all went to their beds. The mother of the family allotted him a quantity of gauzy cotton fabric to protect him from mosquitoes, and Charlinder was allowed to lay his bed outside.
He was savoring the quiet under the netting, at the side of the house shadowed from the moon, and trying to fall asleep. He wondered if it was safe to leave Lacey in the open for the night. Should he be worried? No, of course not; if there were predators around, the family wouldn't let Charlinder sleep outside, so of course he shouldn't worry about her. Then something else appeared that would keep him awake. Someone had come outside from the house, and while the light was nearly nonexistent, he could tell from her shape that it was Rachana. She verified that Charlinder was awake, and shh-ed at him to keep quiet.
While he started to wonder what this could possibly be about, she opened her clothes and let them drop to the ground, her eyes on Charlinder the whole time. Suddenly he was very glad to be staying in the village. He pulled back the netting and covers and helped her inside. She soon helped him out of his clothes and they enjoyed the limited space under the bug net by squeezing close together. She was not the least bit hesitant or uncertain, she knew exactly what she wanted to do, and he was only too happy to join her. While Charlinder thrust into her, egged on by the lovely moaning noise she made, they were both interrupted from their ecstasy by a sudden, angry, "Baaa!"
Charlinder nearly jumped straight out of bed, but Rachana burst out laughing. As he calmed down from the shock, he shh-ed at her to quiet down, as they were right next to her family, but he snickered along with her.
The dawning sun woke him up hours later, but he wasn't ready to open his eyes. He was too comfortable in bed. Slightly later, he sensed, more than heard, someone else breathing from above him. Then there was a tapping sensation at his chest. He opened his eyes and perceived, at the far edge of his morning-blurred vision, a man standing a few feet away. Only then did it occur to Charlinder that he was tangled up in bed with Ravi’s equally unclothed sister, and the rest of the village was no longer asleep.
He and Rachana sprang out of bed almost at the same instant the shouting began. She swiped her underclothes from the ground and scrambled back into the house while her brother bellowed at her. Meanwhile, Charlinder was trying to put his trousers back on while his irate host lunged at him. Several neighbors gathered closer to watch the commotion while Ravi darted back and forth between raging at Charlinder on the ground and his sister in the house. It was only this indecision that protected him from getting strangled while he had to dress himself, snatch up his belonging
s and fetch his animal. One man from the neighbors held Ravi back while several others pushed Charlinder and Lacey away from the house and directed them out of the village. He had to jog some way out of the area before he could pause long enough to consolidate his belongings and finish putting his shirt on.
"Shit, I hope she's okay," he shuddered while milking his sheep.
Chapter Twenty-One
Subcontinent
That visit left Charlinder unsettled like no other. The days following his departure were filled with wondering if Rachana had survived the aftermath of their tryst in one piece. He wasted many anxious days thinking about whether her parents had reacted worse than her brother, and whether her fiancé had found out. He alternated between speculating on what had moved a young woman with an impending marriage to come onto an overnight guest, and reminding himself that he should have thought of that before he took his pants off.
After coming to the resolution that she had made her own decision and probably knew exactly what she was doing, Charlinder kept coming back to Ravi confronting him with those three words. He'd been such an idiot before he crossed the Bering Strait, but for over a year had been comfortable in accepting his punishment of being unable to talk to anyone around him. That crazy young man had been the first person in all that time to remind Charlinder of how it felt to hear someone else speak his language. No matter how unhinged he may have been, he was aware enough of the outside linguistic world, after generations of post-Plague isolation, to recognize spoken and written English, which also left Charlinder to wonder about his level of literacy. At the same time, the effect caught up with him of dozens of visits with no one to talk to, but everyone trying to talk to him. Only when he remembered how much easier it was to deal with someone with a language in common did he realize how exhausted he was from doing without. The thought of that many more sessions of banging his head against that impenetrable barrier left him more daunted than he'd previously been willing to admit. If there was one person in the country who could string together a few words of English in the right order, there had to be a few others who knew at least as much. He spent the next three months marching steadily through the valley and hoping that in the next village he visited, there would be someone who could say more than one sentence that Charlinder knew.
Wherever such people were, it seemed that he was doing a very good job of avoiding them. He grew increasingly weary of remembering that the people sheltering and feeding him didn't grasp the implication of the words, "I don't understand this" even as he said them. He walked longer between settlements, and took again to reading Eileen's journals, if only to make sure that English was still a language that he knew.
He'd read all her entries many times by now. He could recite them from memory if asked. He didn't even like her attitude sometimes, or agree with her tactics, but he needed to keep taking in those words. They kept him knowing who he was, and held him down to the reason he'd left home. Eileen wasn't always coherent, either, but after consuming her voice so many times, Charlinder could handle the times when she lost control. Even when she was so distraught that her handwriting became nearly illegible, Charlinder knew what she was saying.
May 15, 2026
I can't believe this happened the son of a bitch how could he let this happen she was thirty years old dammit what was that jackass thinking didn't he see this coming eight pregnancies in twelve years is too fucking many for one woman but did Mark ever consider that of course not the Bible-thumping slimeball if there's a God with a Heaven and Hell I hope Mark rots in Hell for all the bullshit he's been spouting all these years.
Marissa died because she was doing exactly what Mark keeps insisting we should all be doing. All six of us women of baby-breeding age, anyway. There are only five of us, now. Is this what Mark wanted? Is this what the rest of those cowards who won't tell him to put a sock in it were waiting for? Were they waiting to see if a woman would die from pregnancy? Sarah says the baby died in utero when Marissa was in early active labor. She reached in with a pair of spoons and dragged the fetal corpse out, but it was too late to stop Marissa from hemorrhaging. It would have been a boy. Sarah says Marissa had a placental abruption. I say her body just couldn't take the strain anymore and gave out. That doesn't need a fucking diagnosis. That needs prevention.
The conflict that Eileen had experienced with Mark was not just about deciding on a healthy rate of population growth, or determining what kind of behavior she and her fellow survivors were allowed in their remaining lifetimes. Eileen had been acutely aware of the precedents her community would set for the following generations, and by the time of Marissa's death, that community already included a number of children. Eileen was not merely contrarian in asking her fellow survivors to control their rate of procreation; she wanted their children to grow up in a culture that allowed room for women to do things with their lives aside from keep house while the men of their community built a new world from scratch. She was asking her community to establish a society for their descendants that made the distinction between life and existence. She saw how easy it could have been allow their descendants to forget about the complex balance of growth and sustainability their ancestors had pursued perhaps too late in their history.
In the following months he longed to ask the people he met along the way: are you living, or merely existing? Were they growing, developing, striving for something bigger? Did they have any interest in learning, searching, asking questions? Or did they see life simply as a way for each generation to do the same thing as the last? Of course he wouldn't ask in so many words, but he wanted to find out more from the people who took him in than what they'd feed him and where they'd let him sleep. He couldn't learn these things from them without talking to them, and that made his language barrier all the more frustrating after that unhinged young man asked him if he was English.
He found, more and more, that he didn't want to deal with other people. He was tired of getting his hopes up and then finding nothing. He ate his solid food more sparingly, he carried Lacey while he marched longer and ignored her entreaties to settle down for the night. It was only a matter of time before she found a way to thwart his efforts, and if she refused to cooperate, there was no getting around the fact that he was still, undeniably and inescapably, dependent on her for his survival. It struck him as incredibly perverse that such a simple-minded, unsophisticated animal was the only thing protecting an individual of the world's supposedly most intelligent and ambitious species from starvation. Regardless, Charlinder eventually let his food supply run out and spent five days living on her milk without a second glance at any village they passed.
He knew he had to stop somewhere soon. There was the matter of his itinerary, first; he appeared to have wandered too far north, as he could see staggering mountains on one side but nothing but confusion on the other, and his continued route west was increasingly unclear. He had to find someone to mark his map, at least. Second, he couldn't go on forever shunning human contact and living on sheep's milk. Unless he could figure out which of the wild plants in the area were edible and stay in one place long enough to hunt some game...no, he couldn't think like that. He'd lose a lot of time if he didn't poison himself first, aside from the matter of cutting himself off from human society. He made an agreement with himself, which he sealed by speaking it out loud to Lacey: he would find some food first, then he would find someone else, in another village, to mark his map, but not trouble them beyond that. Then he'd keep walking.
A likely-looking settlement appeared on the sixth day, which Charlinder decided to mine for foodstuffs. He wouldn't bother anyone there, and they, in return, would not keep him. He would simply find a well-stocked pantry, take what he needed, and move along without anyone seeing him. If someone spotted him, he would simply take his sheep and go. It was a large one as post-Plague communities went; smaller than the Hyatts' settlement but big enough to show some specialization, and set in a clearing between short, dense-growing trees. He and L
acey kept just inside the trees, moving only when there were no villagers in sight. Each time they came to a building larger or blockier than the usual houses, Charlinder snuck up and peeked in the window. The first looked like a place of worship. The second was for textile working. The third was full of row upon row of shelves stuffed with cotton sacks or woven baskets all filled to the brim, and bundles of herbs hanging from the ceiling. He'd found his place if he could get inside.
With Lacey cooperatively in tow, he crept around the building to look for an entrance. On the shorter side facing the next building, there was a door. Keeping all but half his face behind the back wall, he waited until all the nearby villagers were out of his line of vision, then crept up to the door. It was locked, he found, with a bolt placed at the top of the doorway. He had to reach well above his head, but it slid easily open and he beckoned Lacey to follow him inside.