by Alyson Miers
He knew he couldn't give this an innocent name like sampling. This was stealing, but like all the other settlements he hit, this one was far from the brink of starvation. He was taking very, very little compared to what they had, and he was an unusual case, after all. He wasn't a habitual parasite on anyone; he would take a little bit and never bother them again. If he could explain his circumstances to the locals, they would understand, but as he couldn't explain anything to them, he would just have to commit this one transgression. He began untying the cotton sacks to look inside.
"What's in here?" he said to Lacey. "Oh, look, yummy dried fruit, don't we love that!" He took one of the empty bags from his pack and transferred a quantity of the fruit inside. "And how about this one? Rice! I'll take some of that. What's in here? Beans. Hmm, those'll have to soak, and they'll still take a long time to cook, so...if I can carry all this junk soaking wet through the rainy season, I can carry a pot of soaking beans, so let's do it. In here we have...lentils! Absolutely--!" he stopped short when he felt something grab the knife he carried in a scabbard on his belt. Before he could look around, his own knife was poised at his throat and another hand kept his head in place by grasping his hair. There was hot breath speaking angry words into his ear. Charlinder put the lentils back on the shelf. Lacey bleated while another man grabbed her by the neck and got her in his arms. Charlinder's captor steered him around and a third man appeared, who tied Charlinder's hands together with a length of the same fabric used for the food sacks. The knife was taken away from his neck and Charlinder was marched by his elbows out of the building.
"Okay, okay, I'm sorry, I'll put it back, just let us go and don't hurt the sheep," he said. If his captors understood a word of it, they were not moved. As soon as they were outside, a woman ran to the door with a footstool and locked it again. All three of the captors were compact, muscular young men several inches shorter than Charlinder and suffering no lack of strength or determination. There would be no wriggling out of their grip, no taking back his ewe or his knife by force. The captors marched him through the village, where all the residents stood still to look him in the face as he passed. The three men stopped him at a wooden cart hitched to a pair of donkeys. Before he could see anything else, someone passed another strip of cotton fabric in front of his face and blindfolded him.
The captors forced him into the cart and tied his wrists to the top beam. He heard some bleating from Lacey and felt her slide in next to him. She was upside down; her feet must have been tied. Charlinder felt the thumps of some inanimate cargo being loaded on, three pairs of feet jumped in, and they set off for somewhere else.
An occasional bleat was the only thing on that ride that kept him held together. He thought at first in a fit of foolish optimism that they would ride for a few hours, let him and Lacey off in a place with no village in sight, and leave them be. Several hours went by and they kept riding. They eventually untied Lacey, but someone slapped Charlinder with something heavy if he made a sound.
He could see just enough through the blindfold to tell the approximate time of day. When night fell and he was still held blindly in the cart, he knew this would not be a simple drop-off. The captors stopped the cart periodically in the daytime, untied the cloth lashing his wrists to the cart, led him to the ground, pulled his trousers and shorts down and pushed him into a squatting position so he could relieve himself.
"I guess you wouldn't want me to make a mess in your cart, huh?" he said out loud the first time they put him through this exercise. He was smacked again.
In the morning and evening, one of the captors pushed the opening of a goatskin bladder into Charlinder's mouth and fed him some water. He was given nothing else to eat or drink. He could feel his stomach shrinking as the ride stretched on for days.
Lacey could move about the cart at her leisure, and she spent most of her time hunkered down next to him. The captors occasionally pulled her away and did something with her that Charlinder couldn't divine. He only hoped they were taking care of her. It was one thing if they wanted to starve, abuse and humiliate Charlinder, but Lacey was an innocent animal that needed to be fed and milked. While he went hungry and couldn't see or move, something else frightened him even more. There was a definite uphill slant to the ride, and the climate grew steadily colder while no one put any warmer clothes on him.
They stopped the cart on the morning of the fourth day of driving. One of the captors took Charlinder's hands off the top beam and shoved him out, onto ground covered in snow. There was a thump of something heavy landing nearby, then Lacey was dropped to the ground. The captors yelled at Charlinder a little bit, then he heard the cart creak into action and roll away.
The wind roared around his ears, his whole body shivered violently and his feet went numb in the snow while Charlinder struggled out of his bindings. When he freed himself from the cloth tying his hands together, the hands were in brilliant agony from the cold. He untied the blindfold and opened his eyes to see mountains all around. Lacey stood nearby in apparently good condition, his luggage was there and intact, and the captors had thrown Charlinder's knife point-down into the ground next to his pack. There was nothing but snow-covered peaks and mist-covered troughs as far as he could see, while the wind had blown away the cart's tracks.
"Oh, shit," he muttered while opening his pack. "Shit, shit, shit, Lacey, I am stupid, and you have permission to murder me." He returned the knife to its scabbard, put on his sweater and jacket, his wool trousers over the linen ones and put two more pairs of wool socks on his feet under the now-threadbare shoes he’d assembled in Bangladesh and should have replaced in mid-India. He also brought out his top blanket and wrapped it around his head and shoulders. The captors had unsurprisingly not left him with the slightest scrap of food. "I haven't had anything to eat in days, pretty girl, how about you?"
There was only one thing to do about that. He set the clay pot under her belly and went to milk her. Lacey's belly was still reassuringly round, suggesting that she had been fed regularly, but her udder had shrunken down to a flat patch of pink skin like that of a nulliparous yearling ewe, and not a single drop of milk issued from her teats. Lacey only bleated balefully as he tried squeezing her some more. "Come on, girl, you can do this," he muttered, but she couldn't.
Charlinder stared around at the sterile points of rock looming all around as the realization sank in. He was freezing and hungrier than he'd ever been in his life, while stranded in the middle of the harshest mountains in the world, in February, and his sheep could no longer give milk. He had no idea how far it was to the nearest village, or in what direction. He got his hyperventilation under control long enough to let out a roar that echoed through the stabbing wind but did nothing to summon any help.
As much as he felt that this was an appropriate time to panic, Charlinder was far too uncomfortable to do so on the side of the mountain, so he took Lacey and started moving downwards. Perhaps it was because it made sense to think that was the likeliest path to help, or perhaps because he was too shaky from hunger to try climbing upward, but his next plan of action was to make his way into the lowest spot between ridges and follow the valley in a roughly western course until he found help or escaped the Himalayas. He would agree to stop occasionally when they came across some frozen vegetation protruding from the snow that Lacey could eat. Charlinder also used these pauses in their descent to try to massage Lacey's udder into action, but he may as well have been asking strawberries to grow from a pot of sand. They continued the downward hike well into the night, until Charlinder found an outcropping of rock that shielded them from the wind and precipitation, where he pulled Lacey into his blankets and huddled down for the night. Even then, he stayed awake for hours and the next morning wondered how he'd managed to wake up with a pulse.
One day of walking became two as they reached the bottom of the depression. There Charlinder found the air marginally less freezing but the landscape perpetually inhospitable. There was no sign of human presence
in sight, while he continued to go hungry.
"What am I supposed to do about this, Lacey?" he rasped out loud while trudging over an interminable stretch of arid terrain. "If you've stopped lactating, I can't use you for food anymore, but I don't have anything else out here. I'll have to breed you again, but it would be months before you even deliver the lamb. We'd have to find someone with a ram to service you, anyway, and I don't see anyone. Do you see anyone, pretty girl? How am I supposed to get us out of this?"
Lacey refused to keep marching that night and so forced Charlinder to attempt sleep again because he was too weak to carry her. He didn't ever really fall asleep that time. Too cold to relax and too exhausted to stay alert, he sank into a limbo of nightmarish images playing through his head without the restfulness of sleep. He rose with the sun and kept walking more out of reflex than reasoning. He was now so tired his senses played tricks on him. Many times that day he whirled around at a flash in his peripheral vision or a buzz in his ear, determined that there was another person nearby. Only Lacey's admonishing bleat reminded him of where he was and what direction they were headed. He grew faint twice that day; he didn't lose consciousness but became so dizzy he dropped to his knees, where the frozen rocks stung through those pathetic two layers of fabric. By that point it was purely fear that kept him moving at all. The gnawing at his stomach was surpassed by the alarm sounding in his head. At home, he'd heard the expression "burning the candle at both ends," but he felt like he was outwardly melting the candle, flame or none, and there would soon be nothing left to hold his shape. He was suffering a manifold deterioration in the worst conditions for any physical weakness. He needed a dry and relatively warm place to sleep, but if not that, then at least something sturdier to protect his feet, and a stronger layer of insulation on his body. He needed something to eat that he could actually digest. Every hour that he walked, he ignored the knowledge of what had to be done. He continued to suffer through his increasingly untenable existence rather than resolve the pointless procession of "what if" and "should" through his head over the way out of the trap he had set for himself.
He spent another sleepless night with the reality hammering at his skull. The stalling tactic of "wait and see" was a luxury he could no longer afford. Lacey became increasingly malnourished on the area's inadequate vegetation, while Charlinder lost weight and his already meager cold tolerance at the same time. There was no "proper" solution to his predicament, no wise hand guiding him through the fog to tell him he could do this, he could find a way that he could live with. He had been stupid, and shortsighted, and had brought this ordeal upon himself, and living through it would have to be his punishment.
The decision was made when the sun rose, Lacey roused herself from her slumber, and Charlinder found he couldn't walk normally. There was nothing wrong with his legs, but his strength was so sapped that he couldn't stand up for very long. He couldn't put it off any longer. Lacey went padding around and eating some pathetic excuse for grass, while Charlinder began to weep. He wasn't sure he hadn't already waited too long to save his own life, and wasn't sure he'd like it even if he lived. "Lacey, come here," he sobbed from his spot sitting on the ground. Queen Anne's Lace looked up, saw him beckoning to her, and slowly trotted over. Her simple response only made him cry even harder. She let him wrap his arms around her neck and shoulders, and soon settled down to rest her front half on his lap.
Warming his hands in her wool, he willed himself under control. "You're a much better beast than I am, Lacey," he said. The sheep looked up at his face, and Charlinder cradled her head in his hand to keep her eyes facing up. "You won't remember that, but I always will." He took the knife out of its scabbard in his belt and poised the blade at her neck. He wouldn't say, "I'm sorry." There was no way to apologize to her for this. He only kept her head in the same place, so she was looking him in the eye when he slit her throat.
She made a quick choking sound and went limp. Charlinder jumped out from under her, the knife still in hand. He wanted to hold her while she died, but instead he moved farther away. He could be her comforter, or her slaughterer, but not both. He would not drop the knife into the snow, or look away as if to separate himself from the deed he'd done. He stood fixed on the spot, keeping his eyes open and focused to watch Lacey's blood melt the snow downhill.
Soon he had her skinned and cleaned. He cut the meat into strips, ate some right away, and left the rest arranged on the rocks to freeze-dry. He strung her hide by the leg-corners to the trunks of four lowlying shrubs to stretch and dry it. He stripped all the flesh off her long bones and saved them for later use. He cut some of her small intestine into sinew and left the rest of her internal organs out for other predators. He would eat enough of her to get his strength back while he dealt with her skin, then carry the rest off when it was dry and didn't weigh as much. In the meantime, he couldn't get the necessary materials for a fire. He half-expected to gag or vomit from eating her flesh, but his body refused to respond except by recovering its strength. There wasn't even very much meat on her; she'd been a middle-aged, underfed, overworked ewe bred for everything except her ratio of muscle to bone. It was all he had for as long as he was caught in the uninhabited mountains. He walked on the hide to keep it supple in the cold. He fell asleep that night long enough to dream that it was all a big misunderstanding, that Lacey was alive and whole and they could just walk through some trees to a warm and well-adjusted village where he could talk naturally with everyone.
The hide was nowhere near ready for use as a sheepskin the next day, but Charlinder was ready to go. He cut the back legs off the skin and sewed them into shoes with the wool inside. He cut a hole in the middle of the remaining skin for his head, sewed the sides together and wore it as a vest under his jacket. The remaining meat and usable bones went into his pack and he continued walking approximately west.
Without the deterioration of his body to hinder him or a traveling companion to demand rest, Charlinder could keep walking for longer hours than before, and he did. He kept pushing himself well into the night and woke up with luggage fully packed, in a crag he didn't remember having chosen. Two days after he picked up again, he saw where the mountains gave way to foothills the following morning, and spent much of the day in a generally downhill hike. In the early evening, he spotted thin trails of gray smoke rising into the sky, which soon led him to find a miniature patchwork of fields dotted with houses, fires and carts in the valley. He continued towards this village until long after nightfall, stopping to sleep only because he lost his sense of direction and couldn’t read the compass in the dark.
He stumbled into the village the following afternoon. There was nothing on the scale of the food depot where he'd been caught. There were only people tending their fields, carrying bundles between houses, and small children getting underfoot. A little boy looked at Charlinder and yelled to his mother. Several more villagers looked over at him. Charlinder took one more step forward and collapsed to his knees, held upright by the bulk of his pack while the world turned to dark and quiet. He felt some hands hoist him up while he drifted into blankness.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Afghanistan
It was warm, tight and scratchy, wherever he was. He could freely move only his head while the rest of him was compressed under something soft and heavy. Charlinder opened his eyes to find a roof of wooden rafters and stone shingles ahead. The layers compressing his body were a straw mattress below and a prodigious set of wool and other animal-down blankets on top. Around the room was a stone hearth, another, larger straw bed, and a simple wooden set of table and chairs. He tried to rise from the bed, but partway up decided otherwise. He was naked except for his shorts and a lot of crude linen bandages applied to his legs and feet, under which the skin felt bruised and raw.
The next thing he saw made him think for a second that he was either dreaming or hallucinating again: a woman rushed to his side and pushed him back under the covers, and for a moment, before his vision wa
s focused, Charlinder thought she was his mother.
A closer look showed him otherwise; the woman bore a vague resemblance to Lydia, with shiny black hair falling in thick waves and a similar skin color, but the waves were too loose and she had green eyes, not brown. She'd brought a bowl of some bean-laden stew and quickly started spooning it into his mouth, talking to him in a soothing voice and again in a perfectly alien language. He let her feed him at first, while he thought through the last things he remembered: he slaughtered Lacey and reduced her to parts, crossed the western edge of the mountains, and collapsed in a village. Someone was about to carry him away when he lost consciousness. Whoever it was must have brought him inside, putting him in the care of the family who lived here. Someone must have found frostbite on his legs, done what they could on it, and otherwise let him sleep. He supposed his clothes were hanging outside to dry.
He tried to sit up in bed, intending to take the spoon and feed himself, but his hostess was having none of that; she pushed him down again with a few stern words and merely let him hold the spoon under her hand while she continued to feed him. He would press his case later.
Other members of the family came in later and saw that Charlinder was awake, so he got his clothes back, cleaned of sheep blood and dry. An older woman in the family changed his bandages, and he had to admit the frostbite had made an ugly picture of his skin underneath, but she let him out of bed.