by Alyson Miers
The family consisted of the first, younger woman and her husband, their four children from early teens to around eight years old, and an older couple who looked like they could be the husband's parents.
Here were the people he'd been trying to find since he was dropped off on the mountain, and Charlinder could only think of getting away from them. He was warm, well-fed and cared for, not allowed to do any work but never made to feel like a burden, and he counted the hours until he would be allowed to leave. He couldn't afford to offend them, as he needed to take food from them or someone in the village, but he kept wondering when they would let him go. They made him eat twice as much as anyone else at every meal, and it only made him feel terrible. The grandmother of the family was a very capable medic and seemed pleased to have a patient who was compliant enough to sit through her attentions and keep his bandages on, but why she would waste her talents on him was beyond his comprehension.
He showed the map to the adults on his third day with them. The grandmother marked their location and showed a spot that was believable, given his previous trajectory, but also much farther north than he'd planned to be after crossing India. It sat on the western edge of the territory labeled Afghanistan. Upon a closer look, it occurred to him that as long as he didn't end up hopelessly off-course, this more northerly latitude would involve far fewer miles than the southern coastal route he'd had in mind.
He asked to go on the fifth day, and the family said goodbye. The grandmother attempted to give him some instructions on caring for his frostbite wounds, but that much was healing. They even provided him with much of the same kind of food he'd attempted to steal, except no beans. Then he was off.
There was no other way to describe what the family had done: they had taken care of him. Those very generous, decent (they deserved better than to be called "nice") people had looked after him just like their own child, and in his helplessness had never reminded him that he was vulnerable. That feeling of safety was so alien to him now, so ill-fitting, because the last place where he’d known that no matter how broken and tired he was, that nothing would happen to him, had been the cabin with Roy where he slept on his mother’s old bed.
Only after he left the family’s care did he think back to those old days. He thought of a time when he was seven years old, and he asked his mother why she was teaching him to knit when all the other little boys were learning no such thing.
"Taylor's mom says you're only teaching me because you don't want to take care of me anymore," he said one night in their cabin as they waited for bedtime. Lydia propped herself up on her elbow next to him on her bed.
"Well, Mariah didn't ask me about that, but I know you’ll listen. I'm sure she would tell me it's because I don't have a daughter to start doing textiles for both of you, and I guess she's right about that. But what she doesn't understand is that even if I also had a girl, I'd still be teaching you the same things," Lydia explained to him.
"Really?" he asked. "How come?"
"There are two reasons. The first is that even if you had a sister, she might not always be around to look after you. The second is that I want you," she began tickling him, "to have lots of things," she continued while he giggled and squirmed around her fingers on his sides, "that you're good at." She stopped tickling him and let him rest. "And you'll never know how much you're good at if you don't get a chance to learn."
"Am I good at making scarves?"
"Well, you've been doing it for a month so far, and you've already stopped increasing at the ends of your rows, so, yes, I'd say you're turning out to be very good at it."
"So if you had a girl, would Uncle also teach her how to cut wood and shoot a bow and arrow?"
"When she was big and strong enough to do it, then, yes, he would also teach her. Because Uncle agrees with me that our kids should be able to make lots of things with their hands. Now, if Mariah thinks I don't want to be counting stitches on your socks when you're twenty, then she's right about that. But," she paused, "just because you’re going to make your own clothes, doesn't mean I'm not taking care of you anymore."
"I know, Mom," Charlinder said impatiently. "You still show me how to do stuff."
"Yes, there's that," said Lydia, "and I also do this." She plunged under the covers and dragged him in with her. She wrapped her arms around him and rolled around, growling like a wild animal; he giggled and burrowed closer into the warm space she made in the bed while the rest of the cabin showed their breath in the air.
Over the sound of his mother's heartbeat, he heard the door open and two sets of footsteps walked in.
"Lydia," said his grandmother, Letitia's, voice, "are you suffocating my grandson again?"
"Sure am, Mom!" She stuck her head out of the blankets. "You wanna kiss him goodnight before I finish him off?"
"If you wouldn't mind."
Lydia dropped the blankets down to just below Charlinder's shoulders, and there was his grandmother, squatting by the side of the bed. He pulled his arms out of the tangle of bedcovers and Lydia's torso and hugged Letitia around the neck while she kissed him goodnight.
“Sweet dreams, darling,” she said.
"You look nice and snug in there," said Roy after Letitia left for her cabin. "You wanna bunk with Mom tonight?"
"No, I always bunk with you," he protested.
"Sis, can I tuck the little guy in?"
"Quick kiss and he's all yours," said Lydia. She hugged Charlinder one more time and exchanged kisses with him. Roy stood by the bed, holding out his arms for Charlinder, who squirmed out of Lydia's blankets and wrapped his shivering limbs around his uncle's body, clinging to him for warmth. He relaxed when they were safely under the covers in Roy's bed, where Charlinder rested his head on his uncle's wool-clad chest and looked across the cabin at his mother, reaching for the candle.
Roy and Lydia had a tone of voice that they used only when they were in their cabin after dark with Charlinder in bed and waiting to go to sleep. Most nights of his childhood he fell asleep to the rhythms of their conversations, and on mornings in the cold weather months, he woke up with his mother's knitted cable design etched into his cheek.
Charlinder's home culture was unusual in that its matrilineal family structure left paternal relations largely untraced, sometimes unknown. This cut the extended family down to about a quarter or less of the traditional sprawl of living relatives, so that he had grown up with few people to call themselves his family and he carried not the slightest confusion over how they were related to him. His great-uncle, Terrence, had died in Charlinder's infancy. This postponed Lydia and Roy's plan to move with Charlinder into the next available cabin, but their mother assured them she was far from a helpless old woman and could still care for her grandson whenever she wanted, so they moved out when he was a toddler. As the Paleola village was situated on the land of a single small farm, his grandmother looked after him for part of nearly every day until she fell ill when he was nine. She died a week later. He was upset to learn she was gone, and even more disturbed to see the distress of his mother and uncle, and it took some time before the reality sank in. For weeks after her death, he would run out of the schoolhouse thinking he would find Grandma and tell her what happened at school that day, and would get all the way to the vegetable garden where she'd worked before someone reminded him that Grandma couldn't talk to him anymore.
His mother broke her leg when Charlinder was seventeen and hung on for two weeks before she succumbed to an infection. He'd spent those two weeks visiting her in the infirmary and assuring her that there was nothing to worry about, he and Roy were going about their affairs as usual and nothing would be out of place when she walked out of Darrell's care. He was so stunned when Roy carried her out in a sheet covering her from head to toe that he felt like the universe had turned on him. He kept expecting to see his mother around the next corner, perhaps limping but still her cheerful self, and spent many evenings back at their cabin, crying on his uncle’s shoulder when she fai
led to appear. It was at that point that Miriam took him under her critical, cantankerous wing and made him one of her children, but he had never seen it coming that his mother could die so young, and consequently had never really said goodbye.
Walking through the northern reaches of the Middle East, he often woke up expecting to find Lacey standing over him. He kept looking around to see where his sheep was. He had to remind himself many times a day that yes, she was dead, in fact he'd killed her himself, moron, and all he had left were some skin and bones no longer connected. He felt like a huge weight had been lifted from his back which he would have been happy to carry indefinitely. He could walk for as many hours in a day as he pleased, and no longer had to pause to allow Lacey time to fill up on fresh grass and wildflowers. When he came to a river, he had only to think of how a man might cross it, not worry about a sheep. She could no longer tire of walking so he didn’t have to carry her. It was a liberation that mocked him. He wanted to speak his thoughts out loud and have Lacey peer placidly back at him, not bothering to wonder at the oddities of tall, smooth-skinned bipedal primates. He wanted his burden back.
He supposed this was how a young mother felt when her baby died; missing something that should rightfully be weighing down her arms. Or perhaps it was how an older man felt about losing his elderly, declining mother; knowing she wouldn't be there forever, but not prepared to stop caring for her.
No, he was ridiculous to compare this bereavement to either of those relationships. Lacey was not his mother or his child. He might have likened her to a sister, and perhaps this was how Roy had felt when Lydia died. Roy had been stoic enough for both of them, and Charlinder had never given any thought, really, to his uncle's grief. He'd been too preoccupied with his own.
That, too, he rejected as soon as he considered it. He did a great insult to his mother and all other men's sisters by thinking of his slaughtered livestock in the same terms. Lacey was not his caretaker, or his dependent, or his equal. She was an animal brought along to suit his needs, not the other way around. The grief he felt was for his peace of mind in the assumption that she would always be walking along at his side; his woolly, small-brained sounding board. He still wasn't sure his survival had demanded her slaughter.
In addition to missing her company was the loss of the convenience Lacey had allowed him. She'd been far more valuable to him alive, when she could provide milk every day for as long as he kept up the demand. Charlinder ate through her meat in a matter of days, and then he no longer had the luxury of ignoring villages. He had to stop often, and at every one he had to beg for additional food to carry with him. He would not risk stealing again, and he could not let the visits be the only time he had anything to eat. Sometimes he ran out of food while walking and still didn't see another human being for two or three days. His weight fluctuated with the population. His skin took a slack, grayish quality when he was all of twenty-three.
Another change that Lacey's absence forced in him was that he had never before fully appreciated the hospitality he enjoyed when he inflicted his foreign presence on the people he met. Some of them had next to nothing, but they had no reservations about sharing it with a person they didn't know and would never see again. He didn't need Eileen Woodlawn to tell him that human nature was far from perfect, but even in the midst of dysfunction, he was amazed to find so much decency. His hosts asked for nothing except to see how much he enjoyed the care they took of him. He hoped he was able to convey how much respect he had for their ability to show kindness to a stranger, but in this aspect, too, he lacked the language skills.
He skirted mountains and other terrain, in a course that he knew was west, but he kept thinking of it as "north." He was also, it occurred to him, much closer to Russia than he'd intended to travel. In fact it was shaped more like his initial idea of a straight-lined march through Russia and Eastern Europe than his uncle's suggestion of a southern, coast-oriented route. Which was not to say he may as well have not followed his uncle's advice; eastern Siberia was more than cold enough just in September. He'd found a lot to enjoy in China. He was prepared to attribute his difficulties in the Indochina territories to poor timing, but he was ambivalent about the yields of his course through India. He was torn between whether he should have taken the time to walk the coast, or braved the interior mountains and stayed clear of the Himalayas. In fact he visited that very subject in his dreams not long after leaving the village where he'd collapsed.
He was walking with Lacey passively at his side through the valley he'd traversed in India. They turned a corner around some trees, and they were walking on a sandy beach dotted with palm trees. Charlinder blinked and they were cresting a mountain with forest and jungle in the distance. "Which way should I go, then?" he wondered aloud. He descended the mountainside, and when he looked up, he was without Lacey at a familiar fork in a practiced set of roads.
"Really, which way is best?" he asked the open air again.
"What are you going to do?" asked the bodiless woman's voice. "Go back and walk through India again?"
Charlinder swatted at the air in front of his face as if this question were a buzzing insect. "Yes, I know I already went there, but if I needed to go again, which route should I take? I like the coast, but wouldn't the mountains be more efficient?"
"You go around mountains whenever you can," said his friend, "and there's a reason why you do."
"I'll bet the ones in India aren't as tall as the Rockies," Charlinder argued.
"The Rockies were unavoidable. You got around the Indian highlands in almost a straight line."
"Yeah, and look at where it got me!" he gestured at the ground where there was no animal, ovine or otherwise.
"And you won't bring your sheep back to life," said his "old friend" matter-of-factly.
"Well, humor me anyway. If I had to go through India again, how would I go about it?" Charlinder demanded.
"We both know why you go around mountains when possible," she said.
"Because I lack imagination?" he suggested.
"Char, you could never be accused of lacking imagination. We're talking about a country of over a billion people before the Plague, in a land area of...?"
"Okay, I guess it wasn't that big, so what are you getting at?"
"You have that many people living that close together, and half of them in abject poverty. How do you think they fared during the Plague?"
"Why are you asking me that if I've already been there?"
"You only saw a narrow strip of the country. With what I've just told you, what kind of survival rates do you think they had?"
"I'd guess they'd be wiped out, but they weren't."
"Surely you know as well as I do that when human beings live under primitive conditions--meaning yours--and they have a choice in the matter, they will gravitate towards fertile land and mild climates. Challenging terrain is the stronghold of the masochist and the outcast. So, if that was the river valley, what do you think the mountains looked like?"
Charlinder thought of a realm without another human being in sight--which was fine by him--covered in plant life he didn't know how to gather, and animals he may or may not have been able to hunt, and of course all this was vertical--
"Okay, the mountains were a stupid idea. How about the coastline? Surely some traumatized Plague survivors could make a livelihood by the ocean?"
"Of course they did, and their descendants still do. So what shape does coastal India take?"
"It's set along a sharp angle, why?"
"And how much longer would that walk take than the one you did?"
"Probably...a few more months?"
"And do you want to spend 'a few more months' going around one country?"
"As I've been on the road for a couple of years now already, I don't see why a few extra months would change anything."
"Do you remember why you decided to take this journey in the first place?"
"Of course I do! I told my neighbors I'd bring them answers,
and of course I will. But no one set me a deadline for my return."
"Don't you remember what Darrell said when he took you outside?"
"He said, 'It's beginning.' So, is it going to end if I waste any time out here? Is my village all going to disappear, is that what you're saying?"
"Probably not in your expected lifetime, no matter where you are. But the longer you're gone from them, the more people will assume they'll never see you again. In the meantime, there are other Kennys, other Bruces in your village and the ones nearby, and other Yolandes and Stuarts caught between them."
Charlinder awoke the next morning and took a moment to remember he was no longer on the Subcontinent. "I think Yolande can look after herself," he said out loud. Then he stood up and kept going west.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Adriatic
He later came to the edge of a huge body of water which his next hosts confirmed was the Caspian Sea. He followed the southern shore of the sea and admired the vast expanse of sky reflected on the water, until he turned north.
The local language changed again and the map markings showed how far north he'd progressed. He went northwest, mostly along a river that took him through some mountains, which eventually gave way to a plain, by which time he was hearing yet another language. At the edge of that plain was an eastern shore of the Black Sea. He continued south from there and soon found himself in Turkey, where he edged along the northern border with the Black Sea on one side and mountains on the other. Though this was not even a casual neighbor of Italy, the location impressed upon Charlinder the approach of his goal. Once he found flatter and lower land, and was able to stay on it for more than a day walking in the same direction, he found the remains of the city of Istanbul.