by Peter David
She ran right up to the boat, not more than a foot or so away from me. If I’d been of a mind to, I could have whacked her head off with one blow. Instead I simply stood there, sword still poised, but making no move toward her. Why in the world would I have done so? I was no slaughterer of innocents. All right, technically, I was a slaughterer of innocents, but I’d had a bad year.
The child picked up her boat and smiled, clearly happy to have recovered her toy, which had apparently gone sailing away from her. Then she turned and looked up at me and grinned. I suppose I should have grinned back, but instead I just stared at her, not quite knowing what to make of her and the whole situation.
Then she startled me as she briskly slapped her arms to either side of her body and bowed stiffly at the waist.
I wasn’t about to lower my sword. This still didn’t have the makings of a friendly encounter. Nevertheless, while keeping my weapon in a guard position, I stiffly mimicked her bow. She bowed once more. I bowed once more. Seemingly satisfied with that, she splashed back across the shallow river to the woman whom I assumed to be either her mother or elder sister.
By that point all the cross-talking and incomprehensible chitchat had ceased. Instead silence hung in the air, as the people were clearly uncertain of what I wanted, and I didn’t have a clue what they wanted. And we didn’t have the language skills to bridge that gap, or so I thought.
Then one of the men took a step or two toward me. “Hunh,” he said, not so much a comment of general bewilderment as it was a sort of noise to get my attention. To announce that an attempt at communication was about to be made.
He indicated the sword in my hand, mimed stabbing with it, and then shook his head in a firm negative manner. One of the women I remembered had likewise shaken her head. It was comforting to know that there were some universal constants, and shaking one’s head to indicate a negative was apparently one of them.
His meaning was clear: They were off-put by my sword. They wanted me to put it down or sheathe it. They considered it a potential means of attack.
Which it bloody well was, of course. They were armed as well, remember, with their pointy steel sticks of death. I wasn’t about to leave myself vulnerable to assault. So I shook my head vigorously and said for emphasis, even though I know they didn’t understand the words, “I’m not lowering my guard. You have weapons, too, you know,” and I pointed at the lethal objects they were carrying.
There were bewildered expressions for a moment as they exchanged looks. Then one of the men, an older fellow whose hair was as straight black as the others, seemed to “understand” something. I doubted he suddenly spoke my language, so I waited.
He held up his “lethal fork” and I raised my blade in automatic defense. “Hunh,” he said once more. Then he said something in his language that I couldn’t hope to comprehend while pointing at his own weapon. I shook my head to indicate I had no idea what he was saying. For some reason he spoke louder and more slowly as if addressing one who was either deaf or stupid or both. Again I shook my head.
Everyone was watching the fellow, apparently waiting for him to get across to me whatever it was he was trying to say. Then he went down to one knee upon the shore and slowly drew the points of his weapon along the ground, churning up the dirt. Watching me intently as he did so, he then took the weapon and stabbed the longest prong straight down, making a small hole. Then he held his hand over the hole and waggled his fingers, as if he were sprinkling something into it.
I watched him blankly for a long moment.
He pointed at the hole in the dirt and then at the white stalks that stood upright nearby.
And damn me if I didn’t suddenly, in a burst of comprehension, understand what he was saying.
Those things they were carrying weren’t weapons. They were farming implements. They used them as miniature hoes to turn the ground and dig holes, into which they would then drop seeds, from which these stalks had grown.
Warriors, my ass. These weren’t warriors. These were farmers.
“Hunh!” I said, as much as in an amused laugh as anything else. Very slowly, hoping I wasn’t making a disastrous mistake, I sheathed my sword. Watching me put my weapon away, they visibly relaxed. There was still tension in the air, but it seemed as if the immediate threat had passed.
The same man who had so deftly mimed the planting of seeds then spoke to me once again. He gestured widely, pointing in various directions, looking at me and shrugging in bewilderment. But it was an “artsy” sort of bewilderment, meant to put across a mind-set. Clearly he was inquiring from whereabouts I had come, since I was so obviously foreign to their land.
My mind raced, and then I suddenly turned to the girl who had so fearlessly approached me earlier. I snapped my fingers to gain her attention and gestured that she should come back toward me. She automatically started to do so, but her mother briefly restrained her. The man said something though in a soothing tone, his hands palm down, apparently putting across to her that everything was going to be all right. Clearly as a matter of trust—perhaps the man was her husband or some other relation—she released the girl.
The child came toward me and I went down to one knee at the water’s edge. I put out my hand and pointed at the girl’s boat. She hesitated only a moment, then handed it over to me. I held it upon the water’s surface, pointed at the boat, then pointed at me. The man’s face clouded for a moment, but then cleared and he nodded in understanding: I had been a passenger on a sailing vessel.
Obviously I wasn’t about to go into detail as to specifically what had transpired to shipwreck me. Even if I spoke their language, I doubt I could have made them understand it. I barely understood it. Instead I simply indicated the ship cruising along, and then suddenly angled it sharply downward and pushed it under the water, conveying the notion that my vessel had gone down. He nodded excitedly to show his comprehension. I then mimed swimming gestures, gasped deeply to indicate exhaustion, and then walked two fingers in a staggering fashion up onto the riverbank to put across that I had made it to shore.
The man spoke in a loud tone, not to me but to his people. Obviously he was explaining to them, for any who might be mime-impaired, the short version of my ordeal. There were oohs and aahs and gasps of comprehension and—could it even be?—pity for what I had gone through. A foreigner with a strange face, surviving a disastrous voyage and managing to make it to shore of an unknown land. It was a dramatic notion, certainly, and one that served to make me a most sympathetic figure.
The most pleasant aspect of the whole thing was that it wasn’t a lie. That was a nice change of pace. Many were the times I’d had to come up with some sort of fabrication to gain the sympathy of someone new I’d encountered. In this instance, the truth of what I’d endured was terrible enough.
The man shoved his farming implement into his belt and came toward me. His movements were not the least bit tentative, but instead open and welcoming. He stopped a few feet shy of me and I watched carefully, not wanting to make any sudden moves. My impulse was to stick out a hand to shake his, but for all I knew such a gesture would be perceived as a threat of some sort. It would be just my luck to frighten or insult these people when I was on the cusp of finessing my way through the situation.
He brought his hands around and placed them palm to palm, fingers straight up in front of him. Then he bowed in a manner similar to the way the girl had done. Slowly I got to my feet with the aid of my staff, having been down on one knee all this time, and handed the toy boat back to the child. I imitated the bowing gesture. Then, deciding to take the chance, I slowly extended my right hand, palm sideways. He stared at it, then mimicked the gesture with his hand so that it paralleled my own. We stood there for a moment, both our hands sticking out, looking rather ridiculous. So I brought my hand over to his, wrapped it around his gently but firmly, and slowly shook it up and down in the traditional gesture of “my people” to show that neither of us had weapons in our hands.
Hi
s expression was one of utter befuddlement, and then several women laughed at the really rather humorous look on his face. This prompted him to laugh as well, and he started to shake my own hand more emphatically. So emphatically, in fact, that our hands jerked up and down in a far greater arc than was standard for a handshake. I didn’t let it concern me, though, since the primary intent was clear.
And so it was that I fell in with a village of farmers in a foreign land. People who knew nothing of my checkered past. Who didn’t know me as a bastard, or a knight of dubious reputation, or a vicious warlord who had laid waste to more cities than he could possibly count. A man who had ruined hundreds of lives and cut a swath of destruction through the world, leaving misery and unhappiness in his wake. A man who had been desired dead by just about everyone he’d ever met in his life.
Here I was just a stranger, a refugee, a man who had survived a terrible mishap when his ship had foundered, and yet had managed to endure. They appreciated my stubborn determination to cling to life in a way that only those who work the land and try to grow things can possibly do.
As odd as it seemed, apparently I’d found a home, however temporary, among people who were not my own and were happier to see me than those who were my own.
The cynic within me knew that it could not possibly last. Worse, that I’d probably do something to make a total mangle of it. At that moment, though, I didn’t care.
It felt good. And I hadn’t felt good in a very, very long time.
And so it was that I came to reside in the land that I eventually determined was called Chinpan. A land of mystery and rituals and a way of life totally unfamiliar to me, practiced by people whose very physiognomy was alien. Then again, I’m sure that I didn’t exactly look normal to them either. That was all right, though. With my irregular features and pronounced limp, I was used to looking not normal.
Chapter 5
Through Chinpan Ali
My facility for languages served me well over the next months as the villagers made a priority of teaching me how to speak their language of Chinpanese. Some of them showed some mild interest in my own tongue, but overall a concerted effort was made to work with me so that I could learn to communicate with them. It certainly made sense for me to learn their language rather than they learning mine. There were, after all, far more of them.
The name of the village, I later learned, was Hosbiyu, and the population couldn’t have been more than seventy-five, if that. They brought me back amidst much chattering, talking to me as if—now that I’d been accepted and my peculiar circumstances understood—I would magically be able to comprehend what they were saying. Naturally that wasn’t the case, but I was determined to be polite. So I smiled and nodded, and this only seemed to encourage them even more.
The village was situated at the intersection of two man-made dirt roads, with well-worn grooves in them as a result of frequent passages with ox-drawn cart. Several of the beasts grazed in a field nearby, along with a couple of cows that probably fulfilled the milk needs of the populace. All the structures were simple huts or slightly larger buildings that served as barns, and the exteriors appeared familiar. Then I realized they were constructed of wood from the tall, flexible trees I’d seen earlier. It was one of the first words of their language that I managed to learn: “bamboo,” it was called, and it was an extremely ubiquitous material. In addition to having used it to fashion their buildings, they’d also built fences with it to hem in the cattle, thinner shoots of the plant had been used to make those strange flat hats, some of the women wore shoes made of bamboo, and I even saw some of the young men sparring with one another with bamboo as quarterstaves.
I took great interest in the material, thinking of the myriad uses it could have been put to back in my native land. By the same token, they were intrigued by the solid oak from which my own staff had been carved. They marveled even more when I demonstrated some of the little tricks built into it, such as the blade that snapped from the dragon’s open mouth, or the fact that the staff could be separated into two smaller staves.
The man who had worked so mightily to establish communication with me brought me to his hut, where his wife eyed me warily even as they hastened to prepare a meal for me. It was very touching. They didn’t have much, but what they had, they were willing to share, even if all they were sharing was a bowl of rice. I’d never been particularly fond of rice, but considering I’d thought I was going to die of starvation on a plank in the middle of nowhere, it could not have tasted better had it been manna from heaven.
Through a combination of more pantomime, drawing primitive pictures in the dirt floor, and the like, my host managed to inquire as to what my plans were. The truth was, I had no plans. I had no overwhelming urge to return home. To what home, precisely, would I have returned? In my native state of Isteria, I was persona non grata. I certainly couldn’t return to Wuin. I had no loved ones to be concerned about an extended absence. And the number of people I knew in Chinpan was limited to those whom I’d met that day.
So I managed to get across to him that I had nowhere else to go and nothing else to do. If I did have some sort of “great destiny,” it was going to have to seek me out in Hosbiyu, because I didn’t have the slightest idea where to go to look for it.
The man nodded, apparently comprehending. He and his wife left the hut after a while, and when I went to the door some minutes later, I looked out and saw what seemed to be the entirety of the village gathered in the middle of the place, where the two roads intersected. They were talking in low, thoughtful tones, and then someone pointed at me. They all stopped and looked in my direction. I didn’t know why they’d ceased conversation. It wasn’t as if I could understand them. Still, it was obvious that I was the topic of discussion. They were trying to figure out what the hell to do with me. I withdrew into the hut, having no wish to disturb them. Certainly annoying them would be counterproductive to my best interests.
I had no doubt that I could fend for myself if I had to. Still, not speaking the language was going to be a major handicap. I hadn’t survived as long as I had through dazzling fighting skills, that was for certain. My strength was the quickness with which I could come up with the right lie to spin for any given situation. If I couldn’t make myself understood, all the quick thinking in the world wasn’t going to do me a fragment of good. I wasn’t completely inept when it came to physical self-defense, but robbed of my ability to obfuscate and bewilder, the likelihood of my longevity was greatly curtailed.
So it was with a certain degree of nervousness that I waited to see what the village consensus about my fate would be. An interminable amount of time later, although in reality it probably wasn’t all that long, my host returned to the hut and looked at me contemplatively for a moment. A group of his fellow villagers was standing behind him.
I said nothing. What would I have said?
He put out a hand and one of his neighbors handed him one of the pronged farming implements that I’d originally thought was a weapon. His expression was very serious and for a moment I thought I’d misjudged the situation horribly, and they were about to charge me and try to drive the weapon through my chest. My sword was on the ground a couple of feet away, but I resisted the impulse to lunge for it.
My host walked toward me, turned the tool around so the hilt was facing me, and proffered it. I hesitated and then reached for it. Taking it gingerly from his hand, I hefted it slightly. It was surprisingly light.
With gestures, he indicated that I should tuck the tool in my belt. I did so. Then, collectively, they placed their hands face-to-face and bowed.
The message was clear. If I was willing to pull my own weight, to work their fields by their sides, I was welcome to stay for as long as I wished.
My heart swelled. Never had I experienced such unbridled generosity. The closest I had come was when Queen Bea and King Runcible had extended an invitation to be a squire in his court. But even in that instance, a squire was one of the lowest of t
he low, and the other squires never missed an opportunity to make me feel like the titleless, unlanded peasant that I was.
This was a totally different circumstance. I was being invited to join a community as an equal, no questions asked (even if questions could be posed). For an inveterate cynic such as myself, it was almost too much to cope with.
I contained my roiling emotions and instead simply returned the bow. They smiled and then walked out of the hut. My host’s wife paused long enough to offer a genuine smile. Even she had overcome her hesitancy and seemed willing to welcome me if the others were.
Those who have been following my adventures know me well enough to be fully aware of exactly what started preying upon my mind:
What was going to go wrong?
It was too perfect, too wonderful. Despite my tendency to be thrust into adventures, I really had no overwhelming compulsion to embark on them. Yet they always seemed to overtake me, always.
Part of me wondered whether I didn’t bring it upon myself somewhat. The closest I’d known to peace in some years was when I was an innkeeper at a place called Bugger Hall. My tenure there had ended rather disastrously (and, of course, thrust me into yet another escapade), but even before that happened, I had found myself growing bored with the quiet existence I was leading. In retrospect, I couldn’t help but believe that on some level, I had brought it upon myself.
Which, of course, made me immediately start worrying about what disaster I would bring upon myself in this new environment.
Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you are desperately endeavoring not to dwell upon something? Naturally, it becomes uppermost in your thoughts. Every attempt to cease thinking about it only causes you to think about it all the more.
That was where I found myself mentally, having been taken in by the good citizens of Hosbiyu. It was nerve-racking. I was fully prepared to settle into an environment that would ask nothing of me except the sweat of my brow and whatever effort lay in my arms to provide. Even as I did so, however, I started wondering how and when it would come to an end.