Charlinder's Walk (16 page)

At other times, he dreamt he was back at home by the Paleola with his uncle, but there was nothing to do about that except keep going.

Every day, he marched on with Lacey at his side, periodically checking his compass to make sure he was on-course. Most of the land they traversed was now flat, but some areas were milder and sunnier than others. They passed through forests and meadows and negotiated several more rivers. Sometimes it snowed, sometimes the sun came out, sometimes the wind blew straight through Charlinder's layers of linen and wool like they were cheesecloth. Sometimes it became just warm enough to rain, so he hoisted Lacey up on his shoulders to keep part of himself warm and dry. Lacey did not enjoy this, but she didn’t enjoy sixteen-hour days on the road, either. Sometimes Charlinder ignored several villages in a day, sometimes there was no sign of human presence for several days.

At some point during what he assumed was still February, his decision was made for him. He opened his pack after sunrise and found that his provisions were nearly gone. He would just have to find a village, introduce himself to some people, and beg some food from them. Perhaps they would put him to work, in which case he would just have to hope it wouldn’t take more than a few hours.

As the morning stretched on, with nothing but perfect, unspoiled nature as far as human or ovine eyes could see, Charlinder figured this would be just his luck; he had waited too long. He wouldn’t see another human being for two weeks, and while he was at it, he would run into a huge, barren plain, where Lacey would become so dehydrated she would stop lactating, and they would both die of starvation before help could be found...just great.

Around lunchtime, his spirits lifted, as he found not a huge barren plain but a river. It was flowing almost due south judging by the occasional vein of flowing water he spotted in the ice. As rivers usually led to settlements, Charlinder led his sheep along and continued north.

They eventually came upon a most promising sight; a break in the ice near the bank held a small boat, in which two men sat holding a net in the water.

"Excuse me!" Charlinder called out to them. The men in the boat looked at Charlinder and their mouths fell open. They looked about Roy's age, though their conspicuous whiteness put him in mind of Darrell. "Do you live nearby?" he asked. The men looked at each other, apparently dumbfounded. "I'm looking for a village," he continued.

"Yeah, ours is just a little more up the river here," said one of them, pointing north. "Listen," he went on, apparently having found his voice, "where are you from?"

"Oh, I'm a long way from home," Charlinder answered. "I come from a village by the Paleola River. That's east of the Appalachians," he explained, seeing their blank expressions.

"Yeah, that's far off," said the second man in the boat. "Anything else we can do for you?"

"Can you tell me the name of this river?"

"It’s the Mississippi."

"Thank you!" Charlinder said appreciatively. He and Lacey continued up the path, out of the boatmen's sight. "Did you hear that, Lacey? We've reached the Mississippi!"

He mulled over just what he would say when he arrived at the village. Telling them about his journey, he decided, was a bad idea; too long and complicated. He was just a traveler on his way through the area, and he would do what he could in exchange for a place to sleep for the night and a few hot meals.

When the snow bore smaller and more random footprints, as though children were running about, he knew he'd found the place. He led Lacey up the path following the footprints into a cluster of small houses. Realizing it would be rude to come striding into this village without notice, he paused on the path and waited for someone to see him. Two of the nearest houses soon had women poking their heads through the windows, looking at Charlinder. As no one did anything except stare at him, he gave a timid smile and wave and continued into the village.

As he progressed to a more open area, he found more people, all of whom dropped what they were doing to watch him come toward them. Under such scrutiny of so many eyes, the greeting he'd been preparing fell away, now seeming foolish and incongruous. What was he going to say to all these people, who suddenly found nothing more spellbinding than his sudden appearance in their midst?

Appearance, he realized upon looking around the crowd, explained the way the boatmen had looked at him. Charlinder had spent his whole life living along the Paleola, in an area inhabited by the descendants of a diverse survivor population, so everyone under the age of seventy in the river valley was some shade of brown or beige. He had never seen so many faces turned translucent-white under the winter clouds. He was surrounded by pairs of blue, green and hazel eyes peering out from under more light brown and blond hair than he'd previously thought could exist in one place. There he was in their midst, with his kinky hair and dark face standing out from the white wool of his clothes and the surrounding snow, surely sticking out like a sore thumb in the middle of all these people who’d clearly sprung from a very differently composed set of Plague survivors. Unbidden, he started to laugh.

"I'm sorry, have you all ever seen someone," he faltered, still laughing, "uh, someone who...looks like me?"

"Not most of us," said an older woman off to his left, "and not in a long time."

"Well, then," he replied, thinking
Yeah, so I don’t sound so rude after all,
"Uh, my name's Charlinder, and uh, yeah, I'm not from around here, but I'm not making any trouble, I'm just passing through, going somewhere else, in fact this is the first time I've entered a village in...I think it's been weeks, now...and this is my sheep, here, she's a good animal, but if you all don't want us here, then I'll just take her and..." he trailed off.

"You look like you could use a place to put down your pack," said a male voice to Charlinder's far right. There was a man at the far end of the crescent-shaped crowd, with a younger woman clinging to his arm. "Why don't you come over to my house for lunch?"

The other villagers, unless Charlinder was hallucinating, were slightly alarmed at this man's offer. They kept glancing between Charlinder and the man with his young partner as if something would surely explode.

"Yes, I'd like that very much," he answered. The rest of the crowd receded into a shapeless mass away from the couple as Charlinder approached.

"I'm David," said the man now leading Charlinder towards another part of the village, "and this is my wife, Annette. I have three children back at the house, they're a little younger than you," he explained.

The children, as it turned out, were a seventeen-year-old girl named Dana, a sixteen-year-old boy named Brian, and a fourteen-year-old girl called Sarah. They were a gentle and soft-spoken bunch, strangely timid and withdrawn. When several much younger children turned up later that afternoon, Charlinder noticed that David and Annette's family were not around to greet their visitors. The children were interested in Lacey; David had provided a basin of grains and some vegetables as a meal for her, and the children came over to pet her while she ate.

"She's such a nice sheep!" said one little girl while patting Lacey's neck.

"Our sheep don't let us pet them," said a boy next to her. The children were all touching Lacey very gingerly, as though she might turn around and snap at them.

"Well, this girl's a dairy animal," Charlinder explained. "I milk her twice a day, so she's comfortable with people touching her."

"So she's like a cow?"

"Yeah, sort of like a cow, sure."

"What's her name?"

"Her full name is Queen Anne's Lace, but I call her Lacey for short."

Their conversation was brought to an abrupt end, however, when a woman rushed over and started corralling the children away.

"Mama, we were just petting his sheep!" the first little girl protested.

"I really wasn't doing anything to them!" Charlinder called after her.

"I know you weren't," the woman called back apologetically. "It's nothing against you!"

Later that day, while he carded wool for Dana and Sarah to spin, Charlinder told them what had happened.

"It's not about you," Sarah assured him while winding the yarn onto her drop-spindle. "It's us she doesn't like."

"Dare I ask what she has against your family?"

"It's not just her, everyone else in the village looks at us like that," said Dana.

"But why?"

Dana exchanged a look with her sister, then said, "Okay, you might as well hear it from us. You know our mom, Annette? How old do you think she is?"

Charlinder was not expecting this question. "Uh, she looks about the same age as my mother when she died, at thirty-seven, but my mom had different heritage, so she might have aged differently, so...I don't know."

"Annette's thirty," said Dana.

"That's awfully young to be your mother."

"That's because our real mother died when I was two," said Sarah. "Dad married Annette a few years later. And Dad thought he'd have more children with her, and she wanted kids, too, but they never did."

"So...your stepmother is infertile, then?"

"What's 'infertile' mean?" asked Dana.

"It means you can't have children."

"I guess so," said Dana with a shrug. "We don't know what the problem is, but everyone else here thinks we're
bad people
because Annette doesn’t have a baby of her own."

"How do they work that one out?"

"Who knows?" Sarah replied. "I don't know what they think we've been doing, but other kids aren't allowed to talk to us, and no one has any time for our parents. I guess they think us and Brian are helping Dad and Annette with some Satan-worship or something."

"That's ridiculous," said Charlinder. He recalled his mother’s experiences and what Eileen had to say about how many systems had to be in perfect working order to produce viable offspring. "If your parents can't conceive a child, then it's a medical problem between them, and it's got nothing to do with the kind of people they are, and especially not you."

"We didn't say it made any sense," replied Dana. "God knows they won't listen to us. Just, that's why those kids aren't allowed to pet your sheep."

"I don't think much of your neighbors, if you want my opinion," Charlinder shared.

"I don't like them, either," said Dana. "Once summer comes I'm getting out of here. I'm tired of people looking at me like I'm dangerous."

"Where will you go?" asked Charlinder.

"I'll find another village, where no one knows who I am or how many babies my second mom didn't have," she answered. "Once I'm settled somewhere, I'll come back here and get Brian and Sarah."

"That sounds like a plan," Charlinder said. "There must be dozens of villages along the river. You shouldn't have to travel very far."

"But I
want
to travel far," Dana protested. "I don't want to stay close to here."

"Traveling far isn't as much fun as it sounds," Charlinder replied, then realized what he'd just said. "Though it may be much easier in the summer, I don't know."

"I'll take my chances."

As if seeing him card wool wasn't enough of a shock to the family, Charlinder cemented his bizarre image to them later that day by helping Annette cook dinner.

"It could be worse, really," said Annette. "People still buy my baskets and go to David to have their shoes repaired. No one is trying to chase us out of here. We just can't make friends anymore, and of course it's hardest on the kids."

"What problem do they have with your family, though?" Charlinder wanted to know. "That's what I don't get. What do they think you're doing wrong?"

Annette shrugged listlessly. "No one can say. I hear some people saying me or David must have offended God in some way, and this barrenness is our punishment."

Why was it that every problem like this featured God in its excuses? "The only punishment you're getting is the way your neighbors are treating you. Real clever of them to call it God's judgment."

Annette looked slightly afraid of him now. "The only problem is I can't imagine what me or David's ever done to offend God that half this village hasn't done just as much, and they don't have trouble like this having kids. Now, my old friend's mother, she says that if I really wanted a baby, I would have at least one by now, and that's the only thing that makes any sense, but..." she went on, until Charlinder cut her off.

"That's nonsense," he interrupted. "I'm sorry, but your friend's mother doesn't know what she's talking about. What you 'really want' has nothing to do with it. If people had that much control over their fertility, there wouldn't have been nearly so many of us before the Plague."

"How many of us were there?"

"Going on seven billion worldwide."

"I can't picture that many," Annette said after a pause.

"I'm sure no one alive today can picture that many," said Charlinder.

"Right, but, like I was saying, if other people think what Mrs. Amundsen tells me, that's the only way to explain how they treat us. Otherwise, what would my problems have to do with David and the kids? I mean, look, he didn't have trouble having children until he married me."

"So, what, you think the village should just ostracize you and leave your family alone?"

"Why not? I'm the one with the problem, not David or the kids."

"Because maybe there's more to you than how many more of yourself you can make."

Annette put down the knife she held in the middle of the half-chopped potato and blinked at him in bewilderment. "That doesn’t make sense," she said. "I can’t do what everyone else can do, and I can’t see any reason why."