Charlinder's Walk (23 page)

Whatever the reasoning for their dislike, Charlinder was not about to judge them, if at all, unless he could find out the story behind the divisions. Since he had no reason to believe there was anyone within a hundred miles who spoke English and could answer any of his questions, he let his puzzlement spread to the higher caste, including his host family. No matter what had created their class structure, the upper stratum was, whether by action or inaction, complicit in their neighbors' suffering. On the second day of his visit, he was on his way back from visiting Lacey when he saw a grown man, clearly in the better-off category, beating an underclass boy of maybe seventeen with a belt, shouting at him the whole time. No matter what the boy had done to deserve this, the part that disturbed Charlinder the most was how the other upper-stratum people on the street shielded their children's eyes and rushed away from the scene. Charlinder watched until the man was finished whipping the boy and barked one last order, and the boy went back to work.

He couldn't look at his host family the same way after that. If he could ask them what the story was behind these miserable people among them, what would they say? They were nice enough people, of course, but then, how difficult was it to be "nice" to a foreigner on his way to somewhere else? How did they treat their neighbors, who were a part of their community every day, year after year? What would happen to their village if all the underclass suddenly disappeared?, he wondered. Who would do the odd jobs then, and how would they be treated? Would the village simply create a new underclass, or would they start thinking about how they treated their subordinates?

The third day began inconspicuously enough. No one found anything amiss when the family woke up that morning. Charlinder decided to try another, this time longer, route to the barn for the day's first visit to Lacey. He smelled something familiar on his way; burning wood, like the Yu'piks' bonfires at the end of the summer. But this was something much bigger than a bonfire: he saw a gigantic column of smoke rising into the sky. Because he hadn't learned from seeing Bruce pulverize Kenny, he let his curiosity lead him to the source. The closer he came to the fire, the more people he saw running around, yelling at each other and scooping up buckets full of snow. The underclass people he saw along the way did not look at him. As soon as Charlinder came close, they turned their faces away. He contemplated their sudden change of behavior as he proceeded toward the fire, but all thoughts of them were gone when he drew close enough to see that it was the barn up in flames.

Cows were pouring out through a burned-out gap in the wall, bellowing furiously, while people beat at the flames with wet sheets of cloth. Charlinder ran around the scene, but didn't see Lacey. Two pairs of hands gripped his arms as he ran towards the blaze, but he wrenched free of them and didn't give them a glance, as he could hear ovine bleating from inside the building.

He dove in through the biggest gap in the flames, inhaled smoke, and dropped to his hands and knees. He crawled over numerous embers, and the air stung his eyes. He kept moving, still in search of his sheep. Around a corner now crumbling into hot coals, there she was, pressed to the floor. Charlinder tried to call for her, but his lungs responded by hacking up the soot he'd just inhaled. Lacey must have recognized him through the coughing, as she then stood up and crept to his side.

They were in a room that used to be filled with heaps of grassy matter, now occupied by mounds of flame. Charlinder began to navigate a path out of the barn that wouldn't inflict fatal injury on him or Lacey, when he heard a new, unmistakably human whine that didn't come from him. In a distant corner sat a dark shape; he could make out crouched arms and legs and just a hint of a face. While not understanding how he'd become so foolhardy, Charlinder crawled over to that corner and pulled a hand away from the face. It was a tiny, elderly woman, and she didn't appear coherent enough to do anything as determined as crawl after him. So Charlinder pulled her onto his back, and in that much, she was cooperative. With this new weight pressing his hands into the ground, Charlinder led Lacey for the nearest exit. He told himself it's like swimming in a deep pond and going for the surface. The end is right there, if you just keep moving your arms and legs. The doorway singed his sides, but he plowed through, and then he was outside, with Lacey close behind.

Someone immediately pulled the old woman off his back, someone else lifted Charlinder to his feet. They were both marched straight to the Grand Poobah's office. As Charlinder was busy hacking up a lung, he went where he was pulled. He didn't see when she arrived, but Charlinder's hostess also appeared by his elbow to accompany him to see the Poobah. He continued to walk where he was directed, and then they were at the office. Someone left the room and quickly came back with the Poobah, who swept the old woman into a lung-squeezing hug. Someone else tried to tell their story, but the Poobah would listen to no one but the old woman. As she was also coughing, she could not speak coherently, but she managed something that involved a lot of gesturing at Charlinder. Before she finished her piece, the Poobah grabbed Charlinder and hugged him in a similarly strong-armed fashion, and then he understood: the old woman he'd taken from the fire was the Poobah's mother.

More discussion followed while Charlinder worked the soot out of his lungs. Then he began to wonder whether he would be able to find Lacey. The man who'd summoned the Poobah came in from another errand, now followed by an underclass boy flanked by a girl at each elbow. The Poobah snarled ominously at all three of them. The girls cringed and looked away from the boy, who stared at the Poobah like a deer looks at a hunter. When the Poobah had finished his tirade, the messenger took the boy by the arm and led him out through the opposite door. The girls stared after him disbelievingly, until the Poobah barked furiously at them, at which they jumped and scurried out the way they'd come.

After he'd had his way with the urchins, the Poobah turned benevolently back to Charlinder. He asked something of Charlinder's hostess, who replied while pointing to his poorly shod feet.

He was out of their village, with Lacey unharmed and at his side, by the late afternoon. The Poobah had been generous to him. For his troubles in bringing the village head’s elderly mother out of the fire, Charlinder was well-provided for. He was gifted with a thick fur hat, a long, tough wool coat, and sturdy leather boots. He now had a large quantity of salted meat in his pack. He had also picked out two pretty lace shawls that looked more suited to a woman’s back, but would probably be helpful in winter, and since when had he ever worried about not appearing manly enough? He draped them over Lacey’s back until nighttime, and would wear them under his coat when the weather became colder still. All this made him feel, in the purely physical sense, heavier, but that added weight was fine.

Also weighing on him was the fact that a young boy had probably just been hanged from a pine tree, and the village would have to build a new dairy barn. No matter how much he told himself about how much was not his doing, the fire would ultimately not have been set had Charlinder not been present in their village. The barn would have been intact, the cows would not have been put in harm’s way, and the defenseless old woman would not have had to be rescued had he walked another day before a stop. Roy was more right than he knew; there were cultures that Charlinder could not expect to understand, and his ability to cause problems, or not, was under his control far less than he liked.

At the same time, his imagination did not stretch quite far enough to widen the limits on his sympathies. "Someone was trying to kill you just to spite me," he ranted toward Lacey as they marched south. "I guess maybe they’ve got nothing to lose, but really? Why not just pack up their nothing and leave that place?"

Chapter Nineteen

China

At first he kept inland and slept in the woods. It made sense; if he went too near the coast, he risked getting sidetracked on a peninsula and losing time. In a forest, the trees cut down on the winds and kept the snow from drifting, which appeared at first to be an unambiguous good, as anything that shielded him from the worst of the winter only made his life easier. In daytime, the sunlight filtered down through the bare trees and lit up the forest floor, whereas the unbroken light on flat snow was blinding. In the denser parts of the forest, there were some patches of ground dry enough to take a cooking fire.

On a night in late October, he spread out his blankets under the shelter of a low, dense-needled pine tree and covered himself and Lacey under the coat he'd acquired after the fire. As usual, he was so tired from walking all day and carrying his sheep in the late afternoon after she refused to walk any further that he became dead to the world as soon as Lacey settled into a comfortable position. Next thing he knew, he was jolted awake by his sheep jumping away from him while the moon was still a brilliant crescent in the sky. It was far too early and she was bleating very differently from the way she did when she needed to be milked. Charlinder sat up and looked around for the source of her distress. It only took a quick turn of the head before he was face to face with a pair of wide amber eyes reflecting the moonlight.

He jumped to his feet with his heart pounding so hard he didn't notice the freezing air. There was a large, pale gray canine animal peering up at him, about the size of a large ram of Lacey's breed but with the musculature and teeth of a species that was accustomed to killing its food. It made a derisive snort in Charlinder's direction and began padding around him to where Lacey had run off.

Charlinder stepped in the wolf's path and flailed his arms around, shouting, "OH NO YOU DON'T! YOU GO FIND YOUR OWN MEAL, YOU CAN'T HAVE MINE!"

The wolf stopped and gave a low growl in answer to Charlinder's yelling. He might have been a beautiful animal in daylight and at a distance, but in such close proximity, Charlinder could tell the winter was not treating him well. His teeth appeared uneven in the weak light and his midsection was concave between his ribcage and narrow hips. Lacey was not the most well-marbled of ruminants, but she was big enough for an excellent meal and had no defense except to hide in her flock, which at the moment consisted of a singular tall, 21-year-old primate with a pathetic excuse for claws, teeth and pelt.

"ARE YOU NOT LISTENING?! GET OUT OF HERE!" he continued to shout at the wolf, which now appeared to be considering whether Charlinder would taste better than his smaller, woollier companion. He looked a lot bigger and fleshier than he was under his clothes, but the wolf would not discover how little meat was on him until he was torn open. "LISTEN YOU IDIOT CANINE, I AM BIGGER THAN YOU, AND I HAVE BETTER DEPTH PERCEPTION! NOW WE CAN DO THIS THE EASY WAY OR THE HARD WAY!"

The wolf gave a final, annoyed huff and stalked away. Charlinder stood in the same place and raised his arms in a threatening fashion when the wolf looked over his shoulder. Once the predator was nearly out of sight, Charlinder caught his breath and checked his trousers to make sure he hadn't soiled himself. "LACEY, WHERE THE HELL ARE YOU?!"

He stumbled off in the opposite direction from the wolf until he found Lacey hiding under the low boughs of another evergreen. "Don't you ever walk away from me!" he yelled at his sheep, grabbing her jaw and forcing her to look him in the face. "Bad girl, very bad girl! You're lucky that wolf was all alone, or else you'd be raw mutton! We're not sleeping in here!"

He walked her back to their abandoned sleeping spot, rolled up his blankets, and led her out of the forest. He took a break to milk her but otherwise kept moving until the sun was out. There would be no more sleeping under the trees. He would just have to get comfortable with the blinding light on the snow and cope with the wind. It took several days before he slept a regular night again.

The coast was still more time-consuming than the interior, but there were fishing villages. He periodically visited to check his progress, and the villagers offered him shelter, which he happily accepted, just as long as no one tried to separate him from Lacey. He would not bring his defenseless ovine into a stronghold of large predatory animals, and he would not risk leaving her closed off in a wooden structure full of dry kindling again.

Someone had more to say about his route than merely to note where he was. When asked to do the honors, an elderly Russian man took Charlinder's pencil and sketched some peaks along the coast just beyond where they were, and another set of peaks briefly inland, then pointed out the corridor of flatter land between the ranges. Charlinder therefore turned westward in from the coastline and kept a close eye on Lacey to take the path of least topographical resistance through southeastern Russia.

When he'd reached a time of year at which he was afraid the lack of daylight would make him go crazy, he received a strange reaction to the usually uncomplicated step of documenting his progress. He was showing his path to the patriarch of the family hosting him at the time, and the old man was just about to press the point to paper, when instead he called over his wife to see what Charlinder was doing. Soon the whole family had come over and all were engaged in a tense discussion surrounding him and his map. It was one of those moments that left him immensely frustrated that he could not understand their language, as he felt he had a right to know what they were saying about him. The family seemed to be worried--he wasn't sure how he managed to piece that much out--about the direction his route was taking. But what was wrong with him continuing south?, he wanted to know. Would they prefer that he turn around and march back into the Arctic Circle in the middle of winter? Though he had to tolerate much fretting over him from the family for the next several hours before he left their home, the map was marked and ultimately no one tried to hold him back.