Charlinder's Walk (25 page)

He was sufficiently intrigued by this turn of events that he stayed in the village for three days instead of his customary one-night stay. He was thus able to go around with the boys and see more of the village. Wherever he went, he saw women in charge. They were always at work, but never answering to a man. Whether supervising or laboring, a woman would sometimes have a baby strapped to her back, other times not, but always entirely at home in whatever she was doing. Even when most of the workers in a job were men, there was always a woman calling the shots. The only women he saw not in the middle of work were walking somewhere, and they were usually unaccompanied, unconcerned. He saw some men with nothing to do, but always staying out of the way.

The theme continued at home, where the husband had dinner ready when the wife came home and kept the house clean. The woman sometimes worked with her partner at his tasks, other times sat down to talk with her children, but she was the only one in the house who took orders from no one else.

Charlinder kept marching southward and eventually found the coast again, which turned westward, and he noted that most communities were more variations of the former, patriarchal persuasion, but that about a quarter of the villages he visited followed the latter, female-dominated model. He watched the contrast in fascination for some time--in fact he was fascinated simply that there was enough variation to show such contrast--but he also had to wonder. If the general rule throughout history was that men wound up in power over a culture, how did the female-controlled villages come to develop? Again, he thought of Eileen Woodlawn, who was probably the main one responsible for making sure her community didn't divide itself into men with responsibility and the women who depended on them. If a handful of women similar to Eileen ended up in the same survivor group, they could possibly have tipped the balance of power in the women's favor.

The more he thought about this, however, the more he was frustrated that he couldn’t ask questions of his hosts. He wanted to know why his hostess didn’t have her daughters sit down with Charlinder and learn textile skills from him along with their brothers. He wanted to know why wherever she spent all day with her daughters wasn’t appropriate for her sons. He wanted to know if the balance of power was ever actually a
balance
. If he ever came upon a community whose gender relations bore out a truly equal distribution of power, what would it look like?

Chapter Twenty

Monsoon

He soon began to question the abilities of his ancestral survivor community, and yes that did include Eileen Woodlawn, for their inadequate cartographical skills. Just as he'd needed local help in marking the mountain ranges of southern Russia, so the path between China and the Indian subcontinent was nowhere near as simple as his map suggested. He carried on with the usual method of following the path of least resistance between the coastline and mountains, whichever was nearer. He soon found himself envying Lacey yet again for her dense coat of wool, as stifling heat with gigantic mosquitoes gave way to dizzying winds and incessant, drenching rain. It poured in around the neckline of his sweater and soaked the linen underneath. Charlinder soon resigned himself to forgetting how it felt to be dry. The linen sagged and stretched with the heaviness of the water and pulled at his every step. His skin became waterlogged. He quickly stopped wearing his sweater because it kept him warmer than he had any reason to be and did nothing to protect him from the rain. He kept his map and other paper goods covered and hidden whenever outdoors and soon found himself negotiating the Indochina peninsula, first with the coast of Vietnam. The people he met at the villages kept him reasonably warm and sheltered and well-nourished when he visited, but the villages also became a blur of faces, voices, smells and textures while he navigated the safest path to the next subcontinent. It must have been the next sign of the existence of God, then, that the area's topography held him and Lacey hostage for an inordinate period of time. Charlinder vacillated between hating the mountains and wondering whether it would be more efficient to march his sheep straight over the ridges as they came. As it was, they were forced to navigate the peninsula in a zigzag course of tortuously shaped valleys between competing mountain ranges, and he had to admit that the frequent downpours did nothing to make vertical travel more tempting. It did not help, either, that almost every time he turned a zigzag, the local language changed. In fact the language probably didn't change more than three times, but he felt like nature was deliberately jerking him around.

"Is it weird that I think that, pretty girl?" he said to Lacey one day while squelching through a river of mud. "I know that's stupid, because nature doesn't
intend
anything, it just does what it does, but...how did I end up like this? I have to blame
something
, so should I blame you instead? Shit, I'm losing my mind."

The good points, he decided, were thus: one, the rain weighed down his pack so much that when it dried out, it would feel lighter than ever before. Two, as long as it kept pouring like this, he had no need to bathe himself or wash his clothes and would come out smelling clean and new on the other side. Three...no, there was nothing beyond that.

"I'll bet this place is beautiful when it's not raining," he shared with his ewe later. "All this greenery must owe something to this nonsense. Right now, though? I'm not impressed."

All told, he spent what must have been months carrying his water-burdened pack up and down the peninsula before he escaped the map of zigzags. He reached a new territory, as ethnically and linguistically distinct from Southeast Asia as China was from Russia. The people here, in fact, looked more like Charlinder than like anyone else he'd seen aside from a very few parts of North America, but he knew his ancestry was very different. It was still raining something terrible, but at least now he could take a roughly straight course west.

There was a river in his way. It was a very wide, heavy, busy river flowing toward the ocean. He had gotten over rivers before on other continents, including a time when he had to walk well out of his way to find a bridge over a big one in China, but he wasn't accustomed to traversing rivers during a months-long spell of heavy rain. An episode of what must have been terribly amusing consultation with the locals suggested that there was a means of crossing the river by foot somewhere north of him. A walk of several miles brought him to a narrow footbridge made of ropes and wooden planks stretched over a ravine. It was just wide enough for two people to sidle past each other in opposite directions.

"Bear with me, Lacey," said Charlinder to his animal. "Oh, this'll take a while," he muttered to himself.

The ravine was deep enough that there was no way he could persuade a sheep to walk herself knowingly over it. He had a hard enough time persuading himself. So he led Lacey up to a point near the start of the bridge, but not so close that she could see into the ravine. He stood over her so that she was standing between his legs, and pulled her face up so that she could only look at him. Then he reached his other hand back, aiming for her tailbone, but that was much too far back in that position. He gripped the back of her neck and hoped that would make her follow.

His feet spread well apart, his hands equally occupied, and with at least sixty pounds of soaked luggage and Lacey's second fleece balanced precariously on his back, Charlinder pushed his animal forward onto the bridge and tottered along above her.

"There we go, pretty girl, just put your hoof down, I won't let you fall," he coaxed. Lacey's eyes were forced up to look at the sky and Charlinder's face, while he did his best to maintain eye contact with his sheep so he wouldn't focus on the river. "If someone comes along and thinks it's funny to mess with us by shaking this bridge," he muttered, "I will murder the asswipe. Right after I shit my pants, of course."

No one approached the bridge behind him, but several people did gather at the other end and watched him approach. Not that Charlinder noticed them; he was so focused on pulling Lacey forward without letting her hooves fall between the planks, while simultaneously keeping the weight on his back from listing to either side, that he jumped a little when he finally reached solid ground to find a handful of people watching him.

"Oh, hi! I guess we must have looked funny right there, huh?"

He managed to persuade a married couple in the group to let him inside, where he had them mark his map. Their hut was too cramped to let him stay the night. He said his thanks, grabbed the sheep, and headed into the rain again.

As he proceeded, locals directed Charlinder to a roughly northwesterly route, where he found the land satisfactorily fertile and low. The rain soon tapered off and when the weather became sufficiently dry, he stopped at a clearing near the river with no sign of a village in sight.

The end of rainy season was in Charlinder's opinion cause for celebrating, and he marked the occasion by letting his belongings dry out. While Lacey feasted on some tall grass, he laid his bedding out on the ground and let the accumulated moisture evaporate. He took off his clothes and hung them on some tree branches that ran perpendicular to the breeze coming off the river. As long as the sun was high, the breeze continued to blow, and no one else was around, Charlinder saw no reason to go anywhere. He felt lighter, like his body was becoming unburdened with actual weight, with each minute spent standing with his arms extended in the breeze. For the first time in over a year and a half, he stopped and looked at himself.

Whereas before he'd left Paleola he'd been uninterestingly skinny all over, now he looked mismatched. The months of walking over mountains had put more muscle on his legs than he'd previously thought possible. The recent months of being constantly hunched over with the weight of soaked baggage had developed his abdominal muscles to an impressive state. He couldn't see his lower back without a mirror, but it felt similarly taut and strong. His upper body hadn't fared nearly so well. The upper back and shoulders assumed a hunched-over shape whenever he relaxed. He couldn't have carried Lacey around, even sporadically, without retaining some muscle on his arms and chest, but aside from that necessary amount his arms were whittled down to sticks covered in knobby veins and tendons.

He laid out one of his blankets in the grass, sat down and looked at his feet. Between the constant, abundant water he'd been carrying around in his shoes and the weight of his encumbered body pressing down for at least fourteen hours a day, the soles of his feet were etched with the impression of the purl side of his socks; it was a minor miracle that the skin remained intact. Worst of all were his shoulders. Aside from his altered posture, he looked closely and found grooves pressed into his shoulders from the weight of his wet luggage combined with the effect of uninterrupted wetness on his skin. He uttered a gasp of disgust loud enough to disturb Lacey from her long-earned meal. No, there was no mistake:
there were dents in his shoulders.

"Don't mind me, Lacey, I just look like shit," he called to his sheep. Lacey also looked thinner than usual. That much was not surprising, as Charlinder must have burned through an obscene number of calories per day, which meant he placed even more demand on her milk supply. "You're a very good girl and I don't know how I would have lived this long without you," he said. "You eat up on that delicious grass while I dry out over here."

With the season change, he was able to enjoy his travels and appreciate his village stays without thinking in terms of when he'd have to get soaked again. The baggage was back to its old lighter weight, and Charlinder enjoyed the dubious privilege of staggering heat and humidity rather than pouring rain. His new source of annoyance as he made his way up the valley was the towering heap of greasy, smelly wool he'd been lugging around since Lacey's second shearing. With its old buoyancy restored, it now harbored numerous flies and other uninvited guests buzzing around his head. It occurred to him that if he could find a way that sheep's wool was valuable to Indians, he could trade it off for food and avoid the risk of getting caught sampling. So of course he was entirely in the wrong part of the world for that. Every time he stayed with a family, he left his pack out in plain view, with the wool resting conspicuously at the top, in the hopes that someone would take an interest. As wool was the last thing anyone would have a reason to wear in their climate, his idea yielded no results for a full lunar cycle. The area of the country Charlinder was traversing was dotted with pre-Plague cities now overgrown with wild, unbridled flora. Street pavement was turned to dust under fields of tall grass, climbing vines pulled down entire walls, dense underbrush held up old roofs, and wild animals inhabited what was left of the buildings. The pulsating he’d felt in North American cities was even stronger here. The sensation of being pushed out was so pervasive that he hardly entered the city limits before he got out and kept to the perimeter. Charlinder gawked at the colorful birds flying around several of these sprawling ruins from the boundary where the pushing-out merely buzzed at him rather than unsettled him. He kept going for a month before he found a village where someone recognized the fleece as something other than a pile of flies.

He was trying to think of what Indians might do with that quantity of wool. Their clothes were all cotton; woven finely and dyed in shocking, vibrant colors. Their houses needed no insulation except from the rain, and they would turn into steam-houses if enhanced with insulating fiber. Make toys for their children from it, perhaps? It was a valuable enough substance that he was loath to let it go to waste, but it was of no use to him at the time.