Charlinder's Walk (26 page)

While he mulled over this question, an elderly woman paid a casual visit to the family hosting him. She met their foreign guest and his sheep, then she went about conversing with the mother of the family. They left Charlinder to his speculations for a while, before his hostess found him and beckoned him outside. The older woman was examining Lacey's shorn fleece.

By the afternoon, he had two elderly men, three more younger women, and several apparently unrelated children dissecting chunks of raw wool with him. Charlinder showed the children what he did with wool by demonstrating with his drop-spindle; it was so hot and humid, he couldn't keep that up for very long without wanting to burn the whole fleece, but he could give them the general idea. Then he got out his previous winter's wool socks and showed the neighbors how the soles were shrunken and felted from use.

Before he knew it, the host family had placed a huge copper pot full of water over an open fire and the wool went in to cook. Charlinder made a feeble attempt at protesting that this really wasn't necessary, in fact it was best kept until later, but of course no one understood him, so he resigned himself to waiting. Then one of the women went to the pot with a ladle and cup and started skimming the melted lanolin from the bubbling surface of the water. He remarked out loud that it was a clever thing to do, surprised that he hadn’t thought of it before.

The wool was dry enough by the next morning for further processing. The children got out whatever metal-toothed brushes they used to groom their animals and helped Charlinder tease the wool into workable tufts. More hot water was prepared, this time with added soap, and he spent much of the rest of the day teaching the family and friends how to make felt. It was disgustingly hot and sticky work, but the men were allowed to take their shirts off while the women could run off to the nearby stream to keep themselves drenched. At the end of it, there was a very large new slab of felt drying in the sun, and it could easily be turned into saddles or sewn into carrying sacks or whatever. They would find a use for it, and in the meantime, Charlinder's hosts weighed him down with cotton bags full of portable food for his journey.

Thus unburdened, he continued northwest through the valley with Lacey. His next visit began with a surprising encounter. Someone must have heard him talking to Lacey, because a young man later accosted Charlinder as he passed behind a row of huts.

"You, are, Eeng-leesh?" he said slowly.

Charlinder took a second to wonder what this guy wanted before he realized he'd just heard someone speak in his own language.

"No, actually, I'm from North America," he said in surprise. "Wow, so you speak English, then?"

The young man started yelling for others in the village, and it appeared that he had demonstrated the extent of his English vocabulary. Several more people of varying ages emerged from the brush and surrounded Charlinder, chattering excitedly with the first guy, who was obviously bent on investigating him further. Charlinder, meanwhile, tried to excuse himself from the crowd, but he was soon whisked into the village. All he could do was encourage Lacey to follow.

Charlinder was promptly deposited into someone's modest thatched-roof house while everyone started investigating him. Someone separated him from his pack, and someone else forced him onto a low wooden bench. The family went about emptying his luggage and examining his belongings in detail. He tried to put a stop to this, but he only got pushed aside again. The practical goods were looked at and then put down, but the real interest began when they found Eileen's journals.

The guy who'd first buttonholed Charlinder was especially enthusiastic with the written materials. His reaction was somewhere between fascination and bloodthirst; all Charlinder could reliably grasp was that he kept saying, "Eeng-leesh, Eeng-leesh!" to his family. An older woman dug out and unfolded the map, and the family went promptly quiet. The English-speaking guy pulled Charlinder into their circle again and demanded his explanation. Before them lay Charlinder's crude sketch and labelings of the world's geographical features, annotated with rivers and mountains he encountered along the way, and a railroad of tiny X marks on all the places where he'd accepted hospitality. The guy making the inquiry was demanding something of Charlinder which entailed a lot of pointing at the island of Great Britain.

"No, I've never been there. I started here, you see?" he explained while pointing at the east coast of North America. The start of the village markings was not far away.

Apparently satisfied that he was not English, whatever that would have implied, the family and especially his accoster became much warmer to him. The accoster was a man only slightly older than Charlinder, there was a woman possibly his wife, his parents, a younger woman who may have been his sister. There were three more people of his parents' age, but they left the house shortly thereafter and Charlinder never found out whether they were relations. In the meantime, whether he liked it or not, Charlinder had landed himself another village stay.

The accoster soon decided he was Charlinder's new best friend. He introduced himself as Ravi, his sister was called Rachana, and he introduced his wife by name but Charlinder didn’t catch it, and Ravi did not understand the request to repeat himself. If he ever stopped long enough to introduce his parents by name, Charlinder missed it in the flux of prying hands and curious faces. Ravi spent the rest of the morning dragging his new guest around the village to meet people in the middle of their agrarian chores. These neighbors sometimes brought Charlinder and his new host inside and served them tea, allowing Charlinder to sit quietly to the side while Ravi did enough talking for both of them. Others appeared just as bewildered by the encounter as Charlinder, merely pausing in their work to answer their neighbor's questions in the middle of their garden plots. This went on until they encountered his wife, who yelled at him in front of their neighbors. After she finished her tirade and walked away, Ravi grumblingly bowed his head and took Charlinder back to his house.

The wife was beginning preparation of her family's midday meal, while her husband went to offer his explanation. The first person in the family that Charlinder saw, however, was Rachana, who caught his eye and smiled through the window while she worked in the back garden between her parents. Ravi being occupied, Charlinder escaped to the garden. He signed to Rachana that he wanted to join in her work. She exchanged a few words with her parents and gestured for him to stay there and wait a moment. After a run into the house, she emerged with a pile of laundry in her arms and beckoned for Charlinder to follow her.

In the much shadier and quieter area of a nearby stream, Charlinder let Rachana show him how she washed clothes on the rocks, helping her where he could, while Lacey grazed on the bordering grass. It was the first time that day that Charlinder could participate at his own pace. His hostess managed to explain to him that her sister-in-law was pregnant, and--this was the best impression he could gather from the following communication--that she, Rachana, was promised to a man in another village. Regardless of whether that was what she actually meant to say, Charlinder also got the impression that she was less than excited about this. Nonetheless, she was very enjoyable company to him, not least because she understood that Charlinder could not understand her language, which he could not say of everyone who hosted him on his journey.

The rest of the day alternated between the peaceful and the tedious. A few times Ravi tried to tow him along on some other adventure, but his wife caught him. Charlinder was otherwise uninterrupted in helping the parents in their garden work and Rachana in her household chores, but was more than a little grateful when nighttime fell and all went to their beds. The mother of the family allotted him a quantity of gauzy cotton fabric to protect him from mosquitoes, and Charlinder was allowed to lay his bed outside.

He was savoring the quiet under the netting, at the side of the house shadowed from the moon, and trying to fall asleep. He wondered if it was safe to leave Lacey in the open for the night. Should he be worried? No, of course not; if there were predators around, the family wouldn't let Charlinder sleep outside, so of course he shouldn't worry about her. Then something else appeared that would keep him awake. Someone had come outside from the house, and while the light was nearly nonexistent, he could tell from her shape that it was Rachana. She verified that Charlinder was awake, and shh-ed at him to keep quiet.

While he started to wonder what this could possibly be about, she opened her clothes and let them drop to the ground, her eyes on Charlinder the whole time. Suddenly he was very glad to be staying in the village. He pulled back the netting and covers and helped her inside. She soon helped him out of his clothes and they enjoyed the limited space under the bug net by squeezing close together. She was not the least bit hesitant or uncertain, she knew exactly what she wanted to do, and he was only too happy to join her. While Charlinder thrust into her, egged on by the lovely moaning noise she made, they were both interrupted from their ecstasy by a sudden, angry, "Baaa!"

Charlinder nearly jumped straight out of bed, but Rachana burst out laughing. As he calmed down from the shock, he shh-ed at her to quiet down, as they were right next to her family, but he snickered along with her.

The dawning sun woke him up hours later, but he wasn't ready to open his eyes. He was too comfortable in bed. Slightly later, he sensed, more than heard, someone else breathing from above him. Then there was a tapping sensation at his chest. He opened his eyes and perceived, at the far edge of his morning-blurred vision, a man standing a few feet away. Only then did it occur to Charlinder that he was tangled up in bed with Ravi’s equally unclothed sister, and the rest of the village was no longer asleep.

He and Rachana sprang out of bed almost at the same instant the shouting began. She swiped her underclothes from the ground and scrambled back into the house while her brother bellowed at her. Meanwhile, Charlinder was trying to put his trousers back on while his irate host lunged at him. Several neighbors gathered closer to watch the commotion while Ravi darted back and forth between raging at Charlinder on the ground and his sister in the house. It was only this indecision that protected him from getting strangled while he had to dress himself, snatch up his belongings and fetch his animal. One man from the neighbors held Ravi back while several others pushed Charlinder and Lacey away from the house and directed them out of the village. He had to jog some way out of the area before he could pause long enough to consolidate his belongings and finish putting his shirt on.

"Shit, I hope she's okay," he shuddered while milking his sheep.

Chapter Twenty-One

Subcontinent

That visit left Charlinder unsettled like no other. The days following his departure were filled with wondering if Rachana had survived the aftermath of their tryst in one piece. He wasted many anxious days thinking about whether her parents had reacted worse than her brother, and whether her fiancé had found out. He alternated between speculating on what had moved a young woman with an impending marriage to come onto an overnight guest, and reminding himself that he should have thought of that before he took his pants off.

After coming to the resolution that she had made her own decision and probably knew exactly what she was doing, Charlinder kept coming back to Ravi confronting him with those three words. He'd been such an idiot before he crossed the Bering Strait, but for over a year had been comfortable in accepting his punishment of being unable to talk to anyone around him. That crazy young man had been the first person in all that time to remind Charlinder of how it felt to hear someone else speak his language. No matter how unhinged he may have been, he was aware enough of the outside linguistic world, after generations of post-Plague isolation, to recognize spoken and written English, which also left Charlinder to wonder about his level of literacy. At the same time, the effect caught up with him of dozens of visits with no one to talk to, but everyone trying to talk to him. Only when he remembered how much easier it was to deal with someone with a language in common did he realize how exhausted he was from doing without. The thought of that many more sessions of banging his head against that impenetrable barrier left him more daunted than he'd previously been willing to admit. If there was one person in the country who could string together a few words of English in the right order, there had to be a few others who knew at least as much. He spent the next three months marching steadily through the valley and hoping that in the
next
village he visited, there would be someone who could say more than one sentence that Charlinder knew.

Wherever such people were, it seemed that he was doing a very good job of avoiding them. He grew increasingly weary of remembering that the people sheltering and feeding him didn't grasp the implication of the words, "I don't understand this" even as he said them. He walked longer between settlements, and took again to reading Eileen's journals, if only to make sure that English was still a language that he knew.

He'd read all her entries many times by now. He could recite them from memory if asked. He didn't even like her attitude sometimes, or agree with her tactics, but he needed to keep taking in those words. They kept him knowing who he was, and held him down to the reason he'd left home. Eileen wasn't always coherent, either, but after consuming her voice so many times, Charlinder could handle the times when she lost control. Even when she was so distraught that her handwriting became nearly illegible, Charlinder knew what she was saying.

May 15, 2026