Charlinder's Walk (15 page)

After the sun came up, the sheep was not so keen to walk as diligently as she had when he led her away from the farm. She wanted to stop periodically and eat some grass or other low-growing vegetation, and Charlinder was happy to give her time to eat, but twice in that morning he had to stop her from poisoning herself on wintering milkweed plants.

The real trial came when they neared the St. Paul village, where Charlinder had gone for a number of trips. He had no doubt they were aware of the journey he had just begun, though he suspected his reasoning had been explained to them primarily by his community's Faithful. Regardless, he was acquainted with a number of people there, and was sure they would be happy to let him tether his ewe in their barnyard, take a seat in front of a fire, and have some lunch. By that time of day he was nicely warmed up from several hours of walking and was thinking of how nice it would be to take a rest.

He steered his animal in a wide loop around the settlement, and did not take a break from walking until they were well past. Of course there would have been a hot meal and a warm spot to rest his feet offered to him there, with many fascinated conversations to follow. Therein lay the problem ahead of him. There were many hours of walking left in the day, and there would be many days of sore feet after that. He could not afford to fall back on the comforts of a familiar place less than halfway into his first day.

It began to snow that afternoon. There were a few inches on the ground when it stopped falling after sunset, which meant he had an interesting time of finding a pine tree with a dry patch of ground under its boughs where he and his livestock could sleep for the night.

As he had previously read Eileen's journals, he knew that a major city had previously stood along the Paleola, but he had never seen it. There was nothing left in the city remains that the survivors or their descendants could use, so he was never given any leave to travel that far and after a certain point in his teens his curiosity about the city had atrophied down so far that he no longer thought about what might be there. Approaching the city remains, he didn’t know what to expect, and nothing Eileen had ever written could have prepared him for what he found the following day. He was aware that no survivors had been found in the city, but he had expected to see something resembling a place where people could live.

He pictured something like a big, colorful, important-looking village with wider roads and larger, man-made structures in materials other than wood and earth. Instead he found a forest dotted with ruins. There was an enormous rectangular field overgrown with weeds and tall grasses, and on each of the long sides stood several clusters of tall hardwood trees rising out of gigantic heaps of rubble. Most were a pale grayish rocky material, one looked like dark red brick from that distance, and one was littered with what looked like scales of rusted copper. That, however, was by far not the most bizarre thing he saw in what was left of the city.

As he entered the former city limits, the first thing he noticed was the smell. It was an aroma unlike anything he’d ever known, but for some reason it put him in mind of a fallen tree rotting into the ground. It was a smell not of death, but of decay and transition, whereas all the vegetation he could see was robust and solidly rooted in the ground.

Further in, he noticed that something in the ground was moving. He felt a pulsating in the grass and dirt under his feet, though it appeared just as still and frozen as the ground in winter always did. He bent over, peeled the mitten part of his fingerless gloves off his hands, and pressed his bare fingers to the ground; it felt cold, hard and not pulsating. Beneath his feet, however, the sensation persisted; it was like the ground had a heartbeat. He looked over at the sheep, who munched at the dormant, dry grass around her like nothing was amiss. He thought maybe the pulse was just in the soles of his feet and would dissipate if he just kept walking. He took the sheep’s lead and brought her further along.

In another part of the city, he found a tighter, more confined stand of trees holding up a peculiarly tall and narrow cone of pale brick fragments. Just beyond that was a pond, set in an unnaturally regular rectangular shape and frozen at the surface except for a lot of small holes broken into the edges, apparently the work of large mammals coming to drink. Intrigued, he led the sheep to follow him in a new direction where he eventually found a miniature mountain of ivy stretching over a heap of blindingly white rubble. At the edge nearest his position was a giant chunk of this brilliantly white material carved in the shape of the upper half of a man's head; he could only assume it had broken away from a larger carving.

"What happened here?" he said out loud to the open air. "Did the looters knock down all these buildings before they died from the Plague?" he wondered.

Not only did the pulsing sensation not fade away with continued movement, he also felt something like a breeze at his back. There was no wind in his hair, just a vague sense of something pushing at him in a northeast direction. Since he was supposed to be moving west, there was no conceivable reason why he’d feel an impulse to head east. It wasn’t even a sense that northeast would be better than west, just a sense of someone telling him,
you need to keep going. There’s nothing for you here
.

He shook his head. Of course this wasn't the work of looters; the buildings had still been intact when Eileen had walked through with the other survivors. It was the work of growing trees in the last 120 years...but he'd never realized trees could be that strong.

"Come on, girl," he said to his ewe while pulling on the lead, "let's get out of here."

In the following days, he frequently asked himself what would have happened if he’d stayed in the city remains longer. The answer that always came was: probably nothing. The pulsing sensation from the ground had disappeared as soon as he’d left the formerly urbanized land, along with the odd smell and the feeling of something pushing him out. He’d taken his animal and left the old city in the quickest northeasterly route he could find, then continued west in the undeveloped land, and in the process he probably wasted several hours. He often wondered how he would describe to someone else what he’d felt in the city, and if he would have believed such an account from another. It bore no resemblance to the mythology of the ghost stories that Paleolan children used to scare each other on winter evenings before their parents rounded them up for bed. A more spiritual person might have suggested that it had something to do with the misery of the people who’d died in the Plague, and that the breeze at his back was the spirits’ way of protecting Charlinder from their pain. There may have been an explanation somewhere in that idea for why the sheep was unperturbed, but the heartbeat-like sensation from the ground and the aroma of decay were different questions. All of those aspects of his experience in the city remains were impossible to verify from the outside. They were indistinguishable from all the other voices in his head, and if he brought someone else to the same place to see if they felt the same thing, they probably would report a similar experience, but only after he asked. The experience was too vulnerable to the power of suggestion, like yawning or vomiting. It was probably an expression of Charlinder’s anxiety at standing in the middle of something he’d never seen before, and of looking at the debris left over from something that was built to such great heights and then ground to nothing.

He later gave his sheep the name Queen Anne's Lace and called her Lacey for short. As most of the area's birds had migrated south for the winter, he heard very little sound other than her occasional bleating. After they passed through the city, Charlinder walked for as many hours of the day as possible; so many that oftentimes he dragged himself forward well into the night, fighting to keep his eyes open, until Lacey pushed his knees out from under him with her sturdily bony head.

The problem was not that he wanted to punish himself, or that he particularly enjoyed walking through the snow-dusted woods well after dark. It was that he wanted to waste no time so early in his journey. He and Lacey passed no more city ruins before they reached the Appalachian Mountains, but there were a number of villages on the way. As with the St. Paul community on his first day out, Charlinder passed by them all without stopping to get a better look. The more miles he could cover in a day, the better, and as long as he had a pack stuffed full of pemmican, dried fruit and grain, he wasn't about to dignify temptation with a response.

The mountains posed a new challenge. He was aware that they were fairly low and flat as the world's mountains went, but they still gave him and Lacey a lot of uphill walking, followed by a balancing act on Charlinder's part to keep from stumbling on the way down. They saw more deer in the woods, but also several foxes that didn't cause any problems except for one that scared Lacey. Charlinder was grateful to find an old highway running west over the mountain range, as it was easier to walk over a stretch of asphalt fragments trapped under a net of grasses and low weeds than to tramp through bramble-ridden forest.

However, though the mountains were relatively low, they were still noticeably colder and snowier at the top than on the plains, so Charlinder didn't let Lacey push him into settling down for the night until they reached a valley between the hills. When she sat down and refused to walk any more, he hoisted her up on his shoulders and carried her down the highway to lower ground. Between the weight on his back and the eighty-five-pound dairy animal above, he was carrying an amount approaching his own weight and with a perilously high center of gravity. The arrangement wasn’t sustainable over large parts of the day, but the exertion kept him warm, and if it honed his balance, so much the better.

Chapter Thirteen

Mississippi

Charlinder supposed he must have reached the Appalachians at a narrow spot. To his relief he walked Lacey away from the last ridge after only a few days. In the meantime, he quickly settled into a routine with his ewe. Every morning, Lacey woke Charlinder with a lot of impatient bleating. By the time they departed the mountain range, he had learned to unpack his clay pot, milk Lacey, decant the milk into his leather bottle, secure the bottle to his belt, repack the pot and his blankets, and lift the pack onto his shoulders with such an economy of movement that he hardly noticed the time that elapsed between rolling out of his makeshift bed and continuing up the road with his breakfast and his animal.

Several days after leaving the mountains, another challenge appeared which made him wonder whether he was right to avoid human contact. He and Lacey came upon a river that ran almost perfectly north-south and was too small to have been recorded on his maps but large enough to make him wonder how to cross it. The remains of the highway stopped shortly before the river and looking across, he could see it resume its course on the other side, but there was no bridge in sight. The surface was frozen, so his best option was to walk himself and his sheep across the ice.

Although the ice seemed solid as the ground on either side when he first stepped on it, he wasn’t satisfied. Lacey was safe, as she was smaller and her weight was distributed on four legs. He, with the added weight of his luggage pressing down on only two feet, was not so confident for himself. He let Lacey graze on the meager vegetation in sight while he deliberated over how to approach the ice without falling through.

"C'mere, girl, I've got an idea!" he said at last, leaning over his animal.

Lacey, for her part, was largely unconcerned when Charlinder dropped his pack to the ground, but confused when he grabbed her and arranged her in shearing position. He pulled the shoulder straps around her legs, tipped her back to the ground, and so when she stood up again, she was holding Charlinder's baggage on her back and bleating indignantly.

"Come on, the sooner we get across, the sooner you can take that stupid thing off," he said, pulling her towards the ice. Lacey dug in her hooves at the spot, bleating her anger and refusing to move. "Lacey, do I have to drag you to the other bank? Do you know how risky that would be?"

As tempting as it seemed, he could not take her by the head and tail and push her across the ice, as that would force them to walk so close together he might as well carry the pack himself. He would just have to persuade Lacey to follow him. First, he dropped the lead and stepped onto the edge of the ice. It stayed solid and unmoving under his feet. So far, so good, but Lacey didn't budge. So he started walking, bent almost double in case he heard a crack and had to drop on all fours. His sheep still refused to follow him. He actually dropped to all fours and started crawling towards the opposite bank. The ice was painfully cold under his knees and hands, but his sheep stopped vocalizing and Charlinder soon found her marching grudgingly beside him.

"See, there's a good girl," he praised her before standing up again. He made sure to walk a few feet away from her, but she followed him across the river without another objection.

Although he didn't precisely note the day it happened, Charlinder soon found that he could wake up in the morning without his legs still hurting from the day before. This was not to say he was perfectly comfortable with the arrangement. His lower legs were numb with cold every morning, and whatever side of him had been against the ground was freezing. It was fortunate that Lacey flopped down beside him every night, or else he probably would have frozen to death. That much, at least, would resolve itself when the weather turned warmer. A source of greater anxiety was his diet.

Some days, he was content to consume nothing but Lacey's milk, as it was such a bother to dig some dried fruit or pemmican out of his pack. He was saving the grain for when it wouldn't be such a trial to start a fire. Several days after they crossed that frozen river, however, Charlinder had a dream in which his mother was alive again, but she kept bleating like a sheep, her hands were hooves, and there was always the specter of a swollen pink udder hovering in his view. When he woke up and came to, he decided he needed to eat more solid food.