Charlinder's Walk (18 page)

He walked for several days with no company except for Lacey before he decided he needed to hear from someone other than a sheep. He stopped in a clearing to prepare lunch one day and took out one of Eileen's journals.

While paging through the worn-out old paper, he found an entry that he especially enjoyed. It began, as so many of Eileen's personal writings did, with a fight with Mark.

The great irony in the elusive beast of Being Right is that in order to win this status, one must put one's ego in the backseat. This is a tall order for a pursuit whose ultimate goal is to boost the ego, but a necessary step. The mother of Being Right is Getting it Right, and many people--not naming names, but it's obvious--would like to skip over the mother and head straight to the finished product, but it's a cheap victory if they manage. Achieving the status of Getting it Right means subordinating one's ego to the cruel slavedriver of reality. It means focusing on the facts, which exist independently of anyone's agenda. It means applying objective, multilateral, externally accountable logic, which means allowing oneself to be the meek underling of logic rather than trying to force the other way around. It means preparing for the possibility that one may eventually be proven wrong, because otherwise one will inevitably put the cart before the horse and therefore lock oneself out of a measurable process of identifying the correct answer. It means taking the risk of being wrong; you choose a position, be able to defend why it works for you, and stick with it, but you also need to know when to give it up. Guessing a correct answer doesn't mean anything if it was hedged between guesses at every other possible solution available to the imagination.

Using God as your answer is the ultimate hedge. The first division runs between: was something the work of God, or not? If it was, then Bob's your uncle, but if it wasn't, then the debate is nowhere near done. A much more specific answer, with all the leaks plugged and ends tied, must be found before the fun is over. And as long as some holes remain unfilled, God will always hold a place as the default answer. Then at the end, even after every blank is filled and every variable explained, you still hear the philosophizing about how God made all that happen, which makes Our Lord and Savior also the Great Face-Saver. There is no burden of proof on choosing God as an answer in the first place, no evidence required for defending Him as your position, and no way to rule Him out of the equation in the end. He is the quickest and easiest way to be
right
at the beginning, without carrying the risk of ever being proven wrong. As long as you can create a could/should/would, there's no need to find an is/does/did. I guess the thing that makes me a godless heathen is that I'm not satisfied with a could/should/would; they're always so unreliable. Is/does/did is there no matter what, if you know where to find it.

After days of feeling rattled by the conversation with Susan, it was such a relief to find that Eileen’s words on paper were still reassuring. A more sensible person would, perhaps, be turned off by her endless annoyance, but something Charlinder always admired about Eileen was that she had different ideas of what it meant to be sensible. She was not around for him to ask her opinion, but surely, she would have approved of his journey, and that was good enough.

Chapter Fifteen

Hyatts

While the conflicts in his own head were easy enough to manage, the outside world was another matter. Much like his and Eileen's sacred facts, the weather did not care what he or anyone else wanted. They were in the madness of springtime and far north of his native latitude. He came eventually to a mountain range that was marked on his map, but a bunch of pointy marks on a sheet of parchment could never prepare him for the Rockies.

There was no way around the mountains, so he led his ewe forward and proceeded, imagining that he would remember the Rockies as majestically beautiful once he was in Asia. As spring came closer to summer, some days were so sunny he could take his hat off and his dark curly hair trapped the heat from the sun. Then it would be all freezing rain or sleet the next day, or he would ascend a ridge and encounter frightening cold and snow again. April stumbled into May, and Charlinder kept telling himself he didn't need to shear Lacey, not yet, as she needed her insulation when they climbed those mountains. His excuses were soon to run out, as the sunny days in the valleys were now just as hot as at his home, and on those days she showed the strain from the heat.

The mountains were not as empty of human population as he may have pictured them; he normally spotted if not visited a village in every big valley. There came a point when he found valleys as usual but no settlements for a week. At the end of that week, he found what had to be the largest settlement he'd ever seen. It stood out like a post-Plague city between the mountains and forests, and Charlinder, being hungry for solid food and human conversation, ventured in.

As he began to walk inside rather than around their settlement, his first impression of the people who saw him was that they were not curious about him. They didn't bother with the shameless staring he'd received at the first village along the Mississippi River; they went straight to the apprehension from when David had invited Charlinder to his house. This was a curiously mixed village; he saw mostly white faces looking at him, with the occasional mixed-black person here and there. The odd part was he didn't see any lighter brown faces like most of his neighbors at home, or in most of the communities he’d seen up to that point. Before he and Lacey had gone far enough to hear a word of welcome from anyone, two very large and mean-looking white men flanked him.

"You'll need to come with us, sir."

As he was comparatively unarmed, alone and travel-worn, he decided not to complicate matters with a struggle. They led him to a building in what appeared to be the middle of the town, built from wooden planks with uniformly placed windows. There was a large wooden desk at the back and center of the room, occupied by a man who looked like he owned the air they were breathing. He was smaller than Charlinder, not much older, delicately pale, even frail-looking, but entirely entitled. He looked up with interest at the two thugs--Charlinder supposed they were considered guards--when they led him and Lacey inside.

"What's this?" asked the man at the desk, putting down his quill.

"I didn't do anything wrong," said Charlinder at once.

"You haven’t been accused," he said. "Simply tell us who you are, and what you're doing here."

"I'm no one in particular."

"Then what is your name, and where are you from?"

"My name's Charlinder, and I'm from a village I'm sure you've never heard of in a place I'm sure you've never seen."

"Then tell us where it is," said the entitled man, in a slightly threatening tone.

"On the Paleola River, on the eastern side of the American territory."

Now the man looked impressed. "Yes, I know where the Paleola River is, so you're a very long way from home. How did you get here?"

"I've been walking for months."

"Interesting. Who else from your area is here?"

"No one, it's just me and this sheep."

"You've traveled this far all alone? What are you doing here?"

"I'm on my way to somewhere else, just passing through. I've never heard of your village before, in case you thought this was my intended destination and I was up to some mischief." Although he wasn't sure what else he could have said in its place, the words sounded ridiculous as soon as they were out of his mouth. There could only be one logical conclusion to "passing through," and what he'd seen of this settlement did not suggest an enthusiasm for hospitality. A more knowing expression came over the entitled man's face, though he didn't address that issue just yet.

"In your village back on the East Coast, what kind of work did you do? Any position you held in your community?"

"I was the village schoolteacher. Have you ever taught school, sir?"

"I'm afraid I've been too busy managing the affairs of my town, but that's an unusual line of work you've taken. Where is this place you're headed?"

"It's not on this continent," said Charlinder.

"You can answer Mr. Hyatt's question better than that," said one of the thugs.

"No, it's fine," assured the man apparently called Mr. Hyatt. "I trust your interest isn't with us. But by 'passing through,' I suppose you'd like to have a place to sleep for a day or two, and something to eat?"

"That'd be really nice. If you've got no room at the inn, though, it's fine, I've been sleeping on the ground for the better part of the last several months, so I'll just move along..."

"I haven't heard the expression 'no room at the inn' for years," said Mr. Hyatt curiously. "Let me see that sheep," he said, beckoning towards Lacey.

Before Charlinder could ask exactly what "see that sheep" implied, the thug on his right steered Lacey up to Mr. Hyatt's desk. "I'll warn you, there probably isn't much meat on her," Charlinder said nervously. "She's a dairy and wool animal, and she's a special breed that keeps lactating on demand without further lambing, but..."

"No, we're not going to slaughter her," said Mr. Hyatt, finished with his inspection of Lacey's wool growth. "I have no problem with you 'passing through' our town, but we'll need some collateral. You can shear your sheep, leave the fleece with my staff, and we'll find a place for you to stay until you're ready to move on. When you're about to leave, we'll give your share of the fleece back to you."

"How much is 'my share'?"

"That will depend on how long you stay. We certainly have 'room at the inn,' but it doesn't come for free."

Charlinder thought it over for a moment. He looked down at Lacey. "Well, I
was
sort of wondering what to do with all that wool on you."

He was escorted outside by the two thugs and Mr. Hyatt, whose given name turned out to be Jansen. They showed him to a courtyard near the building and let him get his shears out. Jansen Hyatt and his guards, as well as a small crowd that gathered, stayed to watch Charlinder shear Lacey. He wondered at first if this community had sheep of its own, until he noticed that the crowd, especially the children, were looking more at him than at what he was doing.

The reason for Charlinder's ability to draw attention was yet to be revealed. After Lacey was shorn, one of the thugs scooped up the fleece and carried it off somewhere else. Jansen dismissed the other one and led Charlinder to a friend's house. The friend and her husband agreed to house Charlinder and shelter Lacey for as long as he needed to stay while passing through and, to their credit, Vilma and Peter did not look at him like a mutant animal. Lacey was kept generously tethered to a tree on their property so she could eat the grass but not the garden plants.

Vilma brought her two youngest children along to show Charlinder around the town. There was the windmill, the tannery, the courthouse and prison, the graveyard behind the church, the market, the butcher shop, and so on. Charlinder wanted to be impressed, but after his interrogation the positive impressions were slow to come. Now that he was out with Vilma, the locals were more inclined to come and introduce themselves, but here he noticed a striking contrast. The white neighbors had no trouble getting acquainted with Charlinder and stopping to chat with Vilma and coo over the two children with them. They all looked like models of excellent health, like descendants of Plague survivors. The mixed-black neighbors were as reticent as the others were garrulous. They stopped to ask about him, and though they seemed curious they didn’t stay long to talk. They also appeared a much less healthy bunch of people than their white neighbors; most walked with a distinct limp, some were wall-eyed, and one or two had to monitor the corners of their mouths to keep the spittle inside, though by their speech they seemed perfectly intelligent.

At her house, Vilma refused to let Charlinder help her cook. The most he was allowed to do was help with her babies, who were young enough to be cute but old enough to make chaos. As he was having an unknown portion of Lacey's fleece taken in exchange for her hospitality, Vilma didn’t want to make him work. Her sister, Ella, joined her with their knitting in the back garden and asked Charlinder to tell her about his job as a teacher to young children. He held Vilma’s one-year-old son in one arm and let the baby poke at his hair while he told Vilma and Ella about his work.

"Then I'm sure you'll make a very good father some day," said Vilma.

"No, I won't," Charlinder replied. He figured that if his hostess was going to be so generous, then he could be honest. "Men in my village raise their sisters' kids, and since I’m an only child, I won’t be a family man."

Vilma and Ella both looked stunned. "So...if the men don't become fathers," Vilma began, "who do their sisters have their children with?"

He shrugged his shoulders while disengaging the baby's hand. "Whatever guys they want. Preferably not related to them within a few generations, but no one's really keeping track."

"So, what happens, then?" asked Vilma. "Does everyone just go around sleeping with anyone they want?"

"Yeah, pretty much."

Vilma and Ella looked at each other. Vilma threw a glance at Charlinder, then in the other direction. "There's actually something to be said for that," she said to her sister. "Don't tell Jansen we had this conversation, okay?" she requested of him.

"Wouldn't dream of it," he promised. "How did you become friends with that guy, anyhow?"

"Our dad was his dad's best friend, our families spent a lot of time together, and Ella and I used to play with him when he was little, which his mother really liked. He trusts us, and we can ask him for a favor here and there."