Charlinder's Walk (27 page)

I can't believe this happened the son of a bitch how could he let this happen she was thirty years old dammit what was that jackass thinking didn't he see this coming eight pregnancies in twelve years is too fucking many for one woman but did Mark ever consider that of course not the Bible-thumping slimeball if there's a God with a Heaven and Hell I hope Mark rots in Hell for all the bullshit he's been spouting all these years.

Marissa died because she was doing exactly what Mark keeps insisting we should all be doing. All six of us women of baby-breeding age, anyway. There are only five of us, now. Is this what Mark wanted? Is this what the rest of those cowards who won't tell him to put a sock in it were waiting for? Were they waiting to see if a woman would die from pregnancy? Sarah says the baby died in utero when Marissa was in early active labor. She reached in with a pair of spoons and dragged the fetal corpse out, but it was too late to stop Marissa from hemorrhaging. It would have been a boy. Sarah says Marissa had a placental abruption. I say her body just couldn't take the strain anymore and gave out. That doesn't need a fucking diagnosis. That needs prevention.

The conflict that Eileen had experienced with Mark was not just about deciding on a healthy rate of population growth, or determining what kind of behavior she and her fellow survivors were allowed in their remaining lifetimes. Eileen had been acutely aware of the precedents her community would set for the following generations, and by the time of Marissa's death, that community already included a number of children. Eileen was not merely contrarian in asking her fellow survivors to control their rate of procreation; she wanted their children to grow up in a culture that allowed room for women to do things with their lives aside from keep house while the men of their community built a new world from scratch. She was asking her community to establish a society for their descendants that made the distinction between life and existence. She saw how easy it could have been allow their descendants to forget about the complex balance of growth and sustainability their ancestors had pursued perhaps too late in their history.

In the following months he longed to ask the people he met along the way: are you living, or merely existing? Were they growing, developing, striving for something bigger? Did they have any interest in learning, searching, asking questions? Or did they see life simply as a way for each generation to do the same thing as the last? Of course he wouldn't ask in so many words, but he wanted to find out more from the people who took him in than what they'd feed him and where they'd let him sleep. He couldn't learn these things from them without talking to them, and that made his language barrier all the more frustrating after that unhinged young man asked him if he was English.

He found, more and more, that he didn't want to deal with other people. He was tired of getting his hopes up and then finding nothing. He ate his solid food more sparingly, he carried Lacey while he marched longer and ignored her entreaties to settle down for the night. It was only a matter of time before she found a way to thwart his efforts, and if she refused to cooperate, there was no getting around the fact that he was still, undeniably and inescapably, dependent on her for his survival. It struck him as incredibly perverse that such a simple-minded, unsophisticated animal was the only thing protecting an individual of the world's supposedly most intelligent and ambitious species from starvation. Regardless, Charlinder eventually let his food supply run out and spent five days living on her milk without a second glance at any village they passed.

He knew he had to stop somewhere soon. There was the matter of his itinerary, first; he appeared to have wandered too far north, as he could see staggering mountains on one side but nothing but confusion on the other, and his continued route west was increasingly unclear. He had to find someone to mark his map, at least. Second, he couldn't go on forever shunning human contact and living on sheep's milk. Unless he could figure out which of the wild plants in the area were edible and stay in one place long enough to hunt some game...no, he couldn't think like that. He'd lose a lot of time if he didn't poison himself first, aside from the matter of cutting himself off from human society. He made an agreement with himself, which he sealed by speaking it out loud to Lacey: he would find some food first, then he would find someone else, in another village, to mark his map, but not trouble them beyond that. Then he'd keep walking.

A likely-looking settlement appeared on the sixth day, which Charlinder decided to mine for foodstuffs. He wouldn't bother anyone there, and they, in return, would not keep him. He would simply find a well-stocked pantry, take what he needed, and move along without anyone seeing him. If someone spotted him, he would simply take his sheep and go. It was a large one as post-Plague communities went; smaller than the Hyatts' settlement but big enough to show some specialization, and set in a clearing between short, dense-growing trees. He and Lacey kept just inside the trees, moving only when there were no villagers in sight. Each time they came to a building larger or blockier than the usual houses, Charlinder snuck up and peeked in the window. The first looked like a place of worship. The second was for textile working. The third was full of row upon row of shelves stuffed with cotton sacks or woven baskets all filled to the brim, and bundles of herbs hanging from the ceiling. He'd found his place if he could get inside.

With Lacey cooperatively in tow, he crept around the building to look for an entrance. On the shorter side facing the next building, there was a door. Keeping all but half his face behind the back wall, he waited until all the nearby villagers were out of his line of vision, then crept up to the door. It was locked, he found, with a bolt placed at the top of the doorway. He had to reach well above his head, but it slid easily open and he beckoned Lacey to follow him inside.

He knew he couldn't give this an innocent name like sampling. This was stealing, but like all the other settlements he hit, this one was far from the brink of starvation. He was taking very, very little compared to what they had, and he was an unusual case, after all. He wasn't a habitual parasite on anyone; he would take a little bit and never bother them again. If he could explain his circumstances to the locals, they would understand, but as he couldn't explain anything to them, he would just have to commit this one transgression. He began untying the cotton sacks to look inside.

"What's in here?" he said to Lacey. "Oh, look, yummy dried fruit, don't we love that!" He took one of the empty bags from his pack and transferred a quantity of the fruit inside. "And how about this one? Rice! I'll take some of that. What's in here? Beans. Hmm, those'll have to soak, and they'll still take a long time to cook, so...if I can carry all this junk soaking wet through the rainy season, I can carry a pot of soaking beans, so let's do it. In here we have...lentils! Absolutely--!" he stopped short when he felt something grab the knife he carried in a scabbard on his belt. Before he could look around, his own knife was poised at his throat and another hand kept his head in place by grasping his hair. There was hot breath speaking angry words into his ear. Charlinder put the lentils back on the shelf. Lacey bleated while another man grabbed her by the neck and got her in his arms. Charlinder's captor steered him around and a third man appeared, who tied Charlinder's hands together with a length of the same fabric used for the food sacks. The knife was taken away from his neck and Charlinder was marched by his elbows out of the building.

"Okay, okay, I'm sorry, I'll put it back, just let us go and don't hurt the sheep," he said. If his captors understood a word of it, they were not moved. As soon as they were outside, a woman ran to the door with a footstool and locked it again. All three of the captors were compact, muscular young men several inches shorter than Charlinder and suffering no lack of strength or determination. There would be no wriggling out of their grip, no taking back his ewe or his knife by force. The captors marched him through the village, where all the residents stood still to look him in the face as he passed. The three men stopped him at a wooden cart hitched to a pair of donkeys. Before he could see anything else, someone passed another strip of cotton fabric in front of his face and blindfolded him.

The captors forced him into the cart and tied his wrists to the top beam. He heard some bleating from Lacey and felt her slide in next to him. She was upside down; her feet must have been tied. Charlinder felt the thumps of some inanimate cargo being loaded on, three pairs of feet jumped in, and they set off for somewhere else.

An occasional bleat was the only thing on that ride that kept him held together. He thought at first in a fit of foolish optimism that they would ride for a few hours, let him and Lacey off in a place with no village in sight, and leave them be. Several hours went by and they kept riding. They eventually untied Lacey, but someone slapped Charlinder with something heavy if he made a sound.

He could see just enough through the blindfold to tell the approximate time of day. When night fell and he was still held blindly in the cart, he knew this would not be a simple drop-off. The captors stopped the cart periodically in the daytime, untied the cloth lashing his wrists to the cart, led him to the ground, pulled his trousers and shorts down and pushed him into a squatting position so he could relieve himself.

"I guess you wouldn't want me to make a mess in your cart, huh?" he said out loud the first time they put him through this exercise. He was smacked again.

In the morning and evening, one of the captors pushed the opening of a goatskin bladder into Charlinder's mouth and fed him some water. He was given nothing else to eat or drink. He could feel his stomach shrinking as the ride stretched on for days.

Lacey could move about the cart at her leisure, and she spent most of her time hunkered down next to him. The captors occasionally pulled her away and did something with her that Charlinder couldn't divine. He only hoped they were taking care of her. It was one thing if they wanted to starve, abuse and humiliate Charlinder, but Lacey was an innocent animal that needed to be fed and milked. While he went hungry and couldn't see or move, something else frightened him even more. There was a definite uphill slant to the ride, and the climate grew steadily colder while no one put any warmer clothes on him.

They stopped the cart on the morning of the fourth day of driving. One of the captors took Charlinder's hands off the top beam and shoved him out, onto ground covered in snow. There was a thump of something heavy landing nearby, then Lacey was dropped to the ground. The captors yelled at Charlinder a little bit, then he heard the cart creak into action and roll away.

The wind roared around his ears, his whole body shivered violently and his feet went numb in the snow while Charlinder struggled out of his bindings. When he freed himself from the cloth tying his hands together, the hands were in brilliant agony from the cold. He untied the blindfold and opened his eyes to see mountains all around. Lacey stood nearby in apparently good condition, his luggage was there and intact, and the captors had thrown Charlinder's knife point-down into the ground next to his pack. There was nothing but snow-covered peaks and mist-covered troughs as far as he could see, while the wind had blown away the cart's tracks.

"Oh, shit," he muttered while opening his pack. "Shit, shit, shit, Lacey, I am stupid, and you have permission to murder me." He returned the knife to its scabbard, put on his sweater and jacket, his wool trousers over the linen ones and put two more pairs of wool socks on his feet under the now-threadbare shoes he’d assembled in Bangladesh and should have replaced in mid-India. He also brought out his top blanket and wrapped it around his head and shoulders. The captors had unsurprisingly not left him with the slightest scrap of food. "I haven't had anything to eat in days, pretty girl, how about you?"

There was only one thing to do about that. He set the clay pot under her belly and went to milk her. Lacey's belly was still reassuringly round, suggesting that she had been fed regularly, but her udder had shrunken down to a flat patch of pink skin like that of a nulliparous yearling ewe, and not a single drop of milk issued from her teats. Lacey only bleated balefully as he tried squeezing her some more. "Come on, girl, you can do this," he muttered, but she couldn't.

Charlinder stared around at the sterile points of rock looming all around as the realization sank in. He was freezing and hungrier than he'd ever been in his life, while stranded in the middle of the harshest mountains in the world, in February, and his sheep could no longer give milk. He had no idea how far it was to the nearest village, or in what direction. He got his hyperventilation under control long enough to let out a roar that echoed through the stabbing wind but did nothing to summon any help.

As much as he felt that this was an appropriate time to panic, Charlinder was far too uncomfortable to do so on the side of the mountain, so he took Lacey and started moving downwards. Perhaps it was because it made sense to think that was the likeliest path to help, or perhaps because he was too shaky from hunger to try climbing upward, but his next plan of action was to make his way into the lowest spot between ridges and follow the valley in a roughly western course until he found help or escaped the Himalayas. He would agree to stop occasionally when they came across some frozen vegetation protruding from the snow that Lacey could eat. Charlinder also used these pauses in their descent to try to massage Lacey's udder into action, but he may as well have been asking strawberries to grow from a pot of sand. They continued the downward hike well into the night, until Charlinder found an outcropping of rock that shielded them from the wind and precipitation, where he pulled Lacey into his blankets and huddled down for the night. Even then, he stayed awake for hours and the next morning wondered how he'd managed to wake up with a pulse.