Forever the Road (A Rucksack Universe Fantasy Novel) (9 page)

The countries he had visited were also well represented. Ireland alone had twenty pins stuck in and around New Galway and the surrounding country.
Maybe a sign pointed them here,
he thought, remembering the red hair and the white sign of a long-ago memory.

He looked west, across the Atlantic Ocean and the North American continent, until he stopped at Idaho. Other than a couple of pins stuck in Boise, the state was empty. Jay traced the green shape of the state with his finger.
The map is not the world,
he thought. Still, for a moment he expected to see the river there again, or smell freshly sawed cedar in his dad’s workshop, or hear the excitement in his mom’s voice as she read from another guidebook.

Instead, he remembered the door opening, the rain pouring in sheets behind the man walking in.

Jay lowered his hand. “Maps are dreams, hopes, and memories,” he said to himself.

Beneath the frame a clear, covered tray held pins. Jay stuck one in Idaho and turned away before the memories could come back.

On the pub’s corner stage, ten people sat in a circle, playing music and singing. The musicians too were local and foreign, though Indian and Celtic sounds and rhythms dominated. People clapped hands, tapped feet, and whooped as a fiddle and a sarinda dueled, their respective players bowing furiously. Other people called out tunes, and the musicians acknowledged each request with a nod.

Jay trudged to the bar, finally resting his elbows on the polished mahogany. The only person behind the bar was Jade, and she moved so quickly that Jay could hardly keep his eyes on her. He watched her as best he could, fascinated with how regally and gracefully she moved. No glass slipped from her hands. No miscounted change dropped to the bar. No patron even had to repeat a drink order. And Jade never stopped moving. Her every motion was efficient to the point of ruthless yet elegant as a bird in flight.

Now and again, she seemed to blur like a skip, a bad spot in her motion that Jay couldn’t follow. Jay chalked it up to needing a beer. She was busy at the other end of the bar, mixing five drinks and pulling a pint of Deep’s Special Lager. She bent over to get something from a low shelf.
No rush then,
Jay thought.
I’ll just… enjoy the view.

And then she was there in front of him. Looking irritated.

Jay realized he was a few seconds behind events. “Huh?”

Jade’s hand seemed to twitch toward something underneath the bar, but she stopped herself and grinned razors. “I said he’s over there. With your pint.”

“What? No… Who?”

The irritated look sharpened in her blue-and-gold eyes. “Let me know when you unpack your brain, backpack boy,” she said. “Who do you think?”

Then she was gone, a blur behind the bar again.

At a table in the middle of the floor, Faddah Rucksack lifted his pint to Jay and beckoned to the empty chair behind a brimming stout.

“You look rested,” Rucksack said. “Or at least a little less like hell. Now it’s time to be restored.”

Jay set his daypack under the table as he sat down. He tucked a chair leg through one of the straps and ignored the endless rustle, which was audible over the talking and the music. “I could do with a drink. Thank you.”

“After the day you’ve had, you’ve earned a pint. Welcome to India, my lad!” The men clinked glasses and drank deeply.

Rucksack set his glass on the table. “It’s been quite a path for you,” he said. “I think we have a bit in common, Jay o’ the road. Could just about figure we were destined to meet. You do like I do. We follow the path we see and let it take us where it’s going. Destiny.”

“Never was one for destiny,” Jay replied. “I choose what I want to do, where I want to go. Then I go there. I make my own way.”

“So you just up and came to India.”

“Sure. Time for a change. Thought I’d get to know one of the world’s most amazing countries. Figured I could see the eclipse too before I skip out of here. It’s supposed to be a rare one. Besides, after Tibet I could do with some warmer weather and thicker air.”

“I can imagine. But I envy you too. I miss Tibet. I know the dirt o’ those mountains anywhere, and that stuff’s ground itself into you from your skin to your soul to the fibers and heart o’ your backpack.”

“You’ve been to Tibet?”

“I have. As well as Bhutan, northern India, Kashmir and Pakistan. From the Hindu Kush to Assam, I know this country like the back o’ my right hand.”

“And the back of your left hand?”

Rucksack grinned. “You’re smarter than she took you for. The back o’ my left hand, that’d be Ireland.”

Jay stared at the black leather glove. The left hand was smaller than the right. “What happened to your left hand?”

“Ah, you wouldn’t want to hear about that. It’s a gruesome tale involving an innovative effort to come up with the world’s first piecrust flattener machine. But the way o’ it is that I’m from the world’s wisest seats o’ wisdom, my lad. I’m born of India and the Himalaya—not necessarily o’ the country, just the mountains themselves, and the land, the water, and the air. I’m Himalayan by birth, Irish by fortune, and myself by choice.”

“How’d you wind up in Ireland?”

“That’s a boring story o’ youth and a family that had to flee for their lives. Nothing that would interest you. You must be tired, you devil, and I’ve peppered you enough. Look at this place!” Rucksack swept his arms wide. People sang, danced, played music. Every table was talk, jokes, stories. But Jay’s eyes kept going to Jade behind her bar.

“Aye,” Rucksack said. “She’s something. More than you or even I know.”

“Maybe I’ll find out.”

“Maybe. Few people are more guarded than a Jake or a Jade, lad. Let that stay right in your mind.”

“What does that mean?”

“All you need to know.”

“And what are you, then?”

“I am the world’s only Himalayan-Irish sage. Now drink up and enjoy.”

The stout warmed something in Jay. Rucksack was evasive and full of riddles, but Jay couldn’t help but like him. “I’ve been traveling for five years,” Jay said. “Lots of stamps in that passport. I’ve even added pages. The last two years I’ve been in Asia.”

“Yet this is your first time in India.”

“It’s a big world. I wanted to see more of it first. Asia... I guess you could say I wanted to save the best for last.”

Rucksack eyed Jay over a swig of stout. “At least you’re here now. India must seem pretty small beer to a well-worlded lad such as you though.”

Jay shook his head. “On the contrary. It’s obviously an eventful place, and I haven’t even been here twenty-four hours. The scariest part, though, was the gang of cockroaches in the loo.”

“How are the roaches?” Rucksack asked.

“I didn’t stay long enough to find out how much they charge for protection money.”

“There’s only one thing for those buggers.”

“Don’t they say roaches would survive the end of the world?”

“They do. Trouble is,
they
know nothing about Indian booze. Get yourself a bottle o’ Ram Rum or some o’ that other swill Jade keeps on the bottom shelf. Pour it all over the loo. Corners o’ the walls, around and in the shower drain, under the sink, everywhere. Bastards won’t bother you again.”

“Why? Does it get them drunk?”

“Melts their legs off. Roach can’t menace if it can’t walk.”

“Not exactly a nonviolent approach to one of our fellow creatures, eh, Rucksack?”

“Please. I have too much to do to muck about with being holy.”

They laughed. Jay sat back in his chair, looking around the crowded pub.
He’s fascinating,
Jay thought,
and he’s the best conversation I’ve had in ages.
He relaxed. Even the noise in the daypack faded from his mind.

Jay nodded toward the musicians. “I’ve never seen anything like this place,” he said. “You could’ve bet me a year’s travel money, and there’s no way I’d figure that you could play Indian and Irish music on the same stage.”

Rucksack nodded. “The world never ceases to amaze me with how it brings things together. Your fiddler there is playing a mean up-tempo riff on the song o’ me heart, ‘The Little Beggarman.’”

“And the Indian player?”

“He’s playing a sarinda, which in a way is like an Indian take on a fiddle. Or you could say the Irish fiddle is a take on the Indian sarinda. Someone here is probably arguing the finer points.”

“What song is he playing?”

“‘Bole Chudiyan,’” Rucksack said. “Wonderful hit tune. The title translates as ‘My Bangles Spoke.’”

“I’d heard about the interesting songs from the Bollywood films here, but I’ve never actually heard any.”

“They could teach the world a great deal about what to call things. There’s also ‘Chand Mera Dil Chandni Ho Tum,’ or ‘The Moon is My Heart, You are the Moonlight,’ and one o’ my favorites, ‘Mera Man Tera Pyasa,’ or ‘My Mind is Thirsty for You.’”

Jay drank half his remaining pint. “Nothing like an Indian love story, from what I hear.”

“Where you hear that?”

“
India Through the Third Eye
,” Jay said. “Big section on Bollywood movies. ‘Love transforms,’ it says. It transforms so much, a scene can go from the middle of a city like Agamuskara to a man and woman singing in a flower field in Kashmir or dancing around each other with the erotic temples of Khajuraho in the background. The movies are larger than life because India is larger than life. If they seem over the top, it’s because they are trying to get at the bigness of the feelings and morals beyond what we normally deal with, what we share and experience in our day-to-day lives.”

“Maybe we should write a song,” Rucksack said.

Jay smiled. “You’re on. How many drinks do you think it takes to write a hit Bollywood song?”

Rucksack laughed. “At least two an hour till it’s done. That would give you a helluva tale you’d be dying to tell the folks back home.”

Jay’s face darkened. “There are no folks back home.”

Rucksack’s pint arm froze halfway to his mouth. “I’m sorry, Jay.”

Jay shrugged and looked toward the stage.

Rucksack set down his glass. “I lost my mum and dad,” he said, clenching and unclenching his gloved left hand. “Long time ago, but sometimes it still hurts like it just happened.”

Jay nodded and looked back at Rucksack. “Do you think Jigme will lose his mum?”

In the silence between Rucksack opening his mouth and actually speaking, the train of Rucksack’s thoughts leaped to another track. “I don’t know. I’ll keep doing what I can, if the doctors can’t do anything else for her. But at this point they have a better shot at healing her than I do. Her malady… there was a time where I could have set her right, just about no matter what it was.” He flexed his left hand. “But not so much these days.”

Jay let the hyperbole pass him by. “These doctors are good ones, though, right?”

“The best in the city.” Rucksack drained his pint. “I have to admit, when I first saw you I thought you might be another Annoyican wanker, parading his Americanness and expecting the world to part and smooth before you. I understood you being mad about your pack being stolen, but you know as well as I do that for a relatively well-to-do foreigner such as yourself, the theft meant an inconvenient day while you replaced your belongings, especially since the crown jewels weren’t in there. No trouble at all for you, really.”

“What changed your mind?” Jay asked, setting down his emptied glass.

“When you took her to the hospital.”

“He what?”

The men looked up. Jade stood over them, holding two pints on a tray.

“The lad from earlier, Jigme, who stole Jay’s pack,” Rucksack said. “We visited his mum, Asha. I did what I could for her.”

“Are you a doctor too, then?” Jade asked

“I’m just a man who does what needs doing,” Rucksack replied. “But in this instance I couldn’t do much. Asha was thin and feverish as could be, and Jigme explained they couldn’t afford any doctors or medicines. Jay stared long at her. Next thing I knew, Jay had arranged transport for Asha and helped her get settled in at the hospital. He said he’d pay for everything.”

A red, hot flush crept down Jay’s cheeks. “It was the right thing to do, that’s all.”

Jade locked her eyes on Jay’s. “There may be something to you after all, backpack boy,” she said, setting down the pints and going back to the bar.

“You didn’t have to tell her,” Jay said.

Rucksack smiled. “You’re going to fit in well here.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Some countries focus on the mind, the voice, or the appetite. But India is a country o’ the heart. It’s beautiful and bewildering. As long as I’ve been in and out o’ the place, I’ve yet to understand it. Indians aren’t perfect. They’re no better, no worse than anyone else. But they lead with their hearts. You can tell at a glance. The movies. The dreams. The look in the eye o’ people as they walk down the street. And I can tell it about you too. You’ve got years o’ travel on you and hardship from before you ever put on a pack. You’re armored in all the thick skin, old scars, and dusty layers that entails.” Rucksack raised his brimming pint. “But beneath all that, you’ve got heart.”