One day of walking became two as they reached the bottom of the depression. There Charlinder found the air marginally less freezing but the landscape perpetually inhospitable. There was no sign of human presence in sight, while he continued to go hungry.
"What am I supposed to do about this, Lacey?" he rasped out loud while trudging over an interminable stretch of arid terrain. "If you've stopped lactating, I can't use you for food anymore, but I don't have anything else out here. I'll have to breed you again, but it would be months before you even deliver the lamb. We'd have to find someone with a ram to service you, anyway, and I don't see anyone. Do you see anyone, pretty girl? How am I supposed to get us out of this?"
Lacey refused to keep marching that night and so forced Charlinder to attempt sleep again because he was too weak to carry her. He didn't ever really fall asleep that time. Too cold to relax and too exhausted to stay alert, he sank into a limbo of nightmarish images playing through his head without the restfulness of sleep. He rose with the sun and kept walking more out of reflex than reasoning. He was now so tired his senses played tricks on him. Many times that day he whirled around at a flash in his peripheral vision or a buzz in his ear, determined that there was another person nearby. Only Lacey's admonishing bleat reminded him of where he was and what direction they were headed. He grew faint twice that day; he didn't lose consciousness but became so dizzy he dropped to his knees, where the frozen rocks stung through those pathetic two layers of fabric. By that point it was purely fear that kept him moving at all. The gnawing at his stomach was surpassed by the alarm sounding in his head. At home, he'd heard the expression "burning the candle at both ends," but he felt like he was outwardly melting the candle, flame or none, and there would soon be nothing left to hold his shape. He was suffering a manifold deterioration in the worst conditions for any physical weakness. He needed a dry and relatively warm place to sleep, but if not that, then at least something sturdier to protect his feet, and a stronger layer of insulation on his body. He needed something to eat that he could actually digest. Every hour that he walked, he ignored the knowledge of what had to be done. He continued to suffer through his increasingly untenable existence rather than resolve the pointless procession of "what if" and "should" through his head over the way out of the trap he had set for himself.
He spent another sleepless night with the reality hammering at his skull. The stalling tactic of "wait and see" was a luxury he could no longer afford. Lacey became increasingly malnourished on the area's inadequate vegetation, while Charlinder lost weight and his already meager cold tolerance at the same time. There was no "proper" solution to his predicament, no wise hand guiding him through the fog to tell him he could do this, he could find a way that he could live with. He had been stupid, and shortsighted, and had brought this ordeal upon himself, and living through it would have to be his punishment.
The decision was made when the sun rose, Lacey roused herself from her slumber, and Charlinder found he couldn't walk normally. There was nothing wrong with his legs, but his strength was so sapped that he couldn't stand up for very long. He couldn't put it off any longer. Lacey went padding around and eating some pathetic excuse for grass, while Charlinder began to weep. He wasn't sure he hadn't already waited too long to save his own life, and wasn't sure he'd like it even if he lived. "Lacey, come here," he sobbed from his spot sitting on the ground. Queen Anne's Lace looked up, saw him beckoning to her, and slowly trotted over. Her simple response only made him cry even harder. She let him wrap his arms around her neck and shoulders, and soon settled down to rest her front half on his lap.
Warming his hands in her wool, he willed himself under control. "You're a much better beast than I am, Lacey," he said. The sheep looked up at his face, and Charlinder cradled her head in his hand to keep her eyes facing up. "You won't remember that, but I always will." He took the knife out of its scabbard in his belt and poised the blade at her neck. He wouldn't say, "I'm sorry." There was no way to apologize to her for this. He only kept her head in the same place, so she was looking him in the eye when he slit her throat.
She made a quick choking sound and went limp. Charlinder jumped out from under her, the knife still in hand. He wanted to hold her while she died, but instead he moved farther away. He could be her comforter, or her slaughterer, but not both. He would not drop the knife into the snow, or look away as if to separate himself from the deed he'd done. He stood fixed on the spot, keeping his eyes open and focused to watch Lacey's blood melt the snow downhill.
Soon he had her skinned and cleaned. He cut the meat into strips, ate some right away, and left the rest arranged on the rocks to freeze-dry. He strung her hide by the leg-corners to the trunks of four lowlying shrubs to stretch and dry it. He stripped all the flesh off her long bones and saved them for later use. He cut some of her small intestine into sinew and left the rest of her internal organs out for other predators. He would eat enough of her to get his strength back while he dealt with her skin, then carry the rest off when it was dry and didn't weigh as much. In the meantime, he couldn't get the necessary materials for a fire. He half-expected to gag or vomit from eating her flesh, but his body refused to respond except by recovering its strength. There wasn't even very much meat on her; she'd been a middle-aged, underfed, overworked ewe bred for everything except her ratio of muscle to bone. It was all he had for as long as he was caught in the uninhabited mountains. He walked on the hide to keep it supple in the cold. He fell asleep that night long enough to dream that it was all a big misunderstanding, that Lacey was alive and whole and they could just walk through some trees to a warm and well-adjusted village where he could talk naturally with everyone.
The hide was nowhere near ready for use as a sheepskin the next day, but Charlinder was ready to go. He cut the back legs off the skin and sewed them into shoes with the wool inside. He cut a hole in the middle of the remaining skin for his head, sewed the sides together and wore it as a vest under his jacket. The remaining meat and usable bones went into his pack and he continued walking approximately west.
Without the deterioration of his body to hinder him or a traveling companion to demand rest, Charlinder could keep walking for longer hours than before, and he did. He kept pushing himself well into the night and woke up with luggage fully packed, in a crag he didn't remember having chosen. Two days after he picked up again, he saw where the mountains gave way to foothills the following morning, and spent much of the day in a generally downhill hike. In the early evening, he spotted thin trails of gray smoke rising into the sky, which soon led him to find a miniature patchwork of fields dotted with houses, fires and carts in the valley. He continued towards this village until long after nightfall, stopping to sleep only because he lost his sense of direction and couldn’t read the compass in the dark.
He stumbled into the village the following afternoon. There was nothing on the scale of the food depot where he'd been caught. There were only people tending their fields, carrying bundles between houses, and small children getting underfoot. A little boy looked at Charlinder and yelled to his mother. Several more villagers looked over at him. Charlinder took one more step forward and collapsed to his knees, held upright by the bulk of his pack while the world turned to dark and quiet. He felt some hands hoist him up while he drifted into blankness.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Afghanistan
It was warm, tight and scratchy, wherever he was. He could freely move only his head while the rest of him was compressed under something soft and heavy. Charlinder opened his eyes to find a roof of wooden rafters and stone shingles ahead. The layers compressing his body were a straw mattress below and a prodigious set of wool and other animal-down blankets on top. Around the room was a stone hearth, another, larger straw bed, and a simple wooden set of table and chairs. He tried to rise from the bed, but partway up decided otherwise. He was naked except for his shorts and a lot of crude linen bandages applied to his legs and feet, under which the skin felt bruised and raw.
The next thing he saw made him think for a second that he was either dreaming or hallucinating again: a woman rushed to his side and pushed him back under the covers, and for a moment, before his vision was focused, Charlinder thought she was his mother.
A closer look showed him otherwise; the woman bore a vague resemblance to Lydia, with shiny black hair falling in thick waves and a similar skin color, but the waves were too loose and she had green eyes, not brown. She'd brought a bowl of some bean-laden stew and quickly started spooning it into his mouth, talking to him in a soothing voice and again in a perfectly alien language. He let her feed him at first, while he thought through the last things he remembered: he slaughtered Lacey and reduced her to parts, crossed the western edge of the mountains, and collapsed in a village. Someone was about to carry him away when he lost consciousness. Whoever it was must have brought him inside, putting him in the care of the family who lived here. Someone must have found frostbite on his legs, done what they could on it, and otherwise let him sleep. He supposed his clothes were hanging outside to dry.
He tried to sit up in bed, intending to take the spoon and feed himself, but his hostess was having none of that; she pushed him down again with a few stern words and merely let him hold the spoon under her hand while she continued to feed him. He would press his case later.
Other members of the family came in later and saw that Charlinder was awake, so he got his clothes back, cleaned of sheep blood and dry. An older woman in the family changed his bandages, and he had to admit the frostbite had made an ugly picture of his skin underneath, but she let him out of bed.
The family consisted of the first, younger woman and her husband, their four children from early teens to around eight years old, and an older couple who looked like they could be the husband's parents.
Here were the people he'd been trying to find since he was dropped off on the mountain, and Charlinder could only think of getting away from them. He was warm, well-fed and cared for, not allowed to do any work but never made to feel like a burden, and he counted the hours until he would be allowed to leave. He couldn't afford to offend them, as he needed to take food from them or someone in the village, but he kept wondering when they would let him go. They made him eat twice as much as anyone else at every meal, and it only made him feel terrible. The grandmother of the family was a very capable medic and seemed pleased to have a patient who was compliant enough to sit through her attentions and keep his bandages on, but why she would waste her talents on him was beyond his comprehension.
He showed the map to the adults on his third day with them. The grandmother marked their location and showed a spot that was believable, given his previous trajectory, but also much farther north than he'd planned to be after crossing India. It sat on the western edge of the territory labeled Afghanistan. Upon a closer look, it occurred to him that as long as he didn't end up hopelessly off-course, this more northerly latitude would involve far fewer miles than the southern coastal route he'd had in mind.
He asked to go on the fifth day, and the family said goodbye. The grandmother attempted to give him some instructions on caring for his frostbite wounds, but that much was healing. They even provided him with much of the same kind of food he'd attempted to steal, except no beans. Then he was off.
There was no other way to describe what the family had done: they had taken care of him. Those very generous, decent (they deserved better than to be called "nice") people had looked after him just like their own child, and in his helplessness had never reminded him that he was vulnerable. That feeling of safety was so alien to him now, so ill-fitting, because the last place where he’d known that no matter how broken and tired he was, that nothing would happen to him, had been the cabin with Roy where he slept on his mother’s old bed.
Only after he left the family’s care did he think back to those old days. He thought of a time when he was seven years old, and he asked his mother why she was teaching him to knit when all the other little boys were learning no such thing.
"Taylor's mom says you're only teaching me because you don't want to take care of me anymore," he said one night in their cabin as they waited for bedtime. Lydia propped herself up on her elbow next to him on her bed.
"Well, Mariah didn't ask
me
about that, but I know
you’ll
listen. I'm sure she would tell me it's because I don't have a daughter to start doing textiles for both of you, and I guess she's right about that. But what she doesn't understand is that even if I also had a girl, I'd still be teaching you the same things," Lydia explained to him.
"Really?" he asked. "How come?"
"There are two reasons. The first is that even if you had a sister, she might not always be around to look after you. The second is that I want you," she began tickling him, "to have lots of things," she continued while he giggled and squirmed around her fingers on his sides, "that you're good at." She stopped tickling him and let him rest. "And you'll never know how much you're good at if you don't get a chance to learn."
"Am I good at making scarves?"
"Well, you've been doing it for a month so far, and you've already stopped increasing at the ends of your rows, so, yes, I'd say you're turning out to be very good at it."
"So if you had a girl, would Uncle also teach her how to cut wood and shoot a bow and arrow?"
"When she was big and strong enough to do it, then, yes, he would also teach her. Because Uncle agrees with me that our kids should be able to make lots of things with their hands. Now, if Mariah thinks I don't want to be counting stitches on your socks when you're twenty, then she's right about that. But," she paused, "just because you’re going to make your own clothes, doesn't mean I'm not taking care of you anymore."