After placing the bag back in the pouch, Gentiola twisted the cord around her wrists so the pouch hovered between her forearms. She lifted her hands to Charlinder's head, where she pressed her palms to his temples and closed her eyes. She slowly drew her hands down, allowing the cord to relax around his neck. Though she didn't make a sound, Charlinder got the same sensation from the ritual as when she'd erased the language barrier between them. Her hands slid over his neck, his shoulders, and his chest, finally leaving the hemp pouch to rest in front of his shirt.
He waited for her to open her eyes and speak first.
"It's yours now," she said after a pause. "I've charmed both the pouch and herbs so no one else can touch them without your invitation. Even I can't take them from you now."
"This is really amazing," said Charlinder. "I'd say 'thank you,' but I'm not sure that's enough."
"You're welcome," Gentiola responded. "I'll stock you up on food tonight, and then I suppose you'll want to leave in the morning."
"Yes, I do."
She loaded him up with food for his journey that night. She stuffed his pack with grain, dried fruits and vegetables, cheese and nuts from her pantry. Then they sat in front of the fire and held each other until they couldn't stay awake anymore.
Part 5: Return
Chapter Thirty-Two
Calais and Dover
Charlinder left the curtains wide open on the bedroom window that night. When the sun rose, the first waves of light penetrated the room and roused him from sleep. He didn't bother taking his time this morning; he dressed, took his luggage, and helped himself to a quick breakfast before he went to her room.
It was a warmer season in her room than in the kitchen, and Charlinder couldn't get over how perfect she looked, bare-shouldered, her arms spread out, her head lain to one side, her hair rippling over the pillow and sheets. He didn't make a sound as he knelt next to her bed and watched her sleep. She took seconds to stir.
"I didn’t expect you," she said through a yawn, "to wake me up before you left."
"I had to come in and say thank you," he said. "Thank you for all you’ve done for me, thank you for letting me rest at your house, and thank you for telling me your story."
"You are very welcome, darling," she said. "Thank you for listening."
"I wish I could stay longer and listen to you more," he said. "But I do have a home to get back to."
"I have to say goodbye to you now," she murmured. "It's not fair that I get so little time with you."
"It's not fair to me, either," said Charlinder. "So I won't think of it as goodbye so much as...I'm glad I met you." He slid his hands under her back and kissed her, deeply, hungrily, savoring every movement of her lips under his mouth and her hands around his head and neck. She broke contact first; he buried his nose into the nape of her neck and breathed in her scent for the last time. He pulled away and looked her in the face, knowing that he would never again peer into those exquisite eyes.
"Go home, Char," she whispered. "Tell your friends what I did."
"I'll never forget you," he said.
"I know," she replied in a voice of nothing but sadness.
The luggage felt unaccountably heavy on his back as he left through the front door. The chickens went on pecking in the dirt as usual. The rabbits glanced at him before going back to nibbling on their greens. The garden was as beautiful a landscape as he'd seen on his journey; the scent of orange blossoms reproached him.
The following days were at once easier than most of his trip and the most difficult of all. The closest comparison he could make was with the very beginning of the journey. This time he was walking in dizzyingly hot rather than numbingly cold weather, he was well-practiced in the crafts of cooking on the go and sleeping outdoors, he was accustomed to being away from the people he loved, and his legs and back were accordingly hardened after two and a half years of walking for sixteen to eighteen hours a day with his entire life pressing on his shoulders. However, he no longer had an animal by his side for company, he had just given up the softest and warmest bed of his life, he'd been kept in such otherworldly comfort during his stay with Gentiola that his isolation with the elements felt like a punishment, and he could still hear her voice in his head, telling him what he'd always longed to know.
He took a jagged, roughly northwestern route through Italy towards the western Alps. At first he considered taking a slightly longer though gentler trip through the coast into France to circumvent the mountains, but cutting himself some slack so early in the game would do him no favors. He was looking at a lot of rough terrain ahead, and his time for taking it easy was spent.
Even while his dreams kept bringing him maddeningly back to Gentiola's house and his body rebelled at the renewed onslaught of the untamed outdoors, he approached the angular silhouette of the Alps with an unfamiliar sense of peace. He could say, finally, that his journey was mostly done, he knew how he would get home, and that he'd gotten what he'd come for without getting himself killed, maimed or unduly delayed. He wouldn't consider it a done deal until he made it out of Greenland with all his limbs intact, but overall the progress he'd made in his journey was not lost on him.
He decided not to use the herbs right away. Every time he approached a new village, he did the usual ritual of bringing out the map with a long trail of tiny markings leading to their location, and while he still got some odd looks for this, there was no denying that it was sufficient. There was always someone who provided him with an acceptable place to sleep and something to eat. He was also treated to a ride on donkey-back through the mountains at several points, which made his Alpine traveling far less nerve-wracking than it would otherwise have been. Some things never changed: Charlinder's lack of language skills continued to lead to many scenes of hilarity. Some of his hosts also tried to feed him meat and were baffled to see him refuse. Ever since he’d eaten Lacey, he couldn’t take anything that used to walk on hooves.
While he appreciated Gentiola's efforts on his behalf, he was reluctant to make use of her magic except under desperate circumstances. The situation which she probably didn't understand, being so isolated, was that he knew what was going on and his hosts didn't. That asymmetry didn't sit right with Charlinder, and so he resolved not to connect any villagers with Gentiola except as a last resort. The idea of her receiving the aftershock of working spells to compensate for what he took also gave him pause. While she could surely look after herself and knew what his using the herbs would entail, he preferred to keep his burden on her to a minimum.
Before he knew it, he was out of the Alps, and somewhere along the way he'd crossed into a different country. The land grew flatter and he heard yet another language from his hosts. He soon passed through a corridor of hills that led him past an ancient signpost for a city called Grenoble and later another one called Lyon while he continued north. After several weeks in France, he was passing through a forest one day when he heard a most peculiar noise; a familiar though incongruous sound that took him jarringly back to his months with Lacey.
He followed the bellowing until he came upon a dairy goat tethered to a tree in the middle of a briar patch. There was no sign of another goat, nor of a corresponding human in the vicinity, besides which it was a very odd place for farm animals to graze. She was confused but not injured, and she looked well-nourished and unharmed, so there was no mystery about what was bothering her: the poor neglected caprine's udder was swollen to a stage that Charlinder would never dream of letting any animal reach under his care.
He dropped to his knees in the grass and took off his pack. He got out his old sheep shears, cut away some briars, and removed the rope around her neck. She approached him willingly and continued to vocalize while he pulled out the clay pot he'd previously used to receive Lacey's milk. With trembling hands he set the pot under the goat's teats and began to milk her. The screaming soon calmed to a much gentler bleat as her udder slackened. Charlinder encouraged her to follow him once he'd filled the pot, which she happily did, though she may have been so amenable partly because he hadn't quite relieved her of all the milk she'd built up. He had to acknowledge that the timing of the discovery was helpful, as he'd been walking alone for several days. Although he didn't intend to take the whole batch of goat’s milk for himself, he indulged in a few mouthfuls as he led her in a direction that he hoped would lead to a settlement where someone would recognize the animal and maybe someone else would host him for a night. It was a welcome gustatory change after days of subsisting on increasingly stale oats and dried-out cheese.
After an hour or so of continuing north, he reached the edge of the wood and found a settlement in front of him, which he entered with the goat at his side. Several people soon turned and stared, but he kept going and waited for someone to approach. A woman yelled at someone else across the path, gesturing towards Charlinder. No one addressed him, but the adolescent girl who'd received the woman's notice dropped her spinning immediately and ran off down the path. Other villagers soon began chattering to each other and glancing at him. While they were less open in their staring than many cultures he'd encountered farther east, there was no doubt that he was the topic of conversation. As he had already visited hundreds of settlements, he found their focus on him reassuring rather than ominous. He had also learned enough by that point to know better than to address himself without invitation to a person who didn't understand English. Before any of the people who watched him along the path demanded an explanation from him, the girl who'd left her spinning showed up with a slightly battered young man, who immediately addressed a question in French to him.
"Sorry, I don't speak your language," he replied. "Look, I found this animal, and she really needed a milking." He proffered the pot full of milk and pointed at the goat.
Whether the bruise-faced youth understood was uncertain, but between the goat and the milk, he was obviously pleased about something. He said something to the girl, who ran back in the direction from which she'd come. Then he commanded the goat to walk beside him, which she contentedly did with a satisfied little bleat. He turned and started further down the path, beckoning to Charlinder to follow.
They soon came to an impressive if austere house, markedly larger and more important-looking than any of the other residences Charlinder had just passed. The young man indicated for him to wait at the gate, while he went inside and left the goat to munch on the weeds by the front door. Charlinder waited, and the messenger shortly reappeared behind an older, neater-dressed man who first exclaimed over the goat chewing on his front yard and next bore down joyously on Charlinder, delighted to see the pot of milk in his hands and pleased at the sight of his humbly bemused face on the property. Having shown himself to be a rescuer rather than a thief, he opened the top compartment of his pack and brought out the map.
His new host was, if Charlinder's interpretations were accurate, the leader of the village. The young man who'd brought him to the house was the shepherd employed to care for the family's dairy animals, and he, along with his employers' two young adult daughters, became Charlinder's new friend. If he understood the French-narrated pantomime correctly, some thugs from another community had ambushed the shepherd recently while he was out grazing the sheep and goats. That explained the bruises around his eyes. While he was unconscious, then, the thugs had made off with the goat, but apparently weren't intelligent enough to know where to keep her, so they'd tied her up and forgotten about her. The village leader, meanwhile, had been thoroughly infuriated at the theft of his animal and not entirely convinced of the shepherd's version of events, but Charlinder's arrival with their missing caprine had restored the peace.
Perhaps because of Gentiola's remarkable generosity to him, the subsequent village visits had never failed to impress upon him that his hosts extended a special effort. There was something especially pleasing about this particular home. The grateful patriarch summoned Charlinder late that afternoon out to the garden behind the house, overlooking the lushly sloping fields they owned, and bade him sit down with his host on the wooden bench amidst the herb patches. One of the daughters set a small wooden table in front of them; her mother then came out and set a tray laden with new cheese and three glasses of wine on the table before sitting down on her husband's other side. The shepherd and two dogs herded a generous flock of sheep and several goats over the field. About a dozen yards to Charlinder's right stood a clutch of wire cages holding the same type of rabbits as Gentiola kept. The wife took a small knitting project out of her apron pocket and stitched away between sips of wine. Her husband put his arm around her, caressing her hip with one hand and holding his wine glass in the other. Charlinder munched on the cheese and sipped the wine, savoring the scene in front of him. The sky was growing dark, and he shivered slightly in the breeze, but the chill felt refreshing rather than forbidding. His host went on to elaborate on something to Charlinder of which he had no idea, but he was obviously feeling cheerful so it was an agreeable one-sided conversation. Charlinder reached over with his non-cheese hand and picked up the ball of yarn from the wife's lap. It was a lovely, magnificently soft piece of work that on examination proved to be a blend of sheep's wool and the rabbits' miraculous fluffy hair. It displayed a fascinating play of colors that he noticed was naturally occurring on only one of their rabbits. He found the wife looking over at him curiously, and happily, pleased that he not only admired but understood her handiwork. She was working on a mitten, and the wisdom in her choice of fibers was not lost on him. The animals called to each other in their mindless ovine way, the wife leaned into her husband's side, and the sun set.