"They didn't expect you to be here--you haven't done this in a long time, I gotta say--but they didn't know they'd have to go shoot deer with no one but Brucie, either."
"Yeah, I can understand that. Still makes me wonder, though--why did you ask me to come?"
Kenny looked around for approaching animals, or maybe just to make sure they were alone, before he answered. "For the same reason Jess and Theo don't want alone time with Bruce."
"You've noticed it, too, then?"
"I notice something," said Kenny, then looked around the trees for something else. "There's a deer stand around here somewhere, let's find it."
After some searching around trees in the dark, Kenny located the platform in question and they set themselves up. As comfortably situated as it was possible to be on a hunting trip, Kenny asked Charlinder to tell him something about the Bible.
“Well, I’ve been thinking about the Christian story about the virgin birth of Jesus," Charlinder began in a discreetly low voice, "and if you think about it, that girl Mary was in a really precarious position for a moment there."
"What do you mean by precarious?"
"I mean that in the time and place she lived, there were very strict moral codes, and if Joseph and the rest of them hadn't believed her story of the visit from an angel, she would have been in serious trouble. Maybe stoned to death, or at least shunned from society. And then I realized--wasn't it just too perfect that they did believe her? That's exactly the kind of story that would get a girl out of a really ugly situation."
"Okay, Char, tell me what you've worked out, just keep your voice down," Kenny prompted, grinning in anticipation while watching the forest floor.
"This is what happened: you've got Mary, living briefly B.C. in the Middle East, and young women weren't exactly first-class citizens, and Mary's no one special. She's just a regular teenager engaged to an older man, and she's not about to argue with looking forward to a life of more of the same, but she wants a little fun before she goes from being her father's burden to her husband's property, so she screws around on her fiancé, except, oops, she gets pregnant. What's a girl to do? She still wants to get married, and she doesn't want to be cast out of society, so she needs to make some crazy shit up. Fortunately, Mary is also a Jew, and they pretty much invented the concept of God as our Faithful know Him, so Mary knows whom to blame. She snorts up a little hallucinogen one night, falls asleep, and the solution comes to her in a dream: it's all from a visit by an angel who says she's having God's baby! So she crosses her fingers, goes to Joseph, and tells him this drug-induced malarkey about an immaculate conception. And maybe Joseph is just that gullible, or maybe he just doesn't want to become the laughingstock of Nazareth and then go have to find himself a new fiancée, but he accepts her story and they proceed with their engagement. Pretty soon, word gets around, and it keeps getting better for Mary: she's got a cousin, Elizabeth, who is supposedly way too old to get pregnant, but then that time period's idea of 'elderly' probably meant slightly over forty, but it's this big special surprise when Liz turns up pregnant, and she's got the same explanation as her cute little cousin Mary. So, first Mary gets her fiancé on her side, then suddenly she gets the best possible ally to help prop her story up: her grown, married, respectable cousin. Nine months later, there's a trip to Bethlehem, Mary gets her dose of indignity squatting down with a bunch of sheep to give birth, and she has a perfect little boy named Jesus."
Kenny was now distracted from watching the forest floor and had by that point turned a lovely shade of maroon with the effort of not laughing out loud. "Okay," he squeaked, "what about the rest of Jesus' life?"
"Ah, yes," Charlinder continued. "It was a very creative load of malarkey, and not even Mary could have predicted how well it would go over, but she has to keep the lie up to keep herself out of trouble. So she and Joseph tell little Jesus he's the son of God, or else he might ask some really awkward questions about why he looks nothing like this guy he calls Dad. And Jesus is a cool kid. He's a nice boy, and a smart boy, but he's also a little wacky as his mom did hallucinogens while she was pregnant, so he grows up thinking he can make all sorts of crazy shit happen. He gets together this minion squad called the Disciples, and they help him go around and make himself notoriously perverse and contrarian. If he can't be famous, he'll just have to be infamous. And underneath the insanity, he does have some pretty gutsy things to say, so he starts building up some followers, until he's thirty-three, when he finally annoys the Romans so much they nail him to a cross and leave him to die of blood loss and septic shock. Or at least he looks like they killed him, wakes up in the tomb a few days later, and comes out to find this hot chick Mary Magdalene, who's very happy to see him with a pulse, and there was much rejoicing in the land. So he keeps carrying on a little while longer, until he 'ascended to Heaven,' which probably means he snorted up some hallucinogen and hopped off a cliff, but all's well, because the minions, I mean the Disciples, now called the Apostles, are still around spreadin' The Word," he finished.
Kenny had now resorted to snorting like a piglet to control his laughter. "I'm so glad we're not with Brucie!" he snickered.
"He'd be trying to kill me right now," Charlinder agreed.
"What would you say about the miracles?" asked Kenny. "I remember hearing something about some fish and loaves, and there was a leper getting cured, too."
Charlinder made a noncommittal sort of noise and corresponding shrug. "Exaggeration. The Bible was edited by people, even if they like to think it was written by God."
Kenny grinned. "If Bruce and all of them are right, and there is a God, you're going to Hell."
Charlinder scoffed. “Whatever, I’ll see you there.”
After they kept quiet long enough, they saw a young buck big enough to be worth shooting. They both took aim but missed.
They waited. The difference between "waiting" and "doing nothing" was that when you did nothing, you were relaxed. Hunting involved a lot of waiting, by definition. The primary difference between Charlinder's and Kenny's waiting was that Kenny might have been waiting for another deer to show up, while Charlinder was waiting to see that it didn’t.
"You didn't bring me out here for my good aim," whispered Charlinder. Kenny looked back at him. "And you weren't looking to hear my theory of the so-called Immaculate Conception, either."
"It's a pretty good story."
"Still, though. What was it you wanted to ask me, that you couldn't in the village?"
Kenny looked back at the forest floor. "I don't really know. Maybe I should be asking someone older, like your uncle, or Miriam. Or my mom, for that matter."
"But I'm here, since you dragged me out when I could have been sleeping, so...what’s going on?”
“Might as well," admitted Kenny. "Do you notice that the Faithful are getting..." he searched for the right word, "tougher? Now? Than they used to be?"
"Tougher. Sure. What have you seen from them?"
"Like Robert showing up at the school asking to lecture the kids."
"Who told you about that?"
"Robert told me. He was all annoyed about it, too, like you wouldn't give him a chance to say what he had to say or something."
Charlinder snorted. "Yeah, right. It's his problem if he can't get the kids to listen to him on their own time, he’s not preaching to them on mine.”
"And did you notice they're doing the Sermons twice a week now?"
This much was a surprise to Charlinder. "No, when did that start happening?"
"Just a couple weeks ago, and they keep trying to do the Sermon in different places, too."
"So they can get more people to listen. How's that going over with the neighbors?"
"Not bad enough to stop them. It's got the grown-ups annoyed, but it's also got some more kids asking them questions."
"Which is exactly what Robert wants," Charlinder muttered. "Good for them."
"Right, so they're getting kind of demanding now. Do you remember them ever getting like this before?"
"Not really," said Charlinder, and thought about it for a moment. "You're right, we should ask someone older. Maybe they've gotten like this before and then let it drop."
"I hope so, because I’ve had it up to my ears of Bruce being such a jackass to me."
"How is Bruce being a jackass?"
"He keeps telling me some compost about how casual sex gets God all pissed off, and I should pray to God that my sins are forgiven, and just getting really rude every time I go near Yolande or Stuart. I think he just doesn't want me doing sex with his sister."
Charlinder pictured Bruce being rude to Kenny, then pictured Yolande snapping at him while nursing Stuart. "There are other women in our village, you know."
"But I like Yolande."
"Does she like you back?"
"Oh shit yeah."
"Really."
"I know she seems pissy most of the time, but once you get her in the mood..." Kenny sat up on his knees and thrust his pelvis at the air, then waggled his eyebrows at Charlinder. It was one of the last things he’d wanted to hear in that setting.
"That's great, Kenny."
"She's awesome."
The five of them managed to take a felled buck to the village that day. Kenny landed an impressive shot on one that came in lured by the scent of a doe which he had wisely declined to shoot. Bruce’s group helped them track him down until he collapsed from the arrow wound. Charlinder volunteered to help strip the carcass to dry the meat for pemmican, as he figured that would get him a chance to talk alone with an old woman. However, as the woman who turned up to help with the deer was Eleanor, he thought it best not to ask her about the history of the Faithful's activities in their village. All he told her, when she asked about the hunt, was how Kenny had shot the buck.
Every day after the children left, Charlinder found himself staring at the map of the world mounted on the schoolroom wall. This new habit made no sense to him; the map had stayed in that spot since someone had helped Eileen Woodlawn etch it into a sheet of clay over a hundred years before. He knew every river, mountain range and coastline so well he could close his eyes, let someone place his finger on a random spot, and name the country with near-perfect accuracy. There was no reason why that sheet of baked clay should interest him so much now. Still he was drawn to it every afternoon, gazing at the layout of the continents until the rumbling in his stomach told him to go to the meeting square for lunch. Eventually, he realized that he was always interested in the northern hemisphere, and the vast expanses of land that stretched across the higher latitudes. He was mesmerized at how North America and Asia created a nearly uninterrupted swath of land from east to west over the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Most of the Earth's surface was water, as he taught his students, and yet, he now observed, if you just stayed far enough north, going from eastern Canada to the westernmost bounds of continental Europe, there was just so much land. People in his era couldn't travel much by water. They built small boats that could handle rivers, but even a river as wide as the Paleola was a thread compared to the broadcloth of the Atlantic Ocean. He could only dream of how people in the pre-Plague era had used airplanes that would carry them over any span of the Earth in a matter of hours, or how they could build enormous boats that sailed across oceans. Now, looking at how much of those higher latitudes was covered in solid ground, mostly Canada and Russia, he marveled at how far one could travel around the world by land. You wouldn't need to be in possession of a large boat to do that. Only a lot of time.
But
why
did he suddenly care enough to see this?
Chapter Five
Children
Charlinder's place in the labor scheme was beyond categorization, as he was the schoolteacher. His position and that of the village medic lay outside the usual divisions. Since he was busy with preparing and giving lessons, making paper and ink for the children to use, and synthesizing older works into new teaching materials, he was not expected to play a regular role in the agricultural work that other Paleolans performed, except for when harvest time came.
The council was open to anyone whose neighbors would nominate them, and it was generally agreed that serving on the village's administrative committee was a responsibility in addition to, not instead of, one's daily and seasonal chores. Therefore, it caused Miriam no end of annoyance when her fellow council members acted as though making a few decisions from the council table was all the work they needed to do. It was an annoyance that she decided to vent one day to Charlinder while they took a part of the sheep flock out to graze.
"...and if it were just the old guys with arthritis in their hands, that would make sense, but it's all of them that do it, so there's no excuse," she ranted while her hand-spindle lowered to her ankles.
"Maybe we're just in such good shape, they figure there's not much that needs to be done," suggested Charlinder, who was busy feeding a milking ewe some clover blossoms from his hand.
"I'm sure that's what they want to tell themselves," she said exasperatedly, "but even if we don't have any shortages, there's always something that could be improved."
"Like what?" asked Charlinder. He was interested in hearing what Miriam would come up with on this.
"Like, even if we have enough food to get us through the winter, there would be nothing wrong with having more than enough," she offered. "Or they could start thinking about ways to make the cabins warmer in cold weather, so we don't have to shiver for three months."