“Sure, why not? What should I read?”
“You could select something that appeals to you from the books in your bedroom.”
She sat on a cushion on the hearth ledge, stoked the fire and stayed there, enjoying the heat on her back. He went into his room and returned with a book so quickly that she was certain he must have grabbed the first one his hand touched, without really looking at it.
Settling into the sofa, he asked, “Tayar, please let your hair loose, so I can see the firelight through it.”
She removed the pins that bound her hair and shook it out around her shoulders.
“It’s beautiful. Thank you.” His voice was soft and gentle in a way it hadn’t been before, and her own delight in it caught her by surprise. He threw a cushion on his lap, ostensibly to hold the book, though she couldn’t fail to see the sudden bulge he was trying to conceal.
He opened the book and began to read.
The days of my travels are more than I can number, though I can count the days of a year and the years of a cycle. Still, the beginning, when I first put one foot in front of the other, with my back to my ravaged village, is lost in the shadows of early life. So ask me not when I began and from where I came. I’ll say only “it was back then, back there, somewhere before today.” Let that suffice, and question me no more.
Nor do my steps since then matter, though they be as many as the stars in a cloudless, moonless sky. One step after another after another and another I have walked. What I have set forth to tell you is of the stops between those unnumbered steps, when I have lingered here or there. The sights I have seen and the people I have met. Oh, there we have much to talk of, for our land is wide, with more in it than any village-bound folk could ever dream.
So I shall start my tales of the stops, the times not walking, when I met others, some like me, but most so very different. Where shall I start? It matters not, since each has been a separate event, isolated, just as the villages are isolated, seemingly untouched by others, except when they war ~ though, in many ways, they are connected by more than my steps.
When he paused, she said, “I believe this may be an old book, written before our Alleshine Peace or by someone who still remains on the outside,” she speculated. “What is the title?”
He looked on the cover. “The Traveler’s Tales. Why do you think it’s old, Tayar?”
“Because our villages are no longer isolated, and war is a thing of the past for those within our borders.”
“Hey, then maybe this is a story of the Before Times.”
“Yes, very possibly from the period of the Great Chaos that preceded our Peace.”
“Wow!” He glanced briefly at the book. “You know, I always wondered what came before the Great Chaos. Our Storyteller hints about an incredibly powerful culture that disappeared or perished, but that’s all he says about it.”
“We know very little about the world before the Great Chaos, beyond fables about a mighty civilization that had stolen the secret of creation from the gods.”
“But did it ever really exist?”
“Something inspired the fables. Perhaps it was a society whose knowledge was so powerful that the people who came afterwards believed them almost godlike. However, the Great Chaos destroyed everything except a precious few remnants and ruins of that era. So all we can do is guess at the truth.” She shrugged. “Please continue reading.”
“Okay, that was the first page. Now, it looks like a new chapter or a story. Anyway, it has a title: The Ungiving.”
On a bright yellow and blue summer day, sometime back in the years, I met a man at a lake. His net jumped with fish, but he pulled not, staring off into the depths of his inner despair. I sat beside him, not wishing to disturb his black reflections, since some people relish such darkness and do not welcome interruptions. But I sat so that he would see me out of the corner of his eye, should his eye be searching for other than his own inner self.
Such was his desire to see beyond that he turned toward me, nodded and spoke. “Hello, Stranger. Or, should I greet you Sister?”
"Hey, the Traveler is a woman!” The boy quickly browsed over the previous paragraphs to see whether there had been any hints about the sex of the narrator that he had missed. "Skies, why didn’t she say so from the beginning? I’ve been picturing a man all this time.”
"Maybe she said nothing of her gender, because it is who she is and nothing unusual in her own mind.”
He nodded, then resumed his reading, his voice mellow and pleasantly modulated.
"Hello, Stranger. Or should I greet you Sister? I do not recognize you as of this region, but I have been alone some time. Perhaps you have lived among my old village, and I knew it not.”
“No, kind sir. I am a stranger here, having just come from the east plains. Nor have I seen any village for some days.”
The man sighed so deeply that I thought all breath had left his body. “My village is a day’s distance in the direction you seem to have been going, before you stopped here, if you had continued in a straight line from the east plains to here to there. That is, the village was there two summers ago, when they cast me out from their sight. Since that day, I have had the company of no man, woman or child, heard no human voice other than my own. Though I have seen visions. Are you another? Can I touch you, or would my hand grasp only air and reeds?”
“I’m real enough to be hungry for that fish you have netted, if you will share with me. Here, touch me.”
But he did not reach out to touch, fearing, I believed, to find me a phantom. When I extended my hand to him, he flinched, and I withdrew, not wishing to shatter his illusion with my solidity. He turned from me to stare inward again, neither pulling in his net nor offering me any of his fish, though I had told him of my hunger.
I left that sad man by the lake, starving for something he would never gather unto himself, though both the fish and I were within a moment’s grasp. I walked in the direction he had indicated, to find his village a day later.
It was one of those fine summer evenings when the sun seems to hang in the sky forever and light reaches into even the most elusive shadows. And the village was as friendly as I’ve ever known. People flowed out to greet me, from their homes and their chores, while children played underfoot.
The bathhouse fire was stoked, so that I might bathe and steam and bathe again. As I scraped the dust of my travels from my skin, my clothes were removed and replaced with splendid garments of soft skins. The shoes seemed made for me. I was told later that they had measured my boots against those of the entire village, until they found the right ones.
Though that time was long ago, I have kept the clothes they gave me, in the bottom of my pack, where most travelers keep food and ointments. But those are things for which the need comes and goes, while these beautiful clothes filled an eternal need, to be connected with good, generous people, to remember that I was once at one with them, though for only a short moment of an overly long life.
They served a welcome feast that thrilled my senses with succulent tastes, joyful music and good conversation. All this they gave me simply because I had walked into their village. They asked nothing of me. Who I was, where I came from. Nothing. So I volunteered what I could, wanting to return their generosity with whatever I had to give. I thought it was little, but they seemed to enjoy my stories, as I hope you do, too.
As the evening’s bonfire burned down to gentle embers, they gave me their names, in a gesture of open fellowship for a stranger that I have rarely seen matched by any people. I told them the name that the last village had given me, which I have long since forgotten. I offered to have them use that one or give me another, for which honor they thanked me and gave me one of their cherished names, which I have also forgotten.
Such are the memories of one who has seen much and had so many names that details are unimportant. Indeed, should you and I become soul mates, I still would not be able to share with you my true name, as much as I would wish.
So, ask it not of me. Instead, name me as you would have me, and I’ll live up to it as best I can.
As generous as they were, I did not wish to ask more of them, but my curiosity would not be still. I turned to the headman, at whose right hand I had been seated, and asked of the vanquished man of the lake.
The headman’s smile faded, so that I was sorry that the words had fallen from my lips. But they were there, out between us, and, being the man he was, he gathered them to his heart and told me the tragedy that haunted his people.
"Yes, it is a difficult story to tell,” the headman began, then hesitated. “How do I help you understand how a village that would welcome a stranger as you have been would turn out one of their own in such a cruel manner? For cruel it is to exile a man whom you have known since he was a seed in his mother’s womb. But even then, there was something wrong forming in him. You could see it in the way his mother carried her burden, becoming more and more sallow and drained, not round and healthy as our women are in their bearing months.”
“At first, we thought it was because she was a recent widow. We were wrong. It was the unborn child. He took so much of the mother that she weakened daily, until there was little left of her to face the trials of birth. When our Healer presented the infant to our council it was as an orphan whose very existence had killed his own mother.
"Yet, childbirth deaths are not unknown and should never be blamed on aught but the ways of the Great Mother. Look at our children. Can you tell by their faces or bodies or by the caresses they receive, which child belongs to which parents or who are the two orphans among them? No, of course not.
“Like these children playing or sleeping among us now, he wanted for nothing. But whatever we gave him, he demanded more. Fine, we said to one another, he has greater needs than most. So we gave even more to him, thinking that if we could satisfy his emptiness, fill him to brimming, he wouldn’t grasp so. We showered the boy with all the village could gather, all our hearts had to offer. Yet nothing ignited in him but selfishness and dissatisfaction.
“Still, we accepted him and would have kept him close to us for the rest of his life, if only he had allowed us. But that, too, is a gift ~ allowing others to love you. No, he’d have nothing of it. Though he lived among us through the years of his youth into his manhood, he kept himself separate. Any gifts from us were thrown back in our faces, but he took whatever he wanted from our homes, our harvests, our storehouses.
“Then one day, an innocent child, who was too young to understand why this one man was treated differently, offered him a crock of juice. You see, she had never before pressed fruit into juice, and was proudly sharing it with everyone she could find. Well, when she offered the crock to this miserable man, he threw it back at her ~ right at her ~ cracking her skull.
“I don’t think he meant to hurt her, but it was done nonetheless. The girl lingered in pain for days. Before we gave her body to the earth, we banished the man, that his presence shouldn’t give sacrilege to her memory.
“We could have forgiven much,” the headman said. "The selfishness, the denial of our gifts, even the child’s death. But he was so adamant in his ungiving that he couldn’t even proffer an apology. If only he had said one thing ~ ‘I’m sorry’ ~ we could have begun to heal. As it is, none of us can ever relinquish the pain of losing these two ~ the man and the child. It lives on within us, in every breath and heartbeat of our lives, for the want of one gift.
“We warned him never to come near our village again. We won’t have him come close enough to steal from us, so we leave him food, goods and tools out beyond our fields. But we know he is there, a day’s walk from us.”
I remained with those good people through two full moons. Among them, I was as one of their daughters, blood and flesh of their ancestors. So thoroughly did I become at one with them that their sorrow seeped into me and became mine. Thus, I gave more and more of myself, aching to salve the wound inflicted by the man of the lake. At the hoe and at the loom, in the hunt and in the spirit house, what I had, what I was, I gave to them.
With the Healer and the Storyteller, I shared knowledge from the many villages I had visited. To the council, I advised of the wars and temporary peaces I had witnessed. Each child became my own. Each man, my brother. Each woman, my sister. I gave until you would think that nothing would remain of me, yet I left them carrying within me so much more than I could ever be.
Why did I leave these wonderful people? How could I tear myself from them? You would do well to ask it of me, for I have asked myself those same questions over the years of hardship and loneliness since then. But, you see, it’s my feet. They needed their steps, one after another after another after another. And where my feet pull, my body must follow. But not my heart, my soul. Those I left in the trust of that generous village. Taking with me the same parts of each of them.
My feet carried me back the way I had come, though it was not my wont to retrace paths already taken. I had to see that man at the lake once more. He was sitting on a rock outcrop, next to a nest of eggs, but did not touch the eggs, staring instead into that deep despair he seemed to prefer above all else.
He spied me as I approached. “I know you. Begone, I’ll not have that vision again!”
I continued toward him. “I’m no vision.” And I used his true name, since I knew the names of all of the village, which had now become my village.
At the sound of his name, his face twisted with terror. He held his arms out, pushing away what could not be real. But still I moved forward.
"I have a gift for you,” I said. And again, I used his name which I have forgotten since, as I have forgotten much, but I’ll never forget the mournful moan that escaped his lips, unbidden.
"Noooo!!”
Then I embraced him.
He did not push me away, though that is what I had expected. Instead, his arms hung limply by his side, like the useless things they were.
I turned my back on that man and continued my travels, one step after another after another after another.
In quiet times, I often wonder why I did it ~ embrace him ~ a man so fearful of being touched that he had murdered a child. Did I offer it in the spirit of the village that had adopted me, as an attempt to shatter his emptiness and fill it with love? Did I believe that I could achieve what none of his people had, because I was infused by their generosity of spirit? Or was it that I was less changed by them than I had thought, so that I was able to demand of him what they would never consider?
Vengeance!
The boy reluctantly closed the book. Only then did he look at his Allesha. Though her face was in shadow, a single tear on her cheek caught the light of the fire.
“You know, that was a strange story.” Perplexed, the boy shook his head. “An embrace for killing a kid. Not my idea of justice.”
“No, it wouldn’t be.”
“I guess you see that as my failing.”
Tayar sighed. “No, not at all. It’s simply that it was right for those people.”
“Do you think they’re real, or just a tale?”
Tayar tilted her head, as she considered the question. “Could such innocent people survive our world, even now, when the Alleshine Peace has taken hold?”
The boy wondered why her sadness seemed to turn inward.
“Yet it does appear that the story is from a time before the Peace. How could such a village hold off the bands of brigands or marauding warriors of the Great Chaos?” she reflected. “I don’t know. I’d like to think they could exist. Or at least that they live, here” — she pressed her hand to her breast — “in our hearts. Perhaps they’re meant to represent the better part of us.”
“I’m not sure about ‘better.’ How can it be good, when a village headman doesn’t know how to guide his people through difficult times or deal properly with a murderer in their midst?”
Tayar got up from the hearth and walked over to the boy, touching his cheek again with that fiery static of flesh to flesh.
“Thank you for your generous gift of that tale. I’ll look forward to discussing it further with you. But right now, it’s late and time for me to go to bed.”
The boy stood, hoping for an invitation to join her.
She saw the question in his eyes. “No, dear, not tonight, but soon.”
She brushed her lips gently against his. But when she turned to go, he wrapped his arms about her, pressing his full body against hers, so that she could feel his heart beating in her breast, his erection pressing through their clothes. He opened her lips with his tongue, and she responded, pressing her hips against him for such a fleeting moment that he could almost believe he had imagined it. But she pulled away, walked slowly to her bedroom and closed the door without looking back.
Chapter 18
At breakfast, the magic of the previous evening was gone. All the boy knew was he had slept alone, despite everything he had hoped and tried. Tayar said nothing of importance, so he ignored most of her prattle.
“Of course, I always take care of the barn animals before breakfast.” She looked at him, as though she expected him to say something. He didn’t. “Perhaps we could take turns with that responsibility.”
With a grunt, the boy dropped his fork onto his plate and leaned back in his chair. She wasn’t sleeping with him, but he was supposed to feed her chickens!
She ignored his sneer and continued. “I’ve been told that we can expect our first snowfall early this year. But we still have the windows to seal, the barn and house roofs to check, and—”
“Humph, no wonder you wanted a Winter Boy — for lugging, not loving,” he grumbled under his breath, but not so low that the Allesha didn’t hear it.
Her eyes blazed for a moment. Then she sighed in exasperation. “Did you hear nothing of what I said the other evening?” she asked. “I’m complete without you. That you might share in my life is for your sake. But it is up to you. Are you a guest to be catered to or a member of this household?”
“You mean I have a choice?” he asked.
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