When both of the young men were in the cart and driving away, the gate clicked itself shut again. The woman scowled after them until they were out of sight. Then she did something entirely bizarre.
She grasped Charlinder's head in her hands by his jaw and crown, closed her eyes, and began muttering something in Latin. She rocked his head around, pushed his jaw from side to side, and did something with her fingers on his ears. Then she was finished, and for the first time, locked eyes with him. She looked at him in an expression of wondrous, almost disbelieving interest.
"My name is Gentiola. What about you?"
It was the first time since India that anyone had asked him a full question that he could understand. He was too stunned to do anything but answer. "Charlinder."
"That's beautiful. Are you part-Indian?"
"No, why?"
"It sounds like an Indian name is all, but you don’t look Indian, not really. Those young men who brought you here could tell you’re from somewhere else, and it’s been such a long time since I met anyone from another country. Won’t you come inside? Are you hungry?"
"I could eat a whole farm right now if it sat still long enough."
As she led him to the front door, he asked, "Wait, can I ask you a question?"
"Yes, of course."
"Where did you learn English?"
"Oh, is that the language you were speaking in their village?"
"Yes. You’re speaking it right now."
"Oh, no, you see, I’m not speaking your language any more than you’re speaking mine. I just cast a spell between us so we can understand each other."
She turned and continued inside, beckoning for him to follow. He went in after her, and not until he sat down behind the low wooden table she indicated did he connect her words together.
The house was unlike anything he had ever seen, inside as well as out. He sat on a cushion made of dense, sturdily woven cotton sewn around stuffing of a soft yet resilient material. He faced the kitchen, populated with shining wooden cabinets and intimidating metal box-shaped contraptions of various sizes. Gentiola flitted cheerfully around between her otherworldly appliances, perfectly oblivious to the fact that she’d just told him something impossible.
"Wait, did you just say you cast a spell?"
"Yes, and that's how you can talk to me."
"Whoa, whoa," he exclaimed. "Cast a spell, as in, magic? Like, what, you're a witch or something?"
"Most people around here think I'm either a goddess or a demon," she answered, looking intrigued at his question, "but, yes, I'm only a witch, and just as human as you." She placed a dish of salad in front of him as if they were discussing the weather.
Too hungry not to take his chances with her cooking, he shoveled lettuce and goat cheese into his mouth. "So, what," he said around a full mouth, "you're telling me magic is real?"
"You never met another witch before me?"
"Not to my knowledge."
"And you only ever heard the myths and fairy tales about witchcraft and magic?"
"Yeah."
"Okay, then," she said with a gentle shrug. "I suppose I can't prove to you that you're not hallucinating now, but, I will point out that the reality isn't nearly as lush as the myths. There are no unicorns, no pixies, no dragons, no mer-folk and I don't even do much with a cauldron. There is energy in the Earth, which can be manipulated through properly trained thought, and I'm one of the small group of people who learned the skills to use it. That's what we call magic, and, in case you were wondering, that's also how my front gate opens and closes without me touching it."
"Does this small group of people keep all this a secret?"
"Not really, not anymore. Mainly we just don't tell anyone who doesn't ask. So it's hardly your fault if you thought it was all bedtime stories." She placed a glass tumbler on the table ahead of his plate and made a round, orange-colored fruit to hover under her palm. It sliced itself in half, the bottom hemisphere dropped to the table, and the top one squeezed its juice into the glass.
"You just made that fruit slice itself," he observed between bites of salad.
"Yes. It cuts down on the dishes I have to wash."
"What else can you do?"
That question took her by surprise; she let out a breath and her eyes widened. "That's a very big question. There are a lot of things I can do by harnessing the energy properly, and it would take some time to explain what's possible. I can remove the language barrier between us, but I don't know what you're thinking." She turned back to the kitchen and came back with a salad for herself in one hand and a pot of stew in the other. "Which is odd, because the guys who brought you here thought you were sick in the head, and that I could sort you out, and I don't know where they got that idea. If you were injured, I could heal your body--like I did with the goose egg on the back of your head--but I can't do anything about your mind. I didn't know you were coming," she pointed out, "and had I known I would have a guest today, I would have straightened this place up a bit!" She sat down opposite him and squeezed the other half of the fruit into her own glass. "Making an orange squeeze its own juice is trivial."
"So
that's
an orange!" he interrupted. The look on Gentiola's face in response was infectious in its enjoyment. "Sorry, I saw those fruits earlier this year, and I read about oranges before I left home, but I never got to connect the name with the fruit," he explained. "We can't grow them where I come from; the climate is too cold. Sorry, go on. What else can you do?"
"Well, I can alter weather patterns in the short term, which is valuable, but very risky and I'll thank you not to ask me to demonstrate for your entertainment. Most of what I do concerns information."
"Okay, then maybe you can tell me if I've been imagining things," he began, and went on to tell her about his experiences in the city remains. He described the smell, the heartbeat in the ground, the sense of being asked to leave as soon as he came in.
"Yes, that's an expression of magical energy you've just described," said Gentiola, apparently intrigued to hear a description of the phenomena from someone learning about it for the first time. "Basically, the land is reclaiming what was formerly taken away from it. What's left of the cities don't want you to stay, but they can't force you out. It's like a wild animal that's more afraid of you than vice versa."
"That explains so much," said Charlinder, now much calmer than in the preceding days of agitation, hunger and confusion. "And all this time, I thought it was just my stupid monkey brain playing tricks on me. I kept telling myself it was all in my head."
"Oh, don't apologize," she assured him. "Our stupid monkey brains do play tricks on us, and if all you ever heard of magic was from fairy tales, then you were absolutely right not to trust your senses. You paid close enough attention to describe your experiences accurately, but you had every reason not to assume there was anything going on except the sort of tricks the mind plays on itself. The evidence you had on hand was nebulous, and if you'd thought it was due to anything except psychology, then you probably would have come to the wrong conclusion."
"And yet, now you're telling me there really was magic involved."
"Well, yes, but you believed the most sensible thing you could with what you knew at the time."
"That's...certainly nice of you to say. This probably tops the list of the Weirdest Days of My Life, and I've had some crazy ones in the past few years."
"I would have liked to start smaller," Gentiola began, "but with the language barrier in place, we couldn't communicate much at all."
"Oh, I am definitely not complaining!" said Charlinder. "All this," he said, gesturing around at the room, hoping to convey the value of her company, the meal, the conversation, the shelter, "is kind of saving my life right now. If those guys thought I was crazy, they weren't far off. This trip was about to make me lose my mind."
"Now that just makes me wonder," said Gentiola, nearing the bottom of her salad, "about your trip. Where are you from? Did you walk here all the way from England?"
"No, I've never been to England. I'm from the American territory, but yeah, I walked."
Gentiola looked up at him and blinked. "Goodness. You must be from California, or further north?"
"No, no such luck. My home is east of the Appalachian Mountains."
"Well. Now I see what you mean about the past few years. Where are you headed?"
"Actually, this area is...
pretty much
where I wanted to go. I still don't know exactly how close I am, but I didn't just end up here by accident."
"Really," she said. "I haven't met someone from so far away in the longest time. What brings you to this part of the world?"
He began to answer, and in that instant, he recalled his 20-year-old self safely at home where he had a job he loved, saw his friends every day, slept every night under a roof and off the ground, and could ask his uncle for advice whenever he needed. He remembered the version of himself that had never butted against a language barrier, never gone a full day with nothing to eat, never crawled through a fire, walked through a monsoon, been chased out of a village half-dressed, or suffered frostbite and deliberately kept himself awake for half the night walking out of the mountains. It was that part of himself that didn't know how it felt to be perpetually cold, hungry, sore, exhausted and unable to talk with anyone.
"I wanted to learn about the Plague," he answered, with that alien, long-forgotten part of himself now rising to the surface. "And I thought this part of the world was the place to do it. Does that make sense?"
Gentiola peered back at him with the most intense, focused expression of wonder. As if he weren't bizarre enough for her merely as a foreigner so far from home, now he wanted to know about the Plague, of all things. "Yes, that makes perfect sense. But, I don't think you came all this way out of simple curiosity."
Then he recalled arguing with Robert in the schoolroom, Ruth challenging him about Eileen, and Kenny waking up in the infirmary. "Um, my home village is getting kind of, at odds?--about the issue, and some of my neighbors are trying to use it as a way to push others around, so I thought it would be best to find a real answer."
"There's a controversy over the Plague, and it's causing problems for your village," she paraphrased.
"I didn't want it to get any worse," said Charlinder. He suspected that if he tried telling Gentiola about the events that led up to his decision to leave home, he would only sound pathetic, overreactive. "I thought it would be best to put an end to that back-and-forth of yes it did/no it didn't, because all that was just digging us into a deeper hole."
"No, no, I get what you mean," she said. "You're doing what needs to be done."
"Only, I just thought I'd come out here and find
something
that would give us an answer," he went on. "But I didn't think about just what it would be. And I'd never been anywhere, so I didn’t know how long it would take to get this far, or how many stupid things I could do in that amount of time. I just had no idea what I was getting into."
"You know," began Gentiola, "I was around for the Plague."
Charlinder looked over at her. How was it possible that she was even still alive, after that many years? She didn't look older than the late thirties. "You were around over a hundred-twenty years ago?"
"Yes," she said, looking nearly as puzzled as he felt. "It must be the magic that's making me live so long, though I've never heard of such a thing happening before. But either way, I was around for the pandemic, and I can certainly tell you what I remember."
"I'd really like that," he said, almost at a whisper. There was a sensation creeping over him, just as powerful as sitting in front of a roaring fire after nearly freezing, or of having a good meal after days of hunger and constant walking. "That would get me off to a great start, if you could tell me."
"Of course, I'll tell you as much as I know. You just decide when you're ready to ask."
"Sure, but," he hesitated. If he wasn't mistaken, she was giving him permission to wait a while before getting to business. "I don't want you to have to wait around for me, since I don't have anything to offer you in return."
"Oh, you don't understand. I'm so tired of having this
ridiculous
house all to myself with no one to talk to, and I haven't had a guest in...it must be longer than you've been alive, now. You look exhausted; surely you'd like to put down your bags and rest for a while?"
"You're sure this is no trouble?"
"No, you're not troubling me at all. All you need to offer is that you'll put up with me."
Charlinder took a disbelieving breath and started laughing. "Yes. I would really like to put down my bags for a while."
"Wonderful! Once you've had enough to eat, I will show you where you can sleep, and then I will show you to the washroom, where you can take a shower."
"I guess I must smell pretty atrocious to you, huh?"
"Don't worry about that; you've been walking in very hot weather for the last several months, and I'm sure a cleanup will make you feel a lot better."
"Here's an odd question," he asked between bites of her bean-based stew. "Do the people who live around here call you something like...La Mamma?"
Gentiola looked slightly embarrassed. "Yes, that is a nickname I've acquired. Why?"
"Because it kept coming up in people's homes when they hosted me. I couldn't very well understand what anyone was saying, except that phrase kept coming up and it was obvious when they were talking about me. And I swear, they kept pointing me in this direction."
"Oh, that's so funny," she remarked, apparently thinking out loud. "The guys who brought you here thought I could make you stop being crazy, but I imagine the people further off directed you to me because they didn't know what to do with someone who didn't speak their language. It's probably the first time in their lives that most of them have ever met someone who didn't speak Italian. Back home, did you ever meet anyone who spoke a language other than English?"