Charlinder explained to the daughters the next morning that it was time for him to move on. He did feel more sorry to depart their home than most, but he couldn't stay for much longer. One of the girls directed him to wait in the main room while she took his luggage toward their kitchen. The other went off to find her parents. He waited a while, and the second daughter came back and beckoned Charlinder outside. In the back garden where he had enjoyed the previous evening with the parents, her sister was waiting with his pack and the parents stood by the rabbit cages. Their mother was holding the multi-colored rabbit in her arms. She said something pleasant and handed the little furry animal to Charlinder.
Momentarily stunned, he held the rabbit out to his hosts and shook his head. "I can't accept this," he said.
The mother argued back and pressed the animal to Charlinder's sweater. Her husband explained while pointing at his grazing animals in the field, and the message was clear: he returned their goat after someone else stole her, so he got a rabbit as thanks. Charlinder's experience with hosts was that once they decided to be generous, there was no refusing their gifts, so he didn't try to hand it back to them again.
"This is really too much," he thought out loud. "Thank you."
He named his new companion Smoky and soon established a care ritual with the animal that kept him occupied. The host family had included in the gift a pouch containing supplies for the rabbit; a tiny wooden comb, a leather halter and lead that fit around the bunny's chest and shoulders, and enough greens to keep him fed for the first couple of days. Charlinder combed out Smoky's wool every evening to make sure it didn't mat under the halter. He stuffed the harvested fiber into a corner of his pack for the night, then spun it on his drop-spindle the next day while he walked. Smoky stayed on the lead for most of the day, hopping beside Charlinder and nibbling on wild greens, though he periodically took the bunny off the ground and carried him in his sweater, leaving only his head and front paws poking out. Summer was gone and the weather was only getting colder. It occurred to Charlinder that this was probably the first time in all his trip that he was heading north as winter approached, so he was glad he still had Lacey's skin with him, though he would have been happier never to have parted with the living sheep. Smoky slept every night curled up next to Charlinder's middle between his sweater and jacket, and he gave him a few spoonfuls from each meal he made for himself. He was covered in fantastically warm wool, but also very small and descended from a species accustomed to living underground.
He reached the northern coast in November. He followed the shoreline in a northerly direction until he reached a settlement. It was something between the Hyatts' town in western Canada and the Albanian community from which he'd sailed across the Adriatic Sea.
The people looked like a solid bunch: weather-worn, wind-blown, ruggedly dressed, well-nourished and with all their bones set in the right places. The most significant part of this settlement, however, was the marina of boats docked along the shore. There were a handful of simple flat rafts like the Albanians used, and there were rowboats and small sail-powered craft. Charlinder paused a moment to stare at these vessels and contemplate how they were used, what kinds of missions they were set, and so forth, and momentarily forgot that he was a complete stranger, looking rather alien with his ragged baggage on his back and furry long-eared companion peering over his shoulder, standing around and staring at the transportation. During that brief loss of self-awareness, he attracted attention. A gruffly questioning male voice snapped him out of his gawk session.
"Sorry, I don't speak French," said Charlinder, also observing that the questioner looked like a viable host. He reached over his shoulder for the map, but then the fellow surprised him again.
"But you speak English," he said, through a heavy accent but very comprehensible.
Charlinder nearly lost his footing on the perfectly solid ground. Memories from a certain day in India came rushing back to him.
"Yes," he responded, cautiously. "Do you?"
"Of course. I go to England often and trade with them. But your speech is different. Where are you from?"
"I'm from America," he said, still dumbfounded.
Now it was the older Frenchman's turn to be shocked. "You joke with me. How did you get here?"
"I walked," he answered. "Mostly."
Now his questioner laughed. "Now, really. I do not ask for jokes. You do not sound like the English, so where are you from? Ireland, perhaps?"
Now Charlinder recovered himself. "No, I'm really American. I started walking west almost three years ago. I took boats over the Bering Straight, around Greece, and across the Adriatic Sea, but everything else has been on land."
"My God. What are you doing here?"
"It's a long story. Here, look at this," he said, holding out the map.
The gentleman's name was Bernard, and he soon let Charlinder roll out his bedding in the corner of his kitchen. Bernard's wife and four children didn't speak English, but he explained the situation to them well enough that they were happy to have him stay. Bernard's brother, however, was another bilingual marine tradesman, who gathered up a crowd of other traders, and Charlinder was caught off-guard that evening to find he had an audience. For the first time since leaving home, he ended up seated at the front of a room, surrounded by people who wanted to know what he was up to, some of whom even spoke his language.
"Actually, I'm on my way to Great Britain," he answered one person's query.
"What are you looking for in Great Britain?" asked someone else.
"Um...from Scotland, I'd then go to Iceland and Greenland," he explained. "I mean, I'm sure Britain's wonderful, and I've really enjoyed it here, too, but I'm looking to go farther than that."
"What on Earth do you want in Greenland?" asked another man; this one with a very different spoken accent and more confident verbal flow.
"I want to get back to North America from the western side, is what I want," Charlinder replied.
This brought a murmur of understanding from the crowd. "Well, that makes sense," said another fellow in a similar speech pattern to the last, "but do you know this is a very bad time of year to go that far north? I doubt you'll find anyone who'll chance it before the spring."
"I know that, so I'm planning to make myself useful somewhere in Britain and wait out the winter."
There was a moment of eerie quiet in the room, while everyone merely stared at Charlinder aside from an interpreter translating his words to the monolingual part of the crowd.
Finally, the latest questioner piped up again. "Well, Bob's your uncle and Fanny's your friggin' aunt, this lad's got a plan!"
The room erupted into jubilant laughter. Charlinder joined in, though he wasn't entirely sure he knew what was so funny.
"Here, Charlie, we're going back to England tomorrow, come along with us!" said a man nearby. "I think he'll fit in our boat, right, men?" he said to his fellows.
"I'd really appreciate that! Did you just call me Charlie?"
"You did not tell us why you are here?" Bernard requested later that night. "Why did you leave America?"
"I needed to find something," Charlinder began, cautiously, "that wasn't there."
"Did you find this something?"
"Yeah, I found it, so that's why I'm on my way home now."
"But how did you know where to look?"
This, he acknowledged, was a valid question. "We got the story passed down from the original survivors--of the Plague of 2010, I mean--that the thing we needed was in Italy, and we figured they knew what they were talking about."
"Yes, that does make sense, but still, how did you know it was still there?"
"That's the crazy thing about this whole adventure. I know now that I didn't
really
know then that it would still be around, or how I was supposed to find it, or what it was like to travel in other countries, but...we needed the information so much that I had to try. It's because of a lot of good fortune that I'm still alive, truth to tell."
"It was information, then?" said Bernard. Charlinder had just said too much. "Was it about the Plague? I cannot think of anything else you would need so much that you would walk for three years."
You caught me.
"Yes, it was about the Plague, and I was lucky to find it."
"We French call that event the--how do you say it?--The Great Turn-Back, is how it goes. We do not worry about how it happened, only that we must be more careful in the future. But you have found your answer, so congratulations to you. If you can go this far, then surely you will go home."
Chapter Thirty-Three
Britain
Charlinder climbed into a sailboat the next morning with Smoky tucked firmly into his jacket, at the invitation of Bill and David, two of the Englishmen from the crowd the previous night. After crossing the Strait of Dover, the tradesmen unloaded their shipment and Bill brought Charlinder to his family's house for the rest of the day.
"I wonder how much you told Bernard and the rest of them," said Bill's wife, Mandy, after Bill left them for work. The children were playing with Smoky in the next room. "You know, about whatever you found out about the Plague."
Charlinder, who was helping Mandy with the cooking, had to pause in the middle of chopping parsnips. "Sorry, but what did Bill say?"
"He heard from Davy, who got it from Bernard, that you found out something about the Plague in Italy," she explained, "so my question is, not really what did you find out, but more like, how much did you share with Bernard and the others?"
"What Bill heard from David," said Charlinder slowly, "is pretty much what I told Bernard, and if he told his French neighbors, that was his idea." He waited for a response, but Mandy only watched him curiously. "Why do you ask?"
"Oh, I'm not accusing you of anything," she answered. "It's just kind of odd to have the boys come back from Calais with something to say about the Plague, of all things. I've got no idea what goes on, really, when they go to France, but I'm sure they're not lying when they say they don't talk much about the Plague with the Frogs. They probably don't talk about much more than who owes what this month when they're over there. I mean, the Frogs certainly don't bother us about much more than that when they come here, and why should they?"
"Wait," Charlinder interrupted, "the 'Frogs'?"
"Oh, I mean the French," Mandy answered. "Sorry, bit of local slang. But I mean to say, even we here in Dover don't have much to say about the Plague anymore. Our grandparents went on about it, but for us, it's more like, yeah, it happened, it killed everyone and the rest of us got put back to the friggin' tenth century BC, now here we are in the ninth century BC, so what else is there to say? We've got to get on with our piddling lives, am I right? There isn't much of anything to find out, in any case, except then up you turn, and you've gone and found something out!"
"I guess," he responded carefully, "if my community felt the same way, I wouldn't be here, but we were talking about the Plague more than we used to, and it was getting sort of tense, so I decided to break the stalemate," he explained.
"In that case, good for you. I never thought we'd hear more about it from the Calais lot, 'cause I know what they call it in their language, the Great Turn-Back. Like we all had it coming, or something, and perhaps we did, but I've spent a bit of time around those blokes, and I don't think they're really so laid-back about the Turn-Back, you know? I think they would like to know more if they could find out, only they've got to get on with their piddling lives, too, so...are you sure Bernard didn't ask you anything else?"
"Yes, that's as far as we went. He said the French think we just need to be more careful in the future, and that was all."
"It was good of him to be tactful like that," said Mandy. "But really, just tell me this much. You were in Italy, right? How did you learn to speak Italian so quick? Our menfolk have been going to Calais since they were small boys, and they didn't speak French after just one season."
"I still don't speak Italian," Charlinder said.
"So what happened?"
"I met a woman," he hesitated, "a very old woman, mind you, who could speak any language at all, and she helped me."
"Really?" replied Mandy. "Now where did you find
her
?"
"She lives in Torino," he decided. "Her name is Zamira."
"Well that's fascinating. Come in here and help Mummy with lunch, loves," she called to her children. "Bring Mr. Char's bunny rabbit with you."
Bill marked Charlinder's map the next morning, while he thanked the family for their hospitality and continued on his way.
"Right, so you've just come through
here
," said Bill with a tiny X on a point at the southern English coast. "Now, you'll want to go a bit west as you go north, since you're headed for the Thames anyway, and you'll have better luck on the west side of London, as the river's much smaller over there. What's left of London now, anyway. It got pretty much cooked by the Plague, from what I hear."
"North and west it is, then, thank you," said Charlinder. He folded the map carefully and replaced it in its accorded spot.
"Now, I'm sure you're not looking to talk about it, but..." Bill began, "I've got to ask, at least...about that old woman in Torino?"
"What about her?"
"How did she help you?"
"She showed me where the Plague came from, how it began. She made it clear that the disease wasn't an act of God."