The Long Road Home

            She rolls over amongst the sheepskins and props herself up on one elbow to watch as he starts to wake.

            He’s a ginger-headed southerner, dark around the face, dark eyed, and with his eyes deep set.  Their faces seem to be all bone, and the bone oversized, straining against flesh and skin for its time in the sun.  This one’s handsome enough in his own way, thin, fine-featured, perhaps not as clean as she would have liked.  But you don’t get to choose.

            They all have a story.  She’s learnt this by now.  This one is the same.

            #

            Last night, in his cups, his breath mixing brandy with wine, he’d told her his.  Bethria was practiced in listening to stories, asking the few questions needed to keep him talking, to let him feel listened to, noticed, to let him spin his story out in the direction it needed to go.

            “I was sent to save my people,” he said to her.  “Did you know that?”

            How would she?  But she only smiled, she nodded.  They all have their stories.

            “The crops failed in Yathoric five years in a row.  Five years!  If you can imagine it, living here, amongst the rivers.  The grain stores lasted the first couple of years, but by the third we were eating our seed corn, scouring the wastelands by the fourth.  By the fifth, skinny and hungry, losing children and old folk to the winter.  It was the same all over.

            “We tossed stones for the duty, and it fell to me.  Chance, right?  To find an answer.”

            She knew how this would end, but she asked him: “And did you?”

            “I tried.  I travelled half the world.  I went to the greatest libraries in the most erudite cities.  I asked the oldest sages, looked into the most famed wishing wells, drowned the last of my coin there.

            “Almost the last.  The rest went on drinking, whoring,” – a quick, awkward glance at her – “avoidance.  Then a man met me in the darkest parts of town, he told me he could give me these seeds.  They would save my people.  In return, I had to give him just one memory.”        In spite of herself, leaning into his telling.  “Which one?”

            He shook his head.  “I don’t… I’m not sure…”

            “Because you gave it to him.”

            “It’s gone.  And what if it’s a wife, or a son, or daughter?  What if they’re waiting at home for me?”

            You would have saved them, I suppose.

            He showed her the smooth glass box in which he kept the seeds.  They were almost ordinary, big and gnarled, sandy yellow, irregularly shaped.  Almost ordinary.  Did she see a slight sparkle in some of them, a promise of more than just a cruel joke or a beggar’s madness?

            “Do you think they’ll work?”  He’d asked her.  “Do you think there’ll be anyone to go home to, to give them to?”

            She couldn’t answer.  He didn’t want her to.

            “Two years.  Out wandering.  Two years, two harvests.”

            “Well, maybe the land healed itself.”

            He doubted.  He turned away from her, the good work of her earlier efforts forgotten in his misery, in the accumulation of his fears.  He lay unsleeping, she guessed, for some hours, gazing into the uncertain prospects of his future.

            #

            But then they all have a story.

            He dresses quickly and thanks her again for the previous night.  For the listening, or for her body – he doesn’t make that clear.  He gives her cheek an uncertain kiss.  Hesitates, fumbles a few last coins into her palm.

            “Home?”  she asks him.

            “Yes.”

            But she can see him doubting, fearing, seeking reasons to delay.

            “It’s time.  I promise you.”  That she, a whore, could make such a promise!  But she’s learnt that men believe a promise from her that they would doubt from their very own mother.  She’s never learnt why.

            “It’s time,” he agrees, and he sets out along the road.  She’ll never see him again, but she watches him leave, watches until she can’t see him anymore.  She wonders where he’ll go.  She didn’t think to ask him earlier: which way is home?

Picture credit/discredit: writer's own work