Even though we didn’t speak the same language, I liked John Dark. Even though that wasn’t her real name, only what it sounded like. And the name it sounded like wasn’t really her name either, I discovered. It was a joke, and as good a name for a French woman as any. Though I didn’t get the joke until it was explained to me long after our ways had parted.
I remember that first day and night very clearly, but the days that followed blurred into one another. I was torn, wanting to be on my way to find Brand, but not being able to leave her until she could at least get up and piss for herself. There would have been no point sewing her up just to leave her in a pool of her own mess. Would have been a waste of good honey, not to mention the not-quite-so-good needlework. And of course I wanted to know her story, why was she here, where had she come from, what had she seen, what she knew. She looked like she’d seen a lot.
She got my story out of me first. Using the dictionary and lot of eyebrow raising she asked, Where from? and I showed her on the map—not exactly, but roughly. I didn’t quite trust her enough for that exactly. Family? was easy. Four fingers answered that. So was Alone? That got one thumb. Why here? was harder: I laboriously pointed out the words for “a man steal my dog; I go find him, get dog”. She made me do it twice because she couldn’t believe it. I added “red beard” the second time, hoping she might know about Brand, but her eyes didn’t flicker a bit in recognition. Where? was easier to answer. I just showed her on the map. And since I had it open, I showed her where I thought we were. She made me get a map from her own bag and, though hers was better, being backed in material, it showed the same landscape. And we agreed we were just outside the big city in the middle of the country.
We established she came from France which was not a surprise by then, having read the cover on the grubby dictionary. What was a surprise was when I asked, Where boat you? and she shook her head and made it clear there was no boat. She pointed to the horses and rolled her eyes. How could she get them on a boat? Then she made walking movements with her fingers. I shook my head and pointed at the sea. She snorted and pointed at another area on the land and traced it across the narrow channel. Then she snapped her fingers and demanded the dictionary. She found the word for “tunnel” which was another word like “infection” that was spelled exactly the same. I didn’t believe her, because even if there had been a tunnel under the sea, I’m sure it would have filled with water after a hundred years or so. And that’s assuming the rising seawater hadn’t submerged the entrances and filled it that way. However, she was emphatic that she had ridden under the sea to get here, with an oil lamp that she showed me hanging off one of the baskets.
I didn’t mind that she was lying. I hadn’t quite told her exactly where I was from either. I did like the swagger of her lie. Ferg once said to me that if I was going to lie I might as well make it a big one as a small one, and I think that’s what she was doing. She didn’t want me to find where her valuable boat was laid up.
I asked why she had come here. Her face did flicker then. Her finger found “family” again. Then “daughters”. Then a word that I first read as “pest” until I realised I was reading the French word and that there was an e on the end and in English it meant “plague”.
I’m sorry, I said.
She shrugged, but her eyes were elsewhere for a long
moment.
I wanted to ask more questions, but I could see she was sad and tired and so I went off with Jip to refill the water bottles from a stream that came tumbling down the slope behind us. As I did so, I wondered about the plague she had spoken of. I decided it was probably just a normal disease that likely once would have been easily fixed with drugs we no longer had. After all, a plague is a disease that sweeps through huge populations, inflicting terrible damage. There just wasn’t enough population left to have a plague in. I think I was wrong and she was actually being very accurate about the symptoms, but that’s what I thought then.
She spent most of the day sleeping, and when she wasn’t she always seemed to be looking at me with her head on one side, as if I was something that she could not quite make out. It was late that afternoon, or maybe the next one when she told me the other reason she was here. She thumbed her chest, then pointed to the dictionary: I. Look. Someone. Too.
Someone? I pointed back and raised my eyebrows in imitation of her questioning expression.
Kel Kun, she said. Kel Kun Demal.
Whoever this Kel Kun was, he made her eyes go away again.
I changed the dressings morning and night, and there was no smell of infection, though the wound line was crooked and red and was, for the first two days, worryingly hot. I kept using the last of my honey on it, and she dosed herself with the contents of her medical kit, and between the honey and the powders and leaves she ingested, the wound did seem to be healing.
She had several habits that were odd to me, things she was emphatic about. Maybe everybody else’s habits are odd to strangers. One was the loo garoo sticks. These were long torches, made from wooden handles which had spools of material wound round the head, material that had been soaked in sticky pine pitch. She never lit them, but she insisted that we kept them laid close to the fire at night. When I tried to ask why, she just pointed out at the darkness, at the three horses hobbled close by and the blackness beyond.
Poor lay loo, she said.
I made a question with my face. She smiled.
Lay loo, she repeated and then made a mock-serious I’m-trying-to-scare-you-but-not-really face.
Lay loo? she said, waggling her eyebrows. Lay loo garoo.
So the torches became the loo garoo sticks, and were—to me—a sort of quaint pointless ritual she liked. Until of course they weren’t.
Several things became clear as we waited for her wound to heal. One was that Jip had got caught in a snare she had set for rabbits around her camp. I found a bunch of them, made from the thin wire in one of her bags. She pointed at them and then at Jip’s leg with a shrug of apology. Another was that she had seen the burning house I had left behind us and had ridden to see what it was, in much the same way that I had been drawn to the fire I had seen from the tower. Like me, she had been drawn to a possible sign of other people—but unlike me she had found it was so. She said she had thought the fire might have been Kel Kun Demal.
One afternoon she pointed at the horses and asked, by miming, if I could ride one. We don’t ride the ponies on the island, just use them for carrying and walking beside them. But since I had ridden them as a small child, perched between the panniers carrying the peat, I nodded.
The next day, we ran out of honey and she decided the wound was knitting well enough for her to start walking and trying the horse. She was grey-haired but she was tough, and now that the pain had subsided and the infection—if it had been infection—had gone, she was energetic again.
By a mixture of mime and dictionary-pointing, she made it clear that she wanted me to go with her into the city, where she had seen a big nest of bees. She pointed to my jar. She wanted to repay me by replacing the honey that had healed her. I was in a strange state of mind—in a hurry to get to Brand, overjoyed to have Jip back, but also not wanting to go our separate ways, and since the city lay more or less in the right direction I nodded. She spent the day reorganising the packs, and then she put one horse-load’s worth on a tree, close in by the car stacks where she indicated she would find it when she returned, and then made me get up on the second bag-free horse and ride around a bit.
Jip barked to see me riding, and the horse snorted in something between ridicule and frustration, as if it could sense how suddenly nervy I was, but she said something to it and her words seemed to work like a spell and calm it right down. There was light left in the sky, but after a couple of wide circles to get used to the feeling of being carried across the landscape on such a high and swaying seat, we returned to the camp and spent a last night feasting on boar and berries.
She didn’t look so cheerful the next day as we saddled up and set off down the hill. Her face was set and sour as the horse lurched over the rough ground, and once again I saw her teeth set against any sound of pain that might try and escape. It was a misty morning, and she rode with her hood up. Jip criss-crossed the slope ahead of us, surprising some early rabbits, but his heart was more in chasing than killing and anyway we had all eaten well the night before, him included.
By the time we descended to the old M road, the sun had driven away most of the mist and as the day warmed, so did she. She dropped back to ride beside me, watching me with a disapproving eye. By the time we had gone five klicks or so, she decided that the various instructions she had communicated in mime to me—things like sit up, squeeze with your knees, relax your hand, don’t pull the reins and so on—had turned me into a slightly less disappointing rider than I had been at the start of the day and she grunted in approval.
Bravo, Griz, she said.
I don’t know which made me more surprised and unexpectedly happy. Her approval or the fact that she’d used my name for the first time.
She rode ahead, leading the pack horse. My horse was happy to follow as they wove in as straight a line as they could through the saplings and larger trees that were invading the old M road. It’s a strange thing, riding another animal. I hadn’t really thought about it when I had been given rides on the peat ponies, but now I felt it strongly. It wasn’t so much the sensation of moving along without doing much—that was familiar enough from being driven by the wind on the sea—it was the fact that the motion which carried me was obviously the particular movement of another living thing. It was a controlled lurch, always—or so it seemed to me—on the point of tripping or at least losing its own special cadence. But as the day progressed, I stopped fighting it, and then by forgetting to worry about it I relaxed and slowly began to feel a part of the horse, rather than apart from it. Which probably doesn’t make sense unless you rode horses and felt what I was feeling. But you probably drove around in cars instead. Did that feel as exhilarating, or were you always worried the engine might run away with you, the same way I had worried about the horse stumbling?
As we headed onwards, the city slowly started to rise around us, as if it were a growing thing crowding in on either side. Once again, the scale of who you were, the sheer number of you, began to wash over me. There were hulks of long, low buildings that must have been factories, and then mazes of regularly divided vegetation that must have been more overgrown streets of identical box houses and then in the distance, converging with us, another raised roadway striding across the intervening wasteland of shrubs, trees and tumbledown buildings on stubby legs of concrete.
What did your cities sound like when these roads were full of cars? Was it a whine or a rumble or a growl? Or a roar? Did all the different kinds of car and lorry sound different? Could you tell what was coming without looking? And seeing all the roads there were, how did you stop bumping into one another if you were travelling at the speeds I’ve read about?
I couldn’t keep my wits about me or stay alert to danger, and I was just riding one horse. If I had been able to, maybe I wouldn’t have ridden right into it.
But then not all danger looks bad on the outside. We were just going to get some honey.
Not everything sweet is good for you.