The girl’s question—“So you know your destination?”—with its unlikely echo, the very words the caretaker had put to the Captain, made me think I would faint again.
Instead, my belly made a dark belching sound and up came a bright splat of all the water I’d drunk too fast. The children went, “Eww!” The girl with the shawl said, “Back up, you lot—clear out,” and they dispersed. All except one, a great big girl with round cow eyes. She gave me a handkerchief to wipe my mouth. Then they took me over, these two, to sit on a barrel by the wagon. The musician had disappeared, packed up his contraption and gone somewhere. The boy came back with the tin cup replenished. I drank more slowly this time. In between sips I told them how I must be on my way, how I needed to catch up with the Captain and Genoveva.
“You’re delivering a message,” suggested the girl with the shawl.
I shook my head. “No—provisions.”
“Provisions! You’re carrying provisions, yet you’re fainting from hunger?”
“More from thirst,” I said. Then after a moment’s thought: “Though it’s true I’ve eaten almost nothing today.”
They told me to stay where I was and went down to the other end of the tunnel. I was content to wait. Now that I was sitting, a tiredness draped itself over me and clung. If before, walking, I’d felt it would have taken more effort to halt than to stay in motion, now I could hardly imagine ever rising again.
They returned with a bowl of stew. “Varda here thinks she saw your man,” said the one with the shawl, the one whose hair was piled atop her head. “Only he wasn’t on a horse.”
“No. He was on a horse, but I don’t know if he had a beard.”
“’S not what you sai–”
“Yes, Ottla! I said I saw a man with a red beard and no horse, but later there was another man riding a horse, a little fat horse, and he might’ve had a beard, or not.”
“Really. And where was I, Varda, during all this parade of men?”
“Not paying attention.”
They went back and forth, bickering lightly, this Ottla with the messy bun and this Varda with the cow eyes.
I myself was only slightly paying attention.
It was because of the stew. It had carrots in it and tomato and beans and potato and apricot and cinnamon at the very least. It was good, the stew and also the water in the tin cup, which they’d replenished yet again. Now that I thought about it, since leaving the Captain’s house I’d eaten nothing but a little supper of fried apple and onion at the Other Side, then a few bites of cheese and honey on the grassy verge today. A single swallow of goat’s milk. No wonder I’d fainted. I took spoonful after spoonful as they continued their muddled conversation.
“Well, which way was he going?”
“Which one?”
“Ai, Varda! Whichever. Any of them, where did they go?” Ottla brought her hands together with an impatient clap.
Varda slipped her little finger inside her mouth, a child’s gesture, big as she was. I should have been impatient for her to reply but felt I couldn’t give anything my full attention until I’d finished the stew. I let the kitten, perched on my lap, put its tiny muzzle over the side of the bowl and feed at the same time.
Slowly, the dizziness and queasiness left. Without the music, this part of the tunnel was quiet. It made me more aware of the commotion down at the far end, where children’s voices ricocheted excitedly. This part of the tunnel smelled soft and ageless, like wet stone.
“The both of them went thataway,” Varda declared finally. She jerked a thumb toward the far end, down by all the hullabaloo.
The both of them. I had a queer vision of two Captains peeling off from a single original. Duplicating first as vaporous shimmers, then each crystalizing into more solid form. Identical except for their hair and Genoveva. One clean-shaven Captain going off astride; one horseless Captain going off with beard intact.
I asked, “What is all that noise down there?”
Varda said something I didn’t understand. It wasn’t only her eyes being too round; her teeth were too large and spaced apart. I didn’t like to look at her. I thought of the cook’s saying no one’s not broken in some way or other.
“What?” I asked, scraping up the last spoonful. My insides were glowing. I felt almost used to the tunnel. The dank and smoky air. The shadows cast by the firelight here in the middle, and the way the shadows surrendered themselves at either end to the rainy spring afternoon light. Was it, I wondered, their home?
“Warshing,” said Varda. “Bathing.”
“Want to see?” Ottla took the empty bowl from me and I took the kitten and we all walked toward the far end, where a tattered curtain of rainwater draped the archway.
Naked and half-naked children were shrieking and shivering, some laughing and some bawling, under the cascading ropes of runoff from higher up the mountain. Some were already clean and sat towel-wrapped on grown-up laps or drifted over, pink-skinned, to stand near the fire. Others were just now getting stripped of their clothes and held under the flow by women who scrubbed at them with bars of grayish soap.
There was something rough about the whole business. Something enviable, too. So many bodies, so much familiarity. At the Captain’s house, though all were welcome, a kind of general shield surrounded each person who came and went. As if respect for unnamed suffering required silence and distance. Among the people at the Other Side there’d been a coarseness, but with something clipped about it, something hard and brusque, even when they were tipsy. Here in the tunnel, the bath-time rumpus—never mind the actual temperature—felt warm.