She shaded her eyes with one hand and peered out at the horizon, though there was nothing inspiring about it. It was three months of low scrub and low hopes.
“Expect more of the same,” I said, taking a drink from my canteen and trying to sound like a grizzled traveler and not like someone who used to live above an alehouse and still hated desert nights.
“I don’t mind,” she said. “I’ve never been outside the walls before. I’m excited for anything.”
I was probably more grizzled than I thought, though, since the idea of being closed in by city walls made my skin crawl.
“Well, if you like scrub, we’ll have plenty.”
“How do the animals take it?”
I looked over at the two bony oxen, who had found enough roots for a meal and were chewing contentedly. “They’re tough beasts, though they look dead.”
“Tough beasts do surprise you that way,” she said.
She went back into the wagon, and only then I realized she had gone all day without so much as a drink of water, and I had offered her none.
“We’ll arrange a bed for you in the wagon,” I said the first night as she and Mark were trying a fire.
“Oh, no,” she said, “I love the sky.”
I wondered if she expected me to sleep at her side. I didn’t know what sandal-husbands usually did. “The wagon is really much better. More privacy.”
“Too late,” she said, “I already know what Mark says in his sleep.”
She handed him the flint, and Mark blushed and bowed his head to the sparks.
After the fire was going, Mark helped me pull rations out of the barrel.
“I hope she doesn’t eat much,” he said, staring at the salted beef and stale bread.
“What do you say in your sleep?”
Mark shook his head, and I hated that they should have been together in the back of the wagon with their secrets while I was sweating in the sun all day.
“Don’t lose your manners,” I said into the barrel.
Mark raised an eyebrow, sliced the meat into three pieces with his pocketknife. “Well, what’s her name, then, so I don’t have to keep calling her Goodwife?”
“You
“Don’t you know her name?”
She hadn’t said it and I’d never asked, but the priest had written it down. “Sara.”
Mark looked at me like I was one of the oxen, and took the skillet out to her.
“Tell me about your city,” she said to me.
“It was like your city. Like any city.”
“I don’t know my city,” she said. “Start there.”
And I must have made a face again, because she explained, “They have the market at night so we don’t see the city well enough to run away.”
I thought about the women picking their way home before it was light, about her thin purse, her refusal to go home and pack. The food turned to dust in my mouth.
“What do you want to know?” I asked, but I knew the answer before she said, “Everything.”
I told her about the alehouse; she asked how ale was made and listened as if she’d married a brewer. She wanted to know how many people could read. I told her about my schooling in the townhouse owned by a noble who lived in the country, and then I realized how it sounded to live in the country when the country looked like this, so I explained lakes and green trees and the soft wet snow that fell in winter.
I described the trader who sold me his wagon, his beasts, and Mark’s indenture in exchange for the alehouse. I expected her to tell me it was a poor trade, but she listened to this story the same as to the others.
When I got to the terms of the sale, Mark said, “This was worth an alehouse in a season city?”
I had no answer, gave him none.
After I ran out of my life, I told her the Tale of the Pearl, which seemed to make her sad, so I told the Tale of the Blind Flower-seller to smooth things over.
Then my throat hurt, and I said, “We should sleep.”
“You know, I grew up, too,” Mark said as he sulked back to the wagon.
She laughed; her voice was dry, and I handed her the canteen.
She laid her blanket on the hard ground and pulled half of it over her. I felt guilty for not having bought a pallet, a felted shawl even, in all the time I’d been sleeping on the ground. The wagon was as it had been delivered to me, as though I was just keeping it for the man who might want it back.
“We’ll buy you a pallet,” I said.
“No need,” she said, like someone who’s used to the worst bed. “Do you know the stars?”
“No.”
She was quiet after that. When enough time had gone by, I made a bed a little behind her; it was cold that far from the fire, and it felt too familiar to be so close, but I wanted to be something between her and the night.
I wasn’t fond of other traders on the road (or ever), but a few evenings later I saw a fire and knocked on the side of the wagon to let them know we were stopping.
I brought a rasher of bacon to trade for a torch to light our fire. They were glass traders from Demarest, and after the pleasantries I found myself saying, “Let me bring my wife over; she has a little pepper to season it.”
Mark and the sandal-bride (Sara, I thought) were pulling bread out of the barrel when I hauled myself into the cramped quarters.
“Bring some pepper,” I told her.
I wasn’t sure how to go on, but she guessed and smiled, and reached for the right barrel.
Mark said, “That’s five coin worth—”
“Come on,” I said, and she carried the ladle like it was mazeflower and not some common thing.
They were surprised to see her, and I remembered she was ugly.
She didn’t notice, or didn’t react, and they made room for us, and when there had been quiet for a moment she said, “Where have you come from?”
They looked to me like she had spoken out of turn.
I thought about the city walls and the night market closing around her again in Okalide.
I said, “Do you know about the stars?”
A week later we found someone who knew the stars, and he went through each constellation, jabbing his finger at the sky.
We found a botanist after that, wasted out in the scrub, who described flowers I’d never seen.
A silk trader liked her. He opened up his caravan of wagons and had his servants bring the best. We held up our lanterns and looked at the embroidered fountains that spit silver spangles along the blue silk.
Pilgrim women never spoke; the men only spoke to me. We stopped trying. Pilgrims could season their own food.
Once when I stopped the wagon for the night I found her sleeping with her cheek pressed against a barrel of cinnamon, like she could hear how it smelled.
I rarely said anything at strange camps; what was there to say when you were always the ignorant one?
But I listened, and I saw how people changed as they spoke of things they loved, and with every story I felt the world opening before us as if my oxen walked on the sea.
A metalworker and his wife sharpened our knives for some chilies, and the sandal-bride’s eyes gleamed in the dark as he explained how to power the wheel, how to shape a blade.
“Where did you learn it?”
“At my father’s feet,” the man said, and tears sprang into his eyes, but even as he cried he told her about the illness that had carried off his parents. He wanted a home by the sea, where the salt air dulled enough knives to feed a metalworker for the rest of his life, and where the fish was fresh.
That night she cried softly, mourning the parents of some man she’d never see again.
I counted the stars: the great ox, the three cubs, the parted lovers, the willow tree.
