She said, “I promise, Father.”
Those three words seemed enough for him. He settled back on his haunches with a look of relief. And Isme wondered: how could he forget her earlier disobedience so easily? But then she realized that he also understood her new resolve.
She had disobeyed once and knew the cost, but the cost had not been paid by herself. That made paying it even worse in her eyes—why should someone else suffer for her mistake?
~
Her father dragged the boat up out of the water, up off the sand, up through the scrub-grass that looked as familiar as home, into the woods, where he placed it in a ditch and covered it with underbrush. Isme helped him work, understanding that this boat might be the only way to return home—and soon, she hoped.
Shouldering his pack, Isme following suit with her own, her father announced, “Now we shall go to the road and see if there are travelers who will take us on.”
Isme asked, “Why? Should we not avoid people?”
“Depends which kind of people,” said her father. “There will be people no matter what. Not only other travelers, but also men on the road waiting to beat and steal from them, perhaps even kill them. If people move in large groups then they have less of a chance of being attacked; that is why we should join a group.”
With a sudden lurching feeling, Isme realized: what she thought was only stories was suddenly very real. Or—no—that was not it. The stories had always been real. It was just that they had been real in some other faraway place, and now they were real right in front of her, real to her, real with her.
“If I was a lone man then I could make the trek on my own,” said Epimetheus. “I could avoid other travelers as much as possible and when bad men fell on me I could simply fight them off.” Seeing how uneasy Isme looked at this prospect, Epimetheus reassured,
“This does not happen often. I am big enough to show that I am not an easy target. Walking alone by myself just confirms this for any robbers. The goal of being a thief is to do less work and gain more than if one was not a thief. When you look like too much work then they will leave you alone and seek less threatening prey.”
As he said this, Isme gripped her walking staff tighter and mentally reviewed all of the times she had practiced tumbling staves with her father. Mostly, she remembered losing. She supposed that was a positive sign that her father could win any fight.
Yet her father looked at her, speculatively, and said, “But you are a woman, Isme. I do not think that traveling alone will work with us. You will present too good of a prize and maybe they will consider the gain worth the risk.”
“I also have a staff, Father,” said Isme. “They don’t have any way of knowing that I’m not as good with staves as you, so would we not both be dangerous?”
Her father laughed. “You are better at staves than most,” he said, and Isme felt her face warm at the praise. “But you best keep that secret, like your voice. Women are not taught to use staves. The robbers will simply assume that you do not know anything and you are just carrying another one of my sticks. If you pretend you are harmless, then you will have the chance to strike first.”
Then his face turned serious. “But also you should never forget—no matter how strong you are, you are still a woman. If a man does not know what he is doing then you are strong enough to beat him. But if he does, you will never match him. Not for strength. You must learn to have guile, Isme. Outthink to outfight.”
~
They found a spot by a road that was a strip of mud and trampled grass, where Isme could hide in the bushes and her father sit on a knee-high stone and wait for travelers to approach. Isme was concerned that travelers might think Epimetheus was a robber and attack him, but he reassured her that lone men often joined caravans. Even if they did not want him around, the caravan would want to avoid conflict and simply leave him be.
“Besides, they will think of me as free protection. I’m a big man and caravans hire big men to move from one place to another. If I ask to join them, I work for free.”
This seems like a fair trade on their end, or so Isme would have hoped they would think. She had never been the leader of a caravan so she did not know for sure.
The sun was a little more than halfway across the sky when a strange sound emerged to Isme’s left. It was a noise like feet, but whoever was walking had hard sandals that rang with every footstep as they clipped against stones and pebbles. From her time hunting, Isme could also tell that this person was heavy. Or perhaps more accurately, the people were all heavy, because the number of footsteps were so many that Isme’s hearing found counting them confusing. She had only ever hunted small deer that populated the island, which typically came in pairs or perhaps up to four.
What emerged from the rolling hills was a group of men and animals—no, thought Isme wildly, men on animals, animals pulling what must have been carts, and people on those carts.
So many people. At first, Isme mistook all of them—people included—as mere animals. Had she not wondered what other men looked like merely a day ago? And now here they were and here she was looking at them. She did not know then that this was not altogether a large group, at most about thirty souls, for they seemed to number all the people in the world.
They were all so very strange.
Some of
