The people of the northern slopes are as welcoming as their lands are not. A look at their reddened faces abraded by the wind, wrinkles deeply wrought around the eyes and mouth, tells of hardy living, akin to the dry shrubbery and wizened trees that disturb the lonesome landscape, a long expanse of rolling hills and scratchy bush. Anyone who seeks shelter among the scattered settlements is granted entry, because one never knows whether they will be the next to ask. Hospitality is a sacred rite, as much a necessity as the goats and oxen they raise, the lumber that forms the skeleton of their camps, the hides they cure for their tents and boots. Any breaches thereof are not to be taken lightly, as this visitor shall learn, soon enough.
He sits now at the fringes of one family’s humble cooking fire, drinking fermented milk to stir his circulation. The smoke burns his eyes, but he leans in still to stave off his shivering, as a child might to a grandfather blowing smoke circles as he tells stories. Not that this man has any such comparison to make, for he has none of the child’s curiosity, none of their willingness to listen. This open hearth is more foreign to him than the landscape of empty hills and forbidding crags, and as a result, he remains on edge, as if dark shapes and peering eyes creep upon his peripheral vision. The matron’s steady hands on the knife as she cleaves the meat from bones for stew, her husband’s grip on the logs he heaves into the flames, her children’s batting fists and flung elbows as they play games with stones and sticks, bring his own hands creeping down to the dagger he keeps sheathed at his waist.
He parries away their questions with cursory answers, seeing them only as ways to pry open what remains of his armor. He has come here alone; his home lies in the south; he has no name worth sharing. His hosts are not unused to such reticence, for few people come here as willing visitors, and open wounds are quick to sting. There are things evident in his manner—the hands always held in preparation for a blow, the quick darting eyes, the guarded hunch in his back—that give away what his tongue refuses to say. Here is a portrait of a man on the run. It is no surprise that his eyes can only see in terms of threat or utility. He has been starved of all other considerations, as he takes stock of the room offered to him.
Had he grown up amongst the yellow grass and grey rock, he would have recognized the sturdy pots, the hardy ropes, the worn-handled tools strewn throughout the room for the valuables they were, a wealth of necessities for living on the land. Only the iron implements, the axes and knives and rods hung out of reach of the youngest children, even begin to entice him, though he sees them only as weaponry, something to split the head or slice the chest of an assailant. The coats and carpets are not useful bulwarks against the cold, but too plain and too coarse to sell for any profit. The earthenware they serve him with is too crude, and the food itself merely slakes his hunger and thirst, as he takes no pleasure in the sour note of the fermented milk, the dry crumble of the flatbread, the gaminess of the mutton stew. It is plain to see that the confines of their home chafe at him, but because the matron makes no uproar about it, and the eldest daughter hushes the younger children who turn bitter looks upon him, he assumes they have taken no note of it, which only rankles him further, that they could be so ignorant to their smallness and insignificance.
Of course he will not listen to any stories from their slight lives, on the margins of the maps he knew. He has arrived here and only thinks to leave, so the only accounts he is interested in concern the people who do not stay. They indulge his requests, his raw longing for elsewhere, by telling him of other passages. The husband, who has set snares and traps before for fur, speaks of mountain passes where treacherous crevasses and rockfalls lurk along with the lynxes and leopards. The matron offers her recollection of caravans carrying their spices and wares between cities large enough that “the city” sufficed as their name. The youngest son, in his excitement, blurts out a tale of traveling bandits flocking together like crows. He takes their stories with little more than a duck of the head, and they do not begrudge him this, because he has mined nothing of value from them. Because he does not think of staying, he does not think to ask about the snowstorms that will ravage the slopes during this season, the salt and cold needed for food to last through long treks under the winter sun, the rivers and springs he can trace for water.
It would be foolish to expect payment, like carving open boulders for meat, and so the family does not. The next day, they wake to find themselves relieved of several cuts of mutton and goat, their sharpest knife, and the husband’s clean pair of boots. This, too, they understand, though it is frustrating that he cannot even take advantage of them correctly. The meat has not been cured yet and will spoil quickly. The knife is too brittle to hunt with and is used primarily for slicing through hides and cloth and rope. And the boots are his summer pair, too thin for the impending snow.
They can pity him as a man with no home, who does not know how to find a new one after being unmoored. Plenty of the strays who escape to these lands have the same story, and they often end up as bones, trail markers left at the side of the paths. The slopes have learned from the people who found ways to live alongside the rocky escarpments and bristling scrub, and they are eager to show him how to make a home himself, to teach him what must be done to survive here. Whatever made him discard hospitality and gratitude as silly, superficial things, they are happy to correct. He who cannot see the use in plain, practical things can become useful himself. Even his name, meaningless and meager as it is, can serve some purpose as a warning.
He will soon grow tired in his strides, if he is not already. The slopes wait to collect his corpse when it spills into the dirt, once his thirst cannot be quenched and his hunger cannot be sated, once his hands grow too cold and his steps too weak. When he falls, he will be disassembled into a more functional shape, so that he can pay off his debts. There are vultures and other scavengers who can sup from his flesh, flies and other vermin that will drink their fill from his blood. The raptors that frequent these grey skies can turn his rib cage and his locks of hair into a nest, where they will cradle their young before they take to the clouds.
Perhaps he will know what hospitality is, once he has been turned into a home.
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Mia Xuan is a writer and thesaurus enthusiast from New Jersey, USA. She enjoys drawing, making comics, and coming up with bad puns. Her work has previously been featured in The Skull and Laurel, Best Weird Fiction of the Year, Vol. 1 (Undertow Press), and Cast of Wonders. |