The maggot man slowed his stride to allow me my stumbling backwards progress. “What do you see?” His words were thick and muddled, as if he had only just learned to talk.
A land of rice and fruit and patient oxen, I thought. Home. “Nothing,” I said, for I already hated him.
“Nothing.” He sounded as if the word had never occurred to him before. “That is fair enough. You leave this place today, and will never see it again.”
“This is not the way to the sky burials.”
Something in his words miscarried, because he gave me a strange look instead of answering. Then he reached for my shoulder and twisted me around from the past to face the future once more. The clasp of his fingers ached awhile.
We walked into the failing of the day, sipping every now and then from his leather bottle of water. The road we followed grew stony and thin. Even the fences gave up, the land unclaimed or unclaimable. Dark, rough rocks were strewn about, some so large the track was forced to bend around them. Everything that grew up here was dusty green or pale brown. Each plant wore a crown of thorns where in my home they would have borne flowers. Insects hummed loudly enough to pierce my hearing before falling stone-silent at the sharp cry of some unseen hunting bird.
The shadows of the few remaining trees grew long about the time their numbers began to strengthen. I stumbled in my fatigue. Recovering my step, I realized we were heading downward for the first time since setting out.
Before us, at the foot of the slope, I could see an iron-gray plain gathering darkness onto itself.
“This is the sea,” the maggot man said. “Have you ever heard of it?”
“Is it stone?”
He laughed. For a moment, I thought perhaps I heard the true man within the cloak of black cloth and muddled words. “No. Water. All the water in the world.”
That frightened me. A ditch was one thing, but enough water to cover all the land like a rice paddy was another. “Why do we walk there?”
“To see how strong you are.”
“No, no. Why do we go to this water?”
“Because the sea is the next step on the journey of your life.”
The immensity of it was beyond description. I saw how the far edge of the water faded into the distance. “I cannot swim so far.”
The maggot man laughed again. “Come. There is a house farther along our way. We can eat there. I will tell you of…” He paused, grasping for a word. “Water houses,” he finally said, and looked embarrassed.
Young as I was, I knew perfectly well that no one built their house of water. Either the maggot man was an idiot, which did not seem likely, or his words had failed him again.
“I am hungry,” I told him politely.
“Walk,” he replied.
We ate stew that evening in a wayhouse. I now realize how small and mean the place must have been, especially by the standards of my captor, but he’d had his purposes. It was much like my father’s hut-mud walls set with beams to make the frame of a thatched roof. The room was larger, though, so big that four tables could fit within and there still be room for the cook’s fire and her black iron kettle.
I had never seen such a great building.
We sat on a bench at one table. A few other folk were around. All glared at the maggot man. No words were said, but I knew even then that trouble followed him, that he was seen as a curse. He’d slipped free the cord. In memory I cannot say whether that was more to ease his dining or to make less of a show of his trade.
Our stew was served within shallow bowls of earthenware. I peered at the outside where it angled away from me. A pattern of lizards and flowers chased one another around the curve. The lizards I could understand in this sere, hard place, but the idea of flowers must have come from my home, for no one born here would see them among the thorns and rocks.
The dark brown stock filling the bowls was almost bitter. It had been made with some small polished nut that split neatly in two beneath my spoon. Instead of homey rice, grains floated in the broth. A few leaves swirled loose, along with chunks of pale meat that tasted like ditch frog.
“Fish.” The maggot man smiled. The effect was ghastly on his pale face. “It is always good to fill your belly after a day.”
“Fish,” I said politely. I wished I had a plantain.
When he was nearly done, he pushed his bowl between us. A dark green mallow leaf floated in the brown puddle at the bottom. “I have asked the word of the house woman,” he told me, almost proudly. “Boat. See this mallow leaf? It is like a boat.”
“There is mallow growing in your sea?”
The maggot man sighed. “I am trying to tell you why you will not have to swim.”
“I never swam because of mallow.” I poked his leaf. “Taro tastes better anyway.”
“Wood floats,” he said.
“So do I.”
“We will travel on a boat of wood, which floats like this mallow leaf in your stew.”
“I thought you said the sea is made of water.”
He threw up his hands and muttered at the rough ceiling of the wayhouse. He then looked at me with a frown. “You will be fearsome once you speak Petraean.”
I’d never realized there were more kinds of words in the world. “Will my father speak Petraean, too?”
A shadow clouded his eyes. “No,” he said in a clipped voice. “We must go. It is another few hours’ walk to the port.”
I followed the maggot man into the deepening gloom of night. My feet began to get in each other’s way. Keeping my pace was especially difficult when the road made a sharp bend or wound through a steep drop along some gully.
The maggot man walked on. His stink had blown off with the evening breeze. Instead my nose was tickled by the scent of salt, and a rot I’d never smelled before.
I was ready to go home. The next time I stumbled, I let myself fall to the ground. The green cord slipped from his wrist. I bounced up off the road and sprinted away.
The maggot man was faster than I might have credited. He was upon me in a dozen steps, grabbing me up into his arms while I kicked and screamed, then working one hand free to slap me very hard across the mouth.
“Do not break from me.” His voice now was stone, hard and unforgiving. “Your path is set. The only way forward is at my side. There is no way back.”
“I am going home,” I shrieked at him through the taste of blood in my mouth.
“You are going on.” A rueful smile slipped across his face. “You have…” He reached for a word a moment, then gave up, instead saying, “Fight. You are strong in body and spirit. Most girls would have run at the first, or fallen crying later in the day.”
“I don’t want fight. I want to go home.”
He still held me in a very tight grip. Together we turned, looking back up the road. “How far do you think you could find your way across that wide country of rocks and thorns? If I had not carried water, what would you have drunk?”
I would lick the sweat from my hands, I thought, but the sting of his blow was a sharp, hard lesson that warded my lips. “I will go to your sea,” I told him grudgingly. “But then I am going back home.”
“You will come to my sea,” he agreed. He said no more than that.
Quite late in the evening we found an inn. I had finally collapsed of sheer fatigue. I made the last part of this journey slumped across the maggot man’s shoulder. The moon gave the night land a sheen like silvered tears. I wondered if it would polish me bitter bright as well.
He had a little room already taken, I realized much later. At the time, we walked through a huge kitchen and up what I later understood to be a flight of stairs to a high room with nets draping from above. A hutch stood within, a thing of bars and boards. Alongside it was a bed and a rough table, all beneath a sloping roof with an inset window tightly shuttered.
Before I knew what he was about, the maggot man dumped me into the hutch and slid the latches across the door.