C Fletcher - A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World

I woke in the early morning, dew beading the trees and the grass. She was poking me with a stick. She needed to piss. Helping her up was a complicated effort. Holding her up while she squatted awkwardly keeping the wounded leg straight so as not to put pressure on the stitches was even more so. When I got her back on her bedroll, she looked white.

Door may , she said, nodding at my bedroll. Then she went straight back to sleep.

By the next time she woke, I had slices of hog sizzling over the fire and the three horses were untied and grazing again. I had also been through her packs. I could make no sense of the things she had clearly collected on her travels, some of which were useful—like tools—and others of which seemed just to have caught her fancy because they looked interesting, like a small bronze head, or a homemade doll, sewn together with buttons that nestled in an old box full of shiny necklaces.

She was looking at me, her face unreadable. Then she gave me a nod, as if I’d done something right.

Mare-see , she said. Mare-see .

I brought her some of the boar. She rolled onto the unwounded side and ate propped up on one arm. She finished the slice and belched, deep as Dad did. She smiled, as if pleased with herself. She picked up the dictionary and flicked through it, found a word and showed it to me with a raised, questioning eyebrow.

Name?

Griz, I said. My name is Griz.

I pointed at her.

Mwah? she said, eyebrow still raised. She shrugged her shoulder as if names weren’t important to her, as if she was above having just any old name like everybody else had one. Then she made a face as if just picking one of her many names.

John, she said.

John? I said.

Wee , she said, nodding. John Dark.

Even though we didn’t speak the same language, I liked John Dark. Even though that wasn’t her real name, only what it sounded like. And the name it sounded like wasn’t really her name either, I discovered. It was a joke, and as good a name for a French woman as any. Though I didn’t get the joke until it was explained to me long after our ways had parted.

I remember that first day and night very clearly, but the days that followed blurred into one another. I was torn, wanting to be on my way to find Brand, but not being able to leave her until she could at least get up and piss for herself. There would have been no point sewing her up just to leave her in a pool of her own mess. Would have been a waste of good honey, not to mention the not-quite-so-good needlework. And of course I wanted to know her story, why was she here, where had she come from, what had she seen, what she knew. She looked like she’d seen a lot.

She got my story out of me first. Using the dictionary and lot of eyebrow raising she asked, Where from? and I showed her on the map—not exactly, but roughly. I didn’t quite trust her enough for that exactly. Family? was easy. Four fingers answered that. So was Alone? That got one thumb. Why here? was harder: I laboriously pointed out the words for “a man steal my dog; I go find him, get dog”. She made me do it twice because she couldn’t believe it. I added “red beard” the second time, hoping she might know about Brand, but her eyes didn’t flicker a bit in recognition. Where? was easier to answer. I just showed her on the map. And since I had it open, I showed her where I thought we were. She made me get a map from her own bag and, though hers was better, being backed in material, it showed the same landscape. And we agreed we were just outside the big city in the middle of the country.

We established she came from France which was not a surprise by then, having read the cover on the grubby dictionary. What was a surprise was when I asked, Where boat you? and she shook her head and made it clear there was no boat. She pointed to the horses and rolled her eyes. How could she get them on a boat? Then she made walking movements with her fingers. I shook my head and pointed at the sea. She snorted and pointed at another area on the land and traced it across the narrow channel. Then she snapped her fingers and demanded the dictionary. She found the word for “tunnel” which was another word like “infection” that was spelled exactly the same. I didn’t believe her, because even if there had been a tunnel under the sea, I’m sure it would have filled with water after a hundred years or so. And that’s assuming the rising seawater hadn’t submerged the entrances and filled it that way. However, she was emphatic that she had ridden under the sea to get here, with an oil lamp that she showed me hanging off one of the baskets.

I didn’t mind that she was lying. I hadn’t quite told her exactly where I was from either. I did like the swagger of her lie. Ferg once said to me that if I was going to lie I might as well make it a big one as a small one, and I think that’s what she was doing. She didn’t want me to find where her valuable boat was laid up.

I asked why she had come here. Her face did flicker then. Her finger found “family” again. Then “daughters”. Then a word that I first read as “pest” until I realised I was reading the French word and that there was an e on the end and in English it meant “plague”.

I’m sorry, I said.

She shrugged, but her eyes were elsewhere for a long

moment.

I wanted to ask more questions, but I could see she was sad and tired and so I went off with Jip to refill the water bottles from a stream that came tumbling down the slope behind us. As I did so, I wondered about the plague she had spoken of. I decided it was probably just a normal disease that likely once would have been easily fixed with drugs we no longer had. After all, a plague is a disease that sweeps through huge populations, inflicting terrible damage. There just wasn’t enough population left to have a plague in. I think I was wrong and she was actually being very accurate about the symptoms, but that’s what I thought then.

She spent most of the day sleeping, and when she wasn’t she always seemed to be looking at me with her head on one side, as if I was something that she could not quite make out. It was late that afternoon, or maybe the next one when she told me the other reason she was here. She thumbed her chest, then pointed to the dictionary: I. Look. Someone. Too.

Someone? I pointed back and raised my eyebrows in imitation of her questioning expression.

Kel Kun , she said. Kel Kun Demal .

Whoever this Kel Kun was, he made her eyes go away again.

I changed the dressings morning and night, and there was no smell of infection, though the wound line was crooked and red and was, for the first two days, worryingly hot. I kept using the last of my honey on it, and she dosed herself with the contents of her medical kit, and between the honey and the powders and leaves she ingested, the wound did seem to be healing.

She had several habits that were odd to me, things she was emphatic about. Maybe everybody else’s habits are odd to strangers. One was the loo garoo sticks. These were long torches, made from wooden handles which had spools of material wound round the head, material that had been soaked in sticky pine pitch. She never lit them, but she insisted that we kept them laid close to the fire at night. When I tried to ask why, she just pointed out at the darkness, at the three horses hobbled close by and the blackness beyond.

Poor lay loo , she said.

I made a question with my face. She smiled.

Lay loo , she repeated and then made a mock-serious I’m-trying-to-scare-you-but-not-really face.

Lay loo? she said, waggling her eyebrows. Lay loo garoo .