Charlinder's Walk by Alyson Miers Read Free Book Online Page B

twice a week now?"
     
    This much was a surprise to Charlinder. "No, when did that start happening?"

    "Just a couple weeks ago, and they keep trying to do the Sermon in different places, too."
     
    "So they can get more people to listen. How's that going over with the neighbors?"

    "Not bad enough to stop them. It's got the grown-ups annoyed, but it's also got some more kids asking them questions."
     
    "Which is exactly what Robert wants," Charlinder muttered. "Good for them."

    "Right, so they're getting kind of demanding now. Do you remember them ever getting like this before?"
     
    "Not really," said Charlinder, and thought about it for a moment. "You're right, we should ask someone older. Maybe they've gotten like this before and then let it drop."

    "I hope so, because I’ve had it up to my ears of Bruce being such a jackass to me."
     
    "How is Bruce being a jackass?"

    "He keeps telling me some compost about how casual sex gets God all pissed off, and I should pray to God that my sins are forgiven, and just getting really rude every time I go near Yolande or Stuart. I think he just doesn't want me doing sex with his sister."
     
    Charlinder pictured Bruce being rude to Kenny, then pictured Yolande snapping at him while nursing Stuart. "There are other women in our village, you know."

    "But I like Yolande."
     
    "Does she like you back?"

    "Oh shit yeah."
     
    "Really."

    "I know she seems pissy most of the time, but once you get her in the mood..." Kenny sat up on his knees and thrust his pelvis at the air, then waggled his eyebrows at Charlinder. It was one of the last things he’d wanted to hear in that setting.
     
    "That's great, Kenny."

    "She's awesome."

     

    The five of them managed to take a felled buck to the village that day. Kenny landed an impressive shot on one that came in lured by the scent of a doe which he had wisely declined to shoot. Bruce’s group helped them track him down until he collapsed from the arrow wound. Charlinder volunteered to help strip the carcass to dry the meat for pemmican, as he figured that would get him a chance to talk alone with an old woman. However, as the woman who turned up to help with the deer was Eleanor, he thought it best not to ask her about the history of the Faithful's activities in their village. All he told her, when she asked about the hunt, was how Kenny had shot the buck.
     
    Every day after the children left, Charlinder found himself staring at the map of the world mounted on the schoolroom wall. This new habit made no sense to him; the map had stayed in that spot since someone had helped Eileen Woodlawn etch it into a sheet of clay over a hundred years before. He knew every river, mountain range and coastline so well he could close his eyes, let someone place his finger on a random spot, and name the country with near-perfect accuracy. There was no reason why that sheet of baked clay should interest him so much now. Still he was drawn to it every afternoon, gazing at the layout of the continents until the rumbling in his stomach told him to go to the meeting square for lunch. Eventually, he realized that he was always interested in the northern hemisphere, and the vast expanses of land that stretched across the higher latitudes. He was mesmerized at how North America and Asia created a nearly uninterrupted swath of land from east to west over the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Most of the Earth's surface was water, as he taught his students, and yet, he now observed, if you just stayed far enough north, going from eastern Canada to the westernmost bounds of continental Europe, there was just so much land. People in his era couldn't travel much by water. They built small boats that could handle rivers, but even a river as wide as the Paleola was a thread compared to the broadcloth of the Atlantic Ocean. He could only dream of how people in the pre-Plague era had used airplanes that would carry them over any span of the Earth in a matter of hours, or how