The old man was walking back from the small village in the next valley when he heard the sound. A faint moan coming from just off the track he walked on. ‘Animal,’ was what he first thought, his mind still untangling itself from the daze it always fell into whenever he walked alone. A moment later, though, he realized his mistake. It was a person. It was the sound of someone who had lost hope of being heard but was unable to keep silent; a man giving voice to utter pain.
Leaning on his staff, he hesitated for a moment as he felt a fear even a religious man like him learned in the current state of the world. He had heard the stories; bandits roaming the lands, using tricks to lure the innocent into their traps. But when the sound of another moan came to him, his fear dissolved in an instant, to be replaced with a shame he would obsess over for days.
Thinking of how close he had come to forgetting all his learning, the old man walked off the track to follow the voice. He found the hole just beyond a couple of trees, almost falling into it himself. The young man lay inside it. Eyes closed in a face contorted with agony, he hadn’t even heard the old man’s approach.
Just for a split second, he paused where he stood looking down at the flesh below, clad in white skin so different from his aged black one. He stood silently, contemplating things too dark to speak, watching the one whose kind had plunged his land into turmoil. Just for a moment, enough time for damnation, he thought of leaving the poor wretch to die where he lay, bone speared through meat as if to ease the feast of the creatures that would have come for him between the moon’s appearance and the sun’s swim up the eastern sky.
But then the eyes opened, revealing twin circles of an odd green. The pupils dilated into large orbs, unseeing for a moment before they settled on the person above. And looking at the plea they held, the old man knew he couldn’t leave.
It was too much like his imaginings. The thoughts that had been built meticulously since the day he left the capital to live alone in a cave. The nightmares he still had of his family pleading a faceless soldier who simply followed orders and brought down his sword on them, so easily making the old man alone in the world.
He carefully lowered himself into the hole, leaving the things he carried on the edge. Ignoring the smell of piss his nose told him was coming from the soaked pants of the injured man, and with practiced ease he hadn’t forgotten from his days as a novice in the healing rooms of churches, he pulled the broken leg into place. After giving a moment for the young man, who had turned a whiter color that the black man would not have believed possible, he worked to get them both out of the hole, hefting the stranger’s bags on to his shoulders. It was not easy, but there were fallen rocks in the hole he piled to make steps of and his tired old bones still remembered the strength of his youth.
It took most of the remaining daylight to get to the cave he called home. The cold, dry stone space held only the bare necessities of the old man’s life: a mattress, a low table, a small chest, the two pots he cooked food in, and a cup. He slowly placed the injured man on the single bed, trying to be gentle.
Though he was barely holding himself together, the young man directed the old to the bags he had carried. They held bandages, threads, needles, and herbs. With shaky but confident hands, he silently prepared the things while his rescuer watched with interest. When he finished, he explained what he wanted done with incessant gestures.
At first, the old man wasn’t sure he had understood correctly. Even when he knew he wasn’t mistaken, it took a moment for him to agree to do it. He had read about such things, heard it from somewhere he couldn’t remember, but it was still terrifying to do. With unsteady hands he accepted the things from the injured man. After cleaning the wound, he willed his hands to stop shaking and began to knit it close with a needle. By the time he was finished, the young man was deep into oblivion, the slight rise and fall of his chest being the only sign that he hadn’t fully left the world.
The foreigners had come ages ago into the old man’s homeland, all of them priests at first. But it was only in the time of the previous emperor that they had held the heart of the throne. That ruler had been deposed and replaced with his son when he had proclaimed his changed fate. Yet even after all that bloodshed the son had learned nothing from his father. Just a few years after he had ascended to the throne, the young emperor had decreed that his subjects accept the new religion.
When the war began, the ruler had called for support from his new friends, allowing foreign soldiers into his land. Most had blamed the one who wore the crown, but the old man had known better. He had known it was the poison the strangers whispered into the royal ear that led to disaster.
‘What tasks you set me,’ the old man thought to his God, watching the unconscious man while anger tried to force its way into his heart.
Days passed slowly, he cursing under his breath as he took care of his guest. The air grew warmer outside as spring turned to summer, and slowly, with the pace of mountains, the old man’s mood lightened.
It was little things that made him change his view of the stranger; little things that made him see the man as a person and not just a part of some evil-minded race come to destroy his world. It was the way the young man slept silently, the gentle closed eyes and the smooth unworried face reminding him of his younger brother in his youth. It was the way a sudden, amazed laugh burst out of the white man, making his old lips unconsciously mirror that mirth.
In time, the old man’s curses became few and far apart. He took silent pleasure in taking care of the injured man. Even when he had become well enough, the aged man allowed him to stay in the slight comforts of the single bed while he continued to sleep on a pile of blankets on the hard floor.
When the pain became too much for the young man and he trashed in bed, he let him drink the concoction he made for his nightmares while he resigned himself to a fitful night. With every sunrise, he worked a little harder to make the boy’s stay more comfortable. And the reasons for his shunning of society faded by the day as the company of even a stranger he could barely talk to eased his weary heart.
“Why here?” the young man asked, speaking broken Arabic, a language they both knew somewhat. It had been days since he had fallen into the hole and injured himself. Color had come back to his face and he was starting to stumble around a little in the cave.
The old scholar looked up from his writings. He stayed silent for a moment, as if deciding which truth to speak. “I’ve learnt more while living alone in a cave than when I was living with scholars,” he finally said, knowing the boy would barely make sense of the words he spoke yet still not willing to give breath to the whole truth.
It wasn’t many years ago that he had left civilization, denounced by all for not accepting the new religion their ruler had converted to. But his life in exile had somehow seemed longer to him, just a bit short of eternity.
On reflection, he thought it hadn’t been as bad as he had feared. Living alone in a womb of rock had given him a sense of peace he had thought lost when he left his father’s farm for the last time. He was a child then, finishing his study of the ancient texts of his religion, and he had thought he would be plunged into glorious adventure as soon as he stepped off the track leading to their village. He had had his adventures, but they were nothing like what his imagination had painted for his young mind.
When the news of his dead relatives reached him, he had finally seen what a fool he had been. Watching as his fellow priests and scholars easily followed whatever their master, the emperor, said, he had realized the truth. God can never be where a man cannot follow his own thoughts.
But realization had come too late, after he had paid the price.
How could he speak of his family’s death; simple people killed for believing what they thought was right. How could he say he had once been the servant of an emperor who had ordered them killed. How could he tell of writing similar orders with his own cursed hands and stay the same gentle old man in the boy’s eyes. Some things are better off unsaid.
“Why are you here?” he asked instead of speaking what lay deep in his mind.
With a bit effort, the old man pieced the story together as the boy stumbled over his words. He spoke of being a healer among soldiers. He had followed his father, who seemed to be some sort of officer in their army, far away from his home not because he had wanted to but because it was what was expected of him. He had gone to war because it was the right thing to do.
He said they were ambushed on their way to the capital. He spoke of the resulting fight with a small tremble stealing into his voice. He spoke of being knocked out in the midst of that battle. When he came to, he said, the whole thing had been over for a while. Thinking him dead, or unable to wait, he said, his countrymen had left him in the corpse strewn field. He had been following their trail when he had had the accident.
As he told his story, his voice had lowered, as if the telling was somehow stealing from his soul. The old man let him fall silent when he finished, feeling something there in the young man’s thoughts; a thing that should not be forced out. He turned back to his writing, his mind wandering to his own past and reminding him of those days of his as a novice. He had seen deserters then, and he knew the signs of one. And though he tried to shy away from admitting it even to himself, he knew the young man was one.
It was this knowledge as much as any other that would shape the rest of their days together. This thing was what made the aged man be more gentle than ever to the healing one. He felt in his heart a need to protect this creature who was not made for the ugly world.
It was only a few weeks later that the lone traveler came to visit the old scholar. The news he brought with him had the taint of both hope and sadness since it held the promise of many ends.
The dark days were finally over. Change would come soon, trailing peace with it to the war-torn land. The old emperor had left the throne to his son.
The news of a new ruler had come with a call to the old ways. The emperor had returned the land to the old faith and all foreigners were to be exiled.
The night after the traveler had moved on, the young man had paused in his eating and said, “I’m leaving tomorrow.”
The old man was silent for some time, not looking up from his own meal. When he finally spoke, it was with a small voice holding a hint of dark humor only a man who had known too many things could have. “Yes.”
They sat in silence for a time.
When the young man filled the empty air with words again, it was to talk about his family. He used mostly words from his foreign tongue but even so, the little things he talked of in Arabic built up over time. And, slowly, the aged man started to add more color and depth to the image of the boy he held in his mind.
He learned the young man was no commoner like him. Though he didn’t believe the size of the house the man had painted for him as his home in a far land, the old man felt the grain of truth in it. As he spoke, he gave the impression of being a part of a large family. He spoke of his sisters and older brothers in loving detail. He spoke of slivers of memories that had stuck with him since childhood.
He spoke for himself more than anyone else. He spoke well into the night.
After weeks of rest, the young man was only slightly shaky as he stood up the next morning. He didn’t even flinch as he hobbled around the cave, collecting the last of his unpacked belongings. He took his time as he performed each mundane task with exaggerated care, his every move a hidden whispered message to the aged man who sat watching him.
‘What tasks you set me,’ the old man whispered once more in his mind to the one whom he had learned listened to every man, woman and child, with lesser distinction in-between than a mother would make among her own children. He looked on with sadness as the person that had lived with him for some time prepared to leave, putting aside, as he did so, the writings he had not looked at since he picked them up to do some work earlier that very morning. He watched in silence a man he would have called enemy once, an emotion different from relief tugging at his heart. He knew he would miss the odd boy with his easy laugh.
Finally, finding nothing more to do, the young man turned to the old one. Looking at that young face not yet marked with time and the troubles of the world, the sitting man suddenly understood a thing he had thought he knew. “You never deserted, did you?”
“What?” the boy asked, confused with the unknown words he had heard.
“Nothing,” the old man said, getting up from his seat and slightly thankful he had spoken in Amharic earlier.
Over the days they had lived together, the old man had slowly shed his initial reservations. From head to feet, they were opposites. The words their tongues naturally shaped couldn’t be more unalike. The faiths they called their own were close but not the same. They were so different.
‘And yet,’ he thought to himself now, following the man he had helped heal as he made his way outside, ‘and yet, here I am now and I know in my heart I’ll always remember him as the son I never had.’
Once out of the cave, the younger man faced his elder. They looked at each other in silence for a breath or two, sad smiles tugging at lips that spoke such different words. Neither breathed a syllable for a moment, relying on a thing that mere language could only imitate.
“Thank you, Zera,” said the young man simply and finally, speaking his rescuer’s name while butchering the sound as he tried to thank him in Amharic.
The old man smiled while giving a gentle nod. And, just like that, the man turned to leave.
His kind had brought so much change into the aged scholar’s world, so much pain. He had felt the young man was no innocent; something in those odd eyes had spoken of knowledge in bloodshed. Still, he knew he could forgive them all because of the last few months spent with the boy. He had learned to move on.
“May you find peace wherever you go,” the prayer left the aged lips in a whisper, meant for his own old ears and the World’s alone.
In time, the young traveler became a shadow as the sun rose, bathing the river he walked before in a sheet of shimmering gold. And, glancing one last time at the confident stride of the youth for memory’s sake, the old man turned to his dark cave and his waiting writings, smiling a smile that was tinged with happiness as much as sorrow.