Free The Fecund's Melancholy Daughter by Brent Hayward Page B

what his father would say, if indeed he was in there.
    The heat sung. Path waited in this growing heat as best he could. Without options. What if his father was killed? How long would he remain here before dehydration killed path or a beast came to investigate?
    Sand stung path’s face and he turned away.
    Later, reappearing from the house, walking briskly, narrow head held down, his father did, however, return.
    Path had to prompt the man several times to discover if anyone had been in the hut, and why his father had chosen that house in particular, and what had happened within, because his father would never think to volunteer such pertinent information.
    “Yes,” answered his father, finally, “they was people in there. Well, one anyhow.”
    “Just one? In the whole place? Was he human? Like us?”
    “Well, he was like me.” Their eyes met.
    Path tried to ignore the implications of the comment but his stumps twitched. “And?”
    “I told him you was waiting outside.”
    “And?”
    “Well, the man—cause it were a man inside there, a sickly man, and old, too—told me they ain’t no people here. Used to be, but no more.”
    “What happened to them?”
    His father pointed with a trembling hand, one boney finger indicating the direction they had been headed. “Out there, he says, just a few hours walk, or maybe a few days, is a place known as Nowy Solum. He said this place is where all people went, including his own three daughters, who left him alone and never paid him no visits nor ever bring him food. Out there, he says, in that direction. Out there what he called a city.”
    “Pick me up,” path said, stricken. His forehead throbbed. High-pitched sounds played in his ears and images flickered behind his eyes. He could almost recall the epiphany that had changed him, and why the desire to leave home had been so strong. “That’s where we’ll go,” he said. “Pick me up.”
    His father looked down the road. “No. We shouldn’t go there. We need to turn back. Go home.”
    “We had no home.” Path was alarmed by this vehemence in him. “We never did. Just a hole where you drank yourself to sleep every night.” He watched the expression change on his father’s face—a draining of resistance, a slackness that set in, as if a shadow had fallen; his father bent slowly and put the sling around his neck.
    “Look,” path said. “I’m sorry, but it’s true.”
    Without further protests, his father stood and began walking, heading toward Nowy Solum.
    Path strained to see anything up ahead, any detail of the upcoming city, but he could not—only sand and low clouds, and the last of these few deserted huts that had, just moments ago, seemed so monumental.
    When he closed his eyes to rest, perspective shifted:
    Wrapped in lengths of cloth, he lay on his shelf where he always lay, near the firepit. The dried fruit salesman, who had unluckily been passing through the arid area where path’s family had dug their hole, sat cross-legged on the packed dirt floor, sipping weak tea. This was clear: the man’s scarred face; the hair on his hands; the smell of his cheroot as he smoked. Mention of Nowy Solum had brought this image back, like a form of sorcery. Prone on his shelf, path was invisible to the stranger. His mother and father listened to the stories that surely could not be real, stories of a fabulous, teeming place, stories that trailed off when the salesman realized path’s father, drunk on spiritus, was a lost cause, a waste of breath.
    But this traveller had lived in Nowy Solum. Had lived there for some time. He described all manner of people and creatures, pushed together in the thronging streets, for better or worse. Anything, the salesman said, could happen there. A man could die in his tracks and be stepped over by all that passed by, or a man could grow rich beyond his dreams. There was food, so much food: fish from the distant ocean, and herbs and roots and spices, giving out such scents as