Chương 60: Chapter 53 — The Joke on the Walk

They got up before first light to head out for the trip. Max ate enough jerky to fill his hunger and packed the rest. The road to their destination was well-maintained and wide enough for two carts to pass without touching. The milestones and campsites were clearly marked. It ran straight for the first hour, then curved gently south before straightening again toward the Millward crossroads.

Sunrise light came warm and low across the fields, catching the dew still clinging to the grass, and the breeze carried the smell of tilled earth and the slight sweetness of wild honeysuckle blooming in the hedgerow. Fenwick used the straightaway. He pointed at a tree.

"Tree," said Max. Fenwick pointed at the road.

"Road," said Max. Fenwick pointed at the sky. Max looked up at it for a long moment, head tilted back, taking in the full width of it.

"Sky," he said. Then, after a pause: "Big."

"Yes," said Fenwick.

"The sky is big." Max considered this.

"Sky," he said again, more quietly, as though confirming something he had suspected. Sindy's screen lit, angled where Fenwick could see it easily from the harness. He does that. Says a word twice when he's deciding whether he believes it. They walked. Fenwick pointed at a stone wall bordering a field, at a gate, at a crow sitting on a post. Max named them in turn, sometimes quickly, sometimes after a silence that meant he was working on it.

The crow he watched for a long time after naming it, his head turning slowly to follow it across the field.

"Bird," he said again, when it flew.

"Bird," Fenwick agreed. A second crow joined the first, the two of them wheeling once over the field before settling on the same fence post, close together, indifferent to the road or the two travelers on it. Max watched that too. He didn't say anything about the second one. He didn't need to. Sindy's screen lit again. That wasn't about the word. He's figuring out what belongs here. The lesson shifted gradually into something less formal as the morning settled. Less pointing, more talking.

Fenwick described what he saw in short sentences and waited to see what Max did with them. Sometimes Max repeated. Sometimes he added something. Once, when Fenwick described a farmhouse set back from the road — smoke from the chimney, washing on a line, the distant clatter of someone working in a side yard — Max looked at it for a long moment and said "family" with a certainty that Fenwick did not question. He's not wrong. I don't know how he knows that. He just does. By midday, they had stopped for Fenwick to eat.

He produced a small parcel from his bag. Greens, some root vegetables, a bundle of dried clover flowers that he ate with the focused appreciation of someone who knew exactly what he liked. The clover smelled faintly sweet, almost like hay left too long in the sun, and Fenwick had always found the smell more satisfying than the actual taste, though he'd never admit that to anyone who'd ask. Max watched him eat.

"Good?" said Max.

"Very," said Fenwick. He held up a sprig of clover, turning it in the light.

"My favorite, actually. I would eat this at every meal if I could." Max looked at the clover. Then at Fenwick. Then, very deliberately, at Fenwick's feet.

"Max eat good," he said. He paused.

"Fenwick foot." He started laughing before Fenwick had finished processing it. Something that rumbled up from his chest and moved through his whole body, his shoulders shaking with it, the hehehe of it low and rumbling and entirely genuine. He had found it funny. He was going to enjoy it regardless of what anyone else did with it. Fenwick sat on the milestone marker and stared at him. Max kept laughing. Then Fenwick laughed.

The sound of it surprised him slightly, the way a genuine laugh sometimes does, catching him before he'd decided to let it out. He sat on the milestone marker and looked at a ghoul giggling on the Thornwall road and did not try to stop either of them. The laughing settled gradually. Max's shoulders slowed. The hehehe became occasional, the last of it working its way out like the tail end of a held breath. Fenwick looked at him, wiping his eyes.

"That was a joke," he said. Max looked back at him. Still pleased with himself, his chest still rising and falling slightly faster than usual.

"Yes," he said.

"Just be glad you didn't tell that to my mum. She would have skinned you." The thought of Grace chasing Max around the kitchen with a rolling pin, yelling at him the whole way, set them both off again, laughing harder this time, leaning into it without any resistance left. They sat with that for a while. Fenwick thought about the seventeen words from that first night, the careful, flat sentences that had followed for weeks after, the slow, patient building of a vocabulary one noun at a time.

He had not expected this — not yet, not for a long while, if at all. He looked at Max and felt something settle in his chest that he didn't have a tidy name for either. Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings. He thought about explaining what made it funny — the setup, the misdirection, the timing Max had clearly worked out in advance — and decided against it. Explaining a joke killed it.

He'd learned that much from Edie years ago, badgering her for the mechanics of something she'd said until she stopped finding it funny at all and started finding him annoying instead.

"Where did you learn that?" he said instead. Max considered the question with the same seriousness he gave everything.

"Sindy," he said. Then, after a pause: "Stories." Sindy's screen lit. I sometimes read him jokes, not on purpose. They're just in some of the stories. I didn't think he was paying attention to their structure.

"Apparently, he was," said Fenwick. Her text stayed up a beat longer than usual, like she wanted it noticed. That's the first one. I'm keeping a record of these.

"Good," said Fenwick.

"Keep it." Then they kept walking. The evening and the morning of the second day went pretty normal. Just practicing words and making time. The Millward crossroads arrived in the mid-afternoon, a wide junction with a direction post at the center, the paint on the lettering faded to near illegibility, the wood silvered grey from years of weather.

A cart had left deep ruts curving off toward the southern fork, long since dried hard, and a scattering of dropped grain near the post suggested someone's load had shifted at some point without anyone noticing until it was too late. Max studied the post for a moment, tilting his head at the faded letters the way he tilted it at anything he was trying to parse.

"Can't read," he said.

"Neither can I, not really," said Fenwick.

"It's been repainted so many times that the letters don't agree with each other anymore. East is east, though. That part doesn't change." They took the road east. The apple trees and maples that had lined the road out of Thornwall gave way gradually to evergreens, the canopy darkening overhead, the light arriving at the road in longer, cooler slants that smelled of pine resin and damp needles underfoot. The temperature dropped a few degrees as the shade thickened. The farms thinned.

One appeared in the middle distance, then another further on, then none. That was normal enough for the edge of settled land. The milestone markers stopped, which was also normal. The trees pressed a little closer, older than those near Thornwall, with a thicker canopy and trunks wide enough that three people couldn't have circled them with linked arms.

Late afternoon, they passed a family of deer on the road, a doe wearing a yellow blouse and blue suspenders and two half-grown youngsters wearing red shirts and matching shorts with white hats who moved to the trailside and watched them pass with wide, careful eyes. The younger one stepped back when they saw Max. The doe put herself between them without a word, her ears flat back, her whole body angled to shield her children. Max watched them as he walked. He did not stop. Fenwick made a note. Sindy's screen lit.

She was protecting them from him. I don't think she knew what he was. She just knew to be careful.

"Most people don't know what he is," said Fenwick.

"Humans are rare, and most live in the omnivore kingdom." Most people are right to be careful anyway. The next morning, no one was on the road. By the second afternoon, the birds had gone quiet. Sound remained — wind in the high canopy, the occasional distant call from something far enough away to be uncertain of the source. But the close sounds were gone.

The small birds that moved through the undergrowth, the insects that filled the air near water, the background texture of a living forest going about its business. This forest should have been full of small movements, small noises, the constant evidence of things getting on with their lives. The texture had thinned to almost nothing. What remained had the quality of a room after most of the people had left. Fenwick found himself listening harder than he needed to, straining for sounds that should be there.

He realized he'd been walking more quietly, too, his footsteps softer on the road. Sindy's screen lit, unprompted. I don't like this. I keep running the math on what's missing, and the number keeps getting bigger. No crows since this morning. No travelers since yesterday. The forest isn't empty. It's been emptied. The road looked fine. That was the problem. He was about to say so when Max stopped. One moment walking, the next entirely still, his weight settled, his hand hovering over his sword.

His head had come up slightly. His eyes were on the treeline to the north. Fenwick looked at the treeline. He saw nothing. He looked at Max. Max had not moved. His eyes moved slowly along the treeline, left to right, the way he tracked the crow, the way he tracked the board at the guild hall, looking for the thing he had already found.

"Max," said Fenwick quietly. Max did not look at him.

"Wrong," said Max. He said it the way he said the sky is big. A fact he had confirmed. Something he had suspected and was now certain of. The trees stood still in the afternoon light. Nothing moved in them. No sound came from them. That was the problem. ⟨ [SYSTEM PRIVATE LOG] ⟩ ──────────────────────────── [Sindy — Private Log — Day 85] He made a joke on the first day. He laughed at it before Fenwick did. I have been trying to find the right word for what I watched happen on that road, but I can't.

By the second day, the birds were gone. He noticed before I finished calculating what was missing. He said: wrong. He was right. ▌ Becca, if you're reading this: ▌ I wrote down the joke. ▌ I'm keeping it.