Faithful Pebble
Part Eighty-Seven
"What is your name?"
The wanderer started. He paused then quickly turned away. His gaze avoided hers. If he could see it, lost somewhere within her brown and coarse and tattered hood, he'd seen it droop and drip with the saddened curtsey of her frown. Still, he didn't need to see it to know it was there. It mirrored his, reflected his, echoed his a little more than he liked. The wanderer quietly shook his head. "I can't tell you," he answered. He looked back at her.
"How old are you?" She tried again. Lifting her little brown sac, Pebble gingerly opened it finding to her surprise a bar of soap nestled somewhere within its velvet center. She tucked it under her hood and smelled its soft waxy polish. Lavender, she remembered. Lavender, she smiled. She hummed before she quickly clutched it to her chest. She was surprised by how pleasant it was, by how much she missed it, by how much she liked it.
Again, the wanderer shook his head. A slight smirk pulled at his lips as he watched her. Pebble saw this and huffed. "What are you going to do? Are you going to work while I pour out my soul to you?" She motioned towards his bag.
The wanderer calmly shrugged. Unfazed, his wistful tenor explained. "Sometimes it's easier to talk when someone is not watching you, especially when it comes to secrets."
As if to prove his point, the wanderer walked away. He retreated to his sac pulling additional items from within its unseen center. For a moment, Pebble wandered. She pondered. Exactly how much could the sizable thing hold? Behind her hood, a thought pulled at her lips. She frowned, crossed her arms and tilted her head. Pebble stepped away from the door. "If you tell me something about you, then I'll tell you my story," she said.
The wanderer nodded not looking at her. "That was our agreement."
"It was," she said. "And here is my question. What is your living?" She pointed at his sac, the numerous tools that seemed to multiply out of thin air. He continued to pull them out one by one as she calmly puffed. "Besides this."
"This what?" He looked up at her. He froze.
"This traveling thing. Did you have a skill? Were you always a traveling man, or something else? A tradesman, maybe? A tradesman who lost all of his wealth in a storm on the sea, a blacksmith with a grudge and a talent, a tailor seeking giants, a carpenter…?"
The wanderer shrugged. Pebble trailed off seeing it. She hoped vaguely somewhere under her hood that he would answer and it wasn't entirely in vain. He didn't say, "I can't tell you." He always seemed to rattle off those words like it was second nature, like he'd heard all these questions before. She eyed his clothes, his sac, his secrets. She guessed he had.
The wanderer looked down at his sac, at his hands, at his heart hidden somewhere on the bottom, in his chest, in his pocket tick-tick-ticking away. The wanderer sighed. "I've been many things," he said. "A healer, a mayor, a magician, a gambler, a musician, and a lover. A father, a husband, a brother of sorts. I've been nearly everything, it seems. My life has allowed me to be everything, but before all that, before fate laid his hands on me and placed me on the path I now tread, I was something else."
"Like what?" Pebble, slightly skeptical, stepped forward. Half of what he'd mentioned she could barely recall the meaning of. But what he mentioned next, she certainly knew about, the whole town did, the village lost somewhere beyond the woods in which they tarried.
The man continued on, his voice rising to her prompt. "I was a soldier first. Nothing more and nothing less. Simple, dirty and poor, a soldier is what I was and in many ways I am that still."
- Calla