10th Part

It was a little child, he saw, not a goat as he'd first believed. The bleating was crying, and what looked like horns were strands of hair twisted among branches. Thorns scraped the clear young skin so the red stood out like street maps. The hermit wondered vaguely what kind of city would have maps like that, its streets marked in pain, and then remembered that every city was that city.

He approached the bush with his arms at his sides. The child's eyes rolled around to meet the hermit's, and they were blue in the middle and red at the edges. It was a little girl. She stopped struggling as soon as she saw the hermit, and shut her mouth.

"Well, child," he said. "You're stuck."

She looked at him with swollen lips turned down at both sides. Her hair was the color of a new penny, straight near the scalp but wavy further down. There were welts and scrapes all over her.

"Don't scream," the hermit said simply, and wrenched some of her hair from the thorns.

The child didn't scream. Tears stood in her eyes then fell, the salty drops falling into her open wounds, and she opened her mouth as if to scream, but closed it tight instead. She closed her eyes as if not to see what else had to be done to set her free.

Remembering pain, the hermit worked quickly. He wanted her out of the plants and home with her mama and daddy as quickly as possible, not because he was afraid of her screaming, but because he could see the pain she was in. Her little white tummy was visible through a tear in her dress, and on it were raised lines like whipmarks. The thorn bush was a cruel captor, much worse than most humans, and it worked its chains deeper even as the hermit tried to pry them off the little girl.

"Is your house nearby?" the old man asked at length, just to keep her occuppied some other way.

She nodded. One arm was free, and she pointed across her shoulder. He could see a small stone cottage with smoke coming from the chimney like the breath of hell's inhabitants. There was no one outside it that he could see.

"Your parents live there?"

A nod.

"They nice folks?"

Another nod, and "Yes. Very."

"Good," said the hermit. "I'll get you back to them in no time."

The girl accepted this forlornly. Once he'd freed her entirely, he picked her up and carried her to the house she'd pointed to. As he approached, her father came running out, a pipe bursting from his lips like a dead flower. He was wide-eyed.

"Where'd you find her?" he asked.

"Over there," said the hermit. "In the thorns."

"Come in, have some dinner," the man said. His wife came running to join them. She looked like the little girl, except womanly. "We've got plenty."

"No," said the old man. "I'm on my way."

"Where to? Surely you can come inside?"

"I'm for the sea," and he pointed across the last range of mountains. The whole family stopped and stared, white-faced and white-eyed. "Got to keep moving."

"That's not the sea over there," the man said. "You better move along, mister."

The man gathered his family back into the house, and closed and bolted the door. The hermit wondered what the farmer was talking about, but decided it didn't make much difference, and anyway he wasn't getting a meal now for sure, so he walked back to the road and continued straight on to the mountains. The salt breeze was stronger now, and he thought he could hear waves, and maybe even the wail of seabirds.