In a small stone hut atop a mountain there lived an old man. The man’s home was a small and crumbly thing, overcome by vines and dirt; in a way, it was quite similar to the man himself, with his bowed back and weathered skin. The house’s squat visage looked out over the wilderness far below, and when the sun set, beams of light poured into the room and cascaded off the walls. As the light of the sun invaded his space, the man—with a weary countenance—looked outward, to both the bruised sky, and to the evergreen wilderness. Within that wilderness, however, the man noticed an out of place thing, an aberration to his routine: from a clearing in the trees, its source out of sight, smoke rose high above, speaking of a campfire far below.
The sign of civilization—of life itself—didn’t impress the old man, because he had no use of it. He had lived here—above the clouds, the trees, and the worries of man—for a good long while, and had developed a sort of apathy to the newfangled structures of people. He knew that just as the moon waxed and waned, so too did societies—an oscillation from splendor, to squalor, to grandeur, to grime.
The man weighed his options as the sun dipped below the horizon and out of sight, as the last embers of the day dimmed and died in his room. In the end, he decided that the interlopers were a problem for a new sunrise. Had he been young, perhaps the travelers would have learned something about trespassing, but as it stood, the idea of ineffectual cane-waving was too much effort to execute.
With a grumble, the old man settled down, and fell into a sleep for the night—the strange sort that leaves one more tired than rested. His waking came much too early, with a sharp rap on the door. Throwing off the sheep-skin rug, he trudged over to his door—his back crooked, and his feet bare at the abysmal hour—throwing it open, with a strength surprising for his size and his form.
“For what do you darken my doorway?” the man inquired, looking at each of the trespassers in turn. At his question, the man in the middle stepped forward. Before his lips parted in speech, the old man assessed him—seeing his youthful countenance, with the type of strength that had yet to face true challenge—and internally sneered at the boy, the whole lot of them, for so brazenly tarnishing his solitude.
“We would like to ask a favor of you, oh mountain man,” the boy responded, hopefully.
To his left, his companion—a girl bearing the same features, and a similar countenance, the familial relation obvious—stepped up: “We three have been in these wilds for no less than a month,” she announced, with the weary monotony of somebody who had been a month without the basic comforts of life.
Finally the third stepped forward—clearly of the same clan, with shadowed eyes, and an air of uncertainty—and spoke in a quieter voice: “We would humbly ask for a night at your home, and a way to escape the wandering: a route to city, town, or small village.”
The old man looked them over, and saw the price of their meandering—the torn clothes, the filth-covered skin, the weary-yet-hardened way they had of carrying themselves—hidden behind a polite hope of living for a further month. There was a modicum of something in the man’s heart; a minuscule droplet of sympathy, of empathy, remembered after his long separation from people-kind. He, in his limited awareness of self, still realized that he could not bear to be the one to turn them away, could not bear to see the hope drop from their faces as they went back in the woods: a place they would surely perish.
“A night,” the man said, words unhappy and warped, as if they had to be drawn from his throat with fishing line and hook. “You’ll clean in the water of the hot springs, so as to not sully my abode.”
The chorus of three, their hope going from polite to exuberant, exclaimed as one, an enthusiastic, “Thank you,” before they ran in the direction the man had gestured, as if hunting dogs were nipping at their heels. After they had gone, the man made that which so long had been his, and his alone, into something suitable for others, while the wanderers cleaned the filth of their journey from themselves.
When they returned, less filthy but more tired than they had been at their arrival, the house had changed completely. Where once a small hut had stood, proud but weathered, there now was a house, with rooms, plural, and tall earthen walls, crowned with a grassy roof. The man sat at the table with a veritable cornucopia of food before him, not acknowledging either the change to his dwelling or the visitors he had invited therein, his eyes locked on the fruit in his hands.
When they sat, he gestured to the food before continuing as he had been, removing slivers from an apple with a knife. The meandering trio was too hungry to complain—for survival off grub and root was just that, survival—and so they asked no questions, nor interrogated their senses as they dug into the feast before them, like a pack of rabid wolves.
Throughout the lavish meal, the old man made no comments and the group was forced into silence by the sheer volume of food that they consumed at all times. As improbable as it seemed, by the end of the night, the proverbial mountain of food had been reduced to nothing at all. When the last of the bones had been picked, the old man asked, with a strange intonation, emphasis on the wrong words, like an alien speaking without understanding language: “Why were you wandering out in the wilds?”
The first to respond was the uncertain one, the third that had spoken at the door, eyes fluttering open from their borderline food coma. “We were trying to cross the border, to venture from the nation of our parents and our grandparents.”
“So you are leaving a place rather than going to one?” The old man inquired.
At his query, the woman, the second to speak at the door, responded: “Back home, the war was becoming an entirely too bloody affair. We didn’t wish to fight, to perpetuate the causeless bloodshed.”
When she paused, the man with them, the first to speak at the door, continued: “When we traveled, we chose a less populous route, and paid the price. The trees, shrubs, caves, and bears all start to roll together after a time, and one can become lost shockingly quickly.”
“That’s the way of it,” the man said, expressing shockingly little with words that sounded as if they should be wizened, as he stared off into the middle distance.
The conversation ended abruptly as the old man stood and led the travelers to a hallway in the impromptu inn. As they walked down the passage, not a short distance, the trio remembered the house they had come to—a small hut, tiny and insignificant—and exchanged looks. While still young, in that particular moment, they could have been said to be wise far beyond their years; rather than asking the old man a question, they decided that if he didn’t want to tell, they didn’t want to ask.
The man led them to a door—the only in the hallway—and gestured over the threshold. Held within was a medium-sized room. On the wall directly across from the door, a massive window allowed moonlight to fall onto the through-way between three stone beds. On the walls, candelabras held crackling flames that added a serene quality. The beds themselves were a strange mixture of primitive and wealthy, with earthen bases covered over by a soft mattress and silk sheets. The floors had animal pelts spread across them, strange creatures that none of the trio could recognize. The walls were bare stone, with a small crack running from the bottom-right corner of the window down to the floor. The ceiling was high and arched, with the top coming to a sharp point.
“Rest now,” the man said. He appeared as if he might continue, but then he turned on his heel, and stepped out. The trio did rest, but only after a period of about a half hour, the time occupied with speculation and confusion. The man believed that they were in the domain of some benevolent spirit, wanting only to help people. The woman was more skeptical, believing that they had signed some sort of devil-contract, binding their souls for all time. The third expressed no opinion out-loud, but quietly believed that the man was some minor god, or long dead spirit, held away from people for a truly great amount of time.
The sound of a scrub-jay’s love song acted as an alarm, waking the trio from a deep sleep. They walked down the too-long hallway, coming to the dining room, searching for food, and, by extension, their host. Therein, they found the mountain man, with a new, less substantial, mountain of food. This time, without the pangs of hunger in their stomachs driving them onward, they weren’t able to clear the table, despite their best efforts. When they had finished, the mountain man began to speak: “If you head north of this house, you’ll find a small town, on the coast. There you’ll be able to secure passage down that coast to your destination.”
The man said the words with a cold detachment, as if neither joyous to clear the trespassing troublesome travelers from his humble home nor sorrowful. This utter lack of emotion was contrasted by one item he offered the trio: bags with supplies—food, clothes, bedrolls, compass, rope, knives, and a half dozen more. The departure was a mechanical endeavor, with platitudes offered, and actions taken, like a clockwork device ticking along its way. They gathered what limited things they had, made an effort to leave things clean, and spoke to the mountain man, offering broad generalizations and vague notions.
When the old man was convinced the travelers would make it safely, they left. There were farewells thrown and goodbyes given, but in the end, the travelers turned to go, opening the new chapter of their lives. The old man watched their retreat, seeing the trio get smaller and smaller, and realized that a part of him—so long deadened flesh—was sore at the loneliness, the emptiness of his space. He walked back into his hut, sat down, and with the light of the morning sun washing through the windows, lighting his weathered face, let out a sigh of sorrow.