Eventually, Sparrow spotted the worn outline of a road. He touched down on it in a swirl of dust and desert grasses.
His feet slapped against the compacted dirt and slowly a smile spread over his face, ‘This is more like it!’ he yelled to the world.
Three bends later and the road met a river and the two ran alongside eachother into the distance.
On the riverbank there was a large willow tree with a rope hanging from it into the water. Sparrow decided he was done walking for the day. He dove into the crystal clear water and let out a shout of joy as he surfaced, feeling alive.
The river was in no hurry to reach the sea. Its current was slow and lazy and it was easy for Sparrow to swim for the rope. He pulled it to the bank and an arm reached down, ‘Need a hand brother?’
Water dripped from his hair as Sparrow looked up. Standing on the bank was a young man with a shirt and rucksack so full of patches that it was difficult to tell what material they had originally been made of.
But what he lacked for in flashy clothes, the guy made up for in a massive smile that stretched a mile across his face.
Sparrow held out his palm, the guy grabbed it and helped pull Sparrow up the bank.
‘Thanks,’ Sparrow said, ‘that water’s beautiful.’
‘It is.’ the patched man said, eyeing the ropeswing Sparrow had retrieved, ‘May I?’
Sparrow passed him the swing, and without a moment’s thought the guy took three giant steps and lept towards the river. His swing followed a graceful arc until the end where he leaned backward and flipped into the water, backpack, clothes and boots, all still on him.
Sparrow laughed, it was a silly, joyous sort of laughter at the sheer unexpectedness of the character whose hat floated to the surface without him.
A few metres down the river the guy appeared in a giant splash. He swam like a whale - flopping about with giant splashes - until he reached the bank. There he found Sparrow’s hand waiting.
‘My god, I forgot I had my pack on,’ the guy said, ‘...and my boots, and hat, and… wait where’s my hat?’
Sparrow pointed at the lumpy, patched shape that was floating beside the character, ‘There you go.’
The man grabbed it with one hand and Sparrow’s hand in the other. Sparrow pulled him up on the bank. The guy’s feet dug little channels in the bank as he climbed.
‘I’m Sparrow,’ Sparrow said, as the guy opened his bag and poured water out of his bag.
‘People call me Patch,’ the guy said, ‘can you guess why?’
They both laughed. Then as the day grew hotter they dove back into the water and swam back and forth along the riverbank.
Occasionally a cart passed them. Some just waved, others stopped for a chat. There were all types of travellers, merchants, politicians, diplomats, military figures. Some from near, others from faraway lands with names that were hard to wrap a tongue around.
In the afternoon three women, dirty, dusty and sweating in the heat arrived. They hit the water in a series of splashes and swum until the sun was well gone from the sky.
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Patch built up a pile of sticks in a pit beside the river and when noone was looking Sparrow started a fire with his hands.
Like magnets to pig-iron, as darkness fell the weary-footed travellers gathered around the campfire. They introduced themselves, tossed the occasional stick into its blaze, and commented on how damn hot the day had been.
Then one of the women, named Tiff, stood up.
‘You guys got any food?’
Sparrow shook his head, ‘Don’t even have a bag.’
‘I got some old oats,’ Patch volunteered, ‘But they’re better at breakfast.’
‘Well…’ she wandered towards the riverbank ‘who wants to try tickle a snortfish for dinner?’
She grabbed a couple of flaming sticks from the fire and pushed them into the ground in bunches.
Sparrow crouched beside her, staring into the dark water.
‘What’s yer name?’ she asked as she washed her hands.
‘Sparrow.’
‘And where yer travelling to Sparrow?’
‘Nowhere really, I’m sort of just cruising at the moment.’
‘Oh? You running away from something?’
He thought about all the times he’d left somewhere; there was Princess Jade, the Demon Queen, school, ‘I guess I’m just running away from staying in one place.’
She laughed at that, ‘But we all are, aren’t we? Come here, have a look at this. No, don’t get too close just yet.’
On the side of the river a group of snortfish had risen to the surface. They were strange muddy-brown with large whiskers on their snouts.
‘What you want to do…’ she whispered as she dipped her hand into the water, ‘is to stroke them juuuust right, so that it feels like your fingers are the water running past their gills.’
Her fingers moved along the side of the fish, gently caressing it. The fish took no notice of her, ‘then you get your fingers in position and…’ her middle finger and thumb closed around the snortfish’s gills, her arm jerked out of the water and a second later the snortfish was flapping on the bank with knife in it.
‘Easy as that,’ she said, washing a little blood from her hands into the river. The snortfish still there hadn’t even batted an eye.
‘Why don’t they swim away?’ Sparrow asked as he ran his fingers along the side of one particularly juicy fish.
‘They love the light in the same way moths do. You never see them during the day, but at night it’s like a god to them, makes them all docile and-’
‘Aaah- Sparrow screamed and jerked his arm out of the water, there was a snortfish clamped around his finger.
The woman was laughing as she tried to grab Sparrow’s arms 'Calm down,' the woman said, reaching for the snortfish and pushing her fingers into its gills. 'They're not aggressive, they just get a little excited when they see movement. Here, let me get that for you.'
She gently pried the snortfish's mouth open and freed Sparrow's finger. 'See, no harm done,' she said, bleeding the fish, then placing it beside hers.
Sparrow examined his finger and saw that it was already starting to heal. 'Thanks,' he said, trying to hide the wound from her as it turned back to skin.
She dipped her hand into the water and plucked out three more with ease.
‘That should be enough for all of us.’
With a knife that hung on a necklace around her neck, she quickly gutted them and fed the entrails to a pair of eels that swum, waiting.
Then they carried the fish back over to the campfire and cooked them one by one on a flat stone in the middle of the fire.
The fish flesh was creamy and soft and Sparrow ate until his heart was full. The bones went to the eels, and their heads lay back on the grass, staring at the sky.
‘God there’s a lot of stars.’ Patch said, hands spread out like a snow angel, ‘Makes you feel pretty small doesn’t it.’
Sparrow nodded, ‘Yeah.’
In the right-hand corner of the sky was a tiny dot that glowed green then yellow then red, then slowly shifted back to green.
Sparrow felt weary, and well-fed, and comfortable. And from within him a strange new thought popped up.
If I were to die now. I’d die happy.
And he held onto that thought. Wrapped the wanderings of his mind around it. And smiled as his eyes drifted closed.