The village materialized through the trees the way distant things do when the body is failing — in pieces, unreliably, each glimpse requiring confirmation from the next. A roofline. Smoke rising in a thin column. The geometry of cultivated ground where the forest floor gave way to something intentional. Eli walked toward it with the focused attention of someone who has reduced their existence to a single next objective, because broader ambitions required a stability of body and mind that he no longer possessed.
He emerged from the tree line into the low amber light of late afternoon, and the village resolved into particulars. Perhaps thirty structures, built low and close together in the manner of settlements that understood winter. A well at the center of the common ground. Chickens occupying the space between buildings with the sovereign indifference of chickens everywhere. The smell of woodsmoke and something cooking, distant enough to be cruel.
The villagers registered him the way small communities register the unfamiliar — with the immediate, collective attention of people whose survival has historically depended on accurate threat assessment. Work stopped. Conversations suspended. A woman drawing water from the well straightened and watched him cross the open ground with her hands still on the rope, neither pulling nor releasing.
Eli was aware of how he must appear. He had not seen his own reflection since the morning before, but he understood his condition through other means — the way the burned skin along his arms had tightened as it dried, the particular weight of dried blood in hair, the gait of a man distributing his weight around several points of damage simultaneously. He looked like something the forest had chewed on and decided against.
He stopped in the middle of the common ground because his legs made the decision before he did.
"The capital," he said. His voice had the texture of something long unused. "Which direction."
The silence that followed was of a specific quality — not hostile, exactly, but the silence of people who have encountered a question they are deciding whether to engage with. A child near the well stared at him with the open assessment of someone too young for social discretion. An older man at the edge of the gathering spoke something low to the woman beside him, and whatever he said produced a slight tightening around her eyes.
Eli tried again, understanding even as he did that repetition was unlikely to resolve a language barrier, but having no alternative available. "The capital. North. Which road—"
The ground came up to meet him with very little warning.
He was aware, briefly, of the packed earth against his cheek and the particular quality of stillness that follows a fall — the body's assessment period, cataloguing damage, deciding on next steps. Around him, feet. The murmur of consultation in a language that moved through registers he had never encountered, its rhythms unfamiliar in a way that suggested not mere distance from his own tongue but a fundamentally different architecture of sound.
Then a voice cut through the consultation with a different quality entirely — sharper, directed at the gathering rather than part of it. A question, from the shape of it. Or a demand. The feet shifted. The murmuring changed tenor.
Eli turned his head and found, at ground level, the hem of a woman's skirt moving with purpose through the standing villagers. She spoke again, and whatever she said produced results — the crowd redistributed, someone moved away quickly, and a pair of hands found his shoulders with efficient gentleness.
He let them take his weight. He did not have a better option.
The sky above him, as they carried him, had gone the colors of cooling embers — the last performance of the day before it surrendered to dark. He watched it until it was replaced by a ceiling of woven reeds, and then he was placed on something that yielded slightly under him, and the light went away entirely.
The headache was the first thing to establish itself when he surfaced, planted at the base of his skull and sending regular reports upward. Then the rest, in rough order of severity — the forearm, which had been wrapped in something cool and layered that was not his torn shirt; the burns; the ribs; the general inventory of a body that had been treated as a site of sustained violence for approximately thirty-six hours and was now filing its complaints in full.
He opened his eyes. The ceiling of woven reeds again, different light now — morning, from the angle of it coming through the single small window, filtered and indirect. He lay on a mat of woven grass, elevated slightly on a low platform, and he was covered with a cloth that smelled of herbs he didn't have names for.
The woman was beside him. Young — close to his age, or perhaps younger — sitting with the patient attentiveness of someone who had been waiting without particular urgency, doing something with her hands that she set aside when she saw him stir. She spoke immediately, a stream of her language directed at him with clear intent, and he caught none of it except the general meaning conveyed by her hands pressing gently downward — stay, be still, do not undo what we have done.
He looked at his forearm. The lacerations had been dressed with leaves laid in overlapping layers and bound with strips of cloth, the whole arrangement held with a care that suggested knowledge rather than improvisation. The skin around the edges had stopped the angry red of active inflammation and moved toward something quieter.
"I need to—" He started to sit up. She pressed his shoulder back with a firmness that acknowledged his larger size and declined to be impressed by it. More words, the same general direction as before.
"I can't understand you," he said, knowing she couldn't understand him either, which made the exchange a kind of mutual performance of intent rather than actual communication. She seemed to reach the same conclusion simultaneously. For a moment they simply regarded each other — two people who had arrived at the clear edge of what language they shared, which was none.
The curtained doorway moved.
The young man who entered was perhaps a year or two older than Eli, with a stillness to his movements that read less as caution than as deep familiarity with the space around him. His eyes were pale, the irises carrying a cloudiness that caught the morning light and held it differently than clear eyes would — not the cloudiness of disease, but of something that had replaced ordinary sight with something else, or simply done without it long enough that the body had repurposed the architecture.
He crossed the room without hesitation, without the small navigational adjustments that sighted people make constantly and unconsciously, and settled onto a low stool near the wall with a composure that suggested he had done this before — arrived in rooms where someone was confused, and waited for the moment to speak.
He spoke. In Eli's language, without accent, without the searching quality of someone translating as they go.
"Rest. The plants will heal you."
Eli stared at him.
"You understand me."
It was not quite a question. The young man's mouth moved into something that stopped short of a full smile — an expression that acknowledged the strangeness of the situation without being diminished by it.
"I can understand anything that walks this earth. My tongue carries every language." He said it the way a person states a fact about themselves that they have long since stopped finding remarkable — the same matter-of-fact quality with which someone might mention that they are left-handed. "Rest. The leaves she has used are from the northern slope of the ridge. They know what they are doing, even if the application looks unconventional."
Eli looked at the woman, who was watching this exchange with the alert attention of someone following the shape of a conversation whose words she couldn't access. Then back at the blind man.
"The capital," Eli said. "How far."
"Far enough that you would not reach it in your current condition." The young man tilted his head slightly. "Which is the more relevant distance, I think."
Eli lay back against the mat, not because he was persuaded so much as because the alternative required physical resources, he was running a deficit on. The ceiling of woven reeds received his gaze without comment. Outside, the village had resumed its morning sounds — the chickens, the water, the low commerce of people going about the careful business of ordinary life.
He thought about the leader's voice. That's where it begins. The certainty in it. The complete absence of concern for anything that might follow.
"Tomorrow," the blind man said, settling more comfortably on his stool, "when you have slept and eaten, we will speak properly."
Eli did not answer. The woman said something soft in her own language — directed at the room in general, or perhaps at no one — and the morning light moved incrementally across the reed ceiling as the village continued outside, and somewhere north of here, in a city he had never seen, something was beginning without him.
He closed his eyes and let the leaves do their work.