Sparrow Apples

It was technically the day after he should have been there, but the pilgrim figured that after so many years, one more day wouldn't matter, and now he had come so far he might as well complete the trip.  His motorcycle roared under him; she didn't want to turn back yet and he let her have her head as the miles clicked by on the odometer.  Still barely noon.  With plenty of green sky ahead of him and no real hurry, the pilgrim stopped in a valley where the twin Geiger tubes slung under the bike's headlamp registered relative safely, and he dismounted and even went so far as to flip up his helmet and breathe the local air.  It smelled good.  Just a hint of sulfer.

A stream ran through the bottom of the valley, passing under the roadway through a metal culvert, and the pilgrim stared down into it with interest.  He thought he could see flickering shapes down there - fish maybe.  If so, they'd be the first he'd seen in five hundred klicks, but maybe that was no surprise.  This close to the grave, everything was more alive.

He looked up from the stream and saw an elderly woman sitting on a boulder nearby.  A fairy or other apparition, he thought, but he couldn't see through her, had never seen such a thing himself anyway and wasn't sure they were real, and when she spoke he knew she was real.  Maybe she'd just snuck up from somewhere while he wasn't looking, or maybe she'd been there all along and he just hadn't noticed.

"Man, huh?"

"What?"

"Male." She enunciated the word as almost two syllables, waved a hand in his general direction.  "You don't have enough padding up front."

"Oh." It was strange to think about, but yes, that would be another effect of being so close to the grave.  If she didn't have a bike of her own, who knew how many years it might have been since she'd see a man?  He didn't guess she got around much.  It wouldn't be safe outside this valley without a pilgrim's protective clothing.

"You staying long?"

"Just a few more minutes.  If that's all right."

"Oh.  Pilgrim."

"Yes." What else could he have been, he wondered.

"You ever been before?"

"What?" It was hard to understand her words and her accent; revise that "many years since she saw a man," who knew how many years since she'd seen another human being in a place like this?  He wondered where she got her food.

"Have you ever seen the grave?  What kind of silliness do you believe about it?"

"The grave of the Sparrow." He said it was religious fervor, because, well, that's what it meant to him.  "A black-bearded man, the last of his line, who--" and he would maybe have recited the whole saga if she hadn't cut him off; something in the air of this place was affecting his sense of time.

"Fine, fine.  At least you're not looking for a little bird."

"A what?"

"Do you even know what a sparrow is, little one?  Back before you were born when the world was new, it was a little bird with a black throat.  Your heroic legend was named after that."

"Oh."

There was a long silence.  Then the old woman slid off the rock, making the young man fear for a moment that she would fall and break her hip and he'd have to interrupt his pilgrimage to lash her to the back of the motorcycle and carry her back to the last town, maybe two hundred klicks back.  But she didn't.  Both her hips were titanium, under warranty, and the cancer would kill her before that expired anyway, though neither of them knew it.

"Well, good luck to you, kid.  You'll be disappointed, but I guess that's part of your penance.  And bring me back an apple." She limped away from him a few steps, then vanished.  The pilgrim blinked; the old woman had been standing out in the open, there was nothing she could have hidden behind or under, and yet one moment she had been walking away and the next she was not present at all.  Maybe he'd hallucinated her entire existence.

He nodded vacantly, got back on the bike, felt her seat mould to his form as he clicked on the injection, and accelerated out of the valley.  The Geiger tubes clicked and snapped and the odometer started counting up again.

It was two more hours before he reached the grave, with its overhanging tree bearing fruit the computer identified as apples.  The computer also said that although apples were in principle "edible and choice", meaning that they were something you'd actually want to eat instead of just possible to eat, these particular ones were too contaminated to be safe.  Especially for a man his age.  He gathered several and stuck them into a foil-lined saddle bag anyway, though.

He was a full thirty klicks away on his way back, before his brain managed to decypher the epitaph on the grave of the Sparrow, and he realised what the old woman had meant about being disappointed.  The pilgrim laughed most of the way back to the valley.