To anyone who found their way here looking for Neil Gaiman's Calendar of Tales: I'm sorry to disappoint you. This is just a random person online taking his idea and his questions, and doing her own Calendar of Tales. You're more than welcome to stay and read my stories too, though I have to warn you, I am definitely no Neil Gaiman.
Here's how this works: I asked a question. People answered the question. I picked one of the answers and wrote a short story based on it. One story per one month. Over the year that should add up to twelve short stories, a whole calendar of tales.
(I won't promise the stories are good. They're probably not.)
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What’s the strangest thing that ever happened to you in February?
Being told you and someone you just met look like an old couple (Answer from Kide)
Her arm hurt. Alisa should have showed it to someone in the previous village, but if she was honest, she didn’t trust the small-village self-declared physicians to be able to distinguish something that would help form something that would kill her. Even so, sometimes you got lucky, and the village you were in had one of those physicians who had actually dedicated their whole lives on understanding the local flora and its medical uses.
Alisa now regretted not even checking. The infection on the shallow cut she had gotten a while back was really starting to weigh her down. It didn’t help she was starting to be high in the mountains. It was by no means her first time this high up, but it had been too long since the last time. Even so, she thought the walking was harder than it should have been. She wasn’t as comfortable in the heights as the locals, but she was ok, and this was worse than ok.
She would have to stop and rest. She had been hoping to get to the next town before that and rest there, but she knew her body. She knew she would need rest sooner than that, even though the town wasn’t too far away anymore.
A little farther up she found an old fireplace someone had set up, and some ready-collected firewood. To her surprise the wood was dry, or at least dry enough, despite simply being piled next to the small remains of a fire. Then again, it never rained much on this side of the mountains, so maybe this wood being dry wasn’t that surprising.
With the last energy she had she started a fire, and lay down next to it to rest. She would have to get up in a bit to add more wood to not let the fire die out, but for now she could close her eyes for a moment.
Alisa woke up to someone shaking her gently. Well, waking up was an exaggeration. Her head was foggy, and she wasn’t able to string two thoughts together. She was barely able to open her eyes in her exhaustion. All she saw was a pair of kind, warm-brown eyes before closing hers again. She just wanted to sleep a little longer. She tried to tell that to whoever’s face those eyes were attached to, but she wasn’t sure if she managed even some unintelligible muttering.
Someone picked her up and started walking.
***
Alisa woke up somewhere warm and dry and soft. She shifted, opened her eyes, blinking against the light. She pushed herself to sit, looking around. She was in a small, simple room that had an inn-feel to it. There was an armchair on one side of bed, currently occupied by a young man, looking at her with a worried look on his face.
“Hey,” he said, the gentleness in his voice matching the kindness of the brown eyes.
“You…” she started, fell quiet. “You carried me here.”
“I did,” he nodded.
“I remember your eyes,” she said. “And I remember being carried.”
Alisa was quiet for a little while longer, trying to get her thoughts together. They were still muddled. The man in the chair gave her the time, waiting quietly.
“What happened?” she asked, finally.
“I found you next to the cold remains of a fire, practically unconscious of a fever. The cut in your arm has gotten infected. So I carried you to the closest town. We’re at an inn. I’m glad you’re awake.”
Yeah, she should have let someone look at the cut in the last village. The fever was still there, slowing her thoughts. Clearly it had been worse, but it was far from gone.
Wait, he said he’d carried her to the closest town?
“Are you a local? From the mountains?” Alisa asked. He shook his head. “From where I stopped to rest it takes at least a quarter of a day to get to the nearest town, uphill, if you’re not used to the altitude. If you’re not carrying a heavy load.”
“More or less,” he said. She looked at him, confused. He was quite short, and lean. The walk from where she had been to here was a relatively tough walk for someone not used to the altitude, even if they weren’t carrying a whole human being worth of extra weight. She wasn’t too big herself, but she knew how heavy even small adult humans could be.
“You carried me all that way?”
He shrugged. She simply looked at him in disbelief. There was no way someone the size of this man had carried her all that way. That would have taken him forever.
“I’m stronger than I look,” he tried to explain, clearly knowing what she was seeing. She was quiet for a moment more.
“Are you just pretending to be a tough guy?” she asked. He seemed taken aback by the question, and confused.
“I…” he stumbled over the words. “What… Why would I do that?”
His confusion was so genuine she decided to believe him. Alisa smiled at him, amused that he didn’t even seem to quite understand why guys would try to act tougher than they were. It wouldn’t have been the first time. It had never worked on her. This was a welcome change.
“Never mind. Fine, I believe you,” she said. “I think you probably saved my life. Thank you.”
“It was nothing,” the man tried, but she held up a hand to quiet him. She didn’t even want to think what would have happened if he hadn’t found her, and saved her. He’d said her fire was already cold? How long had she been sleeping in the cold, unconscious with the fever? She wouldn’t have made it much longer.
“No. It was everything,” she said. “I would be dead from hypothermia by the side of the road by now if you hadn’t come along. And even if you are stronger than you look, I know how heavy people are, even if they’re not very big. Not to mention the altitude. It alone makes moving around so much harder, unless you’re used to it. It must have been tough, and taken very long, just getting me here.”
“I mean, I guess,” he admitted. “But there was nothing else I could have done.”
“You could have left me,” she said, serious.
“No.” She could see he was searching for more words, but none came. As if it had been exactly that simple.
“Thank you,” she said, again, sincere. She was quiet for a few seconds, then realised they hadn’t introduced themselves. “My name is Alisa, by the way.”
“Luka,” the man said with a smile.
There was a knock at the door.
“Yes?” Luka called out, and an older man came in.
“Sorry to interrupt,” he said. “I just came in to see if you would like something to eat. Our lunch is about to be ready. But I’m happy to also see your wife is doing better.”
There was a moment of silence. Then Alisa burst into laughter. Luka grinned too.
“She’s not my wife,” he told him. “This is the first time I’m even talking to her.”
“No, not his wife,” Alisa confirmed after she managed to stop laughing. “He’s just a good-hearted stranger, who would rescue someone they found by the side of the road.”
The man, who must have been the innkeeper, flushed with embarrassment, his face a bright red.
“I… I’m sorry. I just assumed… The way he was looking at you... He seemed so worried. You really only just met?”
They both nodded. The innkeeper seemed confused for a moment longer, then his face turned to horrified.
“Oh, no, I’m so sorry, miss, I let him stay in your room. I would have never done that if I had known you’re not together. I would have never put you in a position where you’re staying in a room with a strange...”
Alisa put up her hand to stop the innkeeper from continuing. For a moment the thought of being forced to share a room alone with a strange man chilled her, but then she glanced at Luka again. He had saved her from freezing to death, apparently because not doing so hadn’t occurred to him. He was a guy who didn’t even seem to understand why someone would pretend to be tougher than he actually was. A guy who had seemed so worried about a stranger that the man at the door had thought they were married.
“Does he look threatening to you?” she asked the innkeeper, gesturing to Luka. The innkeeper turned to look at him. “No, he doesn’t. Which, trust me, I know, doesn’t necessarily tell much. And yes, I would say it’s very, very good you wouldn’t normally let this happen, but it’s all ok. There is no harm done. I’m happy there was someone here to take care of me.” She paused for a moment, a thought only now occurring to her, then turned to look at Luka. “Where did you sleep, if you’ve been in this room the whole time? We’ve been here for long enough that you would have slept, right?”
“On the floor,” he simply said, like it was obvious. She raised an eyebrow at him, then shook her head. The movement made her slightly dizzy. The fever was starting to pull her back to sleep.
“Now,” she said, turning back to the innkeeper. “I am exhausted, and feeling ill and terrible. I just want to go back to sleep. But before that, I feel like having some of that lunch you mentioned is probably a good idea. Any chance you could bring some up here for both of us?”
“Of course,” he said, still looking somewhat startled by the revelation that the two were not together, and disappeared from the door, closing it behind him.
Luka and Alisa looked at each other, and burst out laughing again.
***
The innkeeper gave Luka his own room after that. He didn’t go far, though. His room was just across the wall from hers, so if she needed something, she could simply knock on the wall, and he would come to help her. He stayed until she recovered enough to continue on. She asked him why he did that; didn’t he have anywhere to be? He said no. That he might just as well stay and help out as best he could. So he did. She wanted to tell him to just go, that she would be fine, but it turned out that he, unlike so many of the local so-called physicians, truly knew which of the plants would help her recover faster. From something he said she understood he had been raised being taught things like that, but she never asked. Either way, his knowledge was so welcome she stayed silent instead of telling him to go, her heart heavy with gratitude she knew she would never be able to repay.
It took almost a week for her to recover. She spent most of that time with Luka keeping her company, when she wasn’t asleep. He told her his stories from the road, and she told him hers. He had been on the road for a couple of years. He seemed to intentionally avoid talking about what he had done and where he had been before that, and she let him. The conversations made time move surprisingly fast, and soon she was ready to hit the road again, the fever gone and the cut healing neatly, though Luka warned her it would probably leave a scar. She didn’t mind.
“I wish we were traveling in the same direction,” Alisa told him as they were getting ready to head out. “I’d love to have someone like you to travel with.”
“You’ll be fine alone,” he assured her.
“I know I will,” she said, “But I’d still rather be traveling with someone. And you’re one of those people who make the world seem like a little bit less dreary just for you being in it. The world would be so much better if everyone was a little more like you.”
“I just do what anyone would do,” he tired, but she shook her head.
“You really think that, don’t you?” She sighed. “I wish that was true. But no. You’re wrong. I hope you’ll see that one day.”
She hugged tight, tight, and he hugged her back. She gave him a quick kiss on the cheek, pulled away and smiled at him.
“Take care,” she said and headed uphill, waving.
