Untitled V
(563 words - 9/09)
(1,107 words - 9/10)
There walks a tall, lanky man. See him bruised and scarred, see his wool balmacaan in tatters, his white button-down bloodied. His pleated black trousers with a singular, lengthy gash on his thigh. His leather boot laces undone. His muscles taught and stringy. His palms calloused, his green eyes bloodshot. His angular face austere.
See him victorious.
Birds chitter, squirrels chatter. Chipmunks rustle the fallen leaves. Snakes sunbathe on rocks, slithering away as he comes close and before he sees them. Deer stand observant, silent, still.
He limps towards the spring. There he will find refuge and revival. All his immediate captors defeated, but wolves lurk. Someone is sure to find his captors, and that someone is sure to be hostile towards him. That someone will want vengeance. It is of complete insignificance that he is an innocent man. The blood in the water blinds.
The canopy softens the midday sunlight. The cover from the trees allows him to press forward. If he were to suffer the full brunt of the sunlight, he thinks - he knows - he would not be alive come dawn.
He believes he should arrive before sunset, hobbling as he is. He doesn’t know why he believes that there is a spring. He’s only heard about it from the stories his grandmother used to tell him, long ago. The stories his grandfather used to read to him. The difference is that the grandfather did not believe, his grandmother believed.
Every winter she would recount the story of how her grandfather stumbled upon a spring in the woods. He was wounded from war and there were fairies. Sprites. Spirits of some sorts. Magical little people. And these people gave her grandfather magical little concoctions.
Her grandfather never recovered fully - he became pacified despite no physical disability. In fact, his vigor and his strength grew by magnitudes. At first, he was sullen and despondent. How would he prove his honor, his strength? If he could not prove it through war, then how could he go on? That is what he used to say. He would return to the spring with gifts and he learned the way of the little people. Years passed and he spread their word. He became a renowned medicine man.
Then tragedy struck. Not to him, but to his war party. Had he not been pacified, he would have gone along with them into the abyss. There was not a thing anyone could have done except. Except to not have gone in the first place.
He returned to the spring and he explained his torment and his guilt - that he should have stopped them for going out to War. And the sage of the little people explained that the war party had done nothing wrong. It was for a valiant and honorable cause. There had to be Justice.
And now it fell upon him to bring about Justice. But it was apparent that the heavens decided it could not be done through physical warfare. There had to be another way.
So there was.
Harsh barks alert the man and he pauses. This is a secluded path he walks. Overgrown vegetation, mossy decayed trees overlaid the ruts. Yet he knows there is civilization nearby. A small town in the quaintest sense. The barks did not come from the rear and they sounded further and further away as the minutes passed.
Once satisfied he goes on. He thinks of nothing - not the past, not the future. The only thing that matters is taking one more step. It is intentional, because he could not afford his thoughts to distract him. He could not let himself get lost again as he often does.
On a few occasions he does stop and listen, but nothing causes him to abandon the faded path. Crossing the stream before the forks seem to have been a good decision. His scent was lost, even though he knew close visual inspection could have revealed his direction.
He hides when he sees a hawk through the canopy. Its silence and its presence tell him that it is not an ordinary hawk. It could be one of those magical pet hawks. Kardyu. That is what they are called. Kardyu is the term that applies to all magical, elemental beasts. He does not remember the name for the mirror of the hawk. But the alternative is that it could be one of those fancy new drones.
He prefers if it to be a man-made drone, because those are controlled by humans and human sight is fallible. If it were a trained tracking hawk, he would need to act fast.
The so-called hawk circles around for a few minutes, eerily silent, and then it continues northwest. Perhaps to check the other route he could have taken. Still he takes it slow and cautious. He takes a serpentine route through the bramble and bushes, crossing the old logging trail every now and then. He deduces that it was a logging trail from the presence of deep ruts, the pattern of the stumps, and the neatness and almost perfect monoculture of the remaining trees. Other trees had snuck in overtime, but most were a variety of oaks. At the very least it was this section that was logged.
Gradually he stops his slithering and stays straight. He comes across ponds and burgeoning streams that in millennium could become a river, a narrower trail, and eventually he could not see far into the woods. He could only see glimpses of the fading day.
He walks slower so that he can scan for gifts. An offering. The little people preferred tobacco and berries, but it’s not the season. Next best thing he could do was to pick up the acorns and hickory nuts. He has full pockets and hopes that it is enough.
He starts to see rock piles that appear to be man-made, and notched trees, and after a mile, an obsidian-looking boulder at a crossroads. The perpendicular path was made by deer and bears and foxes. His intuition tells him to follow, see where it takes him, he remembers vague details about how there would be signs. A big, glassy boulder in the middle of the woods takes no master logician to understand.
So he follows. And he arrives at an ancient, ancient oak. There is a clear pond at its base. Supernaturally clear pond. It should be filled with muck and sediment, but it’s not. Something tells him to strip and enter the water, and so he does.
He sits on another obsidian-like boulder and rests. He falls asleep.