Riverside
They kept their backs to a stream where the water ran constant and clear like a current of glass smoothing a bed of stones and falling white faster than they could go. It was cold to the touch and pure in taste and it would satiate them on the trail when the hours drug and dried. They held to their order and rested and watered over a gray caucus of shore rocks. The bank was hemmed by a mud wall ingrown with conniving roots that bowed out upholding slanted timber that grasped at its life blood. Farthest down there the thin soldier bated and spoke almost nothing. The boy would glance at him brief every now and again. Curios. Never was his scrutiny returned nor any measure of acknowledgment shared. A pricked rod of quartz he was, his visage and his demeanor. He knelt with his weapon and put his hands into the sparkling folds of the mountain runoff and cupped them and rubbed his cheeks that against the granular padding of his palms sanded a short crop of chin whiskers. A goatee he wore near indistinguishable from the alabaster clumping wet. The boy watched him and went down with his knees braced on the muddy stones and likewise took hold of the crystalline wash. But his digits were shocked numb to the bone and he drew them out quick and shook them. He looked over, nothing. From his coat pocket he took a balled and wrinkled cloth and he dipped it in and wrung it and dipped again. Then he went about wiping the finger paint from his face still caked and creased as colored sediment dripping into the current and like velvet wisps was taken down the banks. And there just above was the hewn stare of Elias, held deliberate and stoic to the child. His eyes narrow and lit as the shuttered horizon. The boy recoiled and seemed to shrink as though he'd been caught. He bowed his head to the cloth soaked with red and when he peeked again the veteran had stood and was walking behind him toward the clay shelves.
He took the cloth and dipped it back in the river and choked the last of the dye out as much as he could before setting it to dry upon a bleached slab. He sat with his legs crossed on the rocks where the paralytic disquiet he wore prior gave to a vague shame and an orb of animosity compressed and buried in his stomach. He looked to the right. Cale was pointed toward the trail, untouched as it was. Like an explorer on the brink he studied the terrain, ear to the rapids and expectant of a beckon recalled. Wes was near, his company an easing reprieve. He refilled a gourd and drank from it atop his pannier like a beached sea turtle liberated from its shell and he greeted the boy as he ambled toward him. They shared niceties and the crisp wilderness air but all the while the child fidgeted in his pockets and his head dodged about. Eventually he had to say something. "Something on your mind?"
The boy held his attention on the soldier.
"Elias?"
"I don't think he likes me very much."
"He's never been one for conversation."
"I don't think he wants to be here."
"He does, trust me."
"How much do you know him?"
"Known him all my life."
"What's he like?"
"He doesn't have much of a sense of humor. But he's a strong leader." He paused. "And he knows what it means to sacrifice. He wouldn't be here if he didn't want to help you. Even if he doesn't admit it."
The boy surveyed him again. At a distance, preoccupied, maybe out of earshot. "I wished more had come with us."
Wes crossed his hands clutched in the ends of sleeves perforated for his thumbs and he nodded in approval. Near them Cale approached, direct in his movement and notice. "It will be night soon."
"We camping here?" the boy asked.
"Not here." He pointed outward with his first and second fingers. "There's an alcove further up the river. There. It will be more protected."
"I can't see it."
"I can." He took toward where he had pointed and the others were left to pick up and follow. The soldier first and the two lagging behind a quick and pulsing trek cutting against fractured reams of stone and root torn in the ground. It had been hours already, more than they had counted. The miles they broached weaving and bobbing left them as uncertain of the lapse as they were of the trail, vaguely pointed as it was. And the day was going, the first day.
They walked a steady beat that ran at a bevel and then plain and to the left the river was beneath them and obscured. The boy lifted his legs high over shrubbery that curved and fanned like quill feathers while the others seemed to glide through them. Threading the gaps between the trees high and guarded as lush obelisks. He watched the backs of their heads veer ahead and followed where they went, the churn of the river below a familiar metronome. At intervals there would be thickets convened so impassable that they had to stop and bend and cut away at the branches. He was always the first to be led through, ducking beneath swatting hinges. Breaking, swooping. The clawing appendages gunning for ears and nostrils groomed bare by all their drawn weaponry, all but his. An hour passed, still no camp settled. Options grew thin with the coppice deepening around their waists and arms and the sunlight cooling into a morass of blue. The trees now silhouetted against that backdrop looming paternal and dire. "Are we close?" the boy asked.
"Yes." the first in line said. A few minutes went in a shallow trust. The boy wanted to prod further but he didn't.
Wes gave voice instead. "We'll have to stop soon."
"We will. It won't be long."
"It's just that I don't know where it is we're going."
"You'll see soon enough."
The child half believed then that there would be no place set aside for them to secure the night, that their leader would go on and on into the renewed morning and extinguish the day if he wasn't stopped. He could sense a will in him accelerating, a compulsion for the farthest mark. Sparks brazen in his retinas, his gaze unaccountable. It was a doubt that grew as the dusk settled and it lingered even as they squeezed through a slender fissure in a congress of mossy boulders and set aside their belongings inside an oval sealed and shorn. The boughs of redwood overlapped above and the ground was awash in molding leaves that they swept to the sides. A floor of hard packed sediment dappled with talc and the bulbous, round hegemony of stones as watchmen having all but their own voices to stave away the dark. A fine place indeed. They each took claim of a space. More than an adequate amount allotted for the four to own yet still the most was given to the child who fumbled with metal rods and stakes attempting to build his puptent in the right corner. The tarpaulin he opened and spread and inserted the poles through the loops in the corners and tried to drape the cover over a skeleton sturdy and held but it crumpled on the side and the shape never stayed. Cale undid the poles and folded the canvas on the ground. He asked if the child really wanted to use it. He nodded. So he took his rope and tied it to an assorted stake of iron and drove it into a dimple in the stone with his palm and walked backwards with the length and another spike to secure it taut and horizontal in the rock. The tarp was hung over the clothesline and its triangular center fastened on the ground like a laundry pavilion. "That should do it", he said. The boy put his bed spread inside and never thanked him.
He sat down and unfurled the bedding rolled at the pack's crest and smoothed it just so inside the tent. The quilt from the deflating inside, laid on top still folded. Pouches of food were taken warm from friction. Changes of clothes wadded rumpled, haphazard. The little lantern, its bronze handles upturned like a man's rigid arms. Sloshing sounds in the base reservoir and the wick a knitted flatworm coiled at the bottom. At some point it was suggested a fire be made and the white soldier stood and exited through the crevasse without the question even being asked him. The last few minutes of usable light were counted with sounds of cracking lumber and the nimbus smear draining vigorous far into the overhead west. He returned with a paltry bundle of sticks and a rind of bark to shave and kindle and they set about arranging the branches in a stacking cone round a tuft of stripped filaments that seemed to melt when they met with flint spark. Smoke came, aerated with Cale's breath as he stooped prone. Then embers, then flame. Careful not to build it big to keep the canopy from ignition and the stone barricade turning captive. When it was sustaining itself they laid out and measured all rations of food. There were many pouches full of dried berries and nuts of every caliber and a small gourd filled with a creamy paste and in another sack some russet potatoes intermingled with choice vegetables. Most stored within Wes' mobile carapace that sat beside him a trusty companion. The boy himself had a whole loaf of bread and a few apples he had stowed. They pooled it together and divvied out what was wanted and what was allowed. Fistfulls here, pinches there. The child ended up with an apple and held it with both hands. Red, shimmering. He took a bite and set it cratered in his lap and unscrewed the top of his lantern. A few more bites. He poked a twig into the fire and took its flame into the lantern bulb and watched the wick blacken and engulf. A svelte teardrop flame, canary yellow.
"What does that burn?" Wes asked.
"Some kind of oil."
"Better to save it." Cale said.
"I like using it."
"There'll not be any settlements on the mountain."
"Nobody lives up there?"
"There's a city charted southeast of the summit," said Wes.
"A great city of man. Epicenter of commerce." Cale spoke in a tone accommodated for slogan. Knowing of reputation and reputation alone. "Our road leads there."
Elias did something odd with his face, contorted inward as though he'd smelled a foul odor. As the others spoke the boy turned the wheel on the lantern and watched the flame melt languidly and diminish to nothing. He put it in the tent on the mat. Another bite. The thickest portion had been vacated and he was now going about the ridge on top. Near a spitfire that like forked serpent tongues licked the air and painted contour on the guardian stones. Their glowering dance an impartation of some personified sentience. Granite contusions swelled and sagged to bulging cheek bones and broken nose bridges and mismatched brows of empty eye sockets. Moss for their hair, indented furrows for toothless mouths. They transformed ever more pronounced as he studied them. An incarnate circlet, ingrown natural. Not made with hammers or chisels and not possessing in them menace or obtrusion. Their fixed, prescient vision. That those pitiable wanderers there would find themselves not so alone, not really.
"The mountain will be hard," Cale put the side of his face in his hand. "It has never been forgiving."
"Tonight we have this camp," said Wes. "And it's impeccable. How'd you know it would be here?"
"I remembered."
"From what?"
"I was here before."
"You said you never left that forest," the boy accused.
"The land was whole, without borders once. That is where I resided, right here. Everywhere. But others came later with possession and pushed to the east. I never noticed. It only occurs to me now. Memory."
"This exact spot?" said Wes.
"Long nights spent. Long days. There might have been others. I cannot recall." He looked up and around. "The trees were taller then."
"What a thing that must be. Being alive for so long. They always told stories about you to the children. The everlasting spirit of the old forest they called you."
"If I disappoint I apologize."
"Not at all." He lowered his head a bit, facing no one in particular. "It is a privilege to be in the company of such legends."
A grimace was inching along Elias' mouth now. Dim incandescence turning white to seared auburn.
"We used to have stories like that." The boy said. "But they weren't real."
For a period there were no words between them. The apple was gouged of all its meat and the core was spoiling brown in the dirt. The rations were put away and everyone appeared to stall, to purse the moment of fellowship. A preamble quiet and barely lit. Wes bunched the folds of his poncho in his lap and looked at the child. "Do you want to know something?"
He nodded.
"You were the first human most at the village had ever seen."
"Really?"
"Oh yes."
He shook his head.
"The history of your people is known but few are ever up close with them. Many were probably scared of you."
"No they weren't."
"It's true."
At this was heard an accented growl of a kind not familiar to them. A punctuated, legible utterance of words spoken, heard, and understood but not accredited to the source from which it came. It repeated. "I was not." Common language forced through lips unaccustomed, each word made individual and labored. To disprove its anomaly it altered. "I am not." They looked to Elias and let the correlation sync the sound to his mouth. His barbed vocal cords emitting a coarse diction nevertheless clear. And no one responded.
An awkward instance passed and Wes spoke something in his native speech and Elias waited before responding. "I listened."
"He understands us?" The boy asked.
"I," Elias said. "I understand you." Curt and martial was his tone and for the first time the child felt afraid of him.
"Did you plan on keeping that to yourself?" said Wes, visibly bothered.
"You speak enough for us both."
Cale tried and failed to stifle a knowing smirk. Elias saw it. "And you," he roiled, "Immortal. Arrogance in your words."
He said nothing. Glint from the fire steady in his pupils.
Wes stammered something else unknown. Elias scoffed. "Mine is my people's pride. Yours and mine."
Cale leaned forward, brow and mouth gesticulated. "Your people's pride. I remember, I saw." His finger pricked at his sternum. "It drove them away, the humans. And with them an alliance that could have been. Foolish."
"Our fault, then?"
"And theirs."
"So easy for you to say." He looked at the burning twigs, charred scales enamored in the wood. Frustration in his voice, grimace perpetual and marred. He didn't deny it.
Cale reeled inward, skull resting on the wall. "I imagine they've forgotten all about me."
"We never needed them. We do not now."
"There's blood on their hands, no denying it." Wes pleaded. "But our future is with them. I know you know that."
He was silent again, sulking in either meditation or seething anger. Mouth tight, locked. The wounded eye always squinting, always skeptical. If he would speak again the boy dared not ask. He breathed in deeply and his chest puffed outward like a dove's and he straightened his neck with his back and the air had become just cool enough that exhaust from his nose could be seen. "You do not know them as I do. I have fought them. I have killed them. They roam these territories in packs. They draw blood, they steal, they mock as they always have."
"My allegiance is to the child only." Cale said. "If it is not yours I submit you turn back now. There'll be none to stop you."
He did not stand, did not walk away, did not speak again any colloquial variant he possessed. Were it a game they played a draw would've been offered and terms decreed but it was not. There would be no conclusion. They were tired, tired of speaking. Exhaustion to make their parlance fade to irrelevance. Belief entrenched a thousand generations deemed secondary to basic need. A rush of wind rocked southeastern and sucked back the other way as though the world was snoring. The fire dissipated amid a kind of reticence that hushed it time for rest, now, while the opportunity was so accommodated. And so they prepared. Dust poured on the burning logs and feet stomped on the embers to extinguish the fire while the food was put away. Bodies positioned as comfortable as possible sprawled on the hard wall and ground. The immortal lay on his stomach like a feline buried in his elbow folded upon the dirt. Wes up against his pack, globular and slouched. The veteran had curtained himself in his cloak and his hood was up. Only his face visible and near angelic in its purity save for the pink gash ridged as a porcelain crack and jagged. All taken to slumber so quickly with the child left behind. He sat and watched them a few moments then finally took off his boots and his coat and crawled like a toddler into the tent. He consigned to wedging the sword behind the tent where the wall was and he pushed himself away from it to keep his head from touching. The cold was encroaching, the moist late-year draft. But the bedding was stitched and buttoned with its own covering that he wormed into and he managed to unfold the quilt to offer another layer swaddled over him. Face up on the cushioned end of the pocket, legs short enough to stretch and stay inside. Warm, ensconced just enough. Not so bad. He traced the crease where the rope suspended the tent with his eyes and then with his fingernails.
Eventually he rolled over on his side and retracted his knees to his stomach and tried earnestly to go to sleep. He should have been exhausted and in truth was but in him still was a fever racing. A mind aflutter, a jostled nerve that wouldn't quell. He shut his eyes and folded the covers over his face. When he opened them again he wasn't sure of his standing. Whether a minute had passed or an hour. Out in the void passed the wall there was a rustle and heavy breaking that thumped in a line closer and closer until ceasing and not being heard again. The sound without a body to accompany it. A phantom lurching with a corporeal form that warped and shifted weights in the child's mind. An amorphous mass of spindle and hair and fang like watercolor painted in oil. Was it a dream? If he concentrated he could hear a voice he'd heard before. Familiar in all that lonesome silence. Like the gruff slang of his father's. The expectations he had spoken about the future, the plans set upon the trajectory that would be his life. Great things, he said. Did you know? Why didn't you tell me.
He blinked and it was morning and they were up and calling him to wake. He sat up gasping and his forehead struck the crest of the tent. Crust in his eyelids, spittle on his chin, confusion beset and lingering. He waddled out like a drunkard as the tent was already being collapsed and compacted. Elias was there, of course, and accordant with the others' early zeal for the road. "How'd you sleep?" asked Wes.
He mumbled with an inadvertent vitriol. "I don't know." He said he had to use the bathroom and he was obliged to go out with privacy. He felt a touch of sickness somehow in his stomach but won little remedy to it.after doing his business. He sought for a discernible pattern of tracks that the creature could have left and though he found none he scampered back to the fort. There his pack was primed and ready for him and there was nothing left to do save to steel themselves and eat their breakfast on route away from the paling warden stones. The forest wandered around them spatial and shapeless. The distance saw no variety, no particular significance beyond the enclosing chaparral, the trees, the birds nesting within. The river remained the only milestone keeping constant, loyal, and delineating for them a purpose and direction to their steps. Its hum lulled a trance metered with the beats of their feet crunching undergrowth. They made camp in the corner of two intersecting trees fallen prone. The boy and his tent were jammed in the innermost niche and the others were sprawled out ahead in a curving triad like a fleshy barricade. He was uneasy with them so defenseless against the dark, the unfairness of it. It did not make him less scared, but then, he always was in one way or another.
Save for fragmented requisites Elias had not spoken again, a choice not entirely lamented. As they understood him the veteran was a man of command rather than platitude, of action. His head seemed to be filled with thoughts that wavered, often at the brink of outburst. But for him it did not matter. The point on the compass, the camp, the fire. The unuttered conviction that this could have greater merit, the mission. This is what counted, what he had entrusted to himself.
In passing the child asked about life in this part of the world. The serene remoteness of it. Wes started to answer but was cut off by the soldier who cleared his throat and had levity to his growl. He spoke of the turn of the year that not a month prior saw the first throes of autumn dimming a vast confluence of emerald so bright and everywhere that their vision set other colors to blaze like fireworks. The moss veneer thawing and the canopy dispersing leaves the size of your whole torso. They made clothes of them and umbrellas to shield against the graying rains and used the stems as binding for their houses. All swaying, yielding to so wordless and consistent a provider. Their dials set to the shadows it bifurcated on the jungle ground and the passing seasons divined by its visage. The eldest one, the highest branch. Last of its kind, they said, or the last to be found in this land. Once one among multitudes in an endless wild that was their origin but the span of their lives was short and their memory an unbroken recover of dropped words and paintings and rituals etched and spread on the wood itself. Each life intertwined and brought up anchored to a function specific and communal, a few decades granted then gone. He said he was only eleven years of age and already passed his prime. That when he dies he'll be cast around the base where plots of hundreds have been burrowed among rooted gaps. For theirs were lives of reverence lead, lives of impermanence bowing before an ancient. As he spoke the boy sat transfixed but did not understand, did not find in it comfort or kinship.
In the next day and the next they fell into an acceptance of the rare-trodden path they carved. Sleeping outside in makeshift hovels and the necessary tolerance for endless travel became habitual, near ritualistic in its locked tempo. Wake, dismantle camp, walk, eat, walk some more, seek shelter, build camp, eat, sleep. These the posts on which they hung their existence; a sequence whittled down to bare, basic progression. They were an arrow, small and lean, whose flight was at the mercy of the air that carried it and the obstructions it endured. And the child was the head, being winnowed by the road and ever sharpened for the bloodshed he was fated to carry.
He took the cloth and dipped it back in the river and choked the last of the dye out as much as he could before setting it to dry upon a bleached slab. He sat with his legs crossed on the rocks where the paralytic disquiet he wore prior gave to a vague shame and an orb of animosity compressed and buried in his stomach. He looked to the right. Cale was pointed toward the trail, untouched as it was. Like an explorer on the brink he studied the terrain, ear to the rapids and expectant of a beckon recalled. Wes was near, his company an easing reprieve. He refilled a gourd and drank from it atop his pannier like a beached sea turtle liberated from its shell and he greeted the boy as he ambled toward him. They shared niceties and the crisp wilderness air but all the while the child fidgeted in his pockets and his head dodged about. Eventually he had to say something. "Something on your mind?"
The boy held his attention on the soldier.
"Elias?"
"I don't think he likes me very much."
"He's never been one for conversation."
"I don't think he wants to be here."
"He does, trust me."
"How much do you know him?"
"Known him all my life."
"What's he like?"
"He doesn't have much of a sense of humor. But he's a strong leader." He paused. "And he knows what it means to sacrifice. He wouldn't be here if he didn't want to help you. Even if he doesn't admit it."
The boy surveyed him again. At a distance, preoccupied, maybe out of earshot. "I wished more had come with us."
Wes crossed his hands clutched in the ends of sleeves perforated for his thumbs and he nodded in approval. Near them Cale approached, direct in his movement and notice. "It will be night soon."
"We camping here?" the boy asked.
"Not here." He pointed outward with his first and second fingers. "There's an alcove further up the river. There. It will be more protected."
"I can't see it."
"I can." He took toward where he had pointed and the others were left to pick up and follow. The soldier first and the two lagging behind a quick and pulsing trek cutting against fractured reams of stone and root torn in the ground. It had been hours already, more than they had counted. The miles they broached weaving and bobbing left them as uncertain of the lapse as they were of the trail, vaguely pointed as it was. And the day was going, the first day.
They walked a steady beat that ran at a bevel and then plain and to the left the river was beneath them and obscured. The boy lifted his legs high over shrubbery that curved and fanned like quill feathers while the others seemed to glide through them. Threading the gaps between the trees high and guarded as lush obelisks. He watched the backs of their heads veer ahead and followed where they went, the churn of the river below a familiar metronome. At intervals there would be thickets convened so impassable that they had to stop and bend and cut away at the branches. He was always the first to be led through, ducking beneath swatting hinges. Breaking, swooping. The clawing appendages gunning for ears and nostrils groomed bare by all their drawn weaponry, all but his. An hour passed, still no camp settled. Options grew thin with the coppice deepening around their waists and arms and the sunlight cooling into a morass of blue. The trees now silhouetted against that backdrop looming paternal and dire. "Are we close?" the boy asked.
"Yes." the first in line said. A few minutes went in a shallow trust. The boy wanted to prod further but he didn't.
Wes gave voice instead. "We'll have to stop soon."
"We will. It won't be long."
"It's just that I don't know where it is we're going."
"You'll see soon enough."
The child half believed then that there would be no place set aside for them to secure the night, that their leader would go on and on into the renewed morning and extinguish the day if he wasn't stopped. He could sense a will in him accelerating, a compulsion for the farthest mark. Sparks brazen in his retinas, his gaze unaccountable. It was a doubt that grew as the dusk settled and it lingered even as they squeezed through a slender fissure in a congress of mossy boulders and set aside their belongings inside an oval sealed and shorn. The boughs of redwood overlapped above and the ground was awash in molding leaves that they swept to the sides. A floor of hard packed sediment dappled with talc and the bulbous, round hegemony of stones as watchmen having all but their own voices to stave away the dark. A fine place indeed. They each took claim of a space. More than an adequate amount allotted for the four to own yet still the most was given to the child who fumbled with metal rods and stakes attempting to build his puptent in the right corner. The tarpaulin he opened and spread and inserted the poles through the loops in the corners and tried to drape the cover over a skeleton sturdy and held but it crumpled on the side and the shape never stayed. Cale undid the poles and folded the canvas on the ground. He asked if the child really wanted to use it. He nodded. So he took his rope and tied it to an assorted stake of iron and drove it into a dimple in the stone with his palm and walked backwards with the length and another spike to secure it taut and horizontal in the rock. The tarp was hung over the clothesline and its triangular center fastened on the ground like a laundry pavilion. "That should do it", he said. The boy put his bed spread inside and never thanked him.
He sat down and unfurled the bedding rolled at the pack's crest and smoothed it just so inside the tent. The quilt from the deflating inside, laid on top still folded. Pouches of food were taken warm from friction. Changes of clothes wadded rumpled, haphazard. The little lantern, its bronze handles upturned like a man's rigid arms. Sloshing sounds in the base reservoir and the wick a knitted flatworm coiled at the bottom. At some point it was suggested a fire be made and the white soldier stood and exited through the crevasse without the question even being asked him. The last few minutes of usable light were counted with sounds of cracking lumber and the nimbus smear draining vigorous far into the overhead west. He returned with a paltry bundle of sticks and a rind of bark to shave and kindle and they set about arranging the branches in a stacking cone round a tuft of stripped filaments that seemed to melt when they met with flint spark. Smoke came, aerated with Cale's breath as he stooped prone. Then embers, then flame. Careful not to build it big to keep the canopy from ignition and the stone barricade turning captive. When it was sustaining itself they laid out and measured all rations of food. There were many pouches full of dried berries and nuts of every caliber and a small gourd filled with a creamy paste and in another sack some russet potatoes intermingled with choice vegetables. Most stored within Wes' mobile carapace that sat beside him a trusty companion. The boy himself had a whole loaf of bread and a few apples he had stowed. They pooled it together and divvied out what was wanted and what was allowed. Fistfulls here, pinches there. The child ended up with an apple and held it with both hands. Red, shimmering. He took a bite and set it cratered in his lap and unscrewed the top of his lantern. A few more bites. He poked a twig into the fire and took its flame into the lantern bulb and watched the wick blacken and engulf. A svelte teardrop flame, canary yellow.
"What does that burn?" Wes asked.
"Some kind of oil."
"Better to save it." Cale said.
"I like using it."
"There'll not be any settlements on the mountain."
"Nobody lives up there?"
"There's a city charted southeast of the summit," said Wes.
"A great city of man. Epicenter of commerce." Cale spoke in a tone accommodated for slogan. Knowing of reputation and reputation alone. "Our road leads there."
Elias did something odd with his face, contorted inward as though he'd smelled a foul odor. As the others spoke the boy turned the wheel on the lantern and watched the flame melt languidly and diminish to nothing. He put it in the tent on the mat. Another bite. The thickest portion had been vacated and he was now going about the ridge on top. Near a spitfire that like forked serpent tongues licked the air and painted contour on the guardian stones. Their glowering dance an impartation of some personified sentience. Granite contusions swelled and sagged to bulging cheek bones and broken nose bridges and mismatched brows of empty eye sockets. Moss for their hair, indented furrows for toothless mouths. They transformed ever more pronounced as he studied them. An incarnate circlet, ingrown natural. Not made with hammers or chisels and not possessing in them menace or obtrusion. Their fixed, prescient vision. That those pitiable wanderers there would find themselves not so alone, not really.
"The mountain will be hard," Cale put the side of his face in his hand. "It has never been forgiving."
"Tonight we have this camp," said Wes. "And it's impeccable. How'd you know it would be here?"
"I remembered."
"From what?"
"I was here before."
"You said you never left that forest," the boy accused.
"The land was whole, without borders once. That is where I resided, right here. Everywhere. But others came later with possession and pushed to the east. I never noticed. It only occurs to me now. Memory."
"This exact spot?" said Wes.
"Long nights spent. Long days. There might have been others. I cannot recall." He looked up and around. "The trees were taller then."
"What a thing that must be. Being alive for so long. They always told stories about you to the children. The everlasting spirit of the old forest they called you."
"If I disappoint I apologize."
"Not at all." He lowered his head a bit, facing no one in particular. "It is a privilege to be in the company of such legends."
A grimace was inching along Elias' mouth now. Dim incandescence turning white to seared auburn.
"We used to have stories like that." The boy said. "But they weren't real."
For a period there were no words between them. The apple was gouged of all its meat and the core was spoiling brown in the dirt. The rations were put away and everyone appeared to stall, to purse the moment of fellowship. A preamble quiet and barely lit. Wes bunched the folds of his poncho in his lap and looked at the child. "Do you want to know something?"
He nodded.
"You were the first human most at the village had ever seen."
"Really?"
"Oh yes."
He shook his head.
"The history of your people is known but few are ever up close with them. Many were probably scared of you."
"No they weren't."
"It's true."
At this was heard an accented growl of a kind not familiar to them. A punctuated, legible utterance of words spoken, heard, and understood but not accredited to the source from which it came. It repeated. "I was not." Common language forced through lips unaccustomed, each word made individual and labored. To disprove its anomaly it altered. "I am not." They looked to Elias and let the correlation sync the sound to his mouth. His barbed vocal cords emitting a coarse diction nevertheless clear. And no one responded.
An awkward instance passed and Wes spoke something in his native speech and Elias waited before responding. "I listened."
"He understands us?" The boy asked.
"I," Elias said. "I understand you." Curt and martial was his tone and for the first time the child felt afraid of him.
"Did you plan on keeping that to yourself?" said Wes, visibly bothered.
"You speak enough for us both."
Cale tried and failed to stifle a knowing smirk. Elias saw it. "And you," he roiled, "Immortal. Arrogance in your words."
He said nothing. Glint from the fire steady in his pupils.
Wes stammered something else unknown. Elias scoffed. "Mine is my people's pride. Yours and mine."
Cale leaned forward, brow and mouth gesticulated. "Your people's pride. I remember, I saw." His finger pricked at his sternum. "It drove them away, the humans. And with them an alliance that could have been. Foolish."
"Our fault, then?"
"And theirs."
"So easy for you to say." He looked at the burning twigs, charred scales enamored in the wood. Frustration in his voice, grimace perpetual and marred. He didn't deny it.
Cale reeled inward, skull resting on the wall. "I imagine they've forgotten all about me."
"We never needed them. We do not now."
"There's blood on their hands, no denying it." Wes pleaded. "But our future is with them. I know you know that."
He was silent again, sulking in either meditation or seething anger. Mouth tight, locked. The wounded eye always squinting, always skeptical. If he would speak again the boy dared not ask. He breathed in deeply and his chest puffed outward like a dove's and he straightened his neck with his back and the air had become just cool enough that exhaust from his nose could be seen. "You do not know them as I do. I have fought them. I have killed them. They roam these territories in packs. They draw blood, they steal, they mock as they always have."
"My allegiance is to the child only." Cale said. "If it is not yours I submit you turn back now. There'll be none to stop you."
He did not stand, did not walk away, did not speak again any colloquial variant he possessed. Were it a game they played a draw would've been offered and terms decreed but it was not. There would be no conclusion. They were tired, tired of speaking. Exhaustion to make their parlance fade to irrelevance. Belief entrenched a thousand generations deemed secondary to basic need. A rush of wind rocked southeastern and sucked back the other way as though the world was snoring. The fire dissipated amid a kind of reticence that hushed it time for rest, now, while the opportunity was so accommodated. And so they prepared. Dust poured on the burning logs and feet stomped on the embers to extinguish the fire while the food was put away. Bodies positioned as comfortable as possible sprawled on the hard wall and ground. The immortal lay on his stomach like a feline buried in his elbow folded upon the dirt. Wes up against his pack, globular and slouched. The veteran had curtained himself in his cloak and his hood was up. Only his face visible and near angelic in its purity save for the pink gash ridged as a porcelain crack and jagged. All taken to slumber so quickly with the child left behind. He sat and watched them a few moments then finally took off his boots and his coat and crawled like a toddler into the tent. He consigned to wedging the sword behind the tent where the wall was and he pushed himself away from it to keep his head from touching. The cold was encroaching, the moist late-year draft. But the bedding was stitched and buttoned with its own covering that he wormed into and he managed to unfold the quilt to offer another layer swaddled over him. Face up on the cushioned end of the pocket, legs short enough to stretch and stay inside. Warm, ensconced just enough. Not so bad. He traced the crease where the rope suspended the tent with his eyes and then with his fingernails.
Eventually he rolled over on his side and retracted his knees to his stomach and tried earnestly to go to sleep. He should have been exhausted and in truth was but in him still was a fever racing. A mind aflutter, a jostled nerve that wouldn't quell. He shut his eyes and folded the covers over his face. When he opened them again he wasn't sure of his standing. Whether a minute had passed or an hour. Out in the void passed the wall there was a rustle and heavy breaking that thumped in a line closer and closer until ceasing and not being heard again. The sound without a body to accompany it. A phantom lurching with a corporeal form that warped and shifted weights in the child's mind. An amorphous mass of spindle and hair and fang like watercolor painted in oil. Was it a dream? If he concentrated he could hear a voice he'd heard before. Familiar in all that lonesome silence. Like the gruff slang of his father's. The expectations he had spoken about the future, the plans set upon the trajectory that would be his life. Great things, he said. Did you know? Why didn't you tell me.
He blinked and it was morning and they were up and calling him to wake. He sat up gasping and his forehead struck the crest of the tent. Crust in his eyelids, spittle on his chin, confusion beset and lingering. He waddled out like a drunkard as the tent was already being collapsed and compacted. Elias was there, of course, and accordant with the others' early zeal for the road. "How'd you sleep?" asked Wes.
He mumbled with an inadvertent vitriol. "I don't know." He said he had to use the bathroom and he was obliged to go out with privacy. He felt a touch of sickness somehow in his stomach but won little remedy to it.after doing his business. He sought for a discernible pattern of tracks that the creature could have left and though he found none he scampered back to the fort. There his pack was primed and ready for him and there was nothing left to do save to steel themselves and eat their breakfast on route away from the paling warden stones. The forest wandered around them spatial and shapeless. The distance saw no variety, no particular significance beyond the enclosing chaparral, the trees, the birds nesting within. The river remained the only milestone keeping constant, loyal, and delineating for them a purpose and direction to their steps. Its hum lulled a trance metered with the beats of their feet crunching undergrowth. They made camp in the corner of two intersecting trees fallen prone. The boy and his tent were jammed in the innermost niche and the others were sprawled out ahead in a curving triad like a fleshy barricade. He was uneasy with them so defenseless against the dark, the unfairness of it. It did not make him less scared, but then, he always was in one way or another.
Save for fragmented requisites Elias had not spoken again, a choice not entirely lamented. As they understood him the veteran was a man of command rather than platitude, of action. His head seemed to be filled with thoughts that wavered, often at the brink of outburst. But for him it did not matter. The point on the compass, the camp, the fire. The unuttered conviction that this could have greater merit, the mission. This is what counted, what he had entrusted to himself.
In passing the child asked about life in this part of the world. The serene remoteness of it. Wes started to answer but was cut off by the soldier who cleared his throat and had levity to his growl. He spoke of the turn of the year that not a month prior saw the first throes of autumn dimming a vast confluence of emerald so bright and everywhere that their vision set other colors to blaze like fireworks. The moss veneer thawing and the canopy dispersing leaves the size of your whole torso. They made clothes of them and umbrellas to shield against the graying rains and used the stems as binding for their houses. All swaying, yielding to so wordless and consistent a provider. Their dials set to the shadows it bifurcated on the jungle ground and the passing seasons divined by its visage. The eldest one, the highest branch. Last of its kind, they said, or the last to be found in this land. Once one among multitudes in an endless wild that was their origin but the span of their lives was short and their memory an unbroken recover of dropped words and paintings and rituals etched and spread on the wood itself. Each life intertwined and brought up anchored to a function specific and communal, a few decades granted then gone. He said he was only eleven years of age and already passed his prime. That when he dies he'll be cast around the base where plots of hundreds have been burrowed among rooted gaps. For theirs were lives of reverence lead, lives of impermanence bowing before an ancient. As he spoke the boy sat transfixed but did not understand, did not find in it comfort or kinship.
In the next day and the next they fell into an acceptance of the rare-trodden path they carved. Sleeping outside in makeshift hovels and the necessary tolerance for endless travel became habitual, near ritualistic in its locked tempo. Wake, dismantle camp, walk, eat, walk some more, seek shelter, build camp, eat, sleep. These the posts on which they hung their existence; a sequence whittled down to bare, basic progression. They were an arrow, small and lean, whose flight was at the mercy of the air that carried it and the obstructions it endured. And the child was the head, being winnowed by the road and ever sharpened for the bloodshed he was fated to carry.
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