Traps.
I’d walked into one, as Harry had.
I leaned against the tree, sagging into it. I did feel comprehensively dreadful.
If I’d been the archer, I thought, I would have been waiting in position, crouched and camouflaged, endlessly patient, arrow notched on a bow. Along comes the target, happily unaware, going to the camera, putting himself in position. Stand up, aim... a whamming direct hit, first time lucky.
Shoot twice more at the fallen body. Pity to waste the arrows. Another nice hit.
Target obviously dead. Wait a bit to make sure. Maybe go near for a closer look. All well. Then retreat along the trail. Mission accomplished.
Who was the Sheriff of Nottingham...?
I tried to find a more comfortable position but there wasn’t one, really. To save my knees a bit I slid down onto my left hip, leaning my head and my left side against the tree. It was better than walking, better than fighting the tangle of woodland, but whether it was better than lying in the clearing I couldn’t decide. Yet he, the archer, might have gone back there to check again after all and if he had he would know I was alive, but he would never find me where I was now, deep in impenetrable shadow along a path he couldn’t follow in the dark.
It was ironic, I thought, that for the expedition for Gareth and Coconut I’d deliberately chosen to aim for a spot on the map that looked as remote from any road as possible. I should have had more sense.
The darkness intensified down in the wood though I could see stars between the boughs. I listened to the wind. Grew cold. Felt extremely alone.
I let go of things a bit. Simply existed. Let thoughts drift. I felt formless, part of time and space, an essence, a piece of cosmos. The awareness of the world’s antiquity which was often with me seemed to intensify, to be a solace. Everything was one. Every being was integral, but alone. One could dissolve and still exist... I hovered on the edge of consciousness, semi-asleep, making nonsense.
I relaxed too far. My weight shifted against the tree, slipping downwards, and the shaft of the arrow hit the ground. The explosive pain of it brought me hellishly back to full savage consciousness and to a revived desire not to become part of the eternal mystery just yet. I struggled back into equilibrium and tried to ride the pulverising waves of misery and found to my desperate dismay that the finger of arrow in front was almost an inch longer.
I’d pushed the arrow further through. I’d done hell knew what extra damage to my lung. I didn’t know how to bear what my body felt.
I went on breathing. Went on living. That’s all one could say.
The worst of it got better.
I sat for what seemed a long time in the cold darkness, breathing shallowly, not moving at all, just waiting, and eventually there was a lightening of the shadows and a luminosity in the wood, and the moon rose clear and bright in the east. To eyes long in the dark, it was as daylight.
Time to go. I pulled out the compass, held it horizontally close to my eyes, let the needle settle onto north, looked that way and mapped the first few feet in my mind.
Putting thought into action was an inevitable trial. Everything was sore, every muscle seemed wired directly to the arrow. Violent twinges shot up my nerves like steel lightning.
So what, I told myself. Stop bellyaching. Ignore what it feels like, concentrate on the journey.
Concentrate on the Sheriff...
I pulled myself to my feet again, rocked a bit, sweated, clung onto things, groaned a couple of times, gave myself lectures. Put one foot in front of the other, the only way home.
Knocking the arrow seemed after all not to have been the ultimate disaster. Moving seemed to require the same amount of breath as before, which was to say more than could be easily provided.
I couldn’t always see so far ahead by moonlight and needed to consult the compass more often. It slowed things up to keep slipping it in and out of my jeans pocket so after a while I tucked it up the sleeve of my jersey. That improvement upset the old fifty-yard rhythm but it didn’t much matter. I looked at my watch instead and stopped every fifteen minutes for a rest.
The moon rose high in the sky and shone unfalteringly into the woods, a silver goddess that I felt like worshipping. I became numb again to discomfort to a useful degree and plodded on methodically taking continual bearings, breathing carefully, aiming performance just below capability so as to last out to the end.
The archer had to have a face.
If I could think straight, if every scrap of attention didn’t have to be focused on not falling, I could probably get nearer to knowing. Things had changed since the arrow. A whole lot of new factors had to be considered. I tripped over a root, half lost my balance, shoved the new factors into oblivion.
Slowly, slowly, I went north. Then one time when I put my hand in my sleeve to bring out the compass, it wasn’t there.
I’d dropped it.
I couldn’t go on without it. Had to go back. Doubted if I could find it in the undergrowth. I felt swamped with liquefying despair, weak enough for tears.
Get a bloody grip on things, I told myself. Don’t be stupid. Work it out.
I was facing north. If I turned precisely one hundred and eighty degrees I would be facing where I’d come from.
Elementary.
Think.
I stood and thought and made the panic recede until I could work out what to do, then I took my knife out of its sheath on my belt and carved an arrow in the bark of the tree I was facing. An arrow pointing skywards. I had arrows on the brain as well as through the lungs, I thought.
The tree arrow pointed north.
The compass had to be somewhere in sight of that arrow. I would have to crawl to have any hope of finding it.
I went down on my knees carefully and as carefully turned to face the other way, south. The tangle of brown foot-long dried grass and dead leaves and the leafless shoots of new growth filled every space between saplings and established trees. Even in daylight with every faculty at full steam it wouldn’t have been an easy search, and as things were it was abysmal.
I crawled a foot or two, casting about, trying to part the undergrowth, hoping desperate hopes. I looked back to the arrow on the tree, then crawled another foot. Nothing. Crawled another and another. Nothing. Crawled until I could see the arrow only because it was pale against the bark, and knew I was already further away than when I’d taken the last bearing.
I turned round and began to crawl back, still sweeping one hand at a time through the jumbled growth. Nothing. Nothing. Hope became a very thin commodity. Weakness was winning.
The compass had to be somewhere.
If I couldn’t find it I would have to wait for morning and steer north by my watch and the sun. If the sun shone. If I lasted that long. The cold of the night was deepening and I was weaker than I’d been when I set out.
I crawled in a fruitless search all the way back to the tree and then turned and crawled away again in a slightly different line, looking, looking, hope draining away yard by yard in progressive debility, resolution ebbing with failure.
One time when I turned to check on the arrow on the tree, I couldn’t see it. I no longer knew which way was north.
I stopped and slumped dazedly back on my heels, facing utter defeat.
Everything hurt unremittingly and I could no longer pretend I could ignore it. I was wounded to death and dying on my knees, scrabbling in dead grass, my time running out with the moonlight, shadows closing in.
I felt that I couldn’t endure any more. I had no will left. I had always believed that survival lay in the mind but now I knew there were things one couldn’t survive. One couldn’t survive unless one could believe one could, and belief had leaked out of me, gone with sweat and pain and weakness into the wind.