Episodul 228 · Under the Rock

In the morning, Soles marked the places from which a man could watch the charcoal road without showing himself on it.

At the first mark his hand stopped. A hollow open on three sides. He could not explain why it troubled him until he imagined waiting there after dark, with somebody able to come through the trees behind him.

He crossed it out.

At the mouth of one cave the ground rose steeply behind the rock. At another, the path could be seen from inside. Two old forest cabins stood where the ravine narrowed, each with an approach a man could watch from a window.

He circled those.

The forester’s preferences reached him as small refusals: too exposed; nowhere to hear the approach; water that would cover every other sound. Soles checked each against the contours. One of the useful-looking ridges had no path to it. He left it for later.

He had slept less than an hour. The cloth against his ribs had been replaced by a dressing; turning still pulled it. His right ear had begun admitting sound again, thinly, beneath the ringing. At the stairs he had missed someone calling from that side.

He turned the map so the charcoal road ran away from him.

I can’t hear properly. I don’t get to forget that because I’m angry.

He left by the front door and watched the upstairs window until the road took it from view.

The first cave held water, old droppings and a rusted pail. He stayed outside its mouth. A man could have watched him kneel there from the trees above, and Phenom’s attention kept returning to those trees.

At the next turn he found a cord crossing the path. He saw where it entered the leaves and backed away without touching it. Going round took him into mud below the bank; he tested it with a branch before trusting his weight to it.

Nobody was making him hurry. That was another thing anger kept trying to hide.

By midday he had checked the lower cabin. Cold ash, a door swinging in the wind, no mark beneath the spring’s muddy edge. The upper cabin lay beyond the ravine. Its path came to a footbridge of two thick beams and old boards, narrow enough to cross in single file.

Soles stopped before the trees ended.

Across the gap, the path entered firs again. Below the near end of the bridge, a shelf of rock disappeared beneath an overhang. He could see neither its back nor what stood inside it.

A pale breath rose from under the rock.

Wind broke it apart. Nothing rose from the wet bridge or the dark water below.

He waited.

Another small plume, in the same place.

He settled behind the tree rather than take the next step.

The bridge gave a man one place to cross. The shelf beneath it would put a knife beside a traveler’s ankles. Soles looked at the boards, then at the narrow lip farther down the near wall. He could reach that lower ledge by backing up to where the bank sloped into the ravine. It passed below the overhang.

He would have to come back underneath the man who was waiting for him.

His side tightened as he pictured the climb.

Above the bridge, a small bird was turning leaves beside the path. It flicked one away, hopped after something beneath it and came back. Soles watched long enough to see what it did to a loose pebble.

He took the dried berries from his food packet.

He placed them out of sight of the shelf, beside a curl of bark that barely held a few small stones. A touch would spill them onto the rock above the bridge. Then he withdrew into the trees and threw one pebble farther up the path.

The plume stopped coming from the middle of the overhang. A faint scrape reached his good ear from its nearer edge.

He left the trees by the way he had come.

At the slope he went down on his heels and one hand, keeping his bad side uphill. The lower ledge was wide enough for his boots. He followed it back toward the bridge until the overhang hid the sky.

Above him, a boot ground once against stone.

He stopped beneath it. The knife was free in his right hand, its chain gathered short. He could not see the bird now. It might never come back.

He waited with his forehead against the cold rock, breathing through the part of his chest that did not pull at the dressing.

❦

Under the overhang, the Hunter listened to the path above the bridge.

The boy had heard something. That first pause had been too long. Then a stone had moved farther up the path, and the footsteps had withdrawn.

He had gone round to inspect the crossing from another angle. Sensible. He would still have to use it if he wanted the upper cabin.

The Hunter shifted to the near edge of the shelf. From here, he could reach the back of a boot as its owner stepped onto the bridge. Cut the tendon, let the leg fail. The rest would be work on the ground, where that black knife could not be allowed room.

His left wrist still hurt from the bedroom. He flexed it once and closed his hand again.

There was a dry click above him.

Then another, followed by the brief scrape of stones falling together. Close to the bridge. A foot finding its place.

If he waited for the boards to take the man’s weight, the first step would already have carried that ankle past him. He rose on the scrape, knife low, turning toward the leg that should have been there.

There was no ankle.

A bird burst from the path. Loose berries rolled after the stones.

He tried to turn back toward the overhang.

Weight struck him from below and behind. He saw the dark point beside his coat and twisted away from it. The turn saved the center of his body; the blade entered his side instead.

Cold went through him before pain.

Something that had always answered when he reached for it was gone. He reached again, blindly, and found no presence, no life at the far end of it. There was nowhere for it to have withdrawn to. The absence went all the way down.

He heard himself make a sound.

The boy was close enough for another thrust.

The Hunter drove an elbow backward, struck the boy’s wounded side and tore himself away. The blade came free. He stumbled across the bridge into the firs on the far bank, one hand pressed hard beneath his coat.

He did not look back. Blood was falling through his fingers onto the path.