57793731dbdbdd9a0cc57599630e0050 by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Format: epub
Published: 2019-04-18T16:00:00+00:00

13

Stel had killed the five Roti. As he climbed up through the trees and scrub grass, he heard the familiar chant. He was still angry and bewildered by what had happened to him, still smelling the stew faintly in his nostrils. He was weary. Yes, there they came, rattling and sliding down the slope, mindlessly chanting, now unfurling the coiled ropes they carried at their waists. Very deliberately, anger boiling up in him, Stel strung his longbow and nocked an arrow. He strained the bow back, aiming with care. The arrow flashed out, piercing the first two men completely through and penetrating the third. The fourth and fifth simply stopped and looked, unbelieving. Stel drew again and killed another. The fifth looked, screamed, and came for Stel, swinging his rope. Stel waited until he was sure, then released his third arrow at that man’s chest. The Roti pitched forward with only a grunt and lay on the ground twitching.

Stel sank down on the grass. Putting out a foot, he unstrung the bow. Then he rolled over and put his face to the stony ground. What was he to experience next? He lay in utter misery of spirit for some time. Sitting up, he tried to remember where he was, what he was doing there. He took care not to look at the dead men, nor retrieve his arrows, for all the labor they took to make. He could make more. In the mountains. Alone. Far up in the cold wind, then the snow, he would camp and methodically make new arrows. Why would he? He didn’t know. Men needed arrows.

He was conscious of putting one foot in front of the other, drearily, as he went slowly up the hillside. Eventually he would camp, but only after nightfall, only after he could not look back and see the Roti. But what had they been? Nothing. Even now they were returning to the grass, leaching down like dry grass itself. He too was the same. He had no solidity, no direction, no future. Why was he climbing the hill? He didn’t really know. He was wind, moving like the wind in his face. It was not wind. It was simple movement. As he reached the saddle of the westward hill, the sun was setting in red streamers, long flags of blood-red light, stretched and flowing. Stel kept his eyes down, but saw the rose glow on his legs and boots.

He camped that night under a hulking, reddish misshapen rock, building a large fire that threw its moving shadows off the rock and the shrubby pines beyond it. Were there Roti to see and come? He didn’t care. What was wrong? Somehow he seemed subtly unfit for human company. Was that it? He had gotten along well enough at Pelbarigan before his marriage. What had it aroused in him then that twisted all awry? Or was it not him? He tried to review it all, but everything seemed to spiral in his mind like the rising flames.

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