Affront

Help will not come. No living soul passes here, and if one would, it would not stop, it would not linger. He does not know how he is still alive. There is blood everywhere. His blood. On the grass at his feet, on his shoes, on his pants, his shirt, his hands and face, his hair. His sword is spattered with the boar's darker blood. He can feel his blood still flowing from the wound at his side, soaking his shirt and sticking it onto his skin. He is lying on the ground. On his back. He is panting. His flesh is burning, he is sweating, he can feel the beads rolling on his forehead. He shivers. The pain redoubles. He does not know what really happened, if he attacked the boar or if he was charged by the beast. He cannot really remember what he was doing in this part of the forest. He does not know when or how he struck the brute dead. If he passed out or not. What time of night it is. He cannot see the moon. The sounds of the darkness breathing in his ears come muffled, distant, as if they were not really there, as if they were happening in another reality, in another time, as if they came from the moon and that by the time they reached him she had already gone. All he knows is that help will not come. He grabs a handful of grass and presses it on the cut. He does not know why he does this, but it soothes him somewhat. Like filling the hole where his flesh was, as if it could make his skin whole again. The gash runs deep, he can feel the depth with his fingertips. Help will not come. He has to do something. He rolls onto his stomach and he yelps and he can see white dots floating in front of his eyes. Outside of him, darkness prevails. It tries to infiltrate his body through the cut. He pushes on his feet and knees, his right hand clawing at the ground ahead, and crawls. He does not know where, but he crawls on. He cannot remember if there is a clearing nearby, or if the forest is as dense as legends say it is. Perhaps he crawled for hours, for the spangles in the skies have dimmed and the obscurity has faded. He can see somewhat. Never has he suffered so much. He cannot remember if he has ever heard anyone tell of so much pain. It seems now that his dreams have fled, that everything he has lived has come to nought. And the pain. Sharp, steely stabs of pain, spurring at his side, radiating through his chest, numbing his fingers, knotting his throat, churning his innards, crushing his mind. He can die, this he is certain of. His mouth is more parched than when he and his brother were lost in the desert. Back then his body had felt as dry as the sand, but it had felt resistant enough to withstand the ordeal. There had been no breach in his body, no blood spilt. His hair is matted with clotted blood, and he can feel patches of dry blood curdling on his face. He is still crawling, but he does not know how, or why. Or where. The sounds of the daybreak feel less distant, somehow. The pain has not abated, yet the bleeding has ceased. The white dots are still hovering. He does not want to look back, in case he loses his impetus, the little willpower he has mustered. But he cannot know how far he has crawled, he cannot see where it is that his life has changed, for ever. Never has he felt so lonely. He stops to catch his breath. Something is rasping in his throat. Still knotty. He can feel spasms in his left leg. He can feel it jerking at times. Sometimes it does not respond. He rests his chin on the ground and looks around. Trees are less dense, and he can see the sun a little to his right. For now it is only a thin line of purplish red, curved like a nail-cutting. If the trees are sparser, and if he goes on more or less in the same direction, he will come across the cave he has spent the previous night in and in which he has left a few provisions for the return journey. All he can remember at present is the brutal onslaught and his feet being lifted off the ground and the tusks boring through his ribs. On foot and uncaring about the future, the cave is a half day's journey ahead. Help will not come. This land no traveller roams. So he will have to confront the ruthless bite of the sun, the occasional nibbling of the crows which will spring him back to life. This will scare them only a short way off and they will follow and watch. He will have to suffer the thirst, the heartbeats drumming in his side, his wound bleeding again. He will have to suffer the consciousness of the slow progress, the realisation of the imminence of death, the loss of both hope and despair. Nightfall comes and another pain makes his mind swirl. Hunger. Weakness slows him even further down. He is afraid to fall asleep and not to wake up. He is afraid that if he loses consciousness the crows will eat him alive, that some wild beast will finish him off. But darkness is covering the land, fast. Regaining prevalence. He must find a shelter to pass the night, take his chance at sleeping and regain some strength. He would have to find some nook beneath some flat stone at the feet of the mountain, and there he would lay flat on his back and abandon himself to sleep. He would then dream of the boar furrowing in his side as if he were mere ground, and feast on his flesh, its snout dripping with blood and the occasional bone cracking would mark the progress of the banquet. He would feel his body rock and jerk, and the intense, fiery pain electrifying his entire frame. His eyes would only see the fingers of his left hand resting on its back, a little curled, smeared with dry blood. Dirt under his fingernails. He wakes up and finds dawn breaking. He still has a long way to crawl, and his strength seems to have ebbed away in the night. He feels so weak he can barely breathe. Dew dripping on his shoulder. He moves his head a little, lets the drops land on his tongue. It has a strange metallic taste. It has melted the dry blood on his tongue, but it feels strangely reviving. Soon the drops cease to fall. His tongue pecks at the underside of the stone. Salty taste. His heart sinks, he feels like crying. The end is near. He must leave, at once. The return journey is now. Never did he forget the hours he crawled towards the cave, these hours which passed like years; never did he forget the dry thunderstorm which split the skies in twain, which made the ground shake, which splintered a nearby tree with the spine-shivering, crackling noise of bones breaking. He never forgot the pulsating solitude of those hours, the excruciating sadness he felt when he sighted the cave and the sharp feeling of emptiness on that instant as he felt drained from his last resources. He sleeps on the spot, uncaring, ready for either death or life to come. He cares for none, and none has come, it seems. So he crawls forward, unminding the world around him, the rocks snatch at his clothes, tear at his hands, flint roll under him. His mind echoes like a beehive. He cannot think but for the constant buzzing. If he could weigh the heavens up above, each of his eyelids would feel twice this weight. Each of his limbs is a heap of pain, an agonising mass which he drags against its will. Going through the crevice, he realises that he now has to build up a fire, collect water in the pan and boil it, sit up and undress. All of these now sound monumental actions. The routine of living appears as a shocking waste of energy. He has to bathe his wound, sew his skin back into place. Help will not come. He has not done all this to die now. He cannot die. If he survives this, never will he let anything or anyone stand in his way, never will he let a heart break his, nor a sword match his; and spear in hand, he will affront this pig of a world.