A quiet breeze followed Arn through the still waters in the lowest point of the island. Over his right shoulder he carried a wide wooden trunk. His progress was slow, but at least he was able to do it. His left shoulder still pained him, every other step, but it was a mild pain compared to how it felt to eat. His shoulder was healing quickly, impressively so. If he bit back the pain, he could still move it to most angles.
A leaf-eater bolted through the water, splashing it up into the breeze. Arn felt a few drops on his lips and his forehead, but he couldn’t feel anything on his cheeks. The bruises and ripped scars from Trakak’s spear had left his head dazed. He hadn’t slept a lot after that fight, out of caution, but he had ignored his work tasks. He’d taken a few days to let his head rest.
He would have traded all his raft progress for some of Jorik’s herbs, but that would have to wait. He’d already worked another week or two, and his tally of days on this hellish island had increased to fifty-eight.
Arn dropped into the mud as fast as he could, losing balance of his tree trunk and tumbling in shallow water. A screecher’s cry echoed the sky, somewhere uphill from him. After a moment of panted breath, Arn shouldered his burden again. It was heavy, but equally important. With this tree, he would fashion a wider pole to help guide his raft. How had Logern or fisher chiefs of years past not thought of this? There was a story there, one that Arn planned to investigate when he returned to Razaad.
It took him another hour to move the heavy load back to his shack. He set it down with a wet clunk and stretched out his arms. When the scab on his shoulder stretched, he groaned. The bandage helped to hold it still, but wasn’t perfect.
He groaned and pushed through the leaf-eater pelt that covered the doorway. He froze. There was a silent clicking sound. He dropped to his feet as a deafening blast of air tore the pelt free from its nails. Arn slid the shiny blade free of a loop on leg and fell onto his back as a tan figure dropped out of the support beams on the roof. With a jarring weight, the wind was knocked from Arn’s lungs. Blood poured across his stomach and hands, while sharp claws dug furrows into both his shoulders and his shins. As the bandage on his shoulder was shredded, Arn let out his own howl, but his eyes remained locked on the lime-green slits in the big cat’s face. He saw the creature’s jaw grinding, sliding back into position for a shriek. Arn grabbed the screecher’s muzzle, feeling teeth scraping his palms.
The screecher gave one last shudder, gouging deeper its claws into Arn’s flesh, and then lay still.
Arn took a deep breath, and then another. With a trembling whine, the support beams above slid down to the mud. The entire shack trembled, ready to come down upon him with heavy, half-rotted wood.
For a moment, Arn stared up at it in curiosity. Was it time to enter the dreamworld permanently? Arn’s reverie, his brief wish to resign to the daily agony that awaited him, almost claimed him. But then he roared until his throat hurt and rolled, still clinging onto the dead screecher, to the right. He thudded against the edge of his raft, claws still dug into his skin, and then shifted his buttocks, followed by his shoulder, under the half-foot of space beneath the raft.
When the shack came down, with a mighty boom, it shook the raft hard enough to give his forehead splinters and to slide it off one of the four stones he had rested each corner upon.
Arn exhaled the contents of his lungs, every inch of him screaming fiery rage at him. He took a deep breath, but everything went black.
And then colour ebbed back in. A bright purple hue shone down the from the sky, catching the top of each wave like a tiny crescent moon. The bearded amalgamation of all Arn’s dreams and respects reached down his hand and pulled Arn up, out of the water. They walked to Razaad together, wordlessly. Arn tried to call out, but his voice wouldn’t utter a single syllable. Had he lost his voice on Scoa? Had he forgotten how to speak after two months of near silence?
At last the man turned to him and peered into his eyes, but now that visage shone green through catlike slits. “Why do you resist it?” the man asked him. He waved his hands down toward the village on Razaad. A mouth opened up the soil, and rows of stones rose up around it, a small wall. It was the Blood Well, where the hearts who stopped were sent into whatever came after.
“I don’t know how to want anything else,” Arn said, his voice rasping. “I only know how to keep… trying…”
A white fog had covered the village. The man nodded, with sombre understanding, before the mist covered him too.
Arn sat up straight—except he couldn’t. The raft still drove its weight into those rocks, mere ten inches in height. The screecher still lay in the debris next to him, riddled with wood dust and splinters as wide as fingers. The barely-lucid hunter finally let go of the handle of his once-shiny sword. Caked with drying blood, they peeled away with a sickening rasp.
Arn looked up, driving his blood-flecked hair into the mud, to glimpse sunlight shining above the raft length. He pulled himself through, finding hand or even finger-grips in the textured bottom of the raft. He bit his tongue once, and tasted blood, as his muscles yelled louder than the sonic cries of those damned predators.
“I will not die yet,” he whispered. He dragged himself along another rung of the raft.
There were planks of muddy wood scattered around the opening and he hauled himself through them, shoving them aside angrily whenever he could, or pulling himself over them if he needed. His hunted meat, stowed in a bloody sack against one wall, had spilled into the mud. On closer examination, it had been shredded by teeth, not debris. He cursed under his breath and said, “I will not die yet.”
He forced himself to his feet, wiping blood away from his shoulder and shins. He’d need to bathe in the salt water to clean out the gouges. Blood had spread profusely from his shoulder wound, but it had already started to cauterize. The original wound had healed quickly enough before that its scabs quickly stitched them back together.
Arn glared around the ruins of his shack. He had a dead screecher to skin and his raft seemed to have survived the ordeal better than Arn had. But he also had a shack to rebuild, a few decent gashes to endure, and a headache the size of a cliff to outlast. He looked skyward and called, in a barely held-back shout, “I will not die yet.”
A few small birds flew away from the nearest tree in terror.