Longshot (37 page)

I thought about rescue. A long long way off. No one would start looking for me for hours; not until after dark. The sun on my back was warm, but the February nights were still near zero and I was wearing only a sweater. Theoretically the luminous trail should lead rescuers to the clearing even at night... but any sensible murderer would have obliterated the road end of it after he’d found his own way out.

I couldn’t realistically be rescued before tomorrow. I thought I might die while I waited: might die in the night. People died of injuries sometimes because their bodies went into shock. General trauma, not just the wound, could kill.

One thought, one decision at a time.

Better die trying.

All right. Next decision.

Which way to go.

The trail seemed obvious enough, but my intended killer had come and gone that way—must have done—and if he should return for any reason I wouldn’t want to meet him.

I had a compass in my pocket.

The distant road lay almost due north of the clearing and the straightest line to the road lay well to the left of the paint trail.

I waited for energy, but it didn’t materialize.

Next decision: get up anyway.

The tip of the arrow couldn’t be far into the earth, I thought. I’d fallen with it already through me. It could be only an inch or so in. No more than a centimeter, maybe.

I shut my mind to the consequences, positioned my hands, and pushed.

The arrow tip came free and I lay on my side in frightful suffering weakness, looking down at a sharp black point sticking out from scarlet wool.

Black. The length of a finger. Hard and sharp. I touched the needle tip of it and wished I hadn’t.

Only one arrow. Only one all the way through, at least. Not much blood, surprisingly. Or perhaps I couldn’t tell, blood being the same color as the jersey, but there was no great wet patch.

A mile to the road seemed an impossible distance. Moving an inch was taxing. Still, inches added up. Better get started.

First catch your compass ...

With an inward smile and a mental sigh I retrieved the compass carefully from my pocket and took a bearing on north. North, it seemed, was where my feet were.

I rolled with effort to my knees and felt desperately, appallingly, overwhelmingly ill. The flicker of humor died fast. The waves of protest were so strong that I almost gave up there and then. Outraged tissues, invaded lungs, an overall warning.

I stayed on my knees, sitting back on my heels, head bowed, breathing as little as possible, staring at the protruding arrow, thinking the survival program was too much.

There was a pale slim rod sticking into the ground beside me. I looked at it vaguely and then with more attention, remembering the thing that had sung past my ear.

An arrow that had missed me.

It was about as long as an arm. A peeled fine-grained stick, dead straight. A notch in its visible end, for slotting onto a bowstring. No feather to make a flight.

The guidebooks all gave instructions for making arrows. “Char the tips in hot embers to shrink and toughen the fibers for better penetration . . .”

The charred black tip had penetrated all right.

“Cut two slots in the other end, one shallow one for the bowstring, one deep one to push a shaped feather into, to make a flight so that the arrow will travel straighter to the target.”

Illustrations thoughtfully provided.

If the three arrows had all had flights... if there’d been no wind . . .

I closed my eyes weakly. Even without flights, the aim had been deadly enough.

Gingerly, sweating, I curled my left hand behind my back and felt for the third arrow, and found it sticking out of my jersey though fairly loose in my hand. With trepidation I took a stronger hold of it and it came away altogether but with a sharp dagger of soreness, like digging out a splinter.

The black tip of that arrow was scarlet with blood, but I reckoned it hadn’t gone in farther than a rib or my spine. I only had the first one to worry about.

Only the one.

Quite enough.

It would have been madness to pull it out, even if I could have faced doing it. In duels of old it hadn’t always been the sword going
into
the lungs that had killed so much as the drawing of it out. The puncture let air rush in and out, spoiling nature’s enclosed vacuum system. With holes to the outer air, the lungs collapsed and couldn’t breathe. With the arrow still in place, the holes were virtually blocked. With the arrow in place, bleeding was held at bay. I might die with it in. I’d die quicker with it out.

The first rule of surviving a disaster, I had written, was to accept that it had happened and make the best of what was left. Self-pity, regrets, hopelessness and surrender would never get one home. Survival began, continued and was accomplished in the mind.

All right, I told myself, follow your own rules.

Accept the fact of the arrow. Accept your changed state. Accept that it hurts, that every movement will hurt for the foreseeable future. Take that for granted. Go on from there.

Still on my knees, I edged around to face north.

The clearing was all mine: no man with a gun. No archer with a bow.

The day in some respects remained incredibly the same. The sun still threw its dappled mantle and the trees still creaked and resonantly vibrated in the oldest of symphonies. Many before me, I thought, had been shot by arrows in ancient woodland and faced their mortality in places that had looked like this.

But I, if I stirred myself, could reach surgeons and antibiotics and hooray for the National Health Service. I slowly shifted on my knees across the clearing, aiming to the left of the painted trail.

It wasn’t so bad . . .

It was awful.

For God’s sake, I told myself, ignore it. Get used to it. Think about north.

It wasn’t possible to go all the way to the road on one’s knees: the undergrowth was too thick, the saplings in places too close together. I would have to stand up.

So, OK, hauling on branches, I stood up.

Even my legs felt odd. I clung hard to a sapling with my eyes closed, waiting for things to get better, telling myself that if I fell down again it would be much much
much
worse.

North.

I opened my eyes eventually and took the compass out of my jeans pocket, where I’d stowed it to have hands free for standing up. Holding on still with one hand, I took a visual line ahead from the north needle to mark into memory the furthest small tree I could see, then put the compass away again and with infinite slowness clawed a way forward by inches and after a while reached the target and held on to it for dear life.

I had traveled perhaps ten yards. I felt exhausted.

“Never get exhausted,” I had written. Dear God.

I rested out of necessity, out of weakness.

In a while I consulted the compass, memorized another young tree and made my way there. When I looked back I could no longer see the clearing.

I was committed, I thought. I wiped sweat off my forehead with my fingers and stood quietly, holding on, trying to let the oxygen level in my blood climb back to a functioning state.

A functioning mode, Gareth might have said.

Gareth . . .

Sherwood Forest, I thought, eight hundred years ago. Whose face should I pin on the Sheriff of Nottingham ...

I went another ten yards, and another, careful always not to trip, holding on to branches as on to railings. My breath began wheezing from the exertion. Pain had finally become a constant. Ignore it. Weakness was more of a problem, and lack of breath.

Stopping again for things to calm down, I began to do a few unwelcome sums. I had traveled perhaps fifty yards. It seemed a marathon to me, but realistically it was roughly one thirty-fifth of a mile, which left thirty-four thirty-fifths still to go. I hadn’t timed the fifty yards but it had been no sprint. According to my watch it was already after four o’clock, a rotten piece of information borne out by the angle of the sun. Darkness lay ahead.

I would have to go as fast as I could while I could still see the way, and then rest for longer, and then probably crawl. Sensible plan, but not enough strength to go fast.

Fifty more yards in five sections. One more thirty-fifth of the way. Marvelous. It had taken me fifteen minutes.

More sums. At a speed of fifty yards in fifteen minutes it would take me another eight hours to reach the road. It would then be half-past midnight, and that didn’t take into account long rests or crawling.

Despair was easy. Survival wasn’t.

To hell with despair, I thought. Get on and walk.

The shaft of the arrow protruding from my back occasionally knocked against something, bringing me to a gasping halt. I didn’t know how long it was, couldn’t feel as far as the end, and I couldn’t always judge how much space I needed to keep it clear.

I’d come out on the simple camera-fetching errand without the complete zipped pouch of gadgets, but I did have with me the belt holding my knife and the multipurpose survival tool, and on the back of that tool there was a mirror. After the next fifty yards I drew it out and took a look at the bad news.

The shaft, straight, pale and rigid, stuck out about eighteen inches. There was a notch in the end for the bowstring, but no flight.

I didn’t look at my face in the mirror. Didn’t want to confirm how I felt. I returned the small tool to the pouch and went another fifty yards, taking care.

North. Ten yards visible at a time. Go ten yards. Five times ten yards. Short rest.

The sun sank lower on my left and the blue shadows of dusk began gathering on the pines and firs and creeping in among the sapling branches and the alders. In the wind the shadows threw barred stripes and moved like prowling tigers.

Fifty yards, rest. Fifty yards, rest. Fifty yards, rest.

Think of nothing else.

There would be moonlight later, I thought. Full moon was three days back. If the sky remained clear. I could go on by moonlight.

Dusk deepened until I could no longer see ten yards ahead, and after I’d knocked the shaft of the arrow against an unseen hazard twice within a minute I stopped and sank slowly down to my knees, resting my forehead and the front of my left shoulder against a young birch trunk, drained as I’d never been before.

Perhaps I would write a book about this one day, I thought.

Perhaps I would call it . . . Longshot.

A long shot with an arrow.

Perhaps not so long, though. No doubt from only a few yards out of the clearing, to get a straight view. A short shot, perhaps.

He’d been waiting there for me, I concluded. If he’d been following me he would have had to be close because I had gone straight to the camera, and I would have heard him, even in the wind. He’d been there first, waiting, and I’d walked up to the carefully prominent bait and presented him with a perfect target, a broad back in a scarlet sweater, an absolute cinch.

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 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, semiasleep, 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 pulverizing 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 farther through. I’d done hell knew what extra damage in 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 like daylight.