James Clemens - Hinterland

He has forgotten his name, leaving only will to drive him. Arrow-bit and cut to bone, he reaches one hand, then another. The very land rejects his naked body. Fingernails break and bleed. Toes scrabble for purchase on the cliff face. His blood blackens the cold stone as he climbs the Forge.

But he cannot stop.

His pursuers will not.

He hears them far below: the ravening cries of the leathery grecklings, the chinking rattle of their keepers, the harsh shouts of his former captors, and rising like steam, the worst yet, the sweet notes of seersong.

Tears run hotly across his cold cheeks.

The song calls him back, slows him. If he knew his name, he would be caught again. But all is forgotten, so he digs and climbs.

He must not stop.

He searches upward. Light streams over the top of the white cliff, reflecting the morning’s fire off the ice-capped peaks that frame the notched pass above. The Forge. The beacon between two lands. And though the brightness heralds the rise of the sun beyond the mountains, here on the western cliffs night still rules.

He must reach the border.

At last, one hand reaches out to find not rock but air. The top of the Forge. He draws his body upward with the very last of his strength into the morning’s warmth and light. He rolls to the flat stone nestled between two peaks. Ahead, the land falls away again, the slopes gentler.

But not gentle to him…

He rises to his knees, staring to the east.

More peaks, but nearer still lies a promise. Though shrouded by morning mist, the vast emerald cloud forest is visible. Birdsong reaches him even here. He smells loam and wet leaf.

Saysh Mal.

Green lands settled and forbidden to his blood.

He already feels the admonishment under his knees. Fire warms his bones, but it is not the pleasantness of a hearth’s glow: It is fever and fear. A warning at the border, written upon his marrow.

Do not pass.

He stands, and despite the warning, he trespasses. His bare feet move him away from the cliff’s edge, away from the cries below, away from the last notes of seersong.

He leaves the hinterlands behind.

There is a path ahead. Left by whom? Hunters of the distant forest? The curious, the foolhardy, the hopeless? Who would trek to this vantage to stare out over the blasted hinterlands?

He continues, tracing the path down toward Saysh Mal. Each step grows more agonizing. Warmth becomes fire. Warning becomes demand. The blood of this land rejects his own. He smells his own seared flesh. Smoke curls between blackened toes. Drops of his own blood ignite with spats of flame.

He walks onward.

Agony both erases and stretches time.

He hobbles now on fiery stubs, feet gone. And still the land is not satisfied. His bones are now tinder. The fire races through marrow, igniting hip, spine, rib, and skull. He smolders. The old arrows impaled in his body have become feathered torches, fueled by his own blood. Shafts fall to ash.

He struggles onward, a living candle of oil and meager fat.

Past the last peak, he falls to hands and knees. He crawls, blindly, amid smoke and flame.

Then he senses more than hears: Someone is near.

He stops. The land’s attack upon his blood rewards him for halting. Ever so slightly, the fire ebbs. Smoke clears. Though his eyes are burnt away, he notes shadows and light.

A figure steps toward him.

“No, boy!” someone shouts from a different direction. “Stand back from it! It’s a shiting rogue god from the hinter!”

“But it’s hurt.”

“Let it die!”

“But…”

Through his pain, the god hears compassion, not so much with his burnt ears as with his heart. It gives him the strength for one last act. He reaches to his lips and removes his burden, preserved in Grace, carried in his mouth.

No strength remains.

He falls to the ground and lets his burden roll from his flaming fingertips. Though blind, he senses its journey into the boy’s shadow.

It is his last hope, his heart, his life-and the only chance to save this world.

With his burden lifted at last, darkness settles over him as the land consumes the last of his life’s flame. Words echo to him as he fades from this world.

“What is it?”

The boy answers. “Only a rock.”

He was being hunted through the wintry wood.

The forest whispered the hunter’s presence: with the shushing of snow slipping from a pine branch, the skeletal rub of brittle briar branches, the creak of twigs in an ancient deadfall.

Still, Brant remained calm, as he had been taught.

Unhurriedly, he continued through the woods.

With each crunch of his boot, the brittle crust of ice cracked into the deeper snow. He left a trail of footprints that could easily be followed. His father would shame him if he saw his carelessness, but he was long in his grave, killed by a she-panther, leaving no one around to admonish his son.

Especially not in this strange cold land.

Brant was as foreign to this country as a fish on a sandy shore. Even after living here for over a year, he still found the air too heavy and difficult to breathe.

The elders might force him from his own lands and call it a blessing, place him in a strange school in Chrismferry and call it lucky, have him chosen for service by the god of Oldenbrook and call it fate, but Brant would never truly call this land home.

So he kept a ritual, honoring his father and keeping to the old ways. Each morning, he abandoned the raftered bridges and stone pillars of Oldenbrook and hunted the woods that fringed the great lake. He carried a trio of gutted and skinned snowhares impaled along the shaft of one arrow, borne over a shoulder. His baiban bow was hooked over his other arm, while the feathers poking out from his quiver tickled his left ear.

His father could not fault his skill with the bow this day. He had killed the hares swiftly. Three bolts through three hearts. He dressed them where they fell, leaving entrails steaming in the snow, blood scenting the dry air. It was the Way, sharing the rewards of the hunt with the forest. So it had been taught to every child back in his faraway homeland of Saysh Mal. By the Huntress herself, the Mistress of the Cloud Wood, god of loam and leaf. But the Way was not honored here…except by Brant.

Then again, why should it be? Here was not a realm of loam but a land of river, lakes, and ponds.

Brant stopped to listen again as he reached a familiar brook, greeted by his own footprints, those he had left earlier as he headed out into the snowy glade. The whisper of the forest had gone silent. Still, he waited five full breaths.

With his eyes on the forest, he knelt at the creek’s edge, broke through the thin ice to reach the flowing water, and filled his goatskin flask. The wind brushed the tanglepine branches overhead, dusting him with snow and allowing a spear of sunlight to penetrate.

The ice sparked brilliantly, reflecting bits and pieces of the kneeling hunter: a snatch of brown hair, disheveled and draped across an unlined forehead…a corner of an emerald eye, squinted against the sudden glare…a stretch of thin lips, drawn even thinner…a corner of clefted chin, flecked by two days’ growth of beard.