The Healer’s Touch — “From Rock Bottom”
Chapter II/XIV
Read Chapter I
Agrey dawn was approaching as the Killer surveilled the battlefield. The pursuit had lasted for the larger part of the night and the enemy army was annihilated. The valley hadn’t given them a way to disperse or break off. It had been her arrows among others that ground down the remaining soldiers, nowhere to flee with the cliffs in their back. The few that got away would not survive the imminent winter.
Her army had moved on, crossing the mountain range through the pass, and reforming in the southern regions for the next battle to come. For there would always be another battle. If history had taught anything at all, it was that war was something mankind never got rid of. Even with the approaching winter, the work of darkness didn’t rest. It never did. It would continue until breaths turned to clouds and blood froze to ice. It was only a natural consequence to march south.
But the Killer had returned north. Bow and arrows with a short sword hanging over her shoulder, she had made her way back down the valley, passing the support troops that had dispersed the dead after stripping them of valuable armor and supplies.
As she saw from her hideout under some crude, leafless trees, the troops had left the enemy soldiers where they had fallen. Half floating corpses in the shallow waters, others broken over the rocks. Most were missing their shoes, arms or armor. She had seen wagons full of them rolling up the valley. It would be a miracle if they managed to get all of them across the cliffs and narrow paths along the way.
After the thaw of the spring, the rocks and cliffs and trees would be stripped of all memory regarding the battle. Nothing would remain of these soldiers. No one would even remember the cause for which they perished. That was all that war could ever accomplish. To destroy the essence of life itself.
The Killer tied her hair back into a rudimentary knot to clear her field of vision. The valley seemed the embodiment of death itself, lifeless, deserted, but after all, she was searching in hope for a survivor — an enemy. In times of war one could never be careful enough. She had learned this lesson the hard way.
One more time she checked the surroundings. No bird was chirping. Only the stream was purling, unaware of the blood it had washed downhill all night. The air was filled with the cold scent of the pending snowstorm that stretched its ice shield far over the mountains as a harbinger of the threatening winter. She was alone.
Her feet were determined when she retraced the battlefield, trying to remember certain boulders or twists of the waterbeds to find the spot where she had fired her arrow into that man’s chest. In the frenzy of the victory, the soldiers had gone mayhem, running, screaming, killing. Until this one man, unarmored, but with a fierce fire in his eyes, had tried to stop the slaughter.
Why? Why had he done so? He must have known he would be run over and killed in an instant. Yet he hadn’t hesitated. Without tremor, he had raised his sword and halted a whole section of the opposing army. Had he run, he might have lived. So why had he done it? After all the butchering his nation was guilty of in the last decade, how could he have hoped for mercy? Blood begat more blood and retaliation only bred more severe vengeance. He must have known! Yet he didn’t care. Why?
She was here in search of an answer she already understood. Because this man, after all that this war had brought into their lives, all the horror and loss and pain and fatigue and turmoil and devastation and death and … after all of that, this man still believed.
She had seen it in his eyes. It had all been there in this one moment frozen into eternity that he had looked into hers. She had glimpsed a fire so alive in his soul that no war would ever be able to extinguish it. No, it was a furnace so bright she still could see the blinding speckles in her vision, as if she had stared into the sun for too long.
His fire had burned into her soul. Her dead soul. And now this spark was down there in the dark, causing her to leave the army, descend into the valley and look for the man who had caused it. Nobody with so much hope should ever be born into this broken world. She might even have done him a favor by removing him from these mortal spheres.
The Killer turned corpse after corpse, but he wasn’t there. A slice through the forehead, a wound in the gut, a missing limb. She knew he hadn’t suffered any injuries before she had locked her aim at him. She removed all bodies from the spot where he must have fallen. But his body wasn’t there.
Maybe she had injured one of these things some called Gods. Would this explain the exceeding trust in life of that man? Was he after all immortal, without fear to suffer loss or pain?
She sat down on the little gravel island and pulled an apple from her supplies. Eating was just another evidence of mankind’s mortality. We decay every day, she thought, and if we don’t nurture our bodies, they waste away.
Her gaze fell upon a group of trees, clinging half to the cliff side. The roots were washed-out from below, where a branch of the stream pushed against the cliff wall. The trees looked weak and sick, like starving humans, stretching their scrawny arms towards the sky in a last attempt to cling to life.
The Killer shot up, the apple still caught between her teeth, stuck in an unfinished bite. She tore off the bite of apple and strode over the valley floor to the little holt. Blood was still coating the rocks, but she could now make out drag marks stretching in the direction she was heading.
Her boots tore through the water until she reached the trees and bent down. There! Under the roots a small, dirty cavern had formed, visible only from the surface level of the water. And in there, half bedded in dirt, feet dangling in the water, lay the man she had shot. She could barely make out his face or features, but she knew. It was him.
She crouched down, the cold water like liquid ice running over her. Slowly, she pushed herself underneath the rootstock and grabbed the man’s leg. She pulled him out and grabbed his shirt to keep his head from going under water. He was heavy, but she managed to drag him to the small bank.
His face was ashen, his eyes closed. The whole left side of his body was covered in blood, the arrow broken off on both the back and the front, but the rest of it still stuck in the wound. His chest didn’t heave. She brought down her ear to his nose and mouth, hovering over his face at an inch’s distance. Nothing.
Her fingertips felt for his pulse. She closed her eyes. She might have imagined it, but there was a small throb, slow and faint, but existent. He wasn’t dead — yet.
This odd need to talk to him urged her on once more. But he wasn’t of any use in this state. He needed a healer, medicine and rest. And none of these things were available. She stared up over the mountains, gauging the massive blizzard. It thrust itself forward and would come down on them before nightfall.
She looked down the valley. The north would not grant life. She should leave him and return to her battalion before the storm hit. If there was a future, it would be upward and southward. But why bother with the future. All it held was more and more war. And it still hadn’t granted her what she desperately yearned for. Obliteration.
The Killer turned her head to the north again. If she went there, the snowfall would cut off her retreat until spring. She would be stuck, probably alone once this man gave in to his injury. Without supplies she wouldn’t outlast it either. The cliff sides further up the pass might provide shelter until the storm had passed. If the snow wasn’t too deep afterwards, they might dare to cross the mountains.
It wasn’t a pleasant thought, but she didn’t care. That was why she needed to speak to this man. She had forgotten how to care. But for some reason he had at least reminded her of what it felt like.
The Killer heaved his right arm over her shoulder, pulled him all the way up and rose with a groan. Through hundreds of miles had she dragged and carried two of her children over frozen plains. She would muster one man.
With a grim determination she didn’t know she still had within her, she began her march up the valley, towards the mountains, the storm, the winter, towards fleeting life, probable death and the mystery of hope.
