I felt that I couldn’t endure any more. I had no will left. I had always believed that survival lay in the mind but now I knew there were things one couldn’t survive. One couldn’t survive unless one could believe one could, and belief had leaked out of me, gone with sweat and pain and weakness into the wind.
Time... unmeasured time... slid away.
I moved in the end from discomfort, from stiffness: made a couple of circling shuffles on my knees, an unthought-out search for a nest to lie in, to die in, maybe.
I looked up and saw again the arrow cut into the tree. It hadn’t been and wasn’t far away, just out of sight behind a group of saplings.
Apathetically, I thought it of little use. The arrow pointed in the right direction, but ten feet past it, without a compass, which way was north?
The arrow on the tree pointed upwards.
I looked slowly in that direction, as if instructed. Looked upwards to the sky: and there, up there, glimpsed now and then between the moving boughs, was the constellation of the great bear... and the pole star.
No doubt from then on my route wasn’t as straight or as accurate as earlier, but at least I was moving. It wasn’t possible after all to curl up and surrender, not with an alternative. Clinging onto things, breathing little, inching a slow way forwards, I achieved again a sort of numbness to my basic state and in looking upwards to the stars at every pause felt lighter and more disembodied than before.
Light-headed, I dare say.
I looked at my watch and found it was after eleven o’clock, which meant nothing really. I couldn’t reach the road by half past midnight. I didn’t know how long I’d wasted looking for the compass or how long I’d knelt in capitulation. I didn’t know at what rate I was now travelling and no longer bothered to work it out. All I was really clear about was that this time I would go on as long as my lungs and muscles would function. Survival or nothing. It was settled.
The face of the archer...
In splinters of thought, unconnectedly, I began to look back over the past three weeks.
I thought of how I must seem to them, the people I’d grown to know.
The writer, a stranger, set down in their midst. A person with odd knowledge, odd skills, physically fit. Someone Tremayne trusted and wanted around. Someone who’d been in the right place a couple of times. Someone who threatened.
I thought of Angela Brickell’s death and of the attacks on Harry and me and it seemed that all three had had one purpose, which was to keep things as they were. They were designed not to achieve but to prevent.
One foot in front of the other...
Faint little star, half hidden, revealed now and then by the wind; flickering pin-point in a whirling galaxy, the prayer of navigators... see me home.
Angela Brickell had probably been killed to close her mouth. Harry was to have died to cement his guilt. I wasn’t to be allowed to do what Fiona and Tremayne had both foretold, that I would find the truth for Doone.
They all expected too much of me.
Because of that expectation, I was half dead.
All guesses, I thought. All inferences. No actual objects that could prove guilt. No statements or admissions to go on, but only probability, only likelihood.
The archer had to be someone who knew I was going to go back for Gareth’s camera. It had to be someone who knew how to find the trail. It had to be someone who could follow instructions to make an effective bow and sharp arrows, who had time to lie in wait, who wanted me gone, who had a universe to lose.
The way information zoomed round Shellerton, anyone theoretically could have heard of the lost camera and the way to find it. On the other hand the boys’ expedition had occurred only yesterday... dear God, only
One step and another. There was fluid in my lungs, rattling and wheezing at every breath. People lived a long time with fluid... asthma... emphysema... years. Fluid took up air space... you never saw anyone with emphysema run upstairs.
Angela Brickell had been small and light; a pushover.
Harry and I were tall and strong, not easy to attack at close quarters. Half the racing world had seen me pick up Nolan and knew I could defend myself. So, sharp spikes for Harry and arrows for John, and it was only luck in both cases that had saved us. I’d been there for Harry and the arrow had by-passed my heart.
Luck.
The clear sky was luck.
I didn’t want to see the face of the archer.
The sudden admission was a revelation in itself. Even with his handiwork through me, I thought of the sadness inevitably awaiting the others; yet I would have to pursue him, for someone who had three times seen murder as a solution to problems couldn’t be trusted never to try it again. Murder was habit-forming, so I’d been told.
Endless night. The moon moved in silver stateliness across the sky behind me. Left foot. Right foot. Hold on to branches. Breathe by fractions.
Midnight.
