Excerpt: It's Still Desertion

And he began once more to inch across the road. Slowly. Slowly. Slowly. He blinked up at the orange afternoon sunlight as it fell unevenly across him, striped and speckled with shadows. Shadows . . . Trees. Scraggly limbs blocked the sun, barred and dotted the sunlight with shadows of leaves. The trees clung doggedly to the bare rock, roots bulging into crevices, bark notched deep and uneven, branches scoured and twisted by the wind. He reached up a cautious finger, laid his raw skin against the tree bark, first the fingertip, then the finger, then his hand. “Lady of Forests,” he whispered, for his throat was dry and spots of sunlight danced before his eyes. “Thank you for your mercies.”

How long he sat there, leaning against the tree, sitting in pine needles that lay strangely dense in a sheltered place on the ground, smelling the pine sap as it oozed slowly out through a wound in the bark and congealed, he did not know. His cheek pressed against the tree trunk and grew textured; sap tangled in his hair. The tree stood, there on the hillside, held him off the rough and pebbled ground and shielded him from the cold. The sun set, off to the west, a wash of orange painting the sky and coating the world with its color. The light grew dim, sky fading from pale blue through orange to deeper blue, then black.

And the pinprick stars shone whitely overhead. And Emeryis slept.

Dawn rose in silence, staining pink the edges of the once grey sky. Warm light filtered through the tree branches, brightening the mountain air. Emeryis stirred.

Reluctantly he raised his head, slowly relinquishing contact with the tree that sheltered him. He looked around, taking stock of his resources. Not far from where he sat there lay a sizable fallen branch, bare and leafless and just about the right length. Perhaps a god was looking after him.

He reached over sorely and pulled it towards him, dragging smaller bits of wood and pine needles in its wake. The dry scent of pine needles rose around him as he settled the branch beside him and unsheathed his knife to whittle it into a crutch, and maybe some of the smaller pieces into splints.

He spent most of the morning on this handiwork. Whittling was not something he was good at, but he didn’t need beauty from this, only function, and the goddess had provided something very close to good enough. He tore strips from the skirt of his tabard, leaving bloody smears on the dirty white cloth when the scabs on his hands cracked and oozed, and bound them around the end of the crutch to cushion it. He tore more strips of cloth and laid them out beside him, with the smaller pieces of wood.
When he thought everything was as ready as he could make it, he leaned forward and bound the splints around his broken ankle as tightly and securely as he could manage. He didn’t try to remove his boot.

The pain was less than he expected, though still enough to make his head swim and tears start to his eyes. The gods were watching.

He leaned back against the tree and rested, waited for the world to settle down before he dared move on. And at last he took a deep breath, leaned the crutch against the ground, and, clinging to it and the bark of his friendly pine, he struggled to his feet, balancing on the good one and letting the other hang.

Pine branches brushed his head, tangling gently in his hair as he stood, balanced on his one foot and the crutch, and caught his breath. “Thank you for your kindness, lady,” he whispered.

Then he limped forward, out of the tree shadow, and set off to walk down the mountain.