The Pleasure of Memory Read Online Free Page A

the fourth arrow hit.
    Gerd’s mania choked off in mid-shriek. He stumbled backward, but didn’t fall. For a moment, he just stood there looking down at the arrow buried in his chest, his terror replaced by a gape of utter disbelief. He looked over at Beam, mouthed something incomprehensible, and then slowly tottered backward. He landed on his back in the trough of the dusty wagon track with the same meaty thud a body makes when dropped into a makeshift grave. Beam knew the sound well.
    “Gerd!” he called as he crawled up the length of the old bum’s body, “Gerd!”
    The shaft of a Vaemysh arrow rose up from the old man’s chest above a swelling circle of red. Gerd’s eyes were wide and fixed, his mouth agape with all three teeth showing.
    Four, Beam corrected himself. Four teeth, not three.
    He slugged the dirt. He cursed and slugged it again. He’d been selfish and a fool not to have followed his own instincts and run the bum off at the very get-go. Instead, he’d brought the poor old fool into harm’s way. In that moment, all the ghosts of Beam’s past rushed in around him. Brother Dael and Sawtooth Jack, his Mother and Brilla and Hannible Frick, and all the others now long dead stood staring down at him in the reproachful sunlight, and the collective sense of guilt was nearly crippling. He couldn’t bear another ghost plaguing him now; he was crowded to the point of suffocation already. It seemed as though his life had been a thirty-nine year exercise in remorse and shame and self-reproach.
    Another arrow spared him from his suffering. It pounded deep into the pack parked in the dirt at his boots. Beam lurched away from it and in the process rolled over the shoulder of the road and tumbled roughly down the steep bank of the swale. He landed in the brambles a dozen feet below the road. Moments later, he emerged on the far side of the patch in the clearing between the brambles and the forest. A palate of blood and crushed berries stained his hands purple and red. Tiny thorns peppered his fingers and palms, but there was no time to attend to the distress of flesh or clothes.
    He cupped the sun from his eyes and looked up at the road. His precious pack was lying up there on the shoulder, as close as thirty feet and as far away as the sun. Gerd’s body rested on its back beside it with a feathered shaft rising up from his chest like a macabre flower, a grim silhouette against the clear blue sky. It was a dark and wretched sight, and yet it served him an instance of blinding clarity. None of those arrows had missed him. None of them were supposed to hit him. The Vaemyn hadn’t intended to kill him at all, only to stop him. If they’d wanted him dead, he’d be up there moldering in the dirt with Gerd right now. They wanted him alive!
    Beam’s carefully constructed rules of priority abruptly shifted. Death wasn’t something that worried him overmuch. He didn’t necessarily cherish the notion of entering that dark house, but he also wouldn’t be afraid of it when the time inevitably came. Being captured alive by the savages, however, was another thing altogether. That scenario would never be an option, and no amount of gold in the world could persuade him to risk it.
    Surrendering to the faithless truth, he reluctantly bartered his hard won treasure for a beating heart and turned for the forest.
    As he ran, he cursed the Vaemyn, cursed the gods, and cursed the horrible injustice of it all. Most of all, he cursed himself for ever having yielded to that most miserable and useless of emotions, joy.
     

 
     
     
     
     
    II
     
    A JOURNEY BEGINS
     
     
     
H
    E COULDN’T RUN MUCH LONGER.
    Every breath was a knife in his side. His heart was pounding so hard he could feel it pulsing behind his eyes. He didn’t know if he was worse for the flight or the shock of being startled into the flight, but in the end, it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that he’d found himself hostage to a situation he’d