Brandt had never seen Duan use archery, yet in
subsequent days, he’d witnessed the other using spare material to painstakingly
fashion himself a mighty fine bow and a quiver of arrows.
Brandt ’s curiosity and
poised questions were finally answered when at dusk one day, Duan, still seated
at his mount took aim at the sky and let loose the single arrow. Brandt
could not even see the target or what it slew (shot, slain,
felled).
“So, he also excels
in archery...Hmmm”
Brandt made a mental note of this and
spurred his horse to catch up with Duan’s.
Arriving at the spot tad
later, Brandt saw Duan pick up the
felled falcon and retract a piece of note attached to his leg. No amount of
pestering loosened Duan’s tongue however, nor did he let Brandt see the note. He only smirked satisfactorily
and informed Brandt a short time later
of the slight change in their direction.
Passing through a grueling
and treacherous stretch, now at more level ground, Brandt likewise whipped his horse into a full
gallop. The result of three full days
and nights of riding at lightning speed
eventually brought them to a crossroads.
Duan stretched his neck this way and that,
holding his gaze in each direction at length and then charged resolutely
westward. As Brandt followed in
silence, he queried how Duan had arrived at (attained) that conclusion with
such obvious certainty. He racked his
brains to comprehend the existing clues or logic that had so mysteriously
averted him. Having reached the end of
his patience with Duan's arrogance however, he cared not to place himself in
the position of subservience and voiced no such inquiry. But, once more an insidious smile related
Duan’s surmised notion of what was weighing on Brandt’s mind.
Subsequent days their path cut across still
more difficult terrain; before long the deep canyon, the surrounding topography
had taken on a rather sinister turn. At one point, as they passed through a
particularly deep gorge, Duan’s unexpectedly alert demeanor alarmed
Brandt.
Duan now strung tighter
than a bow, with his very being exuding such an air of foreboding, his intense
gaze perpetually swept the looming cliffs.
Brandt’s inward queries were promptly answered however, when on several
instances on Duan’s signal and nimble action, man and mount barely escaped that
certain catastrophe of being buried alive, when massive amounts of dislodged
rocks suddenly cascaded down on them.
Long after, when they
seemingly reached a safer passage, Duan had kept up with his vigil and pressed
them hard to advance with that speed to cover still great distance.
“This isn’t your typical
joyride.” He’d scoffed at Brandt’s silent protests and despite Brandt’s obvious
exhaustion, refused least notion of pitching camp. On this continuous trek they, while still in
the saddle ingested some of their rather unpalatable, scant dried rations and
rarely out of consideration for their mounts, had a brief repose in a crevice
of sorts in this desolate (bleak) region where nothing stirred, with Duan
upholding his vigilance against that phantom enemy’s assault.
Brandt was becoming more incensed (exasperated)
with each leg of the journey suspecting Duan with his spiteful nature to be
conceiving (inventing) this unwarranted trouble, to further torment him, when
suddenly they were under attack.
Once the unnatural dust
storm settled, all at once they’d found themselves surrounded by thirty
well-armed, formidable riders completely covered in black garb, with only slits
that made their eyes visible. Brandt had scant time to unsheathe his sword when
the awesome, agile force spontaneously and in all directions, in a brilliant,
lightening maneuver, launched their
murderous offensives (assault).
Brandt had always been quite adept at fighting but
in this instance, he’d soon found himself outmatched in both skill and ability.
Or had he? For reasons known only to
him, Brandt held back and allowed Duan
to demonstrate the true extent of his prowess.
Rising to this challenge
Duan with his invincible skill, quickly turned the tide in his favor. In a
blinking of an eye, all assailants were vanquished, and men and mounts lay dead
maimed and torn in bloody heaps.
The fortnight’s subsequent
nocturnal assaults were even more lethal. Just as swiftly however, Duan bested
them all; then in small hours, gathering the wounded and piling those atop the
heap of torn, bloody corpses, he set them all alight. Making himself
comfortable on a large flat bolder, he then watched this funeral pyre with
intense perverse delight, occasionally letting out a boisterous laugh as if
entertaining a private joke.
The rising smell made
Brandt retch and vomit till he was
expanded from the exertion; maddeningly, this too compounded Duan’s wicked fun.
After the fourth and fifth
major, deadly skirmishes, Brandt had
gained the sudden intense fear of Duan, as if just grasping the true measure of
this Demon warrior’s proficiency.
Especially since all their previous adventures and exchanges had paled
in comparison to these feats. Despite
his sham indifference however, the swift, shocking intensity and the near
misses of the final mortal combat unequivocally rattled Brandt to the core. Consequently, Duan was more
intolerable, as he relentlessly mocked Brandt
with his contemptuous words, looks and gestures, till eventually he got
tired of it.
A few weeks later, another
falcon was felled by Duan, then another sometime after that. In each instance a
note was retrieved from the leg of the predatory bird, and again, Duan refused
to disclose the contents to Brandt.
Infuriatingly still, any hope of a peek (stealing a look) was promptly
eliminated when Duan routinely fed the contents to the hungry flames of the
night’s makeshift campfire.
Then one evening as they were about to fall asleep, “You can
rest easy now; I doubt there’ll be any more messages.” With his back to Brandt, he’d grumbled his
sardonic, curt response to other’s evermore persistent inward queries.
In the subsequent month,
the ongoing arduous trek had eventually led the two to another set of foothills
beyond which lay a range of white capped mountains. Descending then ascending the endless
precipitous peaks and depths, they skirted ravines, gullies or cliffs, then
negotiated inclines to eventually arrive at the remotest, darkest and most
sinister of forests where ancient trees entirely blocked out the sky
turning night into day.
In this twilight atmosphere they followed
paths that no man before them had dared to tread. All the while the immeasurable peril dogged
their every step. Dangers abound from above and below, ahead and beyond, their
mettle was tested, at times without cessation for weeks on end. With their innate competence and stubborn
resolve, they overcame each one of these hair-raising episodes and dealt
effectively with the other peril from voracious, predatory beasts.
Occasionally their advance
would be hindered by violent storms that erupted quite suddenly yet lasted for
days. During such times they attained
shelter in nearby caves, crevices or caverns after contesting for space with
the prior occupants (original inhabitants).
As they climbed (ascended)
to still higher altitudes, with each leg of the journey the atmospheric
temperatures became more hazardous. With
the overhead sky perpetually riddled with dark, ominous clouds that hung ponderously
overhead, they trod uneasily over the precarious ground that oftentimes would
be littered with intermittent pits blanketed with patches of ice or snow of
varying degrees smoothing over the imperfections.
All was not doom and gloom however, and on
scant clear days, with the surrounding area and tall trees cloaked in
exhilarating, blinding white, it admittedly transformed the glistening environs into a mythological, fabled place
of great beauty. The brilliance of light was so intense in fact that they
advanced through this fabulous ice hinterland with only partially covered eyes,
seeing only through slits.
The makeshift attire from
pelts obtained from the hunted predatory beasts kept the core of their body
warm. Meanwhile, (in addition to melted ice,) they drunk the blood of the game
for satiating (quenching) thirst, and for sustenance, never lacking for food,
Brandt in time even grew accustomed to
chomping on raw meat, or for variety, nibbled on some of the amassed, dried
roots. When hiking over a particularly perilous icy terrain, man and beast
(steeds) wore underfoot an ingenious contraption that Duan had appropriately
devised to prevent slipping and sliding or worse, falling through the cracks/
pits in the snow and being buried alive.
Moreover, to ensure further stability, they made good use of ropes and
iron pegs when their ascending path led them to tapered goat-trails hugging the
sheer inclines.
To Duan’s surprise,
Brandt had born all these hardships
stoically, except for altitude sickness that is, that oftentimes plagued
Brandt when crossing a precarious,
natural viaduct (overpass) over gargantuan (vast) debts or other such risky
terrain with equally dizzying gradient (incline) to one side.
On such instances
Brandt would have gladly traded places
with their blindfolded mounts, to be spared the apprehension and the dire
imaginings; especially since his discomfort without fail was augmented by
Duan’s derisive, contemptuous remarks or his silent cold regard.
Day after day, as though
pulled by a magnet, they pushed (trudged) on relentlessly and unfailingly at
top speed, superseding (overriding) countless dangers and hardships,
Brandt doing his best to keep up with
Duan.
Though they’d done what
was humanly impossible and covered such a great distance in that short time,
far from being pleased, at one point Duan had appeared in fact, quite irritable
and somewhat dismayed. Then one day,
leaving Brandt at a makeshift camp in
an abandoned cave, Duan without so much as a word had set off alone on foot in
search of a phantom path. He must have ventured far, for he’d remained hidden
from sight (view) awfully long period.
Brandt
left to fend for himself, first had prudently solidified his defenses,
kept the fires going and guarded the steeds and their reserves best as he
could, from the marauding, (prowling) ravenous beasts. By the fourth or fifth
day, however, Brandt had begun to get
seriously peeved, for having been treated same as a groom when, late one
afternoon, Duan quite unexpectedly had reappeared. Without so much as a grunt, he plumped
himself by the fire, partook of some of the skewered meat, then reclining passed
out in sound sleep. When at just before dawn he promptly awoke, he spared no
effort to explain; only his words tersely directed Brandt to follow him.
Even before the first rays
of light reached the earth, Duan and Brandt
taking the lead, steered their reluctant mounts further into the densest
part of the pine forest. Previous
night’s storm (blizzard) had dumped abundant snow in the vicinity forcing them
to now advance with immense difficulty through the copiously covered ground and
shrubbery.
They rode whenever
possible, but oftentimes dismounting, they dug their way through waist deep
rough patches. Their several days’ laborious advance eventually came to an
abrupt halt one afternoon just before dusk, when they suddenly faced, what
seemed to Brandt, a rising cliff. He watched with skepticism as Duan, veering
around a huge boulder quickly alighted. A pointed look quickly brought
Brandt to his side. Stalwart duo
exerting some effort in next to no time cleared a fallen tree and similar
debris, pushed aside tall, seemingly impenetrable ice capped dense shrubbery to
uncover an inconceivable niche that turned out to be an entrance to a
pitch-dark subterranean tunnel that passed through to the other side of the
mountain.
Brandt’s elation was short
lived however, for the upcoming perilous journey was far more harrowing than
the culminating previous encounters.
Right at the beginning Duan had
counseled him on the necessity of maintaining absolute silence.
The horses’ eyes covered,
and mouths muzzled, with Duan in the lead they’d steadfastly advanced in
darkness, connected by a rope, Duan periodically (now and again) slashing the
air with his blade to dispatch the persistent dangers.
They must have trudged
incessantly for days in that grueling, subterranean labyrinth, for every
tendon, every fabric of Brandt’s body throbbed with an unbearable ache. After what it seemed to Brandt an eternity,
they’d eventually emerged from this nightmarish tunnel. Brandt
was so overjoyed at having survived this terrible ordeal that, braving
Duan’s derision, he’d simply throw himself onto the ground and hugged it.
The rest of the journey,
though still grueling, by comparison had passed far easier.
~
(END OF SECTION 3)
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