The Pleasure of Memory Read Online Free PDF Page A

they overtook him.
    The path broke abruptly to the right and dropped into a steep pitch. For a sickening instant, he was airborne. He landed too hard. The jar nearly shocked the breath out of him, but he couldn’t wait to be sure. He immediately lifted himself back into the run and raced up the next swell. As he pushed himself forward, he realized the canopy was thinning. Irregular rays of light slashed through the trees here, blinding and unbearable. He was rapidly running out of forest.
    An arrow whistled past his head and buried itself into the heart of a young sapling a few yards ahead with a portentous crack. Beam cursed and doubled into his flight. The ground again dropped steeply, again pitching him sickeningly forward. Another arrow seared past, this one close enough to feel the wind in its wake. It was all the inspiration he needed.
    Just as predicted, the forest deserted him. He exploded out of the trees and into full sunlight like diving into a wall of fire. He was blind as birth and running full bore down a hill toward the terrible noise. The sound was thunderous here, the air cool and thick. The path was rocky and wet and falling away far too dramatically for his feet to keep up.
    His legs continued pedaling even after the ground vanished beneath them. He clawed at the wind rushing past him. Somewhere in the distance, he heard a man screaming.
    He hit the water like it was a wall.
    The icy river boiled him along its frothing bed. He grabbed the air in fits as the current dragged him through the gravel and boulders. He hit a poorly placed log and heard the grisly crunch of ribs breaking even over the roar of the water. The impact knocked the wind clean out of him, and with it his fight. And as the river took him, he suffered a moment of revelation as tiny as a spark and as big as the sun. This was it, wasn’t it? He was finished. Done. This was how it all ended. This was the last slug off the bottle.
    The revelation brought him closer to relief than regret. His only request as he surrendered his fate to the Gods of Pentyrfal was a small one: Please, Lords, carry my body far downstream, well beyond the ravaging hands of the savages. He couldn’t bear the thought of meeting Provareun in the next life with the remnants of his manhood in his hand.
     
    ∞
     
    The darkness grudgingly dissipated. Beam felt himself drifting up toward the light. He wanted to resist it, wanted to remain there in the warmth of his oblivion, but could find no purchase to do so.
    The ground beneath his face felt fleshy and infirm. His legs ached with cold, though his fingers dug into something warm and wet. Then the coughing erupted, wet and compelling, and unrelenting. The water poured from him. The fit seized him completely, reducing his entire world to the essential fight for oxygen, creatively tempered by the driving pain of broken ribs.
    When he finally found his breath, he pushed himself up onto an elbow and pushed the wet hair back from his face. He was blind in his left eye, and considering how viciously it was throbbing, he doubted he’d be seeing out of it any too soon. He tried to push the focus into his working eye, but the sunlight was boiling up from the river’s surface like liquid silver.
    He was marooned on the bank like a wrecked ship, his head and shoulders reefed in the mud. His trunk was up on the mud, partially sheltered beneath a mangle of spiky snakegrass, while his legs bobbed numbly in the icy current.
    He dropped his face to his forearm. As he waited for sight to return, he ran a finger under his lips and found teeth. They were still there, all of them. That was something anyway. A toothless smile would only double the humiliation of begging for his life.
    An arrow sliced into the mud beside him.
    He recoiled from it, tumbling back into the river as a result. The white water dragged him back to its breast and keelhauled him along its rocky bed as the shore bobbed tragically past just a few yards beyond his