The Ritual

head closer to the earth.
    Dom said something, but he didn’t hear it. Luke just pointed ahead of himself, to correct their passage down a rise and into an incongruously sparse glade, in which the dappling light and
dark shadows looked inviting. It was also damp and he wondered if he might extract moisture from the peaty soil.
    Behind him Dom’s crutch clacked against the stones and tree roots as he made his own teetering descent. Every step made his companion grunt in protest.
    At the bottom Luke lay against the cold ground and closed his eyes. Gingerly, he placed his swollen red hands on the outside of the bandage as if to hold in place the shattered crockery of his
skull. The tissues of his brain must be bloated now with a great swelling because he could feel tremors inside the vertebrae of his lower back.
    He imagined a doctor saying you shouldn’t move at all. Don’t move. It’s the worst thing you can do with a head trauma. But he wondered if there was any truth to the
imaginary physician’s words. He knew nothing about first aid. Or survival, or how to find water and nutrition if the supermarkets were closed. Or what the direction of the wind could tell
him, or what information was held in the colour of the sky. He just reacted to shit that had already happened. He was hopeless and broken and deserved to perish. I am of the generation of
arse, he mouthed and then laughed silently. We couldn’t find water in a reservoir. When we walk in a forest we all die. We are but baby birds fallen from nests to an unforgiving
earth.
    He thought he could hear water and sat up. But it was a breeze. So he sucked at the leaves where the drizzle speckled their bitter waxy blades. Went around the clearing like it was a clock face
and he was the minute hand, sucking the leaves. Sometimes a whole drop of rainwater would splash onto his tongue but never reach the back of his throat. He licked the wet bark of a tree. He opened
his mouth to the sky, but the rain fell onto his face, not into his gaping maw.
    In the corner of his squeezed-shut eyes that were hurt by even the faint light of shadows, he saw the blurred orange shape of Dom in his waterproof, picking up leaves and bits of bark. He tried
to swallow water from them like they were oyster shells and he was gulping their slippery flesh down. His face was a dirty grimace covered in beard and shit.
    Luke checked the compass and held one red hand against the left side of his head like a singer trying to find a note. Through one eye, which seemed to be filling with brown smoke, he could see
that they were crawling in the right direction. And then he thought of the vision he had seen from the tree he climbed. That distant edge of the forest. The defined boundary, and the flat mossy
stones beyond it. He thought he’d seen water out there too. Maybe he had. Water must have been collecting in stony bits and basins that he could push his face into.
    Flies whined in the moist air and gathered like iron filings against the bloodied turban of bandage on his head.
    He stood up. He wanted to get to the end of the trees. The short rest had allowed a pang of desire to motivate him again.
    ‘Let’s go. Not far,’ he tried to say to Dom, but it sounded like a gargle and made him swallow furiously, and he knew it was the last time he would speak.
    Dom hobbled towards him and they left the clearing.
    Just before six, he had to stop again and crawl on to a fat boulder, because the dizzy spell was so great his stomach convulsed and his skin froze. Somewhere behind him, Dom
made a sudden noise.
    Dom’s voice seemed unnaturally loud. It wasn’t quite a word, but must have been a grunt of relief because Luke was allowing them another break. There had been so many now. They
rested as much as they moved. Every few metres. And they needed to constantly suck the stones and engulf the wet leaves with their hot mouths. In the distance, Dom’s feet kicked out at
something, scuffling up the leaves.
    Once the swooping of his head settled, Luke squinted through one eye and stood up to continue his uncoordinated tiptoeing and groaning. He tried to grunt while pointing one arm at a thicket in
which he thought he could see a trail winding closer to salvation.
    And into the tangle he went, the nettles whisking against his waterproof and snagging at the legs of his trousers. Vines would curl like tentacles and he would take a step back until they
released him and then step that leg over