The Shaman and his men kept treading in the direction of the river. They knew enough about the land to understand that it led to the border. And also, there was a famous river bank in that direction where children of the village, sometimes even grown men, spent days on end trying to find some treasure that washed up ashore. The bank had a reputation to attract everything solid that the river wanted to dispose of. If the preacher had died, he had certainly washed up there. They had thrown off the dead apprentice into the river. They didn't have the time to perform the formal final rites. The Shaman had half-heartedly delivered some recitations with some theatrics at the site and ordered the men to dump the body, claiming that the deceased was now at peace. The group found several foot marks continuing in the direction of the flow of the river and leading to the bank which further confirmed that they were on the right course. The footmarks must have been left behind by the men of the tribal leaders who had entered the woods before the Shaman and the rest. The sun was in full throttle. Everything was brightly lit and nothing demanded a second look. The group closely followed the footmarks for a while.
Soon they had arrived at the river bank. The shore looked to be as untidy as one can imagine. The fact that the bank hosted every solid junk thrown from the river, didn't seem to need a proof. All sorts of bottles, plastic bags, dead fishes, cadavers and broken hulls of lost ships, every solid that can be submerged was available there with a topping of marine scavenger birds prying for anything organic. The warriors burdened with the handling of the war dogs, released them onto the heaps of junk and sat far away from the action. The Shaman ordered one his apprentices to set down a camp for him and open the box of supplies. The apprentices were used to it and didn't take more than a minute in setting up a miniature camp. The Shaman forbade anyone else from entering the shelter and started to feast on the supplies. The warriors and apprentices sat at the edge of the river bank near the shrubs and bushes, waiting for the dogs to sniff something out of the junk. Moments later the Shaman emerged from the tent and let out a loud groan.
"So those apes were right, the blasphemer still lives!", he grunted and hurled a clay pitcher with all his might onto a nearby tree where it disintegrated on impact. The warriors and apprentices spontaneously jumped to their feet on the sound of the breaking vessel. "Keep moving, let's go to the spot where they saw him", he continued.
The warriors and apprentices scrambled to get a hold of the war dogs and to repack the supplies to go. It didn't take too long for them to be on the move again. The shaman was on the horse again. An apprentice handled the horse from the front being on foot himself.
They walked uninterrupted for hours and the dogs had started to find the remainders of whatever Soleiman had eaten in the nights. They found discarded clothes, wrappers and fruit peels in clusters in the woods. It didn't take a genius to comprehend that the survivor had camped there not too long ago. All the clues led the group further and further into the woods. There were no signs of charred firewood or any sort of bonfire. Shaman almost admired the intelligence of his victim. The dogs didn't break a sweat and kept on hunting for clues. There were a few found on the general direction of the river. The dogs and the trail of the food left behind, were leading the group on the direction of the flow of the river. The group itself wouldn't have decided any different.
A warrior herding a war dog suddenly let out a loud groan as the dog burned his hand by the friction of the rope as it ran away from the warrior frantically. The man was launched meters from where he stood as he flew and landed face first into the dirt. The dog jerked free and took off. The entire group halted the search to have a mandatory laugh on the poor fellow. Even the Shaman was amused as he let out a roar of laughter. Just as they were contemplating to be on the move again, the dog returned. The dusty handler glared at it with pure hatred while the rest of the group laughed even more. With a more focused look at the dog they discovered that the dog was gnawing on a large bone which probably was what had attracted it. Soon they realized where they were. This was their regular spot for dumping the dead. The bone didn't look like it came from anything else but one of their victims from the past. How many corpses were lying around them was anybody's guess but the lack of smell assured that there aren't any new additions to the pile. But the more they walked the more the smell consolidated its presence. The younger members of the group were in shock as they stared at the dog playfully chewing their fellow human's body part. The hunters were not accustomed to seeing such horrors. They were the first ones to puke. The Shaman was stunned as well. He had never thought that he would walk among the ones he had killed. He barked on his horse handler and ordered him to move faster. The dog handlers quickly reformed the formation and placed themselves at the front of the group. They started to move more swiftly. If the preacher was a foot away from them at the moment and even waved at them, they would have simply ignored him and had pretended to miss him in the trees. They just wanted to get out at any cost. The corpses were also taken by the scavenging animals and sometimes even the birds, piece by piece, into the dense vegetation around the walkable path through the forest. Some of the cadavers were still fresh enough to yield a faint stench of rotting flesh. "Don't look in the woods! Don't look in the woods!", the younger members of the search party kept urging themselves but every once in a while, they caught a glimpse of a skull or a bone with rotten skin barely clinging onto them. They quickly averted their gaze but it was of no use. The entire place was an inverted graveyard. Even the branches of the trees had a piece or two of human body to show. The Shaman was surrounded by the sound of soldiers puking and groaning around him. He couldn't complain though because he himself felt like it.
Walking through the dead was just about to welcome the dusk. They would have halted for a rest twice in the duration of the panicked surge they had to extend. Not even the Shaman, who didn't think twice before ending one's life, was willing to spend a night among his long forgotten victims. As for the rest of the group, tribal superstitions and folk lore were enough to fill them with adrenaline. All were willing to sacrifice or promise anything just to get away from the piles of bones. Just as the darkness was gaining strength, the group realized that they were through the corpse land. They walked an hour further just to make sure and erected camps.
The warriors and apprentices gathered around the bonfire preparing meals and exchanged chitchats. The more experienced of the group huddled in one of the smaller tents and contemplated the future course of action. The hunters were the most skilled when it came to surviving on scratch. They huddled at the farthest area illuminated by the bonfire, chewing on God knows what. A lone soldier was given the duty to babysit the war dogs. He was reluctant to accept the task at first but ended up befriending them. The villagers that volunteered out of overenthusiasm were left to spend the night under the stars and on the cold ground. The leaders from the tribes were traumatized for life. They were accustomed to the colorful lives surrounded by never ending meals and women willing to satisfy their every need. The lives where all the sweet was kept and the bitter was thrown out of sight. They had eventually fallen into the pit where they had been dumping the bitter their entire lives. Meanwhile the Shaman laid on the fur mattress in the tent designated for him and regretted not bringing one of the female devotees on the trip, but pushed the thought out of his mind wondering if the trauma of the corpses had left the men worth anything.