"Where did you go?" Aven asked, softly, menacingly.
"I went — I went —" and Hoom saw some of his brothers and uncles and cousins, passing by with tools for mending fences. They had stopped. They were staring at the window. Had they heard Aven's shouting?
"You went to the river?" Aven prompted. Hoom nodded, and Aven roared again. "This is how I'm obeyed! You're not my son! You're an untrainable animal I've been cursed with! I won't have you in my house anymore! You won't live here anymore!"
Hoom could see some of his cousins, and he thought he could see them pointing, laughing, mocking. He whirled on his father and shouted back, as loudly as he could, though his young voice cracked twice, "That's no punishment at all, you old hog! I've been wishing for the day that I could get out of here, and you've set me free all the sooner!" With that, Hoom started for the chair where his clothes were piled. But his father caught his arm in a tight, savage grip, and pulled him back.
"Want your clothes, is it? Well, none of that. My sweat earned those clothes for you, and your mother's."
"I've worked too," Hoom said, defiant but terribly afraid as his father's fingers dug viciously into his arm.
"You've worked too!" Aven shouted, "You've worked! Well, you've been paid for it. You've eaten my food and slept in my house! But I swear when you leave me you'll leave as naked as you came! Now get out, and never come back!"
"Then let go of me, so I can," said Hoom, sick with embarrassment at the thought of having to go out naked in front of everyone, wondering where he would go.
"I'll let go of you," Aven said, "but you won't use the door, boy. You'll go out the way you snuck out last night, hoping to deceive your father! You'll dance out that window, boy." And Aven flung him toward the open window again.
Hoom stood at the window, looking at the ground below him. It suddenly looked farther than it had last night, and his cousins had come closer, were no more than twenty meters off now, could hear every word, would watch him jump, naked, with nothing to cover his shame.
"I said jump!" Aven said, "Now climb up on the sill and jump!"
Hoom climbed on the sill, trying to cover himself with his hand, his mind an agony of humiliation and indecision and hatred.
"Jump, dammit!" Aven bellowed.
"I can't," Hoom whispered. "Please!"
"You could damn well jump last night!" his father shouted; and just at that moment Hoom heard his grandfather's voice, from back by the door, saying, "Aven, be careful with the boy," and Hoom turned to call out to his grandfather, to cry for help, for relief from the intolerable. But at the moment he turned, Aven finished the gesture he had begun, and struck Hoom hard. If Hoom hadn't been turning, it would have struck him on the back and stung bitterly; instead it struck him in the ribs, crushingly, and because he was off balance Hoom teetered for a moment on the sill and then fell from the window.
He wasn't prepared for the fall. He landed with his right leg only, and the knee popped somehow, and with an agonizing grinding the leg buckled under him. He lay there, terribly, acutely, sharply conscious, though the only reality was the vast pain that pressed on him and shortened his breath and threatened to suffocate him utterly. He heard a distant scream. It was his mother. She ran to him, screamed again, crying, "Hoom, my boy, my son," and then in the distance (far up in the sky) he heard his father's voice call out, "Stay away from him, woman!"
"My name is Esten, man!" shouted his mother in fury. "Don't you see the boy's leg is broken?"
Broken? Hoom looked down and nearly vomited. His right leg was bent backward at a ninety degree angle at the knee. Only a little below the knee, a new joint, from which a strange white and bloody bone protruded, bent his leg back again the other way.
"Jason!" he heard his father cry out, as if the call would bring God from his tower. "What have I done to the boy?" And then the pain subsided for a second, Hoom gasped his breath, and the pain washed back, twice as powerfully as before. The wave of agony swept him away; everything went bright purple; the world disappeared.
Hoom woke to hear a knocking at a door. He was immediately conscious of being hot; sweat dripped from him, and the wool of the blankets over him prickled in the heat. He tried to push the blankets off, but the movement was pain, and he moaned.
Someone had come in, and he heard, in the distance (a couple of meters away), an argument.
"You'll stay away from my boy, damn you," said Aven's voice.
"I can heal his leg, Aven," said another voice, "and you have no right to stop me."
"Jason knows you've done enough!" Aven said, his voice rising.
"And you've done more than enough!" came back the savage retort. "At least let someone who really loves the boy care for him now!"
Hoom recognized the other voice. It was Stipock. But now Grandfather Noyock's voice came, soothing, gentling. "Aven, the law is the law. And if a man injures his child, the child is no longer in his care."
A moan, a cry. "I didn't mean to hurt him!" Aven said, his voice twisted and bent with weeping. Father weeping! The thought was incomprehensible to Hoom. "You know I didn't mean to hurt him, father!"
But Noyock said nothing to him, only told Stipock to go ahead.
Hoom felt the blanket come off him. The cold air was biting. Gentle hands touched his leg — fire ran up his spine.
"This is terrible, terrible," Stipock said softly.
"Can you heal him?" Noyock asked. "We've never had an injury this bad, at least not one that left the poor fellow alive."
"I'll need help."
Aven spoke up from the corner. "I'll help you."
"No!" Hoom hissed from his pain–clenched teeth. "Don't let him touch me."
Hoom couldn't see Aven turn away, or Esten put her arm around her husband to comfort his remorse. All he could see behind his closed eyes was the hatred on his father's face.
"You help me then, Noyock. Is that all right, Hoom?"
Hoom nodded, or tried to. Apparently Stipock understood his assent, for he began giving instructions. "You'll have to hold the boy by the armpits, from above. And don't try to spare him any pain. Gentleness won't help him now."
"What's happening to me? What are you doing?"
"Trust me now," Stipock said. "This is going to hurt like hell, Hoom, but it's the only way we can fix it so you'll ever walk again."
And then a hand gripped him at the ankle, which made Hoom moan, and another hand gripped him just below the break, high on his shin, which made him cry out in pain.
"Don't hurt him —" began his mother, and then silence, as Stipock said, "Now pull with all your strength, Noyock," and Hoom felt as if he were being pulled apart. The pain rose and rose and rose, until, suddenly, Hoom could feel no more pain, except that he knew he was virtually dead with it. Above the pain he floated, and felt the dispassionate movement of his body as Stipock pushed the fragment of shin back into place, where it fit again with a terrible snap (I don't feel it; it isn't me); as Stipock slid the kneecap back into position, forced the joint to fit again; as the leg, already used to the torture of the bones out of place, now began to feel the worse torture of the bones back together.
"Is that it?" he heard Noyock ask, from a great distance.
"We need wood and cloth strips," Stipock said. "Straight firm wood, no twigs or branches or green wood."
"I'll get it," Aven said, and "I'll get the cloth," said Esten, Hoom's mother. And then, at last, Hoom fell back down into the sea of pain and drowned in it, drifted down to the bottom, and slept.