Cheers and shouts rose higher, from both sides. Pirvan wasn’t sure if the men were cheering the bold fighting, or the fact that Haimya now wore nothing above the waist.
This mattered little, compared to the fact that his own fighting strength was coming back. He’d felt for a moment that his brains were rolling about inside his skull and all his teeth would fall out of his jaws if he sneezed. But all he could swear to was a bloody lip and a monstrous ache in one cheek.
Haimya, meanwhile, could not have been less concerned at her sudden disrobing. She saw both opponents on the ground and closed, trying to finish at least one.
Instead Waydol rolled, coming up to grip Haimya’s down-thrusting quarterstaff with both hands. Haimya let go, threw herself backward into a somersault, and came up at a safe distance, as Waydol snapped the quarterstaff like a twig and threw the pieces away.
This left Darin still sitting, with his back to Pirvan. Pirvan couldn’t close fast enough, however, and Waydol shouted a warning. Darin leaped up and turned, giving Pirvan only an opening to thrust at the hand holding the leather strip. The blow went home, the leather fell, then both Waydol and Darin were backing away, for the first time in the fight.
Pirvan’s men were outnumbered four to one by Waydol’s, but they made up for it with their lusty cheering.
Pirvan darted in, picked up Haimya’s fallen garment on the end of his staff, and held it out to her as she came up.
She was filthy, glazed with sweat and oil, and bleeding where Darin’s nails had torn her shoulder. She looked like every vision of a warrior goddess ever given to mortal men, all combined in a single splendid body.
“Thank you for considering my modesty,” she said, tucking the upper strip inside the lower one. “But I think I see other uses for this now. Can we lead the fight back to where we began?”
“Eh?”
“Where I was making circles in the dirt with my foot and you thought it was some ritual?”
“Oh.” Light penetrated the darkness of Pirvan’s aching skull. He nodded cautiously. “We’ll have to pretend to be worse hurt than we are, to draw them after us.”
“Another grapple with either of those monsters, and I at least won’t be pretending,” she said, rubbing her rib and shoulder.
“Onward,” Pirvan said. It came out more of a grunt than an exhortation, and Haimya actually managed to laugh.
* * * * *
The cheering and shouting slowly faded into an awestruck silence as Pirvan and Haimya gave ground before the advance of Waydol and Darin. It was a slow retreat, matched to a slow advance, and both knight and lady were trying to judge the state of their opponents every step of the way.
Were the Minotaur and his heir hurt? Or were they merely being cautious, perhaps themselves feigning injury? On the right answer might hang life and death-but there was no assurance of any answer at all.
At last Haimya signaled that they were at the right spot. Pirvan nodded, and moved off to the left to draw Waydol. He still had two good arms and a longer reach than Darin, who was now definitely favoring one arm.
Darin lunged. Haimya went down, rolling and coming up with the upper strap in her hand-and something wrapped in it.
She ran, and Darin whirled to run after her. She ran like a deer, Waydol turned to join in the chase, and Pirvan dashed in to strike him at the base of the spine. Haimya had to have only one opponent for a few seconds.
Waydol whirled, arms flying, and Pirvan once again ducked and rolled clear. As he came up, Haimya whipped the leather strap in three quick circles around her head, then let go of one end.
A stone the size of a child’s fist flew out of the improvised sling. It flew as straight as a mason’s maul coming down on a wedge, at Darin. It struck like that mason’s maul, squarely on his forehead.
The big man stopped in midstride, swayed, but did not quite fall over. Instead he reached out in front of him, as if groping in a fog for something to guide his footsteps. Then he sank to his knees, looked at Haimya, and at last fell over on his left side.
Waydol’s men seemed too appalled to cheer, and Pirvan’s seemed too grateful.
The Minotaur was not so tongue-tied. He glared at Darin and spoke a few words in his own tongue. Pirvan did not know the minotaur language, but suspected that blood-feuds had begun over softer words.
Indeed, it seemed that they had finally made Waydol lose his temper.
For the next few moments, Pirvan and Haimya had a busy time keeping Waydol from tearing them limb from limb. If he had not been trying half the time to catch both of them, one in each hand, he might have succeeded with one of them.
As it was, Waydol was pouring with sweat and breathing like a blacksmith’s bellows when his burst of speed was done. Pirvan and Haimya looked at each other. Both bore new hurts, where Waydol’s fists and nails had connected. Pirvan could barely talk; Haimya was favoring one leg and new scratches had bathed the upper half of her body in mingled blood and sweat.
Victory would come soon or not at all.
They closed with Waydol, coming at him from opposite sides to divide his attention. He lowered his head, ready at last to strike with his horns-and Pirvan forced from his mind a picture of Haimya spitted on one of those horns like a roasted pigeon.
But lowering his head was Waydol’s fatal mistake. Pirvan and Haimya ran at him-and Pirvan tossed his quarterstaff to Haimya, while she tossed the leather thong to him.
Pirvan had never run so fast in his life as he did over the dozen paces it took to get behind Waydol. He leaped up on the Minotaur’s back, kicked him hard at the base of the spine, and looped the leather thong around the base of his great neck.
Waydol reared up, so that Pirvan was dangling by the thong. But the tough leather tightened under his weight, against the Minotaur’s windpipe. Waydol reached back, to grip Pirvan and tear him apart-and left himself wide open to Haimya and her staff.
She thrust furiously at his throat, his belly, his groin, both knees. Then she started all over again. Somewhere in the middle of the flurry of blows, Waydol sank to his knees, and a moment later Pirvan stepped out from behind the Minotaur and gripped Haimya’s arm.
“Hold, my lady and love. He’s done fighting.”
Waydol nodded painfully. He tried to speak, but the blows to the throat had taken his voice for the moment. Instead he lifted both hands and placed them in Pirvan’s. Pirvan took the Minotaur’s bloody hands in his own battered ones, and from far off came the thought that he and Waydol were, in some sense, blood brothers now.
Then the world dissolved in a tumult of shouting, in which each man seemed to have a brass throat and be trying to make more noise than all the rest together. All it did for Pirvan was to make his head ache worse.
Haimya was standing before him, and he held out the leather strip to her. Instead she leaned against him. He thought this was a touching gesture but the wrong time and place, until she went to her knees. He had just time to squat down and catch her before she fainted-and then when he wanted to get up, he found that his legs had finally mutinied.
Pirvan didn’t faint. He remembered what seemed like a small army of people running onto the field, with Birak Epron and Rubina in the lead. From somewhere else came Fertig Temperer, a kender, and a small man with silver hair and muddy blue robes.
He remembered being told that the man had a name, though not what it was, and that he was a priest of Mishakal. He remembered Rubina hugging both him and Haimya, and dropping her staff, which was nearly trampled before Birak Epron drew his sword and drove the crowd back to a safe distance.
Then Sir Pirvan of Tiradot did not precisely faint. But he took Haimya’s hand, and for a long time after that he did not remember what he did or what happened around him in any great detail.