The stone flew away-far, far away-and Pragganag staggered back, a crease of blood showing about his cheeks and nose. He tried to stand straighter, growled against the pain and the numbness that was spreading across his stout form.
He was kneeling and didn’t know it.
He was lying in the sand and didn’t know it.
Cormack grasped his torn arm again and stumbled over to straddle the dwarf. He reached down and pulled the dwarf’s beret free, then grabbed a clump of Pragganag’s hair and tugged his head up out of the dirt.
“I’m not for knowin’ what just happened,” Mcwigik said, and he and the others crowded in a bit and seemed none too happy with the sudden reversal of fortune.
“You said I knew the rules,” Cormack reminded.
Mcwigik thought it over for a moment, then turned to his fellows and gave a hearty laugh, one that echoed through the dwarf ranks.
And still Pragganag showed no signs of resistance or consciousness, prompting Mcwigik to say in all seriousness, “Do ye mean to kill him to death, then?”
Cormack looked down at the mass of hair and blood, then simply let go, Pragganag’s face thumping back into the sand. The man stepped away and a pair of powries went to their fallen comrade, unceremoniously hoisting him to his feet. They gave him a couple of rough shakes and one spat in his face.
“Yach, but what in the dark waters…?” Pragganag sputtered, his words hardly decipherable through his fast-swelling lips.
“What, what?” said Mcwigik. “He popped ye good in the head, ye dope. Put ye down good.”
“I’ll be paying him back.”
“Nah, ye’ll be shutting yer mouth and”-Mcwigik paused and moved to the side, scooping Pragganag’s beret from the sand-“making yerself another cap.”
Pragganag yanked one arm free from the dwarf holding him, and when that fellow tried to grab him again, Pragganag slammed the back of his fist into the dwarf’s eye. “No, ye don’t!” Pragganag yelled at Mcwigik as the dwarf moved toward Cormack, cap in hand.
“Ye got yer bum beat, and yer cap’s the price,” said Mcwigik.
“It is all right.” Cormack tried to intervene, for what was he to do with a powrie’s bloody cap anyway? But Mcwigik wasn’t listening.
“The dactyl demon it is!” Pragganag protested, and he tore himself free of the other dwarf holding him, then held that one back with a hateful scowl before advancing on Mcwigik.
“The human keeped his word in coming out, but yerself’s not got that honor?” Mcwigik asked.
“Ye ain’t to give him me cap!”
“It is all right,” said Cormack, but no one was listening.
Mcwigik turned sidelong to the advancing Pragganag and lifted his right arm up high and back, holding the cap away. He brought his left arm in against his torso, defensively, it seemed.
“Ye give it!” Pragganag demanded, and when Mcwigik kept the cap away from his reach, he slugged the dwarf in the face.
His mistake.
For Mcwigik had retrieved something else when he had grabbed up the cap, and his left arm shot across, neck height to Pragganag.
Pragganag started to shout something, but all that came out was a bubbling bloody gurgle, for that sharpened axe head, quietly retrieved by Mcwigik as he walked over, had cut a neat line indeed across poor Prag’s throat.
Mcwigik stepped back and calmly presented the beret to Cormack, while Pragganag slumped down to his knees, choking and grasping at his torn windpipe and artery, his blood spraying high.
Cormack went for his pouch and his remaining stone. “I can heal him,” he declared, rushing past Mcwigik-or trying to, for the powerful powrie stopped him dead in his tracks with an outstretched arm.
“No, ye can’t. Ye can take yer damned cap and dip it in his blood. Then ye can put it on yer head and get ye gone from here. We’re done playing, boy, and the next blood what’s spilling’ll be yer own.” He thrust the beret into Cormack’s hand. “Dip it!” he ordered in a voice that brooked no argument.
As he stumbled off the beach a few thumping heartbeats later, wet cap in hand, Cormack heard Mcwigik instruct the others-to their relief, apparently, judging from their responses-to take Pragganag’s heart.
By the time he reached the small stone archway that led to the main door of the chapel, Cormack heard the now-familiar powrie burial song carried up by the breeze, its strange and somehow gentle intonations and harmony (given the gravelly voices of the singers) mingling with the sound of the waves so that Cormack would not even have known it to be a song had he not heard it before.
EIGHT
To Prove a Point
The five-man craft drifted through the mist with hardly a sound other than the occasional flutter of the single sail in the slight breeze or the splash of water. Androosis sat forward, his long legs hanging over either side of the prow, which angled up high enough so that Androosis’s feet remained comfortably high above the water. At eighteen, he was more than ten years younger than the other Alpinadorans on the boat, three weathered helmsmen and the oldest of the group, the shaman Toniquay. No hair remained on Toniquay’s head, and his light skin was stretched thin with age and dotted with many brown spots, presenting an imposing appearance indeed, as if he had already gone into the grave and returned. The few teeth remaining in his mouth stuck at awkward angles and shined yellow, and the thin mustache he wore seemed no more than a shadow, depending on the light.
Another man curled against the aft rail, working the rudder and the sails, and the other two sailors sat in the middle of the fifteen-foot craft, just ahead of Toniquay. Each held a paddle across his lap, ready to assist at the command of the navigator.
Long lines stretched out behind the boat, each set with a multitude of hooks. The catch had been thin thus far, with only two rather small silver trout thrashing about in the many buckets in the flat hold between Androosis and the paddlers.
“Too calm a day,” said Canrak, the gnarled man working the rudder. Though he was not an old man-in fact, he was the youngest other than Androosis-his face was so wrinkled that it seemed as if someone had piled separate slabs of skin one atop the other in the shape of a head. Add to that a thick black beard that grew in places where it shouldn’t and didn’t grow in other places where it normally would, and Androosis thought the lean and gangly Canrak possibly the ugliest human being he had ever seen. Quite the opposite of Androosis, who, with his fair skin and yellow hair, had caught the eye of almost every young woman of Yossunfier. Tall and strong, with wide shoulders and a solid frame, Androosis also stood out as one of the more promising young warriors among the tribe, and that fact, he knew, had played no small part in Toniquay’s decision to carry him along on these long fishing excursions.
“She is calm and flat this day, but never too much so,” Toniquay replied. “Mithranidoon is a blessing, storm or still.”
He was replying to Canrak, but Androosis knew that the nasty old shaman had aimed those words his way. Toniquay knew well of Androosis’s friendship with Milkeila, and he had led the outrage against her those weeks before when she had dared suggest an expedition to the shores beyond Mithranidoon. Subsequent to Milkeila’s bold suggestion, it was no secret that the tribal elders had purposely carved up the tasks to keep the suspected conspirators apart. In fact some of those elders, like Toniquay, had been boasting of their wisdom quite openly. When the five had boarded the boat this morning, Toniquay had whispered to Androosis that “this is where you will learn the truth. Not in the wandering hopes of a young woman frustrated because she has found no willing lover among her peers.”