After a brief hesitation, a boy ran up, dropping a coin in the bucket. The hawker’s son stuck a piece of raw meat on the end of a long two-pronged fork, issued some instructions, though they must have only amounted to, “Don’t stick your arm inside,” and then moved aside as the boy walked slowly up to the cage, the meat held before him, though not high enough for me to see.
He stood several feet from the bars, the meat barely sticking in. The ripper, though, didn’t need much encouragement. In two quick strides, it crossed the whole cage with surprising speed. The boy jumped back, dropping the fork as the crowd erupted in laughter, and the ripper cut it short, raising its beak and issuing another shriek sharp enough to still blood. The crowd again murmured, as the hawker encouraged the boy to stick the meat in again. “The bars protect you, boy! Master yourself and feed the beast!”
The boy stepped forward, as a few other boys hooted from the crowd. He stuck the meat through the bars and the ripper whirled around and snatched it from the tongs, nearly pulling the fork through as well.
The crowd cheered. Pale and shaken, the boy raised his arm, as if he had triumphed over some superior foe, or cheated death itself.
Then one of the boy’s friends, clearly trying to show him up, marched up to the hawker’s son with the buckets and asked, loudly enough for all to hear, “How much to go inside?”
It would have been more inspiring if his voice hadn’t cracked, or if his eyes hadn’t been obscured by disheveled hair, but still, a passable bit of bravado. I’m not sure when lads are more stupid-trying to impress their own sex or the other. Either way, the crowd gave appreciative applause, as if this were a scripted puppet theatre and not a boy willingly putting himself as close as possible to a dire threat.
The hawker clapped twice. “Very good, very good! This way, my boy, this way!” He led the lad to the cage corridor and unlocked the gate. The ripper didn’t seem to be paying much attention to the idiot boy as the hawker handed him a long fork with a large chunk of bloody meat on the end. “Now mind, boy, once you’re in there, stay well back from the bars.”
The youth snatched the fork. “I’ll mind whatever I plaguing have a mind to mind, old man. Don’t tell me nothing.”
Something rippled across the hawker’s face so quickly I wasn’t sure if it was simply the play of shadows or anger, but if the latter, the presence of a paying audience made it disappear in an instant. He bowed. “As you will, young sir. Still, my sons will be close by, never fear.”
“Never do,” the boy replied, taking a few steps down the caged corridor, the first two full of the same foolishness youth can summon without any exertion at all, but the third a bit more halting as the ripper looked at him from across the other side of the enclosure, as if curious. Or measuring. The boy saw that, felt that, and stalled.
The hawker called out, “To the center, boy, the center. Safer there. Move to the center, and feed it from there.”
With the ripper looking directly at him, dark eyes tender as molten stones, and the reality perhaps sinking in a bit, the boy hurried along, no longer concerned with impressing anyone just then, the hawker’s sons just behind him.
The ripper opened its huge beak, and I was expecting another baleful screech, but instead it only let out a long, slow hiss and continued tracking the boy as he moved. The youth stepped into the larger caged area in the middle and then stood there, staring back at this creature that surely seemed much more imposing and deadly real than it had when he was standing among other stupid boys in the crowd.
The hawker, now walking around the perimeter of the enclosure again, yelled, “The meat, boy. Step to the bars-close, but not too close-and stick it out there for the beast. Help him, Askill.” The boy didn’t respond, standing still in the cage, arms at his sides as if tied there, as the hawker’s larger son stepped alongside and tried to show him how to proceed while the other watched the ripper watching them.
A few of the boy’s friends called out from the crowd, though it was hard to tell if it was encouragement or derision. Likely some of both.
The boy looked back at the audience, now seeming even younger than his years, clearly wishing he’d held his tongue and maintained his place. But he stepped closer to the bars, careful to listen to Askill’s advice though, and very slowly raised the fork and stuck it out a foot, the meat dangling on the end.
I was wondering what animal it once belonged to when the ripper raised its head, its small talons clicking against the much longer scythe claw at the end of those thin limbs, as it alternated staring directly at the boy, then to what he was holding just outside the bars, almost as if the creature was surveying and calculating, assessing the boy to determine how powerful it was. Or quick.
It took a few steps toward the center, eyes again locked with the boy’s, who continued holding the fork out between two bars. And then, as if it had transfixed the boy and rooted him to the spot, it took three strides, so long and unexpected and blinding fast it was difficult to believe. One instant it was twenty paces from the cage in the middle, and the next, just outside the bars, its beak clamped down on the fork.
The ripper jerked its large head sideways, but instead of letting go of the fork as he’d probably been instructed, the boy held on and he was pulled into the bars, slamming into them with his shoulder. He finally released the handle, but it was too late-the ripper’s thin arms snaked between the bars and small talons fastened on the boy’s wrist. He screamed then, and the hawker’s sons stepped forward with their goads, but couldn’t move quickly enough. The ripper pulled the boy’s arm through the bars, dropping the fork from its maw as the huge beak crushed down on the forearm between its talons.
Askill and his brother jabbed their goads into the ripper’s side, but it knocked one free with the scythe talon on the other limb and ripped it free. Askill jumped back, as the ripper ignored the other brother’s goad, biting down twice, snapping bones and rending flesh while its prey screamed. And then the boy fell back into the smaller hawker’s son, knocking him and his goad back as blood pulsed out of the severed forearm.
The ripper jumped away from the cage out of the reach of any more goading, and then crunched the hand in its beak twice before swallowing it.
Where the crowd had mostly been watching in hushed tones, aside from a few boys who occasionally called out taunts, now noise erupted everywhere. Yelling, cries for the city watch, a final scream from the boy before he fell back in the dirt, staring at the blood pumping out of his stump, Askill yelling for his father, the other covering up the wound with his tunic and trying to staunch the flow as much as possible, looking around for help.
Seeing that foolish boy cradling his wrist, in shock that it no longer ended in his hand, which was now dissolving in a ripper’s gullet, all I could think of was how Lloi had been mutilated and reduced herself. I wondered how her family had done it, and if she had looked at the small bloody nubs after, in shock that she no longer had real fingers, even though she probably knew the punishment was coming. Can you ever be prepared to have some part of you lopped off forever? Had she accepted her fate, or had she fought and had to be restrained by those she once considered kin? Given what I’d known of her, I suspected she fought hard and bloodied some folks of her own before the deed was done.