“It’s supposed to be a bull yackcarn,” Gorbel said, “or rather someone’s best guess since nobody has ever seen one. Now, what a trophy . . . no.” He glanced at the Earth Wife’s back. “I didn’t mean that.”
“You obviously know more about these things than I do.”
“Fash and I used to sneak up here to spy on the Merikits’ rites. They were always good for a laugh, and in those days they didn’t mind the occasional innocent onlooker. Of course, that was before Fash started collecting their hides.”
Outside, Sonny Boy gave a yell of defiance. He was standing at the top of the lodge’s stairs, shouting down them.
“We’d better get out of here,” said Jame.
“How? The wall has turned solid again. We’re trapped.”
“Bugger that. Earth Wife!”
Instead, Sonny Boy plunged down the stair and stopped at their foot, staring. He pointed at Jame, garbled something, and laughed.
Jame felt a chill. “What’s wrong with him?” she asked Mother Ragga, who had turned to sit massively on the second step down, filling it from side to side and blocking out most of the firelight. “Can’t he talk?”
“Not clearly. When he was a child, his older half-brother Sonny dared him to put his tongue on a frozen axe head. When it stuck, he panicked. The weak aren’t dealt with kindly here. His mother shut her lodge door to him and never opened it again, though he sat crying on her threshold half that long winter. She froze to death out of shame. He survived. Since then, he’s found other ways to communicate.”
The boy clutched a fist full of his red vest and brandished it in Jame’s face. With his other hand, he grabbed her coat.
“Ahhh . . . !” He flapped his ruined tongue in her face.
Then, feeling the slight swell of young breasts under his grip, he thrust her back with a jeering laugh that sprayed spittle in her face.
“And he’s found little ways to get back at the world, as you see.”
Jame shot her a hard glance. Earth could be cruel, squatting there clad in the skins of slayer and slain. The wonder, perhaps, was that Mother Ragga brought any mercy to her role at all, if sometimes precious little.
“I understand,” she told the boy in careful Merikit, searching for words that she had heard. “You tell me that you are the Favorite now, not me.”
He nodded gleefully and made another grab for her. She knocked his hand away. “Much more of that,” she said in Kens, “and I’m going to get angry.”
Mother Ragga made a grating noise that might have been a laugh, “That, I would like to see.”
“No, you wouldn’t.”
“Hark ye, boy.” The massive head turned, like the earth rotating on its axis. “Favorites win in combat, before their gods. Red pants are nothing, nor what’s in ’em. You’re only a challenger at best; at worst, you’re a fraud.”
Sonny Boy shouted a mutilated word at her that could only be a curse.
“You,” said Gorbel in Merikit, standing up, swaying, “keep that obscene tongue behind your rotten teeth.”
For the first time, Sonny Boy saw him, and his jaw dropped. He pointed and jabbered. Swinging around, he bolted up the stairs, somehow straight through the Earth Wife. For a moment, a lean, bewildered shaman stood in her place, until she again enfolded him.
They could hear Sonny Boy up in the square, shouting.
“He’s challenging you,” said Mother Ragga to Jame, “and he’s telling them that I harbor a skin-thief in my lodge. I know, I know. That’s your friend, boy, not you, but you’re a Caineron, and that’s enough for them.”
“Then I should be the one to fight him.” Gorbel stepped forward, and fell over.
“I don’t think so,” said Jame. “Besides, he’s challenging the Earth Wife’s Favorite . . . or is that her champion? Either way, that’s me.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Gorbel clawed his way upright with the help of the chair. “You know I handle weapons better than you do.”
“What weapons? I bet you don’t have more than a sheath knife on you. I know I don’t.”
He glowered at her, hanging onto the chair. “If it weren’t for you and your damned willow, I wouldn’t be in this fix.”
“What do you mean, my willow? You didn’t have to help me save the rathorn colt from drowning.”
“What good is a drowned trophy?”
“Children, children,” rumbled the Earth Wife. “The fight is outside. And you,” she indicated Jame, “are indeed my champion this time, as well as my Favorite. So put on the gear.”
The hairy shirt and britches were much too big for her. She put them aside.
The mask was built over a huge skull—a yackarn’s perhaps, or maybe some other giant forest dweller such as a cave bear or an antibison. It had, at any rate, horns with a good three-foot spread, two sets of tusks, and a shaggy hide that probably belonged to some other creature. It was also much too large.
“I can’t see!”
The weight of it pressed down on her shoulders. Inside, her eyes were about level with the thing’s domed forehead and her nose flattened against its browridge. It smelled terrible.
“Here.” Gorbel raised it and jammed his rolled up burgundy coat around her neck as both padding and support.
“Oh, splendid. Now I can see your feet.”
“Are you the Earth Wife’s Favorite or not?” Mother Ragga growled. “If you’re coming, come. Now.”
“It will be like a game of blind-bluff.” Gorbel turned her toward the stairs. “I’ll spot for you. At least you’re good at stumbling around in the dark.”
That was true, Jame thought as she climbed the steps on all fours, dragged forward by the weight of the skull mask. Even before she had been introduced to the sport of blind-bluff at Tentir, where blindfolded players tried to score hits on each other with chalk or knives, she had worn the eyeless seeker’s mask and before that, at Tai-tastigon, had trained to navigate in the dark as a master thief’s apprentice.
A muffled roar, which she belatedly recognized as the audience, greeted her appearance in the square. Trinity, not only was she three-quarters blind but also half deaf; and Jorin, as often in a crisis, had withdrawn into his furry self. This did not bode well.
Gorbel shouted something.
“What?”
“I said, he has a boar spear!”
The brief glimpse of a foot . . . she spun away, feeling the spearhead pluck at her coat, and heard again the muted yell of the crowd.
This is madness, she thought. Why did I let them hustle me into wearing this damned mask?
Why, for that matter, had they?
Gorbel had taken the Earth Wife’s word that it was necessary; and he was annoyed that Jame had claimed this fight in the first place. How deep did his resentment run, or his father’s mandate that she be destroyed?
As for Mother Ragga, did she fear that Chingetai would recognize Jame, the unwanted Favorite, and try to kill her? After all, someone had given Sonny Boy that spear. Perhaps the Earth Wife herself wanted Jame dead.
. . . hard earth, hostile to the foreign seed; cruel earth, that wears life and death as a mantle . . .
It must be raining harder. Icy drops pelted her shoulders and sank through to the skin. Sacred space was breaking apart.
A sudden blow to the head made her stagger and shifted the mask’s alignment. She could no longer see the ground nor draw a full breath of air.
She imagined how this rite would normally be conducted, the Favorite as Lord of the Hunt stalking his prey, the two of them miming combat back and forth across the square. It could be played for laughs with cowering beast or hunter; it could be deadly earnest. In a season of poor game, surely it would be the latter, the beast dying as a sacrifice for the good of the tribe. Sonny Boy seemed to be playing it both ways. As she quested for him, swinging her massive head, all but mute, deaf, and blind, he was apparently prancing around her, mugging for the spectators.