He turned to flee, but Ruc caught him by the arm, nodded to the men and women ringing us. Some carried spears, others bows. “They will kill you if you run.”
The Greenshirt rounded on him, chest heaving, eyes darting from the crocodiles to Ruc to the Vuo Ton, then back.
“The fucking crocs will kill us. I’ve seen what they do. They bite your legs off. You’re still alive while they fucking eat you.”
Ruc hit him hard in the stomach, just below the ribs. Dem Lun doubled over coughing, the words gone.
“You are a soldier,” Ruc murmured, kneeling so that his head was just beside the man. “With you, there will be five of us against those beasts.” He paused. “We need you.”
“I’m not sure that we need him,” Ela interjected. She draped an arm around the Greenshirt’s quaking shoulders. “No offense, but you seem a little nervous.”
Dem Lun turned to stare at her. “We’re dead. We are all going to fucking die.”
“Well, yes,” Ela replied, narrowing her eyes in an effort to understand. “That’s part of the deal you make when you agree to be alive.”
“Not like this,” Dem Lun hissed.
“What’s wrong with this?” Ela ran a casual eye over the crocodiles. “They look efficient. As deaths go, eaten by a crocodile seems quicker than most.”
“We’re not going to die,” I said. “Ela, leave him alone.”
The priestess shot me a wounded look. “I am consoling him.”
“Too much speech,” the Witness cut in, “for people without voices.”
He waved a hand, and one of the Vuo Ton approached. She laid a brace of knives on the reeds before us, then retreated.
“You want us to fight those things with knives?” Dem Lun demanded.
“I was planning to bite them,” Ela said. She bared her white teeth. “I can bite very hard.”
Ruc was sizing up the blades. “One or two?” he asked quietly.
“One for each of you,” the Witness replied. “Each child of the Vuo Ton goes naked into the water with nothing more.”
“Naked?” Ela asked. She ran an appraising eye over Ruc and me. “That sounds distracting.”
“The cloth will kill you,” Chua said. “It is something else for the croc to bite. Another weight dragging you under.”
Kossal shrugged out of his robe without a word. He wore nothing beneath, but his nakedness didn’t seem to bother him.
“You could warn a woman,” Ela said, fluttering a hand in front of her face as though for more air. For all her mock dismay, she eyed him openly. “I expected more wrinkles,” she said after a moment. “And, to be honest, a little less cock.”
The two of them might have been bantering at the town fair, were it not for the crocodiles waiting a few paces away, for Dem Lun staring at the creatures with wide, frozen eyes. Ruc didn’t share the indifference of the priests or the terror of the soldier under his command. He stripped off his clothes in silence, taking the time to study the crocs. I should have been doing the same thing, sizing up the fight to come, but I found my eyes lingering on his stomach, the taut muscles of his thighs. I had hoped that the next time we were naked together, there would have been less of an audience—certainly I’d been hoping the situation would involve fewer predators—but hoping hadn’t been working out all that well for me since arriving in Dombâng. Ruc glanced over, met my eyes. Ananshael was near—I could feel his hand cradling my heart, his fingers tracing my veins—but Ananshael was invisible. It was Ruc I looked at as my heart tested my flesh, Ruc whose eyes met mine as the excitement for the coming fight burned through my blood. He held my gaze a long time, then glanced over at Chua.
“What else can you tell us?”
“They’re attracted to motion,” the woman replied. “Get behind them. On their backs. Attack the eyes. If they catch you, they will roll.”
“Roll?” Kossal asked.
“Crocs prefer to drown their prey. Once they have you, they roll you under, hold you there. The jaws do not kill you. The water does.”
Before anyone could respond, a wild scream split the air. I spun to find Dem Lun charging naked toward the water, the knife the Vuo Ton had given him brandished in a raised hand. His terror had him. Fear does strange things to the mind. It can be easier, sometimes, to feel the teeth close down around you than to wait, wondering what it will feel like.
Ruc started after his man, but I caught him by the wrist, kicked his legs out from under him, rolled him onto his back, then wrapped an elbow in a choke hold around his neck. It shouldn’t have been so easy, but he’d been paying attention to Dem Lun, not me. One of the many advantages enjoyed by the priests of Rassambur is our familiarity with death. We don’t get distracted when a man is torn apart a few paces away. We don’t make bad decisions.
Ruc twisted in my grip, but I had him, my legs wrapped tight around his waist. It doesn’t take long to choke a man unconscious from that position.
“He’s dead,” I whispered into Ruc’s ear. It wasn’t true yet, but Dem Lun—splashing and flailing in his panic—was halfway to the crocs. They split off to close on him from three directions. “If you go in now, you die too,” I murmured, tightening my grip. “And then what will become of Dombâng?”
I left out the rest: If the crocs kill you, I won’t ever have the chance.
The largest of the beasts opened its jaws. Dem Lun, waking too late from the madness of his attack, spun in the water, realized he was alone, began to swim back. Too slow. As he stroked desperately for the shore, the crocodile caught him by the leg. The Greenshirt screamed, thrashed at the surface. The croc reared up, lifted him clear of the surface, then slammed him down. There was blood in the water. Sunlight scribbled the red, spreading stain.
Around us, the Vuo Ton watched in silence. They were witnessing the work of their gods, just as I was watching the work of mine. Ruc was rigid in my arms, his bare skin burning against my own.
Then the crocodile rolled, dragging Dem Lun under; both vanished in a furious, red-brown froth. I counted thirty heartbeats before they emerged, the man a limp puppet in the jaws. The beast slammed him against the water again, over and over until the leg of the corpse tore free at the hip. The other two were on the remains in moments, shredding the meat between them. It was over as quickly as it started.
Chua was the first to break the silence. “This is good. They will be slower with their stomachs full.”
The moment I let Ruc up, he rounded on me, chest heaving, eyes ablaze. I thought he might go for the knife the Vuo Ton had given him, but he had too much of a soldier’s discipline.
“When this is over,” he said, the words caught in his jaws, “you will pay for that.”
“When this is over,” I replied quietly, wondering if I had sacrificed my only chance to win the Trial, “we may all be dead.”
* * *
The water closed over me, warm as broth. Unlike the others, I had kept my own knife strapped to my thigh. The steel ballast was welcome as I felt my body go weightless, legs first, then chest, then finally arms. I might have been stepping into a dream, some other world where all the rules I knew had ceased to apply.
The crocs didn’t budge as the five of us slid into the water. Chua said they were attracted to movement, and unlike Dem Lun, who had gone into the small lake screaming and flailing, we moved slowly, deliberately. I could see only their ancient eyes above the water—crocs could live for a hundred years or more—the raised scales of their backs and tails. It made sense, suddenly, that the Vuo Ton should choose these as the avatars of their gods.
“We go to the flanks,” Ruc said, nodding right and left. There is a fighter’s knack to putting aside everything but the fight. Now that we were in the water, he might have forgotten Dem Lun entirely.
“You go where you want,” Ela replied. “I’m floating.” With no more preamble, she rolled onto her back, and closed her eyes.
The three of us stared at her as she floated slowly toward the crocs.
“Yes,” Kossal replied grimly.
It certainly looked like madness. The priestess had her arms stretched out to both sides, hands idly feathering the water, as though she were lounging in some lord’s private pool, waiting for a servant to bring her a drink, or a towel. The sun blazed on her wet skin. She might have been afire. A contented smile played over her lips.
“What is she planning?” I asked.
“If I understood that woman’s brain,” Kossal said, “I would not be here now.”
Ruc studied her a moment longer, then nodded toward the crocs. “Whatever she’s doing, we want to be on the flanks when it happens. I’ll take the left, the two of you—”
“I will take the left,” Kossal said, stroking away before either of us could respond.
I looked at Ruc. “I guess that makes us a team.”
He held my gaze. “Seems like we were always better at fighting against each other.”
Off to my left, the crocs shifted, two of them tracking Kossal.
“They remind me of you,” I said quietly. The words just floated up, unsummoned, strangely euphoric. If I was going to my god, there were things I wanted Ruc to know. “Their stillness.”
He watched me a while, silent, then shook his head.
“You’re just as insane as the other two,” he growled, then nodded toward Ela. “Let’s go. She’s getting close.”
We swam almost as slowly as Ela floated, circling around the side of the smallest crocodile—small being a relative term when discussing a beast the size of a boat—trying to betray ourselves with as little motion as possible. The creature followed us with those slitted eyes all the same, rotating silently in the water, obeying some imperative bred into its flesh to keep those teeth between it and anything moving.
“Getting behind them seemed a lot easier before we got in the water,” I murmured.
“Never mind getting on their fucking backs.” Ruc nodded incrementally toward Ela. “I hope you told your friend anything you wanted to tell her, because she’s about to die.”
The priestess was barely an arm’s length from the nose of the center croc. She still hadn’t opened her eyes. I watched, fascinated, as she floated closer and closer. I waited for those jaws to open, then snap closed on her throat. The creature didn’t move, even when she bumped up against it.
“Too slow,” I said, shaking my head. “They track motion, and she’s given them nothing to track.”
“Unfortunately, we have to kill them,” Ruc said. “Not just float past.”
Ela rolled smoothly as a log, twisting in the water to press her naked flank against the crocodile’s hide. Slowly, slowly, she slid a hand over the creature’s back, the half-drunken embrace of a woman barely waking from sleep, searching for the lover at her side. She smiled without opening her eyes, slid a hand along the scales, and then, the movement so fast I saw only the spray followed by the fountain of blood, slammed her knife into the creature’s eye.
The lake exploded.
The wounded animal thrashed, snapped its jaws furiously at the air, then rolled, tail thrashing the water to a froth. The other two crocs twisted inward, drawn by Ela’s sudden attack or by the death spasms of the flailing beast. Kossal, quick as an eel, closed the distance in moments, sliding behind the closest crocodile, rolling up onto its back, clenching it between his knees like a rider on a panicked mount as he drew his knife.
I was swimming before I knew it, Ruc at my side, both of us closing on our own quarry from slightly different angles. He was near the head, the snapping jaws. I thought I had the easier approach until the tail whipped across the water, smashing me in the head, knocking me back a full body-length. When the haze cleared and I’d coughed the water out of my lungs, I found Ruc grappling with the thing, one arm caught in its jaws, the other wrapped around its neck, his face a rictus of determination.
Kossal was gone, and the croc he’d been riding, both of them transmuted into a mad boiling of the bloody water. Ela, too, had disappeared, though the croc she’d killed was still twitching, the knife standing proud from the eye. I was vaguely aware of the Vuo Ton chanting and taunting, of Chua shouting some sort of advice, but my world had narrowed to Ruc and the furious beast trying to devour him.
“Your knife,” I shouted. “Stab it!”
By the time the words were out of my mouth, however, I saw it wouldn’t work. The croc was thrashing viciously as a fly-maddened bull. Ruc had managed to hold on so far, but if he let go of the thing’s neck with his good hand, it would toss him around like a doll until his shoulder ripped right out of the socket.
“Get on its back,” Ruc growled. “Get behind—”
Before he could finish, the croc rolled, dragging him down into the muddy depths.
I hauled in a deep breath and dove. The lake was too murky with blood and kicked-up mud to see anything but my own pale hands, groping against the water’s meager purchase. I debated drawing my own knife, but I needed both hands to swim. Ruc and the croc had gone down just a few paces away, but for a long time all I could see was bubbles, the slanted shafts of sunlight, the filaments of trailing reeds. Then, suddenly, I was on them, the croc like a huge rock sunk to the bottom, Ruc the vague shadow pinned beneath.
I couldn’t see anything beyond the outlines, certainly not well enough to stab for the eye. For agonizing moments, I groped in the gloom. I found Ruc’s chest first, warm in the warm water, muscles bunched with his struggle. He went still when he felt my hand, aware enough, even with his arm lodged in the croc’s jaws, to understand that someone had come, to resist the urge to kick and scramble, to go limp while I searched for the creature’s eyes. Once I found the thing’s snout, the eyes were obvious enough—small, tough bulges an arm’s length back from the tip of the nose. Air burning in my lungs, forcing myself to go slow, I drew the knife from the sheath at my thigh, wrapped an arm around the croc’s neck, then drove the blade home, forcing my arm in and down even when I felt the knife lodge on some bone inside the head, twisting it, ripping it free, then plunging it in again.
The beast twitched, reared, then went utterly still.
Done, I thought.
Then I realized Ruc was still trapped in the jaws.
I worked my way along the serrated teeth, tried to haul them open. They wouldn’t budge. In the end, Ananshael takes the strength from all creatures, but my god is patient, and Ruc didn’t have time to wait. I dragged on the jaws again, failed again, forced myself to pause, to think, then found Ruc’s face. Washed in the croc’s warm blood, I pressed my lips to his. He stiffened at the touch, started to draw back, but I wrapped a hand behind his head and drew him close, exhaling the meager air remaining in my lungs into his own. I took his free hand in my own, squeezed it, then empty, aching for air, stroked hard for the surface.
Eight times I filled my chest to bursting. Eight times I swam back down, found him, emptied my lungs, made my breath his own, then worked at the croc’s jaws with my knife. The hide was tough as tree bark, the muscles beneath knotted as old rope, but I kept at it, sawing, slicing, stabbing, rising to the surface, sucking in another breath, then going down again.
In the end, Ruc had to carry me up. I’d waited too long, spent too much time hacking through tendon, misjudged what little air I had left. The blackness closed over me like a fist. I had time for a single thought: My god … and then I was gone.
I woke to Ruc’s green eyes over me.
“Wake up,” he growled, then ground his bleeding palm into my stomach.
I choked, puked out the brackish water, rolled onto my side, groaned. When I rolled back, he was still there, bleeding, watching me. Something hot and violent blossomed in my heart.
Love? I wondered.
Eira, as was her way, did not respond.
20
The crocodiles watched with grave, lifeless eyes as we feasted on their flesh.
Butchers had cut off the heads, laid them on clay platters
longer than my arm, then piled the fresh-carved meat around them, river garlic and boiled sweet reeds layered between the steaming slabs. All of the Vuo Ton had gathered for the feast, the adults sitting cross-legged on the wide rafts—there were no tables, no chairs—while the children made do with whatever space they could find. Surviving the day’s ordeal had earned the four of us a place on the centermost barge, right beside the Witness. The women and men flanking us weren’t necessarily the oldest or the most obviously strong, though they seemed to have more scars, and they carried themselves with the confidence of those who had faced their own death many times over.
Night seeped up silently from the surface of the water, from between the reeds, leaking between the floating houses until it filled the sky. Off to the west, the low moon glowed like tallow, tangled in the swaying rushes. Smoke from the cook fires smudged the stars, but fish-scale lanterns hung from the ropes overhead, swaying with the warm breeze, illuminating food and faces alike with a ruddy glow. I could feel Ruc at my side, a still form in all the motion, a fixed point in the ever-shifting delta.
I looked over to find him watching me, his green eyes nearly black in the lamplight. A tiny old woman with hands like spiders had treated the punctures on his arm with some kind of ointment, stitched them shut, then slathered the whole thing with more ointment squeezed from tubers I didn’t recognize. When she insisted that he lie down, he shook his head.
“I’ve had worse.”
The wounds didn’t seem to bother him during the meal. He used his bloody left hand as often as his right, though he flexed his fingers every so often as though to check if they still worked. None of us had escaped from the water unscathed. I could feel a furious bruise bleeding beneath the skin of my cheek; it felt as though the bone might be fractured, but I couldn’t tell. A pair of slices ran half the length of Kossal’s leg, and even Ela, whose battle had ended almost before it started, bore a set of painful-looking welts across her bare shoulder, although like Ruc she didn’t appear to notice them. All in all, it seemed a mild reckoning. Mild for us. Less so for Dem Lun, whose body the butchers had hacked out of the massive croc.
Skullsworn Page 31