“In the name of my master!” Sun Eagle spoke in a language unknown but understood by all. “In the name of the Sacred Mound! By the bonds uniting the Far and Near, and the blood that must spill to make all things whole, I say to you: Stand down!”
The villagers drew back. Though they kept tight hold on their tools, their fists clenched in wrath, their eyes were full of terror, and they crowded against one another in their efforts to back away.
Sun Eagle took hold of Daylily, who was near collapsing once more. He supported her, keeping her upright until she found a tentative balance. The crowd parted with frightened murmurs as they made their way through, every man and woman bowing their heads as though to some dread sovereign. Only the children dared look, and they from safe hiding behind their parents.
Sun Eagle half carried Daylily, but he made her take each step, however slow, all the way back up the incline. Only once they had reached the sheltering jungle and were hidden from the villagers’ eyes did he allow her to sink against him with a moan.
Gently, he helped her to kneel, then waited until her body stopped heaving up more water and sickness. He stroked the back of her head like he might stroke a dog, even after she had finished and merely sat unmoving in the dirt. Her once white underdress was brown, and leaves and bits of bracken clung to it.
“I’m sorry,” she gasped at last.
“No,” said Sun Eagle. “It was your first fight. You are brave.”
Daylily wiped her mouth, shuddering with sickness, with fear, and even, she realized (and this was most strange), with pleasure. A sickening, sensational pleasure such as she had never before known. She looked up at Sun Eagle. “Why did that man try to kill me?” she asked.
“He did not want to pay the tithe,” said Sun Eagle. “But he will. Following the Circle Ceremony, they will all pay their due.”
14
FOXBRUSH STOOD ON THE EDGE of the gorge, exhausted, panting, seeing nothing familiar around him and yet—he rubbed his eyes so hard that sparks burst behind his eyelids—and yet he knew where he was. Only it was impossible, so he could not know it.
He swayed a dizzying moment as his eyes cleared of sparks. The jungle was still there, thick and moist and full of dreadful sounds. Enormous trees, trunks too broad for him to put his arms around, branches as thick as his waist, draped with starflower vines so dense that he could scarcely see a half dozen paces into the shadows . . . it was all too vivid. But none of it could be true.
“I’m still dreaming,” Foxbrush told himself. “I’m lying at the bottom of that gorge and I’m dreaming, and I’ll wake up in a minute with a splitting headache and . . . and by all the stars of the heavenly host, I’m going to pound that Leo when I see him!”
This last vow, accompanied by a string of curses, sapped Foxbrush of whatever energy remained to him. His knees buckled and he sat down beneath the spreading fig tree growing on the edge of the gorge. With a groan he bent forward until his forehead pressed into the ground, and sat in this broken attitude, unwilling to move ever again.
Something tickled his face. On reflex Foxbrush smacked, hitting himself but missing the tiny wasp, which flew out of his range and disappeared. Dropping his hand and blinking several times, Foxbrush tried to breathe.
Something tickled his neck. Once more he smacked, once more he missed, and another wasp flitted away.
Foxbrush closed his eyes, wondering if he could make himself sleep and perhaps wake up in the gorge where he should be, escaped from this nightmare. He drew three long breaths, hoping to calm his racing heart.
Something fist-sized and spherical landed hard on the back of his head, exploded, and filled the world with the fury of a hundred and more tiny wasps.
With a yelp, Foxbrush was on his feet and running from the tree, covering his ears, closing his eyes as the wasps followed him in a cloud. They stung his neck, his ears, his shielding hands; they stung any exposed skin they could find, and he screamed as pain like fire flowed under his skin.
He ran into a tree, fell in an agonized bundle, and lay at the feet of a tall stranger.
“Great hopping giants, you fool!” a rumbling voice bellowed. “Have you no sense?”
Foxbrush, however, did not understand the words, for they were not in a language he knew. He yelped and rolled, desperate to escape the wasps. The tall stranger, whom he had not yet seen—for the wasps were diving at his eyelids for all they were worth—leapt over Foxbrush’s prone form and strode toward the fig tree, shouting as he went:
“Call them off, Twisted Man! Leave the dragon-kissed fool alone!”
A voice (that was in no measure human and spoke without words but that, somehow, Foxbrush understood as he did not understand the stranger) replied:
“He disobeyed! He violated! He lay upon my roots!”
“And it hasn’t hurt you, has it?” the stranger replied.
“He violated! He broke treaty!”
“Well, he’s sorry enough for it now. Call off your wasps!”