By the time he reached the track that led up from the trees to the mountain, it was noon. He had swallowed the incident down like bitter medicine. And, in the way of solitary unique events, it had become unreal.
He was about half a mile away from the pass, when the woman’s man caught up to him.
Dro heard the clatter of hoofs on the slate and stone of the track, knew, and turned around. But the man seemed to burst out of the very air. There had been time to gain an advantage, yet Dro had not tried for one. His contempt for the man, his contempt for the woman who would stay with such a brute, and his contempt for himself, tangled, however briefly, between them, made Dro stand there arrogantly at the wayside, waiting, in full view.
Of course, he was remembering the absence of weapons, the balled, empty weakling’s fists. But this time the man had armed himself with a long dull swerve of violence which Dro never properly saw. Because, unspeaking, preplanned, malicious in cunning and in accuracy, the man swung and delivered his blow in the exact moment he came level with Parl Dro. Nor did he aim where he might have been expected to—at head or heart, or even, with an obscene aptness, at the groin. Yet the target of the blow was, nevertheless, both obscene and apt. He hurled the unidentified weapon with all the force of his fermented compost-heap hate, at Dro’s crippled left leg.
One second then, Parl Dro was a thinking man, astonished, out-manoeuvred in the quiet afternoon. Next second he was a howling mindless thing flung down into a hell that knew neither night nor day, nor any time at all save the hour of his agony.
He understood after, he had fallen over and away, rolling off the side of the track, through stone defiles, gaunt thickets, along the mountain’s hollow flanks, in a cascade of shale. He fetched up in a narrow channel with one broken wall, and if he had gone farther it would have been off the mountain entirely, into space and presumably annihilation. In any event, he knew none of that till much later.
He came to once, in a roar of pain. He had been dreaming of the pain, even unconscious, dreaming that the ghost-thing on the bridge was at work on him once more. He seemed soaked in hot water, or sweat. The avenger had not followed him, had been unable to, or unable to discover him. But he had forgotten that, too. The pain was not localised. It was a sea, and he floundered in it, screaming. And then he died again. He went on like that, dying and waking, dying and waking, for a long while, or rather a timeless while. He never positively knew, when at last he began to reason again, how long he had lain in that channel of the mountain.
When eventually he was able to think, he was amazed, for the leg was not even broken—every bone had seemed splintered, and the splinters mashed.
When he got free of the channel, it was night, and the moon was shining. From the shape of the moon, and certain horrible, barely recalled revivals, he deduced he had been lying there two or three days.
The hurt in the leg had subsided to a blaze, as if the muscles and tendons were merely on fire. It was the damaged nerves of the previous wounding, ill-equipped to endure another wound, which had so incapacitated him.
His return to consciousness was marked by a frantic feverish compulsion to get to the woman. He had incoherently realised by then, naturally, that her pleas that he go away had been entirely for his sake. She had known what “her man” was capable of, and foolishly had put Dro first. If she had instead appealed to him for help, they might both have fared so much better.
Scrambling down from the mountain was difficult. The agony it cost him went almost ignored, save when he fell and lay in the slate dust, the stars darkening with the blood behind his eyes. In the end, the descent grew more facile. He became used to staggering on the blazing stick of leg.