The Raven Warrior by Alice Borchardt Read Free Book Online

explain.”
    He nodded. “The men running out of that fortress will be better armed than you are, and the first thing they will do is grab your hair and slice your head off. If you don’t give them a convenient handle, they can’t do that.”
    He snapped the shear blades together. “Your hair! All of it.”
    He got it. We slicked down what was left of it with mud.
    “Next thing you need to know is what to do after ‘he’—” Ure grinned. There was no mirth in it. “—finds he can’t get a grip on you.”
    We waited.
    “You save your last shot, rock or lead, it doesn’t matter. Put it in the sling and swing it toward his . . .” He paused. “What?” he asked.
    “Head,” someone said.
    “No.” He bared his teeth again. “You swing it toward his what?” he asked Albe.
    “Balls,” she said.
    “Yes! There’s a good girl,” he said. “Now, I want everyone to repeat what I just told you back to me.”
    The troops looked dismayed.
    “You can use your own words, but I want it all.”
    The first was mistaken. Ure clouted him so hard he got a nosebleed and began to cry. But Ure made him repeat himself until he got it right.
    Ure didn’t speak further to me, so I rose because I had an idea. Gray and Maeniel were standing aside, watching. I walked over to them.
    “God! He’s good,” Gray said. “If they stand a chance at all, it will be because of him.”
    Maeniel nodded.
    I looked up at them. “I’m going back to the village.”
    “You mean to the house posts standing in the water,” Gray said. “Why?”
    I shifted my gaze to the Gray Watcher. “They were our people,” I said. “They understood we are one people, the dead, the living, the yet unborn.”
    “They are gone,” Gray said.
    “No,” I said, looking away over the marsh, over the still waters that reflected the sky. “They are not gone, but still there. At least, some of them, waiting. Waiting for me.”

    He uncurled himself, became human, and studied her. “What are you doing here?”
    She snorted. “I decided not to cut off my nose to spite my face. You’re the best-looking thing I’ve seen in about a thousand years.”
    “What do you want?” Black Leg asked.
    “God!” she said, raising her fist to the sky. “I sure can pick them. Do you hear? This idiot wants to know what I want. Hear that? He wants to know what I want! Well, Mister Hung-Like-a-Horse, what the hell do you think I want?”
    Black Leg felt himself turning red all over. “You sure that’s all you want?” he mumbled.
    “I’m sure,” she said grimly.
    “You’re not going to drown me?”
    She answered slowly, as if speaking to a child or one somewhat intellectually impaired. “No! Why the hell would I want to drown you?”
    “To . . . so . . . you could eat me,” Black Leg answered.
    “Why the hell would I want to eat you? I know your kind are sometimes not too bright and logic certainly isn’t one of your strong points. But trust me, even I couldn’t figure out a good enough reason to want to kill and eat you. No, the longer you live, the better I like it.
    “I know you might not believe this, but from time to time some moron does fall into the water in one of the lakes and springs I frequent. And then, if I’m not around to yank him out and chase him back on shore, the bonehead does drown. Trust me, eating those things is not my first impulse.
Yeech!
It’s not even my last. The sons of bitches stink! And I usually get the unhappy task of dragging the remains to shore and dumping them so their people can find and dispose of them.
    “Trust me, fool, you wouldn’t want to hang around a drowned corpse too long, much less eat one. After even a day or two in the water, bloating . . . but Christ, why am I explaining this nonsense? What I want to do is get it on.”
    Black Leg stood up and glanced down at the sleeping old man. “Who . . . ?”
    She rose and glided toward him. “How the hell should I know?” she answered.
    “Why . . . ?”