Thok sagged at the reminder. “Skin her first and no crocodile butter in the sauce.” The gigantic female nodded approvingly.
Nessa was hauled to her feet and gave Caroc an accusing stare—she was still angry with him.
“Maybe just a little bit of butter,” Thok called out as his meal left the tent.
Caroc was taken outside to the village centre, a muddy square whose main attraction was a giant cooking pot, and locked in a wooden cage. He studied the surrounding huts. In one of them Nessa was being butchered, and it was his fault.
Young toadoks wandered over and started using Caroc as a practice target for their blowpipes.
The children soon tired of their game and drifted away. The darts weren’t poisoned, and Caroc found his muscle control return to him.
A fire was set under the large pot. The children came back with buckets filled with water from the nearby river. Fistfuls of herbs and baskets of orange banyan roots were tossed in too.
As the brew began to bubble and froth, toadoks, attracted by the smell, emerged from the huts and gathered around the pot. Last to make her appearance was the main ingredient. She didn’t arrive in a basket or bucket but on her own feet. She carried her meat with pride to the pot.
Caroc whimpered when he spotted her. A wet, red horror. He wouldn’t have known it was his sweet Nessa except for her large emerald eyes. They’d skinned her alive and were making her walk to the pot. Over one toadok’s shoulder was slung her birthday suit.
A tentative toe at first tested the water only to be jerked back. The water was much too hot. This wasn’t a warm bath. The toadoks didn’t take kindly to their rebellious meat and pushed her into the water. The pot tottered, dangerously close to toppling.
Nessa came up gasping and thrashing.
Caroc wanted to shout out to her that she was right and he should have listened, but the muscles in his throat were still semi-paralysed and the only sound that came out was a strangled cry.
Nessa tried to scramble out of the pot, but an army of apprentice chefs prised her fingers off the scalding iron lip and pushed her back into the steaming water. She trod water and cried until her body could take no more. Slowly, she sank into the stewy depths only to re-emerge bobbling up and down with chunks of banyan root.
When she was tender, the toadoks pulled the meat from her bones, heaped a portion in a bucket-sized bowl, and splashed it with buttery, parsley sauce for the chief.
The rest of Nessa was served to the tribe. A bowl, steaming as if Nessa was trying to ascend to the heavens, was left beside his cage to taunt him until a greedy child ran off with it.
Caroc closed his eyes to the horror. The slurping sounds of the toadoks devouring the stew, and the images of Nessa walking to the pot replayed over and over in his mind. He grabbed his head and crushed his fingers against his skull to try to smash the flashbacks. He had to escape. He couldn’t take this anymore—to die as Nessa had would be unendurable.
Caroc started to gnaw on the hard wood with his teeth. Pierced by splinters, his tongue swelled to the thickness of an eel. Early in the morning, when the sun rose oblivious to the horrors the moon had presided over, he chewed his way through the second bar and squeezed through. He spared a final look for the stew pot lying on its side, a pool of fat glistening in the mud, and Nessa’s bones lying cracked, the marrow sucked out, before disappearing into the forest.
Blodwen led Goron an hour downstream to an ancient willow tree near the water’s edge. Beneath its leafy canopy, on a bed of moss as soft as any mattress, they made love. “Will you stay here with me always and be my lover?” Blodwen asked as hot and weary they slipped into the murky waters of the river.
“Always.” All he needed was Blodwen and his axe, and he knew he would be happy. Wichsault be damned. Morwen and her curses be damned, and that cowardly ranger be damned.
After they had bathed, Goron complained of his hunger. He hadn’t eaten since yesterday evening. She left him to doze in the shade of the willow while she foraged for wild berries.
Goron’s stomach rumbled. He was too ravenous to sleep, and berries would do little to satisfy his hunger. He wandered down to the river in search of the ugly, bulbous fish he’d had for dinner the night before. Instead, he found fat, silver fish sunning themselves in the shallows on the riverbanks.
He grabbed at one, but the fish changed from a silver stone to a shooting arrow. They all teased him the same way—couldn’t they see how hungry he was? He tried to cleave some with his axe, but all he did was dull the blade on the river rocks.
The only thing for it was to make a spear. He cut a limb, nearly as hard as iron, from a ruinwood tree and set about whittling it into the desired shape with his axe. The axe was a cumbersome tool, and it took him three attempts before he was satisfied. It was late afternoon when he trudged back through the columns of trees to the river.
The fish were still there teasing him with their stone-like stillness. Goron grinned. Didn’t they know that he was the best shot in the guards with a spear? Three were skewered before the news spread, and the fish sought a safer spot to sun themselves. He gutted them in the river and returned to the willow.
Nibbling the moss where he’d made love only hours before with Blodwen, was a doe. She looked up as Goron
