Passage - Lois McMaster Bujold [80]
Then Hawthorn arrived, agog to be let try. At least his hands were clean from the dishwashing and wouldn’t leave grubby prints on the bow. Dag promptly set up Whit as Hawthorn’s instructor, a good old-patroller trick to force a novice to focus on his problems from the outside for a change. Dag grinned to hear some of his own phrases falling glibly from Whit’s lips. Remo, Dag was bemused to note, kept creeping closer, first to the end of the gangplank, then to the end of Dag’s log. Every once in a while his hands twitched. If Remo owned a bow, he had not brought it with him on his cross-river swim. Well, if he wanted to play with this one, he would have to ask Whit, just like Hawthorn.
When Dag returned from seeking the next set of misses, and had suggested Whit move Hawthorn rather closer to the target, Remo said suddenly, “Collecting spent arrows was always work for the beginners. Not for a captain.”
Not for a captain with twenty-seven malice kills to his name, did he mean? On whose behalf was Remo offended? “You fetch back your share when you were a tad, did you?”
“Yes!”
“Good for you.”
Fawn wandered back to watch over Dag’s head, finding a task for her restless hands by kneading Dag’s shoulders, which disinclined him to get up and run down the shore again. She said, “What about you, Dag? You haven’t practiced in a while either.”
“Now, Spark, I’ve been pulling a sweep half the day. I’m tired. If I can’t hit that target it’ll make me look nohow in front of all these youngsters.”
“Ha,” she said unsympathetically, abandoned her lovely task—he tried not to whimper out loud—and dodged back up the gangplank. In a couple of minutes, she came back toting Dag’s adapted bow and his well-stocked quiver.
Remo sat upright, eyes widening. “What’s that?”
“That’s my bow.” Dag unscrewed his hook from his wooden wrist cuff, dropping it into the leather pouch on his belt. He stood, put his weight into bending the short, heavy bow, and strung it. Setting into his cuff slot the carved bolt that stuck out where the grip would be, he rotated the bow once to seat it, making sure the string ended up to the inside, and snapped the lock down.
“A farmer artificer that Fairbolt Crow knew up in Tripoint made it for me, some years ago,” Dag went on. “And my arm harness and all my gear that goes with it. It took us four tries to get a design that would work. Interesting fellow. He started out making wooden arms and legs for miners and foundry men, see, as the folks in those hills do a deal of that dangerous work. He’d been a friend of Fairbolt’s back when Fairbolt was a young patroller up that way. Seems you never know when you’ll need an old friend.”
Remo’s ground was as shuttered as his expression; hard to tell how he took this pointed moral. He said only, “It looks like it has a heavy draw.”
“Aye, it’s a right bear. It was all compromises by that point. We needed a short length, to keep it out of my way if I had to move in a hurry, because putting it down takes a minute and dropping it isn’t an option. At the same time, I needed penetrating power. When I had two hands, I used a much longer bow, matching my height and arm length. Took me months of practice to finally change all my long-bow habits.” His remaining fingers had bled.
“You’re pretty matter-of-fact about it all.”
Dag had no idea what Remo was going to hear out of this, but he chose the truth anyway. “I wasn’t at first. I took a long time getting over it.” A little jerk of his left arm made his meaning clear. “I won’t say no one can be a blighted fool forever, because I’ve seen some try for it. But I finally decided I didn’t care to be in that company.