Star Wars_ Splinter of the Mind's Eye - Alan Dean Foster [69]
His dragging hands encountered something oblong and unyielding. A rock, but too large for him to get a hand around. He’d need both hands to raise anything so massive, and much better leverage than he possessed at the moment to make use of it.
The hand he feared came down on the back of his neck. It shoved downward, brutally hard; so hard that Luke’s face plunged into the sandy bottom of the pond. He felt the clean grains pressing into his nostrils. Raised on a desert world, he was about to meet a death damper than any he’d ever conceived of.
His thoughts became hazy as his blood scoured the last dregs of oxygen from his lungs. A voice sang fancifully in the back of his mind. It was exorting him to relax. Well, that was simple enough to do, he reflected pleasantly. Relax he would. He was tired, so tired now.
The Coway took it for a ploy and didn’t ease the pressure on Luke. If anything, it shoved harder, sensing victory. Then, miraculously, the pressure vanished from Luke’s neck. Unable to think of turning to defend himself, of striking back, Luke shot to the surface.
Air! Most delicious of gases, it filled his starved lungs, those weakened bellows pumping harder with every fresh breath. Coughing up water, he stayed on his knees, delirious with the pleasure of being able to breathe again. Only when his system’s panicky requests for oxygen faded did he think to turn and look for his opponent.
Blood trickled from the side of the Coway’s head into the clear pond water. It was lying on its back, manifestly unconscious, maybe dead.
On hands and knees a thoroughly dazed and somewhat puzzled Luke crawled to the Coway’s motionless side. With one hand he touched the other’s face, raised a fist over it. But there was no movement. The Coway’s distress was genuine and not some cat-and-mouse alien ploy. It did not rise to attack.
Another body was suddenly in the water beside him. “You won, Luke, you beat him!” the Princess was shouting into his ear. She had both arms wrapped tightly around him and the pressure almost sent them both tumbling together into the water.
“Don’t you understand?” she asked brightly. “You won. We can all go free now. That is,” she continued in a more subdued voice, staring around at the silent crowd and trying not to show any fear, “we can if these creatures have any sense of honor.”
“I wouldn’t worry too much about that, Leia,” he advised her, wiping water from his face. “Canu has judged, remember? Besides, it takes many thousands of years of advanced technological development for a society to reduce honor to an abstract moral truism devoid of real meaning.
“If this were an Imperial arena, then I’d be concerned.” He regarded the watching natives. “I think the Coway keep their word.”
“We’ll find out,” she assured him, wishing she could share his certainty. Putting his left arm around her shoulders, she helped him to his feet. As they started out of the pond Luke heard something burbling and snorting like a hog in heat. A glance to his left showed the twitching form of his opponent. He was gratified. The Coway wasn’t dead.
As soon as this became apparent, several Coway broke from the assembled ranks and approached their injured relative. For a moment Luke felt concern. He’d heard of primitive societies where the vanquished or dishonored representative of a tribe was put to death for his or her failure.
It looked as if the Coway were more mature than that. They lifted their defeated champion to a sitting position and held some kind of burning plant under his face. Luke caught a whiff of it and it helped him regain his strength. He tried to hurry past. Even if the Coway was dead, he decided only half-jokingly, one breath of that incredibly pungent burning substance would have aroused him.
Then something caught his eye and he paused, staring blankly at it. What had riveted his attention was not the Coway’s continuing methods of medication, nor the vanquished warrior’s convulsive reactions