The Shadow Isle - Katharine Kerr [167]
“Food,” one of the males said to Kov. “For you, and this hut. We chain your leg.”
“Very well.”
Kov stopped walking and stood head down, slump-shouldered, as if he were weighed down with defeat. As soon as they stepped a little away, he bolted forward at a dead run. He managed to get some twenty yards before they fell upon him, wrestled him down, and shackled his left leg to a long iron chain.
“Bad slave.” One of the men was grinning at him. “Now you eat and not run no more.”
Since they fastened the other end of the long chain to a ring in the stone pillar in the center of the village, Kov decided that he might as well sit down and eat. For the time being he could run no more, most certainly, but he had every intention of finding a way to do so, and as soon as possible. He could only pray that he could escape before this mysterious binding ceremony.
Someone handed him a plate of grilled fish fillets, accompanied by a ladleful of porridge, and a thin split of wood to use as a spoon. While he ate, he looked downriver, where he could see the dark bridge looming over the starlight-speckled water like the shadow of some huge monster indeed.
Kov spent a restless night in the hut with only the crone for a guard. The shackle, however, served better than a whole squad of axemen to keep him where he was. Whenever he heard the crone snoring, he would sit up and test the iron band for weaknesses. If he’d had a decent set of dwarven tools, he might have managed to pick the crude lock, but with only a splinter of wood for a weapon, he never managed to defeat it. On each try, the sound of the chain clanking would wake the crone; she would swear at him in a mix of several languages and then sit up, ready to shout an alarm, until he lay down and pretended to sleep.
Eventually he did nod off, only to wake suddenly at dawn to a crowd of villagers just outside his door. They were chanting a loud repetition of six syllables, one of which sounded like a click of the tongue. The crone rose from her blankets and nudged him with a foot in his ribs.
“Up, Mountain Man,” she said. “Ceremony is now.”
Kov let fly with a few choice oaths of his own. He crossed his arms over his chest and lay where he was. They can just come and fetch me, he thought. The crone kicked him again, then stuck her head out of the door and yelled, most likely for help, since three burly fellows arrived and stomped into the hut. They grabbed Kov, peeled the blanket off him, and carried him outside with the chain clanking behind. They laid him down by the stone pillar, then stepped back.
A few at a time, a crowd gathered, standing well back but forming a rough circle with Kov and the pillar in its center. As he considered them and their pinned-together tabardlike garments, it occurred to Kov that they dressed as they did in order to slip out of their clothes and dive into the water as fast as possible. They lived in fear, these people—like most misers, he thought. All that gold, heaped up and stored where no one could even see it! Yet, of course, it would be his job to correct that situation, his for the rest of his life, hundreds of years that would warp his very soul. I will not end up like Otho, Kov told himself, not all bitter and greedy, I won’t, I can’t let myself!
One of the burly fellows who’d carried him out stepped forward, grabbed him, and hauled him up to prop him against the pillar. Kov considered sliding back down, but the crowd in front of him was parting, murmuring, to let someone through. Dressed in her glittering scales of gold, Lady blazed like a tiny sun in the fresh dawn light.
“Welcome to our river,” she said, and she smiled. “Soon you will be one of us, bound to the water as