Jorik the Embalmer sat cross-legged in Arn’s hut, a pained expression on his face. The man’s greying hair and constant, eerie stench, made it hard for Arn to focus. The chief of Razaad rested on the balls of his feet, muscles stretching as he balanced there. He regarded the healer and mortician with a stern squint and a neck stiff from his body trying to keep up with all the training he did. “Do you have an apprentice?” he asked.
“N-No,” Jorik stammered. “That’s not what we were speaking about.”
“You should get one,” Arn told him.
The Embalmer lifted his hands in front of her. “Arn, you broke two of her ribs and dislocated her shoulder.”
Arn’s squint turned into a glare. He teetered back onto his heels and stood up to his full height. He had already heard a list of Thalla’s minor injuries, but what was the point of it? Jorik tensed as Arn took a step closer. “Get out,” he said. “Get your damned tongue out of my hut.”
Jorik stumbled backward as he climbed to his feet, reaching for the door flap as Arn shoved him toward it. In Arn’s hand hung the metal sword from Scoa, his fingers gentle clasped around the base of its blade. It was a hot day, and the dried mud sent a cloud of dirt through the air as the Embalmer scraped his way into the sunshine and fled cowering from Arn’s home.
Through the swinging curtain of his doorway, Arn saw someone else standing in front of his hut. He blinked in disbelief and pulled the animal hide to the left. It was Shar, the man who had caused Arn the most problems on Razaad. His hair was unkempt and his beard a chaotic assortment of whiskers and clumps, and he stood crookedly, one shoulder higher than the other. He raised his hands to his sides peacefully as Arn scowled at him. “No, no, no, no!” Arn’s hand shifted to the sword hilt as he stormed toward his old adversary.
Shar stumbled back from his charge. The leg that Arn had twisted into a mess of fractured bones moved with a severe limp, and he soon skidded through the tall grass on the edge of the cliff. “Please,” he whispered, as Arn loomed over him. “Hear me out.”
“Unbelievable,” Arn whispered. He looked down the cliffs at the second new raft. It was still a work in progress, but Arn’s old raft and Logern’s most recent watercraft were already ready for the next crossing. He looked back at Shar and inhaled deeply. The man’s bloodshot eyes and chapped lips were both wide as he counted what could be his last breaths. “Speak,” Arn said, and spat off the cliff.
“I’m nothing,” Shar confessed, his voice a broken squeak. “Without my leg, I’ll never be a hunter again. And death would be better than the shame of weaving baskets for the rest of my life.”
“Fine,” Arn said, and brandished his sword again.
Shar flung his arms up. “Wait!” he pleaded and Arn did. “Let me serve the way I should have. Let me right my wrongs.”
“How?”
The cripple gasped and sought the courage to speak. He twisted off his backside and rose on his knees. “You crossed the Deep,” he said. “Impossible, I thought. But you proved me so, so wrong. Let me help cross again.”
A wide-winged gull held in the air overhead, as a gentle breeze carried it at an angle over the muddy village. Arn watched it quietly. In his head was a chaos too intense to consider, full of violent motions and breaking body parts. Thalla’s. He couldn’t dwell there. He looked back down at Shar and forced himself to smile, even to chuckle. It seemed appropriate. “Get out of here,” he said, and spat again.
Shar’s expression crumpled, and he lowered his posture away from Arn. As Arn waited, staring off the cliff, the other young man slowly stood up and began to walk between Arn and the hut, toward the road down the hill. When he started to reach Arn’s blindside, Arn tensed and turned to make sure the wretch didn’t give him a shove.
A lunch of a greasy ‘scale meat and herbal berry juice did little to improve Arn’s mood. Still, he stopped hiding in his shack. He hadn’t heard from the hunting band since removing Thalla’s leadership, but the meat had kept coming, and the craftspeople still had plenty of scale hides to beat and plenty of gull feather to pluck. Thalla may not have expected the beating she had received, but her instruction that Arn strike her had been clever. The hunters would fall in line, he knew.
And it was only Arn’s ambitions that remained. He strode through the village with his head held high. He owed it to them to see their scorn, their disbelief—he had beat a woman senseless even when she had barely raised a hand to defend herself.
One old man did the opposite. He looked at Arn as the leader walked past, and nodded. With the slightest smile and a quivering grey beard, the senior gave Arn his approval for keeping the chiefs in line.
With one new raft and Arn’s old one, the lagoon had begun quite crowded. Arn dropped cliff-to-cliff down into the rocky cove watching as men dragged muddy paste over a new layer of the work in progress. This would be their third raft for the Deep, and it was the largest. The little fishing crafts seemed smaller than ever, as Logern’s crew sang a soft tune and jabbed their spears into the murk.
“Brother,” Arn said, as he walked along. Joroth had been pounding a few pieces of wood into the front of the new raft. While the second resembled Arn’s single guiding plank at the boat’s stern, the front of Joroth’s current project resembled a spearhead instead. “How does the work go?”
“A few more days and this one will be done,” he said, folding his calloused hands into the crooks of his elbows.
Arn blinked. “Really?” he asked. “Already?”
Logern and Bravar had been working on narrow fishing spears nearby, but set down their work to listen to the conversation.
“What should we work on next?” Joroth asked, leaning against the wooden deck.
“Oars,” Arn said, smiling.
“Well, how many do we need?” Bravar asked, standing up. The fishing band had felt replaced by Joroth’s authority, requisitioning assistance from crafts-folk and fisher-folk alike. “We already have four.”
Arn grinned at their reluctance. “Ten per raft?” he suggested.
Logern whistled. “If you say so. You know how much doubt you’ll face when you try to find that many per raft?”
It was a small number compared to the number of the tribe. Arn had grown tired of doubt in his days before crossing the Deep. Now he had proved himself, and he wouldn’t tolerate it. “I won’t be trying,” he said. “There will be volunteers.”
Joroth tilted his head in consideration while Logern and Bravar smiled to one another, scoffed, and returned to work. Arn let them have their humour for now. If Shar had volunteered, there would be others. And Taran had already asked for a place of power in Arn’s new order, so he couldn’t likely be considered a volunteer also.
Arn gave Joroth a few suggestions for his attempt a new design for the raft’s guiding front, and then began to reclimb the cliff wall. He spotted a woman on the edge of the village, looking down the cliffs at him. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought it was Thalla and raised his hand to wave. The figure raised its left hand but didn’t wave.