Blood Feud Read Free Page B

red haze, I could understand after a fashion.
    ‘It’s the herdboy. Didn’t you kill it, then?’
    ‘Seems not. But that’s a matter easy to set right.’
    ‘You killed my dog!’ I yelled again.
    ‘It gives tongue like a wolf-cub, too.’
    The grip shifted, a giant of a man loomed up in front of me, and the point of a dagger was tickling my throat. ‘So now we kill you too, and that will make all neat and ship-shape,’ he said gravely. The rest crowded round, laughing. I had ceased to struggle, and stood still, knowing – but as though I were standing aside and knowing it of somebody else – that in a few more breaths I should be dead.
    But another man, who seemed to be the chief, struck the dagger aside. ‘Leave that.’
    The giant turned on him, showing his teeth a little, but lowering his dagger-hand nonetheless. ‘Why? Is he a long lost brother of yours?’
    ‘Do not you be a fool, Aslak; what use is he to us dead? We can’t eat him as we can the cattle –’
    ‘There’s not a good mouthful on his bones anyway,’ someone guffawed, ‘and wolf meat’s too strong for my stomach.’
    ‘And alive, he’ll fetch his price in the Dublin Slave Market. We haven’t done so well, this trip, that we can afford to toss aside a bit of easy profit that falls into our hands.’
    There was a general growl of agreement; and the giant with the dagger shrugged, half laughing, and thrust the blade back into his belt.
    ‘Tie him up and dump him against the rocks yonder, outof the way.’ The man who seemed to be their chief jerked his thumb towards the sheltering outcrop.
    So they bound my ankles together, and lashed my wrists behind me, with cords that somebody brought from the boat; and hauled me over to the rocks and flung me down there like a calf for branding; and went back to their own affairs.
    Everything had begun to go far off and hazy; and I knew very little more, until suddenly – it must have been a good while later – the meat was cooked, and somebody was jabbing a sizzling lump of it against my mouth on the point of a dagger, shouting, ‘Eat! If we do not kill you, eat!’
    The chief nodded, grinning from ear to ear, with a lump of fat hanging half out of his mouth. ‘It is you – your people that give the meat; now it is fair that you feast with the rest of us.’
    And a third man struck in: ‘A good host should always set his guests at their ease by eating with them himself.’
    ‘And since no other one of your people seems coming to join the feast . . .’
    ‘I am thinking it’s not often you fill your belly full of the good red beef you herd for them.’
    And that was true enough; and the lump of meat was still jabbing against my teeth. And I opened my mouth and ate.
    Not because I was afraid they would kill me if I did not, but for a mingling of reasons that went deeper than that. I thought what did I owe to my mother’s kind? And what did it matter? What did anything matter? Old Brindle was dead.
    So I ate the meat, and knew, even as I did so, that now I could never go back to the world that was only just behind me. Even if I were not, in all likelihood, going to be killed, even if I were not going to be sold in the Dublin slave market, I could not go back. I had broken the Tabu, the unwritten Law of the Spirit, that binds all herdsmen, eaten the stolen flesh of the cattle I herded; I had done the Forbidden Thing.I threw most of it up again soon after, but that was merely the blow on my head. I had done the Forbidden Thing, and there could be no going back.
    I ate, and threw up, and slept. And when I woke, still with a splitting head, it was morning, and the seas had gentled, and the men were running their ship down into the surf.
    They stowed the uneaten meat below the thwarts, and myself along with it. They had slackened off my ankle ropes and rebound my hands in front of me. (Every cattleman knows that the better the condition of his steers when they come to market, the better price they