“Yes,” she told him. “They’re very close.”
He toyed with her hardened nipple. “If I give myself up, what will happen?”
“I think we’ll all leave this country, one way or another.”
“And … in your opinion … would that be such a bad idea?”
“No,” she told him. “In my opinion it would be a very good idea.”
“And they won’t hurt me?”
“They won’t hurt you.”
“You promise?”
She looked into his eyes, brown into gold. “I promise they won’t hurt you.”
“All right,” he said, lifting his arms up and putting them round her neck. “It’s time we put an end to this. But first you have to kiss me.”
“According to who?”
“According to me.”
She kissed his grizzled lips. And as she did so, he leapt out of her arms, as though he’d been slick with butter; a jump that carried him three or four feet above her head.
“Prindeti-l!” the Duke yelled.
His men weren’t about to come so close to their quarry and lose him again. They each caught hold of an arm and leg of the child, and carried him, squealing more like a pig than a goat, to the wooden crate.
Before they could get him safely locked away, however, there came a shout from Eppstadt. “Where are you going with that thing?” he demanded.
“They’re taking it away,” Todd explained.
“Oh, no they’re not. Absolutely not. I saw it commit murder. I want to see it tried in a court of law.”
He started towards the two men who had taken hold of the creature. The Duke, sword drawn, instantly came to stand between them.
Tammy, meanwhile, even before she’d buttoned herself up, was ready to add her own voice to the argument. “Don’t you interfere,” she told
Eppstadt. “You’ll fuck up everything.”
“Are you crazy? Well, yes, why am I asking? Of course you’re crazy. Letting that thing suck on you that way. You obscene woman.”
“Just do it!” Todd urged the men, hoping his miming of the boy’s imprisonment would help the men understand his meaning.
It did. While the Duke held Eppstadt at swordpoint, his men put the goat-boy into the crate, the wooden bars of which were decorated with small iron icons, hammered into the timber. Whatever their meaning, they did the trick. Though Qwaftzefoni was easily strong enough to shake the crate apart he did not so much as lay his hands on the bars, but sat passively in his little prison, awaiting the next stage of the proceeding.
The Duke issued a new round of orders, and the men lifted the crate onto the back of one of the horses, and started to secure it there.
While they did so the Duke made a short, but apparently deeply sincere, speech to Tammy, thanking her, she assumed, for her part in this dangerous enterprise. All the while he kept an eye on Eppstadt, and his sword raised should the man attempt to interfere. Eppstadt was obviously equally aware that the Duke meant business, even if he didn’t understand the exchange, because he kept his hands raised throughout, and his mouth shut.
Todd, meanwhile, stood watching the sky. There was, it seemed, a subtle change in the configuration of the heavens. The moon was very slowly moving off the face of the sun.
Suddenly, there was a shriek from one of the Duke’s men. The goat-boy had found a place where his hand and arm could fit through the bars without touching the icons, and using a moment of the man’s distraction, had reached out and was digging his short-fingered hand into the meat around the man’s eye. He had firm hold of it; firm enough to shake the man back and forth like a puppet. Blood gushed from the place, splashing against the goat-boy’s palm and running down his victim’s face.
The horse on which the crate was set reared up in panic, and the crate-which had not yet been firmly fixed to the saddle, slid off. The creature did not let go of his victim. He hung onto the man’s face as the crate crashed to the ground. It did not break open, as no doubt the goat-boy had hoped; and in a fit of frustration he started to tear the man’s flesh open still further.