From childish excitement, from game to perplexity. Thorn’s brow contracted in a spasm of anxiety. Perhaps Duun would break his promise? Perhaps he was being teased?
Duun took off the cloak and dropped it behind him. He picked up the wer, a middling blade. He stretched out his bare left arm, fist clenched, and set the knife against his forearm.
“No!” Thorn cried suddenly. A game? A threat? Something he had done wrong? Duun was teasing him?
Duun slowly brought the blade down and down, deeply. Blood sprang out and rained in steady, heavy drops on the weapons and the blanket. He kept his fist clenched and held the arm steady, resting the knife butt on his knee. Thorn’s eyes were wide, his mouth open with nothing coming out.
“That’s what weapons are for,” Duun said. The blood poured, soaked the blanket. “Each time you take them up, remember what they’re for.”
“Stop it,” Thorn cried. “Duun, stop it bleeding!”
Duun held out the knife, the wounded arm still spurting. He turned it in his maimed hand and offered it hilt first to Thorn. “Can you do it?”
Thorn took the bloodied knife. His eyes still were wide. His lips set themselves, drawn in. He held out his own clenched fist and set the knife to his skin. He drew the blade down the same way, and his face was red and his eyes poured tears; his nostrils and his lips went pale. He drew the knife down. Blood began to drip. The small hand drew away, the knife wobbling in tremors that convulsed the knife-arm and began to involve the other. As Duun had done, he set the knife hand on his knee, and his face was all white and beaded with moisture, while the blood ran down and made another darkening of the blanket.
So. So. Duun had expected last-moment flinching. His own head grew light. His cut was deeper and bled abundantly. He held out his hand and took the knife back. He saw the terror in the child. (What more, Duun? What else? What worse? I’m scared, Duun!)
“It is not a game,” Duun said. He put down the knife and pressed his right hand to his wound. “You can hold it. Hold it tight.” He got up from his cross-legged posture without using either hand. He went and opened the med kit and pressed a sealing film on the wound. He came back to Thorn with another square of the gel, and pressed the film to Thorn’s arm and held it, warming it with his hand until it took and stayed, soft and blood-reddened, over a wound that would scar. Duun held the arm.
Alien eyes looked up at him, white all round. He was tender in his grip. “You won’t forget,” Duun said. “You won’t forget what weapons are. You will never pick them up when I tell you not.”
“No.” A small weak voice. “You will use them when I say. And you’ll set them down when I say.” “Yes.”
“Good.” He slid a bloodstained hand past Thorn’s head and rubbed Thorn’s nape in the vise of his maimed hand till the tension left and Thorn’s body gave to and fro with that motion, his eyes still fixed on Duun. “Believe me, Thorn. Believe me in this. You hurt now. But you did what I asked. That was brave.”
Muscles in Thorn’s face shook, as in some dire chill. His limbs convulsed. Stopped. Duun kept on his massage until the shiver passed. Thorn’s eyes lost their wild look. They were wide and moiled with forethought and calculations. (What else does he want? What did I win? What did I do? What next?)
Duun let go. Motioned at the bloodstained weapons. “Clean them. I’ll show you how.”
Thorn stirred, edged closer to the array of weapons on the blanket. “You said-” he began. “I said?”
“We’d go hunting. You said-we’d go hunting today.”
“That we will. We won’t eat tonight if we don’t take something.”
Thorn’s eyes flicked up a second time; Thorn could do that, without turning his head. The look hoped for a joke and Duun made his face implacable.
There was no question, of course. The place was full of unwary game. No one hunted it much. Yet. And a hatani could, in the most desolate place, find some sustenance.