Free Jane Carver of Waar by Nathan Long Page A

turned and walked out.
    Yup. Shit creek. Big time.
     

CHAPTER SIX
    CONDEMNED!
    A fter a day when nobody but Queenie came into the tent—and she only came in to feed me and didn’t say a word—two tough looking hardcases, wearing the Chief’s colors of orange and green woven into their dreads, stepped in, cut me loose, and led me out.
    I’d had plenty of time to think about what I’d done and what kind of shit storm paying the piper was going to involve—time enough to go from dead certain I was going to die to optimistic and back again. It was automatic death for a slave to strike or even lip-off to an Aarurrh, so I knew I was fucked. But then I started thinking. If they were going to kill me why wasn’t I dead already? Had Queenie put in a good word for me? Had she seen One-Eye try to ice Handsome? Maybe I’d get a pardon. Maybe they’d even let me go. Yeah right. On Queenie’s say so? Females, even wise old mamas like Queenie, didn’t get much respect in a testosterone boy’s club like an Aarurrh tribe. And with One-Eye’s clan practically running things? The men would probably just laugh at her and kill me anyway. But I wasn’t dead yet, so...
    A big crowd surrounded a square of open space in front of the chief’s tent. The camp, as they dragged me through it, was only half repaired. The teepee skyline had more gaps in it than a shark with dental problems, but it looked like everybody had downed tools to see the pink chick get the axe.
    The chief was impressive—a massive, white-muzzled silverback with a head full of gray dreadlocks and so many white scars criss-crossing his fur it looked like somebody had written on him in Chinese. He sat on a low-slung, upholstered hassock, built to fit an Aarurrh’s lower body. It was the biggest piece of furniture I’d seen in the camp.
    He was flanked by a bunch of other higher-ups. They didn’t get couches. Under their feet was a beautiful rug decorated with twisting purple and black lines that looked like a cross between Arab stuff and the Celtic knot-work from a biker’s tattoo. It was big enough to cover a basketball court. I wondered who the sucker was who had to lug that thing from camp to camp. Some poor slave most likely.
    Standing before the bigwigs, in the open space in front of the rug, were Queenie, Kitten and Handsome on one side, and One-Eye and a couple of his clan homies on the other, like plaintiffs and defendants in a trial—which I began to suspect this was. The space was square, with wooden posts pounded into the ground at the corners and roped off to keep the crowd back. The posts were taller than me and carved to look like big swords sticking into the ground. I didn’t care much for the symbolism.
    My two guards ducked me under the rope and pushed me to the center of the square, then stood at my shoulders. They carried battle-axes as tall as stop signs, with huge double blades nearly as big around.
    The chief gave me a skeptical once over while his mouthpiece, a thin Aarurrh with a face like a stuck-up bobcat and some kind of official necklace, got the show started with a long loud roar and a little ceremonial semaphore. Once the crowd simmered down he introduced the players, giving the two sides big build-ups like the ring announcer at a wrestling match, while the chief continued to look from me to One-Eye and back again like we were a nut and a bolt that just wouldn’t fit together. Then the mouthpiece finished speechifying and we got down to business.
    I was still at square one when it came to understanding Aarurrh yakking—it just sounded like cats in heat to me—but I could get the gist of the arguments that went back and forth from everybody’s gestures and tone of voice. First One-Eye said his piece, pointing at me and growling something fierce. He had to have been saying that I’d struck an Aarurrh with intent to kill and that was all there was to it.
    Handsome spoke next. It should have been Queenie, but apparently only males