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“It is time for the match. Batey is the game.” He gestured toward the ballcourt. At the motion of his hand, thunder grumbled beneath my feet. “If you score, then we shall give you a chance to stand before the elders and defend yourself against the accusation laid against you. On behalf of the spirit lord you call the Master of the Wild Hunt, you cut a path into our country and allowed him to kill here as if he possessed the right to do so when he possesses no such right. Think how we must look at you, Cousin! We let you walk in our land as a guest, and you betrayed us.”
My head was still spinning with the vision of Vai encased in ice. “So if I score a point, I’ll be allowed to stand trial before a hostile assembly? That’s my chance?”
“If you don’t choose to speak in your own defense, it’s no skin off my nose.”
“It scarcely seems a sporting game if I’m obliged to play a game I only learned a few months ago against spirits and opia who have played for time uncounted.”
“I freely offer you a gift, Cousin.” A skull inset with beads and gems sat by his right knee, and I was sure it was watching me, for its hollow eyes gleamed. “The gift of the skill you would have achieved had you played the game for as long as these others have.”
I had to take the chances I was offered. “That seems fair. I agree only if all responsibility falls to me. If the ancestors find I am not at fault, then my brother and I are both free to go.”
“We are agreed.”
“I’ll need leather cords to tie up my skirt.”
The rabbit scribe set down its pen and tossed me a rope of braided cords. I untangled the cords and used them to secure my skirt at knee length. I still wore only my sleeveless bodice.
Thunder himself fitted me with arm guards. There was something not intrusive but intimate in the way he handled my body. He did not loom or leer, but I felt the spark all the same. Loving Vai had opened my eyes to the currents that roil the waters between people who feel attraction one for the other. But while I might have been appreciative, I was not tempted. I smiled to show I understood his game, and I stepped back politely.
He looked me up and down suggestively. “Do you play with the sword attached? Like a man? It will only get in your way.”
“I will not give the sword into anyone’s hand except my brother’s.” Although I looked around the central area, I could not see Rory. “If you bring him to me and let him watch, then I will let him hold it for me.”
“You do not ask what will happen if you do not score a point.”
“I see no need to ask,” I said.
He laughed. A second laugh echoed him in a mist of rain. At the other end of the ballcourt rose another platform. There another man sat cross-legged. He had skin the color of waves and hair like long brown seaweed: It was Thunder’s brother, Flood, he who had almost drowned me when I had been trapped beneath an overturned boat.
Vai had saved me from the flood.
Resolve steeled my heart. I would not let them intimidate me. “There’s no reason for me to play if I don’t know my brother is safe.”
“I agree,” said Thunder with a suspiciously amused smile. I scarcely had time to blink before a bedraggled saber-toothed cat appeared under the ceiba tree’s lofty roots. With amber eyes fixed on me, he limped the long painful way to the platform. When he arrived, I examined his shoulder. Like my injuries, the wounds were healing unnaturally fast. I pressed a cheek into the coarse black fur of his head, stroking behind his ears.
“I give my sword into your care until I come back for it. Wait for my signal. We may have to retreat quickly.”
I lashed the sword to his body, took a swig of the potent ginger beer, and rubbed my nose against his dry one. At last, I descended onto the ballcourt.
The stone risers, where onlookers sat, swarmed with people and spirits and creatures, some wearing the same form and others shifting through faces as if they had no face of their own. The force of all those gazes made me tremendously uncomfortable, for I preferred the shadows. The players had gathered along the walls of the ballcourt. Most looked as human as I did, but some had the heads of animals or had claws or paws or furled wings. The crowd roared as I looked around to see who would play with me, for alone I could not possibly score. Maybe this was the trick by which Thunder meant to defeat me.
A man strode out to greet me. “Reckon yee don’ know me, gal. Yee saved me from under a boat.”
I’d only briefly caught a glimpse of the frail old man I’d helped rescue from beneath a boathouse during a hurricane. This man was younger, all sinewy flesh and muscle. He looked like a person who might know how to play batey.
“My thanks.”
He grinned in a likable way, then whistled. More men and women trotted out from the shadows to join us. One introduced himself as Aunty Djeneba’s deceased husband; others were the deceased relatives of the household or kin of people I had a friendly relationship with in Expedition. They were all the spirits of dead ancestors. I knew it because they had no navels. I thanked them and shook their hands in the radical manner. The more recently dead received the gesture with smiles while the older ones were puzzled, for it was a manner of greeting they’d never before seen.
The opposing team assembled. A man pushed to the front like a captain coming to lead his troops. He looked exactly as my husband would have if he had been stripped down to the short cotton loin-skirt worn for batey by men. I stared, my mouth gone quite dry.
He had no navel. Could he be my sire? Was that the trick?
I whispered into the ear of the dead boatman. “He can’t be the opia of my husband, for my husband isn’t dead. Is he a maku?”
“He smell of cohoba and tobacco, like a Taino lord might. I know not who he is. Peradventure he have taken a dislike to yee and mean to distract yee.”
I could play that game! I took a moment to admire how well the opia had transformed himself into Vai’s skin, for his bare shoulders and chest and thighs really were quite admirable, so I admired them with a lift of my eyebrows that made his lovely eyes narrow as if he were bracing for me to cast a spear that he must bat aside.
