“I shall catch a wink of sleep,” the gull said, tucking his head under his wing.
***
The Protector, seeing his troops pushing the city’s youth into the river, decided there was no reason why he should be obstructed further by these bucks and maidens fresh out of school dressed up as an honour guard. He simply lurched into them, shoving them aside like underbrush, and grabbed Sensibella by the scruff.
“Remove your paws from her, you beast.” A blonde-tipped, snub-nosed maiden spitting venom.
“I paid for her. She’s mine for the night,” Meatbreath growled. His escort with the beautiful tail fell passive. But her mouth muscles were rippling. Oh god – she was going to speak. Please, not that! He could put up with her silent squirming rage, there was no way he could endure another word bath from the loquacious bitch. And now her vainglorious buck was coming at him with menace in his eyes.
“Paws off her, Meatbreath. Or you’ll be upside-down in the river.”
Meatbreath! The upstart stud had called him Meatbreath! He took his claws off the girl and went for the challenger. This wasn’t a taunting contest to see which of them would back down. This was a fight to the finish. These things happen sometimes. They can be fatal. He had the force and weight. Let’s see what the kid had.
Bandit, with the unyielding absoluteness of immaturity, put his head down and charged at his parent like a truck. The larger raccoon lost balance, turned the angle of force into a roll, and was back on his feet before the challenger found his throat. Bandit missed the jugular and ended up with a mouthful of ruff. And the adversary’s ruff was enormous – he could chew into it for seconds and not get near the muscle. Meatbreath sat on his haunches, recovered his axis and rearranged his mass – a whole planet, his girth like a sort of equator. He raised his head and began to shake his mane. He shook it back and forth, and Bandit flew this way and that in the air, still hanging on.
“Oh, you have come to rescue me from the sulphurous breath of that Vile Monster,” Sensibella called out to him. Then in a softer voice, she explained to Flaxentips: “He’s my paramour, and his loyalty is beyond question.”
“So I see. But do you not think the Protector will kill him?”
“He is prepared to die for me,” Sensibella said. “Who can kill such a fine spirit?”
“The Protector can. And afterwards he’ll jump up and down on him until your Paramour resembles roadkill.”
The other members of the Honour Guard thought the same. They had made a space for fighters, a circle of pitying eyes and sagging ears. In a fight to the finish, it is foolhardy to intervene.
Bandit, still clinging to the ruff behind the ear, changed his position so that he was riding Meatbreath’s back. Meatbreath promptly rolled over and pinned the cub underneath him. He lay on him with his vast stomach in the air, hearing the cub’s ribs crack and feeling him struggle for breath. It was then that Bandit, in a last act of defiance before he perished, reached up and tore his father’s ear off.
Meatbreath jumped to his feet, spraying blood over Flax and Sensibel. His eyes were black holes of blind rage. A terrible darkness filled his brain. He began to salivate. His tail lashed like the worst kind of Drooler, those dogs with the black and tan muzzles who like to taste blood. Except they have two big ears. He only had one. The other was in his son’s mouth.
“I’m done for,” Bandit thought, seeing the giant raccoon measure his leap. Goodbye world. Goodbye Mom. Goodbye sibs. Goodbye Sensibella of the Pond with her breath like apples and her sighs like the breeze passing through willows. His short life flashed by in memory … wrestling with his cousin in the bulrushes. Oh, how she could wrestle …
In the instant before Meatbreath landed on him, Bandit performed the osoto-gari he’d learned from Sensibella. His adversary fell with a thud that made the stage shake. He hadn’t prepared himself for the angle of the fall, and something else broke away beside his ear. What broke was his reputation. For the first time in his meteoric career, he’d been beaten. And in public view by a cub. He wasn’t a fighter. He usually got his way by lying and bluffing, and aggressive force of personality. Like he’d done with that other trumped-up warrior chieftain who’d challenged him earlier in the Dead Zone.
Then he remembered. That one had called him Meatbreath too.
“Get up on your feet, Meatbreath,” Slypaws said. “We have some unfinished business.”
The woman in the crowd. The one who had drilled a capsule of pure fury into his skull as he’d passed.
“Bandit, will you give him back his ear? No, don’t look around for it. It’s in your mouth.”
“Who in the hell are you?”
“I am just another one of your conquests. The ones without names.”
“And you expect me to apologize? You know how the game is played. It’s Custom.”
“But you have given me a name, see? You made me a Clan Mother. I am Slypaws of the River Clan at the Islands.”
Bandit spat the ear at his father’s feet. “To the loser goes the ear.”
“Congratulations! And this is your son. In point of fact, my son! He seems to be full of vigour. What are you complaining about?”
“What you do to maidens is what you do to everything. You manhandle us, then throw us in a dumpster.”
“I don’t know,” Meatbreath said, “that this is the time for a lesson in etiquette. My High Guard is pushing your young people into the river. Pretty soon, they’ll be crayfish snacks.”
“This,” Sensibella said, “is a perfect time for etiquette.”
Meatbreath wiped away the blood flowing over his left eye. “I’ve got some etiquette for you, honey. Get a life. You’re not a dumb coonette. You’ve got attitude in every hair in your tail.”
“You are nothing without an army.”
“Well, we’ll see how it turns out. Right now, I’m hungry. Fighting gives a guy the munchies. As soon as this special military operation is done I’m going to hit the food.”
“Why don’t you eat your ear?” Touchwit said.
“Oh, god. Another one. Have you got any more cubs to inflict on me?”
“Indeed, I have. And I expect he’ll be here shortly,” Slypaws said.
“Oh yeah. The one who called me a bad name. He happens to be lying on a marble slab in the Dead Zone with his head broken. With his patsy army strewn all around him.”
Lusty chanting from the direction of the river. It was the victory chant of the High Guard. The mean-minded, spirit-breaking bullying without even a gesture of respect for the opponents who had made the mistake of challenging them. They directed their chant at the line of defeated raccoons floating downriver with the current in the moonlight.
“That’s the end of you lot,” Meatbreath said, picking up his ear. “Now I’ll go and eat some ribs with my real sons, unless you have more cubs.”
A high-pitched, lyrical call to the south. The raccoons on the stage pricked up their ears. The defeated fighters in the river heard it too, and knew. There is no sound in the world like it. The ancient, thrilling war cry of the River Clan in battle.
