THE TUFUGA HAD SET UP A TATU BENCH BY THE FIRE, and a long queue wound around the room. Trula was making potato soup. The apothecarist was treating Arthur and a roomful of others whose symptoms were the same. Jago stood in the middle of the room, the center of a kind of chaos that was new to him.
Will Bluebird yelled out, “Who can it be, banging at the door, that isn’t here already?”
Two men stood there with hatchets and ropes. Behind them stood so many more that Will Bluebird could not see where the crowd ended. Utlag had sent for the stag, they said. Will Bluebird closed the door. Jago went to a crack in the wall and looked out.
Utlag had sent a hundred. Jago had sixteen, plus Arthur’s five. If Arthur had been well and fighting, or if they had Jago’s cat, they could almost have called it even. Jago was at the wall a long time and finally said, “Give them the stag.”
“No, we can fight,” said the apothecarist.
Jago raised his eyebrow. “A tufuga and a formidable apothecarist. Right. Listen, if you don’t give up the stag, we’ll be bloodied, and Arthur and these kelps will be taken anyway.” The two of them crossed their arms and stared at one another, until Jago said, “You know what your noble runner would say.”
The stag rose when the mob came for him. For a long moment the men all stood back, in awe of the great creature he was, his face noble, his body powerful even in surrender. Then? Then they threw a set of ropes around his antlers and another set around his legs and yanked one set to the right and the other to the left, and he went down so hard the pub shook.
The tufuga followed at a distance. The hundred men dragged the stag down into the earth, pushing and folding his great bulk into the tunnels and finally forcing him to get up and lie on a cart they could pull. The tufuga crept after them. When the stag’s antlers jammed up against the tunnel walls, the men got out their hatchets. When they reached the depths of gaol, they prodded the stag with spears to force him through the gate of the arena. A crowd cheered when he looked up at them. He struggled to stand.