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Valentine remembered the preprocessed barbecued meat from his days masquerading as a Coastal Marine and in Solon's shortlived TMCC. Placed in a hard roll with onions and pickle relish, it was a popular sandwich.
"You don't mean-"
"Yeah. You put enough barbecue sauce on you can hide the taste. Ribstrips are ground and pressed legworm."
* * * *
Human instinct is to join a crowd, and Valentine gave in to it the next morning. Everyone in the party save Duvalier came along to watch events.
At breakfast, mixing with the Bulletproofs, he'd learned a good deal about what to expect out of the contest. The challenge was fairly simple, a mixture of lacrosse and one-on-one basketball.
The two sides lined up at either end of an agreed field, roughly a thousand yards apart. At the Bulletproofs side, a line of short construction stakes with red blasting tape stood about ten yards out from the crowd, and the only one at the line was the Dispatcher.
Valentine decided there was probably an interesting story having to do with the rifle range of an experienced marksman behind it, but didn't press the issue. The two contestants each went to the center of the field, carrying only a legworm starting hook. The referee, usually either a medical man or a member of the clergy, would be in the center of the field with a basketball. He or she would toss it high enough in the air to dash out of the way before it came back into crook-swinging distance, and the contest would end when one contestant brought the basketball to his side.
"Why a basketball?" Valentine asked a Bulletproof rider who was also explaining the rules to his young son. Nothing was happening yet. The Dispatcher and some of his riders were meeting their opposite numbers in the Wildcats, presumably negotiating the recompense that would be paid.
"You know the answer, Firk. Tell him," the father suggested.
The boy shook his head and shrank against his father. Valentine turned away to save the boy embarrassment and looked out across the dew-spangled field, recently hayed. Opportunistic spiders had woven their webs on the stalks, creating tiny pieces of art like cut glass in the lingering summer sunshine. Some operational farms still existed in this part of Kentucky. Valentine wondered how they ran off grazing legworms.
"It's about the size of a worm egg," the father explained. "That, and basketballs are easy finds."
"No other rules?" Valentine asked.
"I see where you're going. You can't bring anything but the crook. You're stripped down to your skivvies to make sure. Not even shoes."
"Does one ever try to just brain the other and then walk back to the home side with the ball?"
"You get that sometimes, but both sides hate a plain old brawl. Slugging's no way to pump up your mojo, or your tribe's."
A stir of excitement broke out in the crowd when a wandering wild, or unreined, legworm dug a feeding tray toward the challenge field. A pair of legworms with riders hustled out at full speed for a legworm, about the rate of a trotting horse. By judicious use of the mount's bulk, the furrow was redirected.
By the time that ended the two parties had returned from the center of the challenge field. The Dispatcher looked downcast.
Valentine edged closer to the center of the line of people, but many others had the same idea.
He couldn't hear through the babble. "What's up?" people called.
Word passed quickly in ever-expanding circles. "The Wildcat challenger is a Grog! Some kind of import!"
"Ringer!"
"Damn them."
"Take a knee, everyone!" someone bellowed.
Everyone but the Dispatcher sat down. He looked around, nodded to a few, and spoke out to the squash field of foxtailed heads.
"Yes, you heard right. They've got a big Grog they're using in the challenge. Biggest one I've ever seen-even standing on all fours he's bigger than me."
Valentine judged the Dispatcher at about six-three. Ahn-Kha's size. Could there be another Golden One wandering the Cumberland Plateau?
"I saw a man challenge a Grog when I was eight," a well-muscled, shirtless man said, presumably the contestant, as everyone else had jackets or knits against the cool of the morning-warming fast as the sun rose.
"I remember that one," the Dispatcher said. "Fontrain died from his injuries. There's bad blood for this one. According to their Dispatcher, Tikka killed a man when she got taken into custody. Could be they're looking for payback.
"We're going to forfeit," he continued. "It's a hell of a ransom, but I'm not risking Tuck's head over a challenge."
