"It was simply an accident, Dayhan. The glacier had nothing to do with it."
"I trod on tabooed ground. I defied him."
"Man makes the taboos and the punishments and the sacrifices!"
"So you have said, my Lord, and yet—"
"I have taught you truth. You walked alone and without harm on tabooed ground. You must tell that to your people. The harm came to you after you found us, Dayhan—from Baiel. Only man is cruel to man, not the gods."
I pulled her arm around my shoulder and we began the slow, painful walk back to the village. We had to stop frequently to rest. Twice I loosed the tourniquet to permit the blood to circulate in her lower leg.
It was four hours before we reached the edge of the forest. There two of my men met us. They had begun to search the forest for me when Baiel returned to the village alone. We improvised a stretcher for Dayhan and carried her between us. The bleeding of her wound had stopped. With a pinpoint Hayden beam, I turned a drift of snow into steam and used the boiled water residue to cleanse the caked blood away from the cut. I seared a strip of skin and used it as a bandage. On the gently swaying stretcher Dayhan closed her eyes and slept.
When we were still a quarter of a mile from the village, the chief and a small band of his hunters met us on the forest trail.
"The sun god speaks to us in a giant voice," the chief said. "It thunders in every corner of our village!"