Dust and dry brown rot-powder hung thick in the slanted afternoon sunlight across the northern half of the wrestling pit. For the space of three breaths after the twenty-foot crossbeam crashed into the stone drainage trench, nobody in the four galleries spoke or moved. The sudden absence of the timber’s groaning roar left a ringing quiet broken only by the drip of displaced trench water, the steady three-second plink of Mother Renn’s red water-clock. The ragged, open-mouthed breathing of the young man kneeling beside the splintered post.
On the southern podium, Mother Renn’s tally clerk looked from the fallen beam to the grey-haired lodge mistress. Mother Renn had not left her post by the brass stopcock. There, the red water droplets continued to fall through the glass nozzle into the lower metal tube. Her scarred jaw was set hard, her eyes fixed on the center of the pit.
“The water is still falling,” Mother Renn said. Her deep voice carried clearly across the stunned tiered arena. “Neither man has stepped wholly outside the thirty-foot chalk. The stone hasn’t been taken from the box. Count.”
The clerk swallowed, picked up his dropped boxwood stick from the podium planks, checked the graduated glass metal tube where sixty-six drops now rested. Then he found his voice. “Sixty-six. Sixty-seven.”
