Fiona tied a three-foot loop in the end of the rope. She tossed it over Gretched – well over; the single strand passed over her right shoulder. Fiona reeled the rope back in and gave another toss. This time, the loop landed encircling Gretched's right hand. Fiona tugged, hooking it under and sliding it down into the sandy soup under Gretched's arm. Both top courses of the loop ran behind Gretched's dome.
"Okay, stop there," said Gretched, her head tilted back to keep the sand out of the corners of her mouth, "and reposition to get the loop over mah head." Fiona walked along the stable earth, holding the tail of the rope high in her right hand to make an angle with the sand. She gave it a wiggle to send a wave down the rope. The loop jumped over Gretched's head and wrapped below her chin. Fiona repeated the action, flopping it the other way; now the pair of ropes fell between the ogress' nose and lip. "You're awmost theyah," she said, separating the strands with her tongue, guiding one below her chin.
With more wiggling and wavering, together the two opened the loop far enough to wrap around Gretched's head. Fiona pulled, tucking the bottom of the loop deep in Gretched's right armpit. Her right arm floated up, and her body rolled to the left. "Nope!" Gretched muttered through clenched teeth. "Not yet. Get my left arm."
Fiona returned to the loop-flipping exercise, and eventually hooked the top of the loop over the extended middle finger of Gretched's left hand. Fiona walked back around behind Gretched's head, and tugged on the rope, sliding it below the sand under the ogress' left arm. For the first time in hours, Gretched pushed her arms down, into the muck, to hook the rope under both armpits. "Okay, you've got me. Haul."
Fiona feared that, with the rope arranged over Gretched's chest, she'd end up pulling her down. But what motion she could produce was horizontal, and Gretched's body rode up over the sand. This was a promising motion, but it only lasted for maybe half an inch. Gretched could feel the suction pulling the shoes off her feet; sucking her shift tight to her thighs.
Fiona grunted with exertion, but made no progress. Her lips pursed and her eyes reddened. How could this be? She'd done it, by grimm! She'd found a rope. She'd taken the murderous hunters out of the picture. She'd gotten to Gretched before she'd sucked sand. And yet still it wasn't enough. She couldn't do it. She wasn't strong enough. Snot ran out her nose, and she sniffed it back, salty mucus running down her throat.
"Lee-verage," Gretched said. Her own panic was easier to control; having the sand a half-inch farther from her nostrils really opened up a world of options. "Get you some lee-verage. Tie it off tight and bend the rope in the middle."
Fiona looked up. Of course Gretched wasn't going to give up. So neither would she. Fiona was standing on the root ball of a stout maple. She tossed the rope over a branch as thick as her leg some twelve feet off the ground, then went behind the tree and scrambled up lower branches to reach the rope on its perch. She pulled it taut, wrapped it three times around the branch, and let the loose end fall below.
Back out of the tree, she saw that the rope was already providing some support to Gretched's shoulder blades. From her stance on the rootball, Fiona grabbed the rope, about halfway between the branch and the ogre it leashed. She hung her weight on the rope, pulling it away from its diagonal.
"Dear goodness!" Gretched cried as the rope dug hard into her armpits. "Keep on it, but steady. It's working." Pulling the rope sideways produced a tremendous force, many times Fiona's already impressive nighttime weight. That, combined with the slightly-upward angle, was working! And Fiona didn't get exhausted. All she had to do was hang there and wait while the sand slowly gave way, working around Gretched's body and filling in the vacuum she left behind. The effect was almost invisibly slow, but Gretched announced "it's working" through gritted teeth. "Hurts like hell, but I can't tell you how welcome this is."
Over a minute or two, Fiona had sagged the rope a few feet down from its original taut line, and Gretched had oozed perhaps an inch and a half closer to the tree. "Now what?"
"Rope's so low it's not making progress," Gretched said. "You let go and go put the tension back on the rope in the tree. That won't take but three minutes; I won't go nowhere."
Fiona cautiously released her grip on the rope – but it drooped; Gretched was right. She wasn't going to drop back into the sand at that short time scale. Fiona scrambled back up the tree, rewound the rope, and repeated the exercise. It worked a little better this time, because the rope had just a bit more upward slope, and there was just a little bit less of Gretched under the sand to pull against.
Fiona repeated the pattern – five minutes hanging on the rope, three minutes retying it – a dozen more cycles, inching Gretched across the pit. Eventually, the angle of the rope was so steep that hanging on the rope didn't do anything; it needed to be pulled on the diagonal, and there was nothing to pull against. "I'm going to try another branch," Fiona said. She liberated the rope, now with several more feet of slack, and tied it off to a branch reaching behind the tree. This restored the shallow angle from the beginning of the project, and Fiona got back to work.
Her legs ached from climbing the tree. Her arms burned from hanging on the rope. Her hands chafed. But Fiona figured those pains were nothing compared to the tremendous abrasions that must be tearing through the ogress' ribs. She kept at it.
Steady progress eventually pulled Gretched's arms and shoulders above the surface. The rope was stained red where it emerged from her armpits. Fiona kept at it. The task slowly eased as the ogress' bulk was extracted from the sucking sand.
Ultimately, Gretched's bum began to slide up the mud that formed the bank under the surface of the sand puddle. As her thighs emerged, she finally had enough purchase to dig her heels into the mud, push off some roots with her hands, and heave her body onto the root ball next to Fiona. She lay there on her side, exhausted, eyes closed. The rope still passed through Fiona's hands, and wound around Gretched's heaving body. Bloodstains blossomed out along her muddy shift.
Gretched took a series of deep breaths. Blew them out through tight lips to steady herself. "Well, that really wasn't so bad, was it?" she said, chuckling, and then buckling a bit in pain.
Fiona looked at the ogress. The adrenaline that had fueled her body for hours drained. Relief washed over her, and she began to sniffle.
"Hey now," Gretched said, still lying on her side, "what are you crying for? Seem t'me you were always on the safe end of that rope."
Fiona fell onto Gretched's significantly larger form, wrapped her arms around her, and buried her face in Gretched's broad bicep. She sobbed.
A quarter of an hour passed, both creatures lying in the same exhausted heap, even the energy to cry drained out of Fiona.
A few blackbirds at the crest of the ridge gave a gentle chirp. Fiona's ears perked. Sunrise might be less than an hour away. Gretched, evidently so calm after being nearly drowned, might not be so delighted to discover her rescuer was really a human. She sat up, torn. She should really help Gretched get back to her camp, but she didn't want to rush the exhausted ogress.
Gretched noticed Fiona's motion, and connected it to the approaching dawn. "Boy, you sure are serious about curfew!"
"Uh, no, that's Dragon. You really don't want to get someone mad when they can cook you, you know what I mean?" Fiona said with an awkward grin. "But I should help you clean up, and get you home, yes?"
"Oh, I'm sure I'll be fine," Gretched said, "it's amazing how perky you feel when you're not under a few tons of wet cement!" She sat up, wincing at the pain in her armpits.
"Sorry I tore off all your skin," Fiona offered lamely.
"It was that or leave it all in there," Gretched smirked, nodding at the puddle. "Why don't you help me dress these little scrapes on our way back, and I can hike up the hill on my own." Gretched pushed herself to her feet, and Fiona followed.
The ogres walked a couple miles back up into the woods, Gretched spreading her arms away from her body like a marionette, until the track crossed a little stream. Gretched reached down and tore long strips from around the hem of her shift. She ripped a few squares off the end of the strips to make wipes to go with the bandages. She rinsed them out in the cold water, and handed them to Fiona.
Then, as Fiona looked on, Gretched hiked her shift up over her bum, worked it onto her elbows, and flipped it over her shoulders, baring her entire backside, including the raw, bleeding skin on the rolls of her torso. Fiona looked away awkwardly, but Gretched, facing away, arms held up like chicken wings, didn't notice. "Yeah, so go ahead and just scrub those wounds right out, if you'd be so kind."
Fiona grimaced, then held out a wet rag at arms' length and gently patted the gouge behind Gretched's right armpit. Gretched sucked a sharp breath, but said "no, that's not goan to work. You're not spritzing me with perfume, you're digging out all the dirt. Put yer back into it!" she bellowed, snapping Fiona right back to those weeks of exercises.
Fiona took a step forward and winced at the muddy, bloody paste dribbling down the expanse of green girth before her, but then focused on the task at hand. She shoved the rag deep into the wound, scrubbing it hard. Gretched tensed; she hollered "oh yeah – that's it – keep going – right there" too loudly. Her words motivated, but her tone made it clear that the pain was intense.
Fiona tried to block out the sound. The exposed tissue was a bloody red pulp, which wasn't really like anything she'd seen before, and the skin around it green and unlike her natural skin, so she could distance herself from the body she scrubbed. She imagined she was scrubbing old beans out of a pot.
At Gretched's insistence, Fiona kept at the task, rewetting the rags, until the last grain of sand she could see in the setting moonlight had been washed out. She did the same for her left arm. When all was done, she rinsed and wrung the long bandage strips, then wrapped them around Gretched's back and over her chest to bandage up the damage.
"Well, you had best be going," Gretched said, turning to face Fiona. "Nice of you to do that; I couldn't have done it without you." She wriggled her filthy gown back down over her hips, the now-truncated hemline settling well above her knees.
"Oh, hah hah, I know, right? Not enough arms!" Fiona giggled, mimicking tying the bandages around herself.
"Sure, that, and also the part about not dying. That really made my whole day, Fiona."
Fiona bit her lip, then leaned in to embrace Gretched, resting her head against the collarbone of the bigger ogress. She deposited a few more tears onto a filthy shirt that would never know the difference.
"You did me right, kiddo. Now you get back past that dragon before you're served up as ogre flambé." Gretched grabbed Fiona by the shoulders, pointed her down the track towards the dry plain, and pushed her on her way.