Shardik (41 page)

In less than a year, however, Shardik had grown sullen and lethargic, afflicted with worms and plagued by a canker which caused him to scratch dolefully at one ear until it was ragged and misshapen. Lacking both Rantzay and the Tuginda, and hampered by the confined space and
the
continual gloomy savagery of the bear, Kelderek abandoned the hope he had once entertained of recommencing the singing worship. Indeed all
the
girls, though assiduous in feeding Shardik, ministering to his needs and cleaning and tending the building that had become his
dwelling, now feared him so greatl
y that little by
little
it became accepted that to come near him, unless protected by the bars, no longer formed any part of their services. Only
Kelderek
, of all their company, still knew in his heart that he must stand before him, offering his life for no reward and uttering again and again hi
s prayer of self-dedication, ‘Se
nandril, Lord Shardik. Accept my life. I am yours and ask nothing of you in return.’ Yet even as he prayed he answered himself, ‘Nothing -except your freedom and my power.’

During the long months of searching, in the course of which two girls had died, he had contracted a malarial fever, and this returned from time to time, so that he lay shivering and sweating, unable to eat and - particularly when
the
rains were beating on
the
wooden roof above - seeming to himself, in confused dreams, to be once more following Shardik out of
the
trees to destroy
the
appalled and stricken hosts of Bekla: or a
gain, he would be seeking Melath
ys, plunging down the Ledges in the starlight towards a fire which receded before him, while from among
the
trees the voice of the Tuginda called, ‘Commit no sacrilege, now of all times.’

He came to know the days when he could be sure that Shardik would make no move -
the
days when he could stand beside him as he lay brooding and speak to him of the city, of
the
dangers that beset it and its need of divine protection. At times, unpredictably, there would return upon him
the
inward sense of being elevated to some high plane beyond
that
of human life. But now, instead of attaining to that pinnacle of calm, shining silence from which he had once looked down upon the outskirts of the
Ortelga
n forest, it seemed that he joined Lord Shardik upon the summit of some terrible, cloud-swirling mountain, a place of no-life, solitary and distant as the moon. Through the darkness and icy vapour, from the pit of stars flaring in
the
black sky,
there
would sound rolling thunder,
the
screaming of birds, half-heard voices - unintelligible cries of warning or fierce triumph. These were borne to him crouching on the edge of a visionary and dreadful precipice, enduring
this
world of suffering without refuge. From
pole to pole there was none
left in the world to suffer but he; and always, in this trance, he was powerless to move - perhaps no longer human, but changed to a rock buried under snow or split by lightning, an anvil hammered by a cold power in regions unendurable to human life. Usually, his sense of this awful sphere was mercifully dulled - superimposed, as it were, upon a continuing recollection of fragments of his lucid self, like reflections upon the visible bed of a river: as that he was king of Bekla, that sharp blades of straw were pricking the flesh of his legs, that the open gate to the Rock Pit was forming a square of bright light at the far end of the dark hall. Once or twice, however, he had become enclosed and locked altogether, like a fish in ice, among the gulfs of time where the mountains lived out their lives and crumbled and the stars, in millennia, consumed away to darkness: and, falling to the ground, had Iain oblivious beside the shaggy body of Shardik; until at last, hours later, waking with a profound sense of grief and desolation, he had limped his way out of the hall to stand in the sun with the exhausted, undemanding relief of one cast up from shipwreck.

Una
ble to comprehend whatever truth
might lie hidden in this terrible place to which, as by a compass-needle, he was guided by his unaltered devotion to Shardik, he would nevertheless seek, clumsily and conscientiously, to derive from what he suffered some meaning, some divine message applicable to the fortunes of the people and the city. Sometimes he knew in himself that these soothsayings were contrived, all but mendacious, the very stuff of a mountebank. Yet often, those which he knew most surely to have been cobbled out of incomprehension, self-reproach and a mere sense of duty would appear later to have been fulfilled, to have borne actual fruit; or at all events were received by his followers as evident truth; while the nebulous searchings of his integrity to compass in words what lay, like a half-remembered dream, beyond his power to recall or express, would evoke only shaken heads and shrugged shoulders. Worst of all, in its effect on others
, was the honest silence of hum
ility.

Shardik absorbed him night and day. The spoils of Bekla - to the barons,
the
soldiers and even to Sheldra and her companions so precious and gratifying an end in themselves — were no lure to him. The honour and state devised for the king he accepted, and the role which gave heart and assurance to barons and people he fulfilled with a profound sense both of their need and his own fitness through election by God. And yet, musing in the gaunt, echoing hall, watching the bear in its fits of rage and of torpor, he was filled with the conviction that after all, what he had accomplished - all that seemed
miraculous and near-divine in human terms - was of no importance in contrast to what remained to be revealed. Once, in the days when he had been concerned with no more than to get his hunter’s living, he had thought only of what was necessary to that narrow purpose, like a peasant leaving unconsidered the whole world beyond his own strip of land. Then the power of Shardik had touched him and in the eyes of himself and others he had entered upon the world as an emissary of God, seeing plainly and certainly, through the knowledge divinely imparted to him, both the nature of his task and what was needed for its performance. As the instrument of Shardik he had been accorded a unique perception, self-sufficient and free from all ignorance and uncertainty. In the light of that perception everything had been found by others to have the value which he himself attached to it: and everything had fallen into the place to which he had appointed it. The High Baron of
Ortelga
had proved to be of small moment; yet all-important his own appar
ently
suicidal determination to carry to Quiso the news of Shardik’s corning. But now, though Shardik was lord in Bekla, this perception no longer seemed, to himself, sufficient. Continually, he was haunted by an intuitive sense that all that had happened as yet had scarcely touched the fringe of the truth of God, that he himself was still blind and that some great disclosure remained to be sought and found, to be prayed for and granted - a revelation of the world in the light of which his own state and monarchy would signify as
little
to himself as to the huddled creature in
the
cage, with its staring pelt and evil-smelling dung. Once, in a dream, he found himself robed and crowned for the festival of victory held every year upon the onset of the rains, but paddling his hunter’s raft along the southern shore of Ortelga. ‘Who is Shardik ?’ called the beautiful
Melathys
, walking among the trees. ‘I cannot tell,’ he called back. ‘I am only an ignorant, simple man.’ At this she laughed, took off her great golden collar and tossed it easily to him across the reeds; but he, in the act of catching it, knew it to be worthless and let it fall into
the
water. Waking to see Shardik rambling back and forth beyond the bars, he rose and, as the dawn lightened, stood a long while in prayer. ‘Take back all else, Lord Shardik; my power and kingdom if you will. But give me fresh eyes to perceive your truth - that truth to which I cannot yet attain.
Senandril,
Lord Shardik. Accept my life if you will, but grant, at whatever cost, that I may find what I still seek.’

It was this all-demanding austerity of preoccupation which, more than his readiness to confront the bear, more than prophecy or any other attribute, maintained his power and authority over the city and established the awe felt for him not
only by the people but also
by those very barons who could not forget that he had once been nothing but an Ortelgan hunter. There was none to whom it was not plain that he was in truth the prisoner of his own all-consuming integrity, that he took no pleasure in the jewels and wine,
the
girls and flowers and feasti
ng of Bekla. ‘Ah, he speaks
with
Lord Shardik
‘ they said, watching as he paced through the streets and squares to the soft beat of the gong. ‘We live in the sun, for he takes
the
darkness of
the
city on himself.’ “G
ives me the cold shivers, he doe
s,’ said the courtesan Hydraste to her pretty friend, as they leaned from her window in the hot afternoon.
‘You
couldn’t do even that much, to him,’ replied
the
friend, flicking a ripe cherry down upon a young man passing below, and leaning a
little
further over the sill.

To himself, his integrity was unforced, rooted in the compulsion to seek, to discover a truth which he felt to lie far beyond the fortune he had made for
Ortelga
, far beyond his own role of priest-king. In his prophecies and interpretations he was less betraying this integrity than compounding with necessity in the face of his need for more time if he was to attain to what he sought; just as a doctor, feeling himself on the brink of discovering at last the true cause of a disease, may nevertheless continue to treat it by accepted methods, not from any intention to deceive or exploit, but because until he succeeds in his great aim there is nothing better. Kelderek, who might have drugged Shardik to be sure of standing safely before him on appointed days in the presence of the people; who might have introduced human sacrifice or elaborate forms of compulsory worship, so great was the veneration in which he was held, endured instead the danger of death and the twilit solitude of the hall where he prayed and meditated continually on an uncomprehended mystery. Something there was to be discovered, something attainable only at great cost, the one thing worth attaining, beside which all older religious notions would appear pathetic
fragments of superstition, an esoteri
cism as shallow as
the
whispered secrets of children. This it was that would constitute Shardik’s supreme gift to men. And thus he himself knew that his priesthood, which seemed to others incapable of further magnification and therefore essentially procedural and unchanging in its nature, a matter of service and rites performed in due season, was in reality an all-demanding search, during which time was always passing and his steps never covered the same ground twice. This it was which by its tremendous nature would transcend - even justify - all wrong done in the past, all violence to the truth, even - even - and here the trend of his thoughts would fail, giving place to the pictu
re of the road to Gelt at moonse
t and himself standing silent while Ta-
Kominion
led his prisoner away down the valley. Then he would groan and fall to striding up and down outside the bars, beating fist on palm as he strove to break his train of thought, and tossing his head as though in imitation of the afflicted Shardik.

For the memory of the Tuginda gave him no peace, even
though
the event had made it plain that Ta-Kominion must have been right and that she would have thwarted the miraculous gift of victory and frustrated
the
conquest of Bekla. After Shardik had been brought to the city and all but the southerly provinces round Ikat had recognized the rule of the conquerors, the barons had decided, with Kelderek’s full agreement, that it would be both magnanimous and prudent to send messengers to assure
the
Tuginda that her error of judgment had been forgotten and that the time was now ripe for her to take he
r place beside them; for notwith
standing all that
Kelderek
had come to signify, no Ortelgan could lose that numinous awe for Quiso with which he had been instilled from birth, and not a few were uneasy that in their new pros
perity their leaders should evi
d
ently
have set aside the Tuginda. It was known that two priestesses had been killed between the corning of Shardik and the battle of the Foothills, and as long as the conquest of Bekla remained to be consolidated by subduing the provinces, the barons had been able to tell their followers that they had begged the Tuginda to remain in Quiso for her own safety. Many had expected that Shardik, once recovered, would be taken to Quiso, as in days long ago. Kelderek, however, from the time when he had set out from
Bekla
to find the bear, had never intended this; for if he were to go with Shardik to the Tuginda’s island he must forfeit his supremacy as priest-king, while without the actual presence of Shardik he could no
t expect to reign in Bekla. With
Shardik in Bekla and the northerly provinces subdued, there could no longer be any plausible reason for
the
Tuginda’s absence except her own refusal to come, and the messengers - of whom Neelith had been one - had been instructed to stress to her the harm that might well be done to the people’s confidence and to the fighting power of the army were she to continue to grudge
Kelderek
his superior power of divining the will of Shardik, and to show petty
spite by sulking in Quiso and the
reby depriving the people of all she meant to them.