Shardik (64 page)

‘You say that all who enter the Streels must die?’

‘Yes, from that moment
their
death is certain. One respite only there may be, but it is very rare - almost unknown. Once in a hundred years, perhaps, it may happen
that
the victim comes alive from the Streel: and then they will not touch him, for that is a sign that God has sanctified him and intends to make use of his death for some blessed and mysterious purpose of His own. Long, long ago, there was a girl who fled with her lover across
the
Bekla
n plain. Her two brothers — hard, cruel men - were following, for they meant to kill
them
both, and she saw that her lover was afraid. She was determined to save him and she stole away by night and came upon her brothers as they slept; and for his sake, because she dared not kill them, she blinded them both in
their
sleep. Later -how, I do not know - she came alone to Urtah and there she was stabbed and thr
own down as she lay in the Stree
l. But that night she climbed out alive, though wounded almost to death. They let her go, and she died in giving birth to a boy. That boy was the hero U-Deparioth, the liberator of Yelda and the first Ban of Sarkid.’

‘And that is why Elleroth knows what you have told me?’

‘He would know that and more besides, for the House of Sarkid has been honoured by the pries
ts of Urtah from that day to th
is. He would certainly have received news of what befell Lord Shardik and yourself at Urtah.’

‘How is it
that I never learned of the Stre
els in Bekla? I knew much, for men were paid to tell me all; yet this I never knew.’

‘Few know, and of them none would tell you.’

‘But you have told me!
’

She began to weep once more. ‘Now I believe what
Elleroth
said to me at Kabin. I know why his men did not hurt Lord Shardik and why he spared your life also. No doubt he was not told that you yourself had not entered the Streel. He would indeed be insistent that your life must be spared, for once he knew that Lord Shardik - and you, as he supposed - had come alive from
the
Streels, he would know, too, that neither must be touched on pain of sacrilege. Shardik’s death is appointed by God, and it is certain
–
certa
in!
‘ She seemed exhausted with grief.

Kelderek
took her hand.

‘But
saiyett, Lord Shardik is guilty
of no evil.’

She lifted her head, staring out over the dismal woods.

^‘
Shardik
has committed no evil.’ She turned and looked full into his eyes. ‘Shardik- no:
Shardik
has committed no evil!’

42
The
Way
to
Zeray

Where the track was leading he did not know, or even whether it still ran eastward, for now the trees were thick and
they
followed it in half-light under a close roof of branches. Several times he was tempted to leave altogether the faint thread of a path and simply go downhill, find a stream and follow it - an old hunter’s trick which, as he knew, often leads to a dwelling or village, though it may be with difficulty. But
the
Tuginda, he saw, would not be equal to such a course. Since resuming their journey she had spoken little and walked, or so it seemed to him, like one going where she would not. Never before had she appeared to him subdued in spirit. He recalled how, even on the Gelt road, she had stepped firmly and deliberately away down the hillside, as though undaunted by her shameful arrest at the hands of Ta-Kominion. She had trusted God then, he thought. She had known that God could afford to wait, and therefore so could she. Even before he himself had caged Shardik at the cost of Rantzay’s life, the Tuginda had known that the time would come when she would be called once more to follow
the
Power of God. She had recognized, when it came, the day of Shardik’s liberation from the imprisonment to which he himself had subjected him. What she had not foreseen was Urtah -
the
destination ordained for the bloody beast-god of the Ortelgans, in whose name his followers had
-

Unable to bear these thoughts, he flung up his head, striking one hand against his brow and slashing at the bushes with his stick.

The Tuginda seemed not to noti
ce his sudden violence, but walked slowly on as before, her eyes on the ground.

‘In Bekla,’ he said, breaking their silence, ‘I felt, many times, that I was close to a great secret to be revealed through Lord Shardik - a secret which would show men at last the meaning of their lives on earth; how to safeguard the future, how to be secure.
We
would no longer be blind and ignorant, but God’s servants, knowing how He meant us to live. Yet though I suffered much, both waking and sleeping, I never learned that secret.’

‘The doo
r was locked,’ she answered listl
essly.

‘It was I who locked it,’ he said, and so fell silent once more.

Late in the afternoon, emerging at last from
the
woods, they came to a miserable hamlet of three or four huts beside a stream. Two men who could not understand him, but muttered to each other in
a
tongue he had never heard, searched him from head to foot, but found
nothing
to steal. They would have handled and searched the Tuginda also, had he not seized one by the wrist and flung him aside. Evidently they
thought
that whatever chance of gain
there
might be was not worth
a fight, for they stood back, cursing, or so it seemed, and gesturing to him to be off. Before the Tuginda and he had gone a stone’s throw, however, a gaunt, ragged woman came running after them, held out
a
morsel of hard bread and, smiling
with
blackened teeth, pointed back towards the huts. The Tuginda returned her smile, accepting the invitation with no sign of fear and he, feeling that it mattered
little
what might befall him, made no objection. The woman, scolding shrilly at the two men standing a little distance off, seated her guests on
a
bench outside one of
the
huts and brought them bowls of thin soup containing
a
kind of tasteless, grey root
that
crumbled to fibrous shreds in the mouth. Two
other
women ga
there
d and three or four rickety, potbellied children, who stared sil
ently
and seemed to lack the energy to shout or scuffle. The Tuginda thanked the woman gravely in Ortelgan, kissing their filthy hands and smiling at each in turn.
Kelderek
sat, as he had sat the night before, lost in his thoughts and only half-aware that
the
children had begun to teach her some game with stones in the dust Once or twice she laughed and the children laughed too, and by and by one of the surly men came and offered him a clay bowl full of weak, sour wine, first drinking himself to show there was no harm.
Kelderek
drank, gravely pledging his host: then watched the moon rise and later, invited into one of
the
huts, once more lay down to sleep upon the ground.

Waking in
the
night, he went out and saw
another
man sitting cross-legged beside
a
low fire. For
a
time he sat beside him without speaking, but at length, as the man bent forward to thrust one end of a fresh branch into the glow, he pointed towards the nearby stream and said ‘Zeray?’ The man nodded and, pointing to him, repeated ‘ Zeray ?’ and, when he nodded in his turn, laughed shortly and mimicked one in flight looking behind him for pursuers.
Kelderek
shrugged his shoulders and they said no more, each sitting by the fire until daybreak.

There was no path beside the stream and the Tuginda and he followed its course with difficulty through another tract of forest, from which it came out to plunge in a series of falls down a rocky hillside. Standing on the brow, he looked out over the plain below. Some miles away on their left the mountains still ran eastward. Following
the
chain with his eye he glimpsed, far off in the east, a thin, silver streak, dull and constant in the sunlight. He pointed to it.

‘That must be the Telthearna, saiyett.’

She nodded, and after a few moments he said, ‘I doubt whether Lord Shardik will ever reach it. And if we cannot trace him when we get there, I suppose we shall never know what became of him.’

‘Either you or I,’ she answered, ‘will find Lord Shardik again. I saw it in a dream.’

After gazing intentl
y for a
little
towards the south-cast, she began to lead the way downhill among the tumbled boulders.

‘What did you see, saiyett?’ he asked, when next they rested.

‘I
was looking for some trace of Ze
ray,’ she replied, ‘but of course there is nothing to be seen from so far.’ And he, acquiescing in the misunderstanding - whether deliberate on her part or
other
wise - questioned her no
further
of Shardik.

From the foot of the hillside there stretched a wide marsh that mired them to
the
knees as
they
continued to follow the stream among pools and recd-clumps. Kelderek began to entertain a kind of fancy
that he, like one in an old tale
, was b
ewitched and changing, not swiftl
y, but day by day, from a man to an animal. The change had begun at the Vrako and continued imperceptibly until now, when he wandered, like a beast in a field, pent within land not of his own choosing and where neither places nor people had names. The power of speech was gradually leaving him too, so that already he was able, through long, waking hours, not only to be silent but also actually to think nothing, his human awareness retracted to the smallest of points, like the pupil of a cat’s eye in sunlight; while his life, continued by
the
sufferance of others, had become a meaningless span of existence before death. And more immediate to him now than any human regret or shame were simply
the
sores and other painful places beneath the sweat-stiffened hide of his clothes.

Crossing
the
marsh after some hours,
they
came at last upon a track and then to a village, the only one he had seen east of the Vrako and
the
poorest and most wretched he could remember. They were resting a short distance outside it when a man carrying a faggot of brushwood passed them and Kelderek, leaving the Tuginda sitting beside the track, overtook him and asked once more the way to
Zeray
. The man pointed south-eastward, answering in
Bekla
n, ‘About half a day’s journey: you’ll not get there before dark.’ Then, in a lower tone and glancing across at the Tuginda, he added, ‘Poor old woman - the lik
es of her to be going to Zeray
‘
Kelderek
must have glanced sharply at him for he added quickly, ‘No business of mine - she don’t look well, that’s all. Touch of fever, maybe,’ and at once went on his way with his burden, as though afraid that he might already have said too much in this country where the past was sharp splinters embedded in men’s minds and an ill-judged word a false step in
the
dark.

They had hardly reached the first huts, the Tuginda leaning heavily upon
Kelderek
‘s arm, when a man barred
their
way. He was dirty and unsmiling,
with
blue tattoo-marks on his cheeks and the lobe of one ear pierced by a bone pin as long as a finger. He resembled none that Kelderek could remember to have seen among the multi-racial trading throngs of Bekla. Yet when he spoke it was in a thick, distorted Beklan, one word making do for another.

‘You walk from?’

Kelderek
pointed north-westward, where the sun was beginning to set.

‘High places trees? All through you walk?’ . ‘Yes, from beyond
the
Vrako. We’re going to Zeray. Let me save you trouble,’ said
Kelderek
. ‘We’ve nothing worth taking: and this woman, as you can see, is no longer young. She’s exhausted.’

‘Sick. High places trees much sick. Not sit down here. Go away.’

‘She’s not sick only tired. I beg you -‘

‘Not sit down,’ shouted the man fiercely. ‘Go away!’