Shardik (76 page)

A little
before noon, reaching the furthe
r end of one of the island
-
like promontories, he saw below him a pool at the mouth of a creek. Scrambling down the bank, he knelt among the stones to drink, and on raising his head immediately saw before him, some yards away on the creek’s muddy, further shore, a bear’s prints, clear as a seal on wax. Looking about him, he felt almost sure that this must be the place spoken of by the fishermen. It was plainly an habitual drinking-place, bear-marked so unmistakably that a child could have perceived the signs; and certainly visited at some time since the previous day.

To have seen the prints before his own feet had marked the mud was a stroke of luck which should make it simple, a mere matter of patience, to gain sight of the bear itself. All he needed was a safe place of concealment from which to watch. Splashing through the shallows, he made his way back as far as t
he next inlet, a long stone’s th
row from
the
pool where he had knelt to drink. From here he once more climbed the promontory to the ollaconda tree and, having made sure that he could observe the shore of the creek, lay down among the roots to wait. The wind, as the elder had said, was from the north, the forest on his left was so thick that nothing could approach without being heard; and in the last resort he could take to the river. Here he was as safe as he could reasonably hope to be.

While the slow time passed with the movement of clouds, the whine of insects and the
sudden, raucous cries and scutte
rings of water-fowl on
the
river, he fell to reflecting on how the killing of Shardik might be accomplished. If he were right, and
this
was a drinking-place
to which
the
bear regularly returned, it should afford him a good opportunity. He had never taken part in killing a bear, nor had he ever heard of anyone, except
the
Beklan nobleman of whom
Bel
-ka-
Trazet
had spoken, who had attempted it. Certainly a solitary bow seemed altogether too dangerous and uncertain. Whatever
the
Bekla
n might have supposed thirty years ago, he himself did not believe that a bear could safely be killed by this means alone. Poison might have succeeded, but he had none. To try to construct any kind of trap was out of the question. The more he pondered his difficulties, the more he was forced to the conclusion that the business would be impossible unless the bear’s alertness and strength had become so much weakened that he could hope to hold it with
a
noose long enough to pierce it with several arrows. Yet how to noose a bear? Other, bizarre ideas passed through his mind - to catch poisonous snakes and by some means drop them out of
a
sack from above, while the bear was drinking; to suspend
a
heavy spear - he broke off impatiently. These childish plans were not capable of being effected. All he could do for the moment was to await the bear, observe its condition and behaviour and see whether any scheme suggested itself.

It was perhaps three hours later, and he had somewhat relaxed his vigilance, leaning his sweating forehead upon his forearm and wondering, as he closed his eyes against the river glitter, how Ankray meant to set about getting more food when what was in the house had gone, when he heard the sounds of
a
creature approaching from the undergrowth beyond
the
creek. The next moment - so
quietly
and swiftl
y may the most fateful and long-awaited events materialize - Shardik was before him, crouching upon the brink of the pool.

After war has swept across some farm or estate and gone its way, the time comes when villagers or neighbours, their fears aroused by having seen nothing of the occupants, set out for the place. They make their way across the blackened fields or up the lane, looking about them in the unnatural quiet. Soon, seeing no smoke and receiving no reply to their calls, they begin to fear the worst, pointing in silence as they come to
the
barns with their exposed and thatchless rafters. They begin to search; and at a sudden cry from one of their number come running together before an open, creaking door, where
a
woman’s body lies sprawling face down across the threshold. There is a quick scurry of rats and
a
youth
turns quickly aside, white and sick. Some of the men, setting their teeth, go inside and return, carrying the dead bodies of two children and leading a third child who stares about him, crazed beyond weeping. As that farm then appears to* those men, who knew it in former days, so Shardik appeared now to
Kelderek
: and as they look upon the ruin and misery about them, so Kelderek looked at Shardik drinking from the pool.

The ragged, dirty creature was gaunt as though half-starved. Its pelt resembled some ill-erected tent draped clumsily over the frame of the bones. Its movements had a tremulous, hesitant weariness, like those of some old beggar, worn out with denial and disease. The wound in its back, half-healed, was covered with a great, liver-coloured scab, cracked across and closing and opening with every movement of the head. The open and suppurating wound in the neck was plainly irritant, inflamed and torn as it was by the creature’s scratching. The blood-shot eyes peered fiercely and suspiciously about, as though seeking on whom to revenge its misery; but after a
little
the head, in the very act of drinking, sank forward into the shallows, as though to keep it raised were a labour too grievous to be borne.

At length the bear stood up and, gazing in one direction and a
nother, stared for a moment dire
ctly
up at the mass of roots among which
Kelderek
lay in hiding. But it seemed to see nothing and, as he still watched it through a narrow opening like a loophole, me belief grew in him that it was conce
rned less with what it could see
than with scenting the air and listening. Although it had not perceived him in his hiding-place, yet something else - or so it appeared -was making it uneasy; something not far off in
the
forest. If this were so, however, it was evid
ently
not so much disturbed as to make off. For some while it remained in the shallows, more than once dropping its head as before, with the object, as Kelderek now perceived, of bathing and cooling the wound in its neck. Then, to his surprise, it began to wade from the pool into deeper water. He watched, puzzled, as it made towards a rock some
little
way out in the river. Its chest, broad as a door, submerged, then its shoulders and finally, though with difficulty, it swam to the rock and dragged itself out upon a ledge. Here it sat, facing, across the river, the distant eastern shore. After a time it made as though to plunge into midstream, but
twice stopped short. Then a listl
essness seemed to come upon it. Scratching dolefully, it lay down upon the rock as some old, half-blind dog might crouch in the dust, and covered its face with its fore-paws. Kelderek remembered what the Tuginda had said—‘He is trying to return to his own country. He is making for the
Telthearna
and will cross it if he can.’ If such
a
creature could weep, then Shardik was weeping.

To see strength failing, ferocity grown helpless
, power and domination with
ered by pain as plants by drought - such sights give rise not only to pity but also - and as naturally - to aversion and contempt. Our sorrow for our dying captain is sincere enough, yet we must nevertheless make haste to leave this sunken fire before the increasing cold can overtake our own fortunes. For all his glorious past, it is only right
that
he should be abandoned, for we have to live - to thrive if we can - and setting aside all other considerations, the truth is that he has become irrelevant to the things that should now properly concern us. How odd it is
that
until now no one, appar
ently
, should have perceived that after all he was never particularly wise; never particularly brave; never particularly honest, particularly truthful, particularly clean.

Upon
Kelderek
‘s inward eye flashed once more the figure of
Melathys
standing in the light of the sunset, she the once unattainable, who but two days before had held him in her arms and told him with tears that she loved him; she whose gay courage had made light of the foul danger and evil amidst which he had been compelled against his will to leave her to take her chance; she who in herself more than outweighed his lost kingdom and ruined fortunes. Hatred rose up in him against the mangy,
decrepit brute on the rock, the
very source and image of that superstition which had made of
Melathys
a brigands’ whore and of Bel-ka-Trazet a fugitive; had brought the Tuginda close to death and now stood between him and his love. That
this
wretched creature should still have power to thwart him and drag him down together with itself! As he thought of all that he had lost and all that he still might lose - probably would lose - he shut his eyes and gnawed at his wrist in his angry frustration.

‘Curse you!’ he cried sil
ently
in his heart. ‘Curse you, Shardik, and your supposed power of God! Why don’t you save us from
Zeray
, we who’ve lost all we possessed for your sake, we whom you’ve ruined and deceived? No, you can’t save us: you can’t save even the women who’ve served you all their lives! Why don’t you die and get out of the way? Die, Shardik, die, die!’

Suddenly there came to his ear what seemed like faint sounds of human speech from somewhere within the forest. Fear came upon him, for since the night on
the
battle
fie
ld there had remained with him a horror of the distant voices of persons unseen. Strange sounds were these, too, mysterious and hard to account for, resembling less the voices of men than of children - crying, it seemed, in pain or distress. He sprang up and as he did so heard, louder than the voices, a heavy splashing close at hand. Looking behind him, he recoiled in terror to see the bear wading ashore at the very foot of the bank below. It was glaring up at him, shaking the water from its pelt and snarling savagely. In panic he turned and began to force his way through the undergrowth, snatching and tearing at the bushes and creepers in his way. Whether the bear was pursuing him he could not tell. He dared not look back, but plunged on over the top of the hillock, scarcely feeling the grazes and scratches which covered his limbs. Suddenly, as he forced his way through a tangle of branches, he found no ground beneath his feet. He clutched at a branch which broke under his weight, lost his balance and pitched forward down the steep bank of the creek bounding the promontory on its landward side. His forehead struck a tree-root and he rolled over and lay unconscious, supine and half-submerged in mud and shallow water.

49
The
Slave-Dealer

Pain, thirst, a green dazzle of light and a murmur of returning sound. Kelderek allowed his half-opened eyes to shut again and, frowning as he did so, felt something tight and rough pressed round his head. Raising one hand, he found his fingers rubbing against a band of coarse cloth and followed it round one temple, above the eyebrow. He pressed it, and pain blazed up like a flame behind his eyeballs. He moaned and let fall his hand.

Now he remembered the bear, yet felt no more fear of it. Something - what? - had already told him that the bear was gone. The daylight - what
little
he could endure
beneath
his eyelids - was older - it must be some time since he had fallen - but it was not
this
that had reassured him. His mind began to clear and as it did so he became aware once more of the roughness of the cloth upon his forehead. And as an ominous sound, heard first faintly at a distance and then more loudly near by, at the moment of repetition thrusts its startling meaning upon him who originally heard it with indifference, so, as Kelderek’s returning senses grew keener, the significance of the cloth forced itself upon him.

He turned his head, shaded his eyes and opened them. He was lying on the bank of the creek, close to
the
muddy shallow into which he had fallen. The impression of his body was still pla
in in the mud, and the furrows e
vid
ently
made by his feet as he was dragged to the spot where he now lay. On his othe
r, shoreward side a man was sitti
ng, watching him. As
Kelderek
‘s eyes met his th
e man neith
er spoke nor altered his gaze. He was ragged and dirty, with bristling, sandy hair and a rather darker beard, heavy eyelids and a white scar on one side of his chin. His mouth hung a little open, giving him an abstracted, pensive air and showing discoloured teeth. In one hand he was holding a knife, with the point of which he kept idly st
roking and pressing the finger-ti
ps of the other.