Shardik (77 page)

Kelderek
smiled and, despite the stabbing pain behind his eyes, raised himself on his elbows. Spitting out mud and speaking with some difficulty, he said in
Bekla
n,

‘If it was you who pulled me out of there and put this bandage on my head, thank you. You must have saved my life.’

The other nodded twice, very slightly, but gave no other sign that he had heard. Although his eyes remained fixed on
Kelderek
, his attention seemed concentrated on pressing rhythmically with the knife-point the ball of each finger in mm.

‘The bear’s gone, then,’ said
Kelderek
. ‘What brought you here? Were you hunting or are you on a journey?’

Still the man made no reply and Kelderek, recalling that he was beyond the Vrako, cursed himself for being so foolish as to ask questions. He still felt weak and giddy, but it might pass off once he was on his feet. His best course now would be to get back to Lak before sunset and see what he was fit for after a meal and a night’s sleep. He held out one hand and said, ‘Will you help me up?’

After a few moments the man, without moving, said in broken but intelligible Ortelgan, ‘You’re a long way from your island, aren’t you?’

‘How did you know I’m an Ortelgan?’ asked
Kelderek
. ‘Long way,’ repeated the man.

It now occurred to
Kelderek
to feel for the pouch in which he had been carrying the money he had brought from
Zeray
. It was gone and so were his food and his knife. This did not altogether surprise him, but certain other things did. Since he had robbed him, why had
the
man dragged him out of the creek and bound up his head? Why had he stayed to watch him and why, since he was clearly not an
Ortelga
n himself, had he spoken to him in
Ortelga
n? He said once more, tin’s time in Ortelgan, ‘Will you help me up?’

‘Yes, get up,’ said the man in Beklan, as though answering a different question. His previously half-abstracted interest seemed to have become more direc
t and he leaned forward alertl
y.

Kelderek
, supporting himself on one hand and beginning to draw up his left leg, felt a sudden tug at his right ankle. He looked down. Both ankles were shackled and between them ran a light chain about the length of his forearm.

‘What’s
this
?’ he asked, with a sudden spurt of alarm.

‘Get up,’ repeated
the
man. He rose and took two or three steps towards
Kelderek
, knife in hand.

Kelderek got to his knees and then to his feet, but would have fallen if the man had not gripped him by the arm. Shorter than
Kelderek
, he looked up at him sharply, straddle-legged, knife held ready. After a few moments, without moving his eyes, he jerked his head to one side.

‘That way,’ he said in
Ortelga
n.

‘Wait,’ said Kelderek. ‘Wait a moment. Tell me -‘

As he spoke the man seized his left hand, jerked it forward and with the point of his knife pierced him beneath one finger-nail.
Kelderek
cried out and snatched his hand away.

‘That way,’ said the man, jerking his head once more and moving the knife here and there before
Kelderek
‘s face, so that he flinched first to one side and then to the other.

Kelderek
turned and, with the man’s hand on his arm, began to stumble through the mud. At each step the chain, pulled taut between his ankles, checked the natural length of his stride. Several times he tripped and at length fell into a kind of shuffle, watching
the
ground for any protrusion that might throw him down. The man, walking beside him, kept up a tuneless whistling through his teeth,
the
sound of which, intensified suddenly at random moments, made
Kelderek
start in anticipation of some further attack. Indeed, had it not been for this he would probably have collapsed from weakness and the nausea induced by
the
wound under his finger-nail.

What kind of man might
this
be? From his dress and ability to speak
Ortelga
n it seemed unlikely that he was a
Yeldashay
soldier. What was
the
explanation of his having taken the trouble to save from a swamp, in lonely country, a destitute stranger whom he had already robbed?
Kelderek
sucked his finger, which was oozing blood from beneath the severed nail. If the man were a maniac - and why not, beyond the Vrako? What else had Ruvit been? - all he could do was to keep alert and watch for any chance
th
at
might offer itself. But the chain would be a grave handicap and the man himself, despite his short stature, was plainly the ugliest of adversaries.

He raised his eyes at the sudden sound of voices. They could not have walked far - perhaps not much more than a bow-shot from the creek. The ground was still marshy and the forest thick. Ahead was a glade among the trees and here he could make out people moving, though he could sec no fire or any of the usual features of a camp. The man uttered a single, wordless cry - a kind of bark - but waited for no answer, merely guiding him forward as before. They had reached the glade when the chain again tripped him and Kelderek fell to the ground. The man, leaving him to lie where he had fallen, walked on.

Breath
less and caked in mud, Kelderek rolled over and looked up sideways from where he lay. The place, he realized at once, was full of a considerable number of people, and in fear that after all he had once again fallen into the hands of the Yeldashay, he sat up and stared quickly about him.

Save for the man himself, now sitting a
little
distance away and rummaging in a leather pack, all those in the glade were children. None appeared to be more than thirteen or fourteen years old. A boy near by, with a hare-lip and sores round his chin, was staring at
Kelderek
with vacant, sleepy attention, as though he had just awakened. Further off, a child with a continuous twitching of the head gazed up wide-eyed, his mouth gap
ing in a kind of rictus of startl
ed alarm. As
Kelderek
looked this way and that he realized that many of the children were blemished or deformed in one manner or another. All were thin and dirty and had about them
an air of listl
ess ill-being, like half-starved cats on a laystall. Almost all, like himself, were chained at
the
ankles. Of the two he could see who were not, one had a withered leg, while above the ankles of the other the cracked weals left by the removed shackles were pustulant with sores. The children sat or lay silent on the ground, one asleep, one crouching to excrete, one shivering continually, one searching the grass for insects and eating them. They imparted to the green-lit place an eerie quality, as though it were a pool and they fishes in a world of silence, each occupied entirely with his own preservation and paying no more attention to others than this might require.

The man, then, must be a slave-trader dealing in children. The number of these permitted to work in the
Bekla
n empire had been fixed, each being authorized by Kelderek, after enquiries made of the provincial governors, to buy specified quotas at approved prices in
this
place and that, a second quota not being allowed to be taken from the same place until a stated period had elapsed. The traders worked through the provincial governors and under their protection, being required to satisfy them that they had taken no more than their quotas and paid the approved prices, and in return receiving, where necessary, armed escorts for their journeys to
the
markets at Bekla, Dari-Paltesh or Thettit-Tonilda. It seemed likely that this man, while journeying with a party of child slaves bound for Bekla, had been cut off by the Yeldashay advance and in view of the value of his stock had decided, rather than abandon them, to flee beyond the Vrako. That would account for the children’s shocking condition. But which of the dealers was this ? No great number of warrants had been issued and
Kelderek
, who, intent on learning as much as possible about the yield to be expected and the trade’s taxable worth, had himself talked to most of the traders at one time or another, now tried to recall
their
individual faces. Of those he was able to remember, none corresponded to this man. At no time had more than seventeen authorizations been valid in the empire and of these scarcely any, once granted, had been transferred to a second holder; for who, once he had got his hands on it, would surrender so lucrative an occupation? Out of twenty names at the most he could not recall this man’s. Yet surely he must be one or other of them? Or was he - and here
Kelderek
felt a sudden qualm of misgiving -
could he be an unauthorized slaver, one of
those
he had been warned about and had declared liable to the heaviest penalties, who got their slaves where they could, sometimes by kidnapping, sometimes by bluff and terror in remote villages, or again by purchasing the half
-
witted, deformed or otherwise unwanted from those who were prepared to sell them; and, bringing them across country as
little
observ
ed as possible, sold them secretly, e
ither to the authorized dealers or else to anyone ready to buy? That such men had been operating in the empire he knew, and had known also their reputation for ruthlessness and cruelty, for unscrupulous double-dealing and taking what they could get wherever they might find it. ‘All slave-traders are dealers in wretchedness,’ a captured Yeldashay officer had once said to him while being questioned, ‘but there are some - those of whom you pretend to know nothing - who creep about the land like filthy rats, scraping up the very dregs of misery for trifling profits; and for these, too, we hold you answerable, for he who builds a barn knows that rats will come.’ Kelderek had let him talk and later, becoming still more indignant, the officer had unintentionally revealed a good deal of useful information.

Suddenly Kelderek’s recollections were broken by the most unexpected of sounds - the laughter of an infant. He looked up to see a
little
girl, perhaps five years old, unchained, running across the glade and looking back over her shoulder at a tall, fair-haired lad. This boy, in spite of his chain, was pursuing her, evid
ently
in sport, for he was hanging back and pretending, as people do when playing with quite
little
children, that she was succeeding in escaping from him. The child, though thin and pale, looked less wretched than the boys among whom she was running. She had almost reached
Kelderek
when she tripped and fell forward on her face The tall lad, overtaking her, picked her up, holding her in his arms and tossing her up and down to comfort her and distract her from crying. Thus occupied, he turned for a moment towards
Kelderek
and their eyes met.

He who catches suddenly the lilt of a song which he has not heard for years or the scent of the flowers that bloomed by the door where once he played in the dust, finds himself swept back, whether he will or no and sometimes
with
tears, into the depth of time past, recovering for a few moments the very feeling of being another person, upon whom life used to press with other, lighter fingers than those which he has since learned to endure. With no less a shock did
Kelderek
feel himself once more the Eye of God, Lord Crendrik the priest-king of Bekla; and recall on the instant the smells of fog and of smouldering charcoal, the sour taste in his mouth and the murmur from behind him as he faced the bars in the King’s House, trying to gaze into eyes that he could not meet; the eyes of the condemned
Elleroth
. Then the fit was gone and he was staring in perplexity at a youth tossing a yellow-haired child in his arms.

At this moment the slave-dealer stood
up, calling, ‘Eh! Shouter!
Bled! Get moving!’ Leaving his pack on the ground, he strode down the length of the glade, snapping his fingers to bring the children to their feet a
nd, without speaking again, hustl
ing them into a group at the further end. He stopped beside the tall youth, who stood looking at him with the
little
girl still held in his arms. She cowered away, hiding her face, and as she did so the youth put one hand on her shoulder.

After a few moments it became plain that the slave-dealer meant to stare the boy down and subdue him without word or blow. Tense and wary, the boy returned his stare. At
length
, speaking in halting Beklan with a strong Yeldashay accent, he said, ‘She’s not strong enough to stand this much longer and there’s no profit to you if she dies. Why don’t you leave her outside the next village?’

The dealer drew his knife. Then, as the boy still waited for his reply, he took from his belt an iron object in the shape
of two half-circles, each bluntl
y barbed at either end and joined together by a short bar. The boy hesitated a moment, then lowered his eyes, pressed his lips together and, still carrying the
little
girl, walked away to join the other children.

At the same moment a scowling youth, a little older than the rest,
with
a cast in one eye and a birthmark across his face, came running up to Kelderek. He was dressed in a torn leather tunic and carried a pliant stick as long as his arm.