The Island Under the Earth (14 page)

Spahana’s litter had been battered to bits in the mad stampede of the onagers that first day, and only a few pieces of harness survived to tell it had ever existed. The two children rode quietly along on the back of the oldest, stoutest, and staidest beast, with Stag and Bosun on either side. The children had insisted that they hadn’t been lost at all, that they were just around the next hill from home, that they had only been gone a few moments or so. Although hill succeeded hill and still no home, they were quiet, clearly enjoying their ride. After all, the men had known their name and had known their mother’s name; they didn’t know why their mother was somewhere else, but the absence of any familiar landscape gave no cause for a desire to leave. The men had come to an explanation of what had happened, though they were not equally content with the explanation.

“If they were, well, moved — transferred, you might say — by the gathering up of the way and the day, as we were … when we were … how did it happen that we met their mother before it happened, not after?” This was Bosun’s question.

Stag had been thinking the same thing, and his answer was immediate. “When something like this happens,” he said, “it connects a day with the day before. We think,
It happened today
. That’s right. But it didn’t only happen today.
It happened yesterday as well
. It doesn’t only go from
Now
to
Then
, from
Here
to
There
. It goes at the same time from
There
to
Here
and from
Then
to
Now
, don’t you see?”

“Well …”

Stag glanced up, as though to find help along the overhanging branches of the massy forest trees, glanced away and tried again. “Every day is a today, isn’t it? And at the same time, every day is a yesterday, isn’t it? And every day is also a tomorrow, isn’t it? We weren’t with Rary when it first happened. We don’t know how much time or how much space that gathering up affected. Suppose it struck what was her
Today
and knocked her children back in time so that … or … no … and then we …”

Bosun gave his head a rapid shake and struck himself upon each cheek alternately. The children giggled. He said, “Leave it be, Master. I see enough of a glimmer. If I try harder, I’ll be perhaps dazzled, and not able to see at all.”

They went along in what seemed like a long, long quietness. Stag spoke only twice, and his man was not certain afterwards which it was that he had heard first; Stag had spoken in a low voice as though speaking to himself, and he had said, “I will be glad to see her,” and he had said, “I wish that I had never gone there.” But which had he said first? And did it matter?

They went on, and they went on, and they met the woman crying for her children.

The children, certainly, could not have been as startled as the men were, for the men heard the voice a second before they recognized it, but the children recognized it the second they heard it. “There’s Mam, her,” said the girl, Darda, and she slipped off the onager. “It’s Mam, her,” the boy said. He lifted out his arms. “Help us adown, Dardy,” he said. To the children it seemed the most natural thing in the world. But to the men it meant something else, but what that something was —

“What is she doing
here?
”

In another moment there she was, almost as they had first seen her, coming not so fast this time, coming with more uncertainty and less resolution this time. Her voice seemed now not so much demented as disorganized.
“Trenny …? Darda …?”

“Mam, Mam, here’s us here!” the children called, running up to her. “What’s up, woman?” Bosun shouted. “Where are the others?”

Stag said nothing, but he walked very fast. Her clothes were dirty and her hair half-loose, and she looked at them so very anxiously, and she waved her hands as though to attract their attention and to keep them from passing by her.

“Have you seen my children?” she quavered. “Have you seen two young children, a boy and a girl — ”

“Here’s us here, Mam!” the children called, running up and putting their arms around her and laying their heads against her. She looked at them, at first astonished, then she said, half with a sort of assumed amusement and half in a kind of restrained reproach, “Oh … now … no … children … Why …
you
are great big things … and mine are but bitty bairns, you know … Have you seen them?”

The bosun looked at her, and went close to her, and he looked from her to Stag and he touched the side of his head and he inclined his head towards her. On her forehead near the temple was an ugly bruise and clotted blood. He looked at his master as though prepared for an outburst, his muscles tensed as though prepared to resist a blow or to start off on a run. But Stag nodded, he only nodded. He said, “You’d better come with us, Rary. Up you go, on this beast here — up you go, children. Hold on to them, now.”

She made some feeble protest. She looked at him, confused. She wondered aloud how he knew her name. She mounted. She held the children. She mumbled, sometimes to herself, and sometimes to them. She looked from side to side. She said two names, over and over. The boy babbled on: he and Dardy had gone for a walk and they had done this and done that and seen that and seen this, “Us’s has, Mam” — but his sister, who was older, looked at the men in bepuzzlement and alarm.

“We’d go dozens faster without them,” the bosun suggested.

“We’re going that fast as will be fast enough,” said Stag. “I don’t suppose that minutes matter.” He nodded at the girl Darda and he gave her shoulder a few pats. She seemed to relax, rather. She held the woman’s hand, but her eyes did not part from Stag.

They were quite near the house when the onagers seemed to grow restless and uneasy. Rary’s crooning had come to a sudden stop, she looked about as though in her perplexity she shared the beasts’ unease. Stag’s hand on the bridle of the leader-ass tightened, and the whole stride of them came to a halt. “Now, mother,” he said, in conversational tone, “we’re going to tether the animals here just a short time whilst I and this fellow go on ahead to have a look. You must stay here with the children, you know, for there’s none other to.”

She frowned, slightly. “Why, wherever is their mother?” she murmured. But it was concern, not complaint. In a moment she had them picking flowers, which her fingers deftly wove into chains. As the men moved out they heard the boy say, “What’s that called, up there, Mam?” and her abstracted answer, that it was just the island, just part of the sky; and him saying, contented, “That’s what Dardy, she says, too.” Automatically, the men looked up. There seemed the beginnings of an overcast. The wind seemed damp. Then it shifted. The wind reeked.

“Sixies!” they exclaimed. “Sixies!”

Wordlessly, they left the trail and began, furtively, to proceed towards the house through the thicket and the wood. They saw the door half-open. They saw the window-shutters swinging ponderously. They abode a good while in concealment, before they finally came out. Signs of the sixlimbs were all about, on the hoof-scarred turf, in the piles of dung, the wads of part-chewed herbiage, the still-flattened places where they had lain them down. The bosun pointed. The door must have been at least partly opened at the moment of the attack, for an arrow had scored the wood of the post as it could not have done had the door been closed. And the bosun pointed again. Glints of blue in the grass. Stag bent and picked at them. Beads. One by one he picked them up, one larger than the other, placed them in his scrip.

There had not been much in the house which could have been disturbed. Remnants of a meal. Heavy furniture all in place. Rags hung up to dry. Nothing to tell them anything. And nothing on the upper floor, and nothing in the tiny room under the eave. Stag said, low, “I thought this would have to be the best place for a look-out. They’d have to pass by in view, because of the hill. Thought I, ‘I’ll see you at least as soon as you see me.’

“Not knowing I’d not be here to see….”

He looked at his bosun, asked, “Wouldn’t you say that we’ve had enough troubles? And that the sensible thing would be to cut our losses, head back to town, and make other arrangements?”

The man rubbed his bristled cheeks. “I would, I would. It’s too bad, she was a well-behaved and well-moving woman; for that matter, that was a well-behaved and well-moving ship you traded off. But you can build and find. There’ll be, I expect, others just as good — ”

Stag gripped his wrist. “But I don’t want another just as good. I want that one. I want her. I want her so much I’d give everything I have for her.” He moved so swiftly that he was gone before the bosun could blink.

He was in the yard, striding fast, before the bosun could catch up with him. “You’re daft, Master,” he said. “These troubles have turned your mind. You’d best come back quick to town and seek a healer or a priest — ” He stopped, aghast. Stag was smiling at him.

“If I’m mad, that’s the way I want to be. What will you say when I tell you that I’m glad she was taken? If she’d not been taken I’d mayhap never have learned how much I want her! I’d begun missing her since we turned back, I believe, but it wasn’t till just now that I realized how much — Now — ” He stopped and frowned, but it was in thought alone. “Somehow I’m confident that the sixies won’t hurt her. Don’t know why they did take her, or that doctor-priest — yes, I know the old wife’s been hurt, but who knows how? My thought is that they’ll ask a ransom for her. Well, they shall have it. Every sixy in the world could swim in the wine I’d give for her. But it may not come to that. Meanwhile — Ah. Ay yes….” His voice sank. “I’d forgotten. The old wife and her twain children. What’s to be done about them?”

“Leave them here,” the bosun promptly said.

To this his captain prompt agreed. “It’s safest. Lightning may not strike so soon again here. There’s food enough and gear enough. Yes … that’s best.”

Even in the short time they had left the woman she had changed. She seemed now to know who her children were but she evidently had no recollection of ever having seen either of the men before. “And it’s about to rain, and who knows how many leagues we are from home,” she said, distractedly. She returned to the house peacefully enough, with never a sign that ever she had seen it before; and they unloaded the onagers. While they were so engaged Stag paused, scowled in his usual manner of deep thought, then shook his head. “What’s amiss?” his man asked. But Stag couldn’t say. A vagrant thought had tickled the corner of his mind, was gone without being identified.

They untied the beasts, hobbled them, put some food in their scrips, said farewell to the woman and her children, and were off. Once again they had an easy trail to follow, and even the rain did not wash it out entirely — a few moments’ downpour from which they sheltered themselves not at all, but pressed on ahead. Such a thing as a centaur who attempted to cover his trail is a wonder which no world has ever seen. The rain stopped abruptly, but it drizzled intermittently throughout the remainder of the afternoon and dimlight; by dimlight, however, they had already paused and taken up shelter in a hole in a hill — one which conveniently slanted slightly up from its entrance before leveling out into a space long enough and wide enough and dry enough for them to stretch out.

During that night they both awoke. Each sensed that the other was no longer sleeping, neither said a word, both moved to the mouth of the cave. Nothing was visible. The sky was completely overcast. Nothing stirred. Now and then a slight breeze shook a leaf or a few leaves, and then the
tip tip tip
of the delayed raindrops was heard. Yet all did not seem right, and still they stared and strained their eyes and ears. Stag was about to back up and retreat into the burrow and to sleep again when it seemed as though a breeze so high he could not feel it stirred for one swift second a cloud so high he could not see it. And it seemed as though for that fleet shaveling of a second he could perceive a light burning brightly, briefly, in the dull night sky. Then it was gone. The bosun cleared his throat. Then he slid backward. Then he began to snore.

And still Stag stayed there. He had no word to explain how he had felt a few moments before. Things had seemed somehow out of place and order, yet it was nothing like the gathering-up of the day or way…. Wild suggestions, arcane speculations, took hold of his mind. Then another thought took hold of his mind. Spahana. He had hardly known her, really. He had almost forgotten that that was her name until he had heard her tell it to Rary. He smiled, wondering to himself, wondering at himself. It was an odd way to feel about a woman … odd … odd…. Odd how light things were…. He realized that the night had passed and that it was now dawn.

The trail was not so easily followed that first part of the new day, after they had made a quick, small breakfast. The light was dim, and it did not so soon grow much lighter, the weather continuing overcast. The bosun grumbled that things “still felt odd.” But the trail was never lost for long, and when they left the region of rocks and gravel and descended into one of softer earth and low and rolling hillocks, it became much easier. And then Stag saw something which brought him to a dead halt.

“What’s happened, Captain?” Bosun asked, uneasily.

“It’s a folly…. We’ve been two fools, haven’t we, then?”

“How do you — ?”

“Well, just stop and think. We’ve seen only hoof prints, haven’t we? Were they both of them, the augur Castegor, and my lady,
riding
the Sixies?”

The bosun blinked. He wet his lips, tried to think. “Uhh …” was all that came out.

Stag said, “Have we been following the right trail?” He pointed. The prints of human feet were in front of them in the wet soil, not very clear, but unmistakable. They followed them a short distance, followed the opposite way that the feet had been going, saw that they had come down out of the higher land and into the main path. “We have … We have … Following the wrong trail. Following the obvious one. It’s all come right, it seems, but if it hadn’t? — I suppose, though, it had to. The Fourlimbs weren’t with the sixies at all. The sixies must have known that the track they took — the track we hadn’t noticed — would come out here eventually. The sixies weren’t exactly following them … but yet they were. That means that the sixies hadn’t captured them at all. That — ”

A wrathful notion swept the confusion from the bosun’s face and mind. “You don’t mean that they ran off together?” Almost immediately he said, “No … the arrow …”

“Exactly, the arrow. And now I’ve remembered that idea which flitted through my mind like a bat yesterday whilst we were unloading the onagers. Recollect how you told me that line was fastened to them, when the old silverhair sixy stole them back for us? You said there were no knots at all in the line — only loops, you said.
Why?
Still don’t see it? Forgotten what the augur told us, what he reminded us of that we’d seen but hadn’t thought of? Their hands, man! Their hands! A little finger on each side of each hand, but no thumbs, man! A sixy can’t tie a knot! A sixy can’t cast a spear! And so it follows as one Flux follows another,
A sixy can’t draw a bow nor shoot an arrow!
Sixies didn’t attack Stonehouse and sixies didn’t rape away those that were in it. Men did. Men….”

His hand pointed to the footprints before they were obliterated by the mass of hoofprints. Here and there was the slender mark of a woman’s foot. But mostly there were the heavier prints of men. Of how many men? Of what men? “Who — ”

Stag’s face was fixed in a wild grimace. He dug his hand into his scrip, clenched, dug, pulled it out. “Look. Look. Ah — Here it is.” His breath came hard and fast. His palm held several small stones.

“Beads…. Beads…. So — ”

“Beads?
All
beads? Ah, no.
This
is a bead and
this
is a bead, and
this —
But not
this:
it’s too big. It’s got no hole through it. It isn’t a bead. It’s a talley-pebble. Isn’t it? And who uses talley-pebbles? Answer! I’ve asked no riddle.”

The bosun half-groaned. He nodded. He knew who, and only who, used talley-pebbles. “Merchants,” he said.

“Yes….” Stag swung round and all but ran. Over his shoulder came one word.

“Merchant!”