The Island Under the Earth (5 page)

Tabnath Lo was at his desk, which meant, at his talley-pebbles. Two galleys had come in that same day from Silverstrand and their captains stood before him with their knotted talley-cords in their hands and porters moved between them, from the wharf to the ware-loft; the block-and-tackle creaked an accompaniment to the accounting. “You took thirty bales of stockfish,” he said to the captain who stood one pace foremost; “what did you sell?”

The captain fingered a cord, his lips moving with his fingers. “Sold twenty-eight,” he reported; “ate two.”

Lo took pebbles from a pocket. “One, with such good weather, was ample,” he said. “If you want to engage in private trading you must do it with your own goods; you’ve never been denied a discount … yet.” He laid a pebble in a groove and set another one next to it.
Click
. “Bring any passengers?”

“Two. That is — me one and he one.”

“Answer for yourself alone. Tree-silk?”

The fingers moved on the cords, the lips moved. “Six sixes.” More pebbles. Another groove.
Click. Click. Click-etty-click. Click, click
. Later age was to improve upon the system by boring holes in the talley-pebbles and stringing them upon wires set into a frame of wood, but no such alteration had yet come to pass: still, the merchants dug grooves into a table-top — or, if upon a trading voyage to a place where no such convenience obtained, simply squatted upon a bale on a beach or a riverbank and scored the grooves in the sand with a stick or forefinger: a groove for ones, a groove for sixes, a groove for twelves — set down his colored pebbles and moved them up and moved them down:
click:
a snowy hind’s-skin …
click:
a six of skins …
click
… a dozen. So many sacks of spelt, so many sacks of pelt, such a number of quills of dust-of-gold, such a number of thin-scraped goats-horns full of gold seeds —

Click. Click. Clicket-a-click
.

“Sight Leviathan? Hear Rahab?”

“No, Merchant. Didn’t neither. Heard a doctor say Star-flux was soonly due, but didn’t see, didn’t hear. Doctor’s’ll say anything. Brought some nice aromatic gum this time.” He was bow-legged and broadbellied, with a beard like the great-grandfather of all goats. The second captain was little better than a lad, with a line of carefully trimmed pussydown along his jaws.

“How much?”

“Seven kids.”

Click
. A pause.
Click. A
house-girl passed in with water, and the younger captain’s eyes roved and he moved from one leg to another like a boy who has to go behind a bush.

“Your passenger biding, or can we take him south when the
Dolphin
goes?”

“Didn’t say.”

So it went, a phrase of talk, a click. Here it was common as breath, but afar and afar the savages gaped, scratched their armpits and their crotches, loosed … for whole moments … their grips on clubs and spears.
Merchants’ magic
— thus, their term for the arithmetic of the talley-stones. But sometimes bemusement turned into an intenser suspicion, particularly if explanation of a fall in the price of their own wares had been insufficiently assimilated. Merchants’ magic! What color had this magic? Then a fist with grime set hard into its knuckles might tighten … a look … a head of goat-tangled locks toss back … a grunt … a roar of rage …

Blood amidst the spilt wine, then, on the barren beach.

Blood upon the talley-pebbles by the riverbank.

The senior captain had finished presenting his accounts and had seen his cargo stowed away and had received his wage and share. The junior captain raised one foot, ready to step forward and get on with it, but still the elder didn’t move. First he scratched his head, then he winkled his forefingers in his ears, then he ran them through his beard. “They say the Cap of Grace is on the move again.” The merchant looked at him with politely raised eyebrows, but the eyes beneath them strayed to the customary “little gift” which the captain had just laid upon his desk: a small packet of soft leather, bulging at one end. Tabnath Lo was not about to open it yet.

“Ah, wouldn’t that be a fine thing, if it came this side?”

“Indeed.”

“There wasn’t none of this denying and lying and false weights and violences, when the Old Queen was in her tower, you know. (“No, indeed.”) Fair weather, good winds, cheap buying and dear selling, seamen knew their place and the sixies stayed where they was meant to; no flux and no pox, and if a man couldn’t find justice he only had to go to the Tower and ask for it. Ah …”

Tabnath Lo blinked only once. He said, “The wine-house has a few new girls from up south, and the word is that they haven’t all been tapped yet.”

The stout sea-captain (his name was Clarb something, or something Clarb) pulled his nose. “Wine…. Yes. I shouldn’t mind a jug or two. Well, then, Merchant, you know where to find me. Good venturing. — See you, sonny.” — this to the junior; and left.

Tabnath Lo looked at the junior sea-captain quietly. Just as quietly he asked, “Do you think your passenger will be moving south on the
Dolphin
or will he bide?”

“Didn’t say.”

This time the look he got was longer. The young man forgot to fidgit. The merchant dropped his hand into his pocket and drew out a handful of talley-stones, but instead of putting them in the now once again empty grooves he began to drop them, one by one, from one hand into the other.
Click. Click … Click
… After a while he said, “Clarb was captain of a coaster twenty years ago. He’s master of a coaster today. Do you want to be coast-master” …
click … click … click
… “twenty-years from now? or do your ambitions go further?” …
click
…

The young man may have gulped, but his answer came soon and sturdy enough. “They go further.” The merchant’s head went slowly up …
click
… and came slowly down …
click
… he said nothing.

Young Captain Ramman had noticed the way Clarb had strutted off, trying to suck his stomach in. He regarded the still untold bundle of knotcords in his freckled fists. At this rate it would be dark before he got to the winehouse. Tabnath Lo was a crabfish with a hard shell, that was certain. He thought wistfully of the girls, familiar, and the girls, new, of good wine and good food and afterwards a good bath. What did the merchant mean? What did he want? … Old Clarb! … Twenty years! … Master of a seacrosser! Lo had seacrossers!

“I can tell you this much, Merchant,” he said, to his own surprise: “the passenger was heard to say, the subject of
Dolphin
having come up somehow, that rather than ship on her he’d tie a stone around his neck and wade out and drown
himself
. He said it would come cheaper.” And heard in his ears, aghast, the echo of his voice.

The merchant smiled, and it was a cheerful smile. “Oh,
Dolphin’
s not that bad,” he said. Then, “Let me keep your talley-cords, Captain Ramman. Post a guard aboard your vessel and we’ll account the cargo tomorrow. — Early, mind!”

Ramman fairly danced away. He got to the winehouse while old Clarb was still dipping his snout into the first jug, and almost choked into it, seeing his junior there so soon. Ramman had one of the new girls on his lap inside of a minute, and then he showed her some ear-rings he’d brought with him from Silverstrand, and then he took out her old ones and they played a game about putting in the new ones, and then he ordered wine and they shared the mug and then they went upstairs and played another game, and when they sent for more wine, and afterwards she asked him what he was thinking about and he lied cheerfully and then they played another game.

But he had been thinking about Tabnath Lo, and how interested he’d been in the ships’ passengers.

The farmwife dozed and nodded by the fire. Every now and then she by an obvious effort of will got up and put her ear to the chinks of one or another of the windows, and her lips moved; then she stumbled wearily back to the fire. Once and twice she had gone to Spahana and spoken softly, softly to her, gesturing to the piles of springy bed-branches; but the younger woman had merely stroked her hands, let her lips move into the brief-most of smiles. The bosun snored lightly, one hand on his knife, one on his ropes. And Stag sat at the augur’s feet.

“There is no reason in logic to assume that either one was first,” the augur was saying. One side of his face was lit by the dim ruddy fire, the other by the unwinking phosphorlight of the log of gleamwood. He seemed two people. “We don’t ask if riverhorses were before seahorses, or the other way around. We all know the story of the monstrous infatuation with an onager and the monstrous birth it brought forth: perhaps a four-limbed woman
did
give birth to six-limbed twins, one male and one female; if so, it would have been as natural for her to conceal them as it had been unnatural for her to conceive them and as natural for the people to want to destroy them once their existence was discovered. If the story is true it would certainly account for many things, such as their extreme shyness in times past, their absolute refusal to allow themselves to be seen by man, the inveterate antipathy between our two species … But
is
it inveterate?” Stag growled that as far as he was concerned, it was. But the augur brushed that aside.

The Sixlimbed Folk, he reminded Water Lord Stag, had their own accounts of things. If men said that they ate man’s-flesh, they accused the Fourlimbed Folk of eating centaurs’-flesh. But Stag would have none of this. “It would poison us … who has a better right to say so than I?” Castagor shook his head; again, as the fire-lit side of his face was turned to the gleamwood, as the phosphor-lit side was turned to the fire, he seemed to change faces. Serpent venom, which tainted the blood unto death, might safely be swallowed; hemlock and the curiously-named gentlebane, fatal if swallowed, was of no more danger to the skin than so much milk. He recounted an incident where the severed limb of a centaur, well-washed in a running stream, had been eaten by a pack of dogs: what dogs may eat, so may their masters.

“If we term them wild, they term us cowards. What? Growl, then. But listen. Did I not see you step back when you were considering putting your javelin into that old one’s side? Why? You were afraid his blood would sear you again, weren’t you? Naturally. Of course. The blood of centaurs is notoriously deadly to the softer skin of man, and this makes man reluctant to engage in hand-to-hand combat with centaurs. If one really wishes ill to a centaur, the shot from ambush is preferred, the rock pushed off a cliff, the hidden snare, the deadfall…. Of course the result is that sixies despise us as thicketlurkers, ambushslayers.

“That old one lying out there” — he gestured. “In the morning, by which time he will probably be dead, take a look at him. I have no doubt that you’ll find many scars on him, and many of man’s inflicting: but I doubt if you’ll find the mark of a single sword.”

Stag muttered that he had not come hereabouts with any hatred towards them, had, in fact, something quite the opposite…. “Who were their leaders since the days of Drogorógos?” he asked. “My small sack of knowledge stops there. Or, never mind ancient history, who’s their leader now?”

Castagor seemed sworn to gainsay him at every point. Drogorógos had never been their leader. They had no leader. “Keep in mind that the Sixlimbed Folk are not one united people, but passionately untrammeled individuals. Pity rather than hate the Sixlimbed Folk, for they have men minds and brute bodies, and just as much as their men minds strive to direct their brute bodies, so do their brute bodies strive to direct their men minds. If they have treasures, if they have secrets, if they have wisdom, if they have anything of value or of virtue, oh, Water Lord! — never begrudge it them, for they possess whatever they possess at the cost of pains and travails which neither you nor I would ever care to pay!

“Words cannot express, Water Lord, what anguish it can mean to be half-man and half-brute!”

Long was the silence then, till Stag broke it, though softly, with the words, “Now, about the Cap of Grace — ”

There was a loud, enormous yawn, which merged into Rary’s voice saying something half-smothered, and only the last word clear. “… food.” Castagor blinked and got up, his face moving from side to side and changing, changing; in a moment he had oriented himself and was walking towards the fire. “Food, food…. Let it not be despised. One must keep body and soul together.

“If one can,” he said, a sudden gloomy tone in his voice. “If one can….”

All night long the house had spoken to them, as though eager to make up for years either of silence or talking to itself. It was an old house and it spoke as an old person speaks, sighing and whispering and creaking, muttering and mumbling. It was present in all their dreams, sound though they slept after the labors of that day. Rary whispered endless goodnights to her sleeping children. The bosun whispered and was whispered to by an unseen companion, and he nodded, and he looked about to reassure that no one overheard. Castagor muttered to two others of interpretations and of expectations, and they muttered back, in turn, to him. Stag sighed his near fulfilment at sight of a something glittering with jewels, and there was something else there with it, too; something totally surprising and yet so well familiar.

But at dawnlight no one spoke of dreams.

Stag said the same thing, over and over, in different ways.

“If that rascal onagerer reports back to port, Partner Lo is certain to come out looking for us. But suppose the rascal doesn’t? Suppose he was killed? — not that it wouldn’t serve him right! — We might starve here, waiting. Lo must be sent word; well enough to say,
Send word;
but here’s the problem: who’s to be sent? Not you,” he said to Spahana, who was silently combing her hair in a corner with a small horn comb; “your feet are too torn, and I’d not send you alone in any event. Not you, soothsayer, much though you’d be pleased to leave here and never wanted to come at all — you’d see some trifle and mistake it for an omen and fly away in the wrong direction like any ninny-bird. Nor yet you, woman, for you’d be seeing your own sort of omens as well and in the end, I’ve no doubt, wind up totally lost: no children found, no word delivered. No. No. There’s no other choice but that you and I must go, Bosun, go back. Be sure we won’t be any longer than we must be, you women. Damned if I like it, though. Damned if I like it.”

With some great reluctance he gave Castagor his javelin, and many directions. Though a soothsayer was perhaps but half a man, still that was better than no man at all; and perhaps his arcane gifts might make up for what he lacked elsewise.

Castagor was not so much certain or uncertain as certain of his uncertainties, for as much as he wished to go along, just so much did he desire to stay. In the end, of course, he stayed, not for any uncertainty or certainty of his own, but by reason of the by now certainty of Captain Stag. “So be it, then, Water Lord,” he said. “At any rate allow me to take sight for you, for all that I have lost my divining kit, yet we can improvise and — ” But Stag would not have it; all his wrath and grievance came bubbling out of the bottle again as he thought and spoke of the previous day’s augurings and of (he roared) the great ill and the little good which had occurred despite. Softly the augur said, “Yet that little good, good Captain, might have been less.” He said it very softly, though, and he made no further objections.

Stag’s leavetaking of the women was brief and succinct. “You are not to go beyond earshot of the house,” he ordered, “and are never to be out of sight of each other. — And do I see but a single sign of your children, farmwife,” he declared, forestalling her, “I’ll not let it pass ignored.” And, perhaps thinking that it was not as rich a promise as it might have been, he added, “Besides, I’ll spread word everywhere, and see the bailees and the syndics learn of it.”

Mere mention had made her restless once more, but the sight of him seemed to reassure her, the sound of those puissant names as well. And, “Ah …” she murmured, having described the children to him for the hundredth time, “if the Old Queen could only learn of it, I’d have them back soon enough.”

The last fading lines of starlight were just going as they stood in the yard together. Spahana said something which might have been in her own language, Rary blessed their going, the augur uttered a formulary, Stag and the bosun nodded and then turned and left in silence … silence broken in a moment as Stag, with a loud
“Ah!”
stopped short, and with the butt-end of his javelin swept down the fennel and the wild roses where the old sixy had made his lying-place, and bent over to peer. The
huh! huh!
of his astonishment brought them all in an instant to his side. The rank smell of the creature was strong, and the lineaments of his body were plain to be seen in the crushed grass. A cud of chewed herb of some sort was still there.

But of the old centaur himself, there was nothing more to be seen.