Shardik Page 11

  The hunter knew that if he were not himself to die, he must now go down and kill Bel-ka-Trazet--and that he could not do it. With a low cry he raised his hands to his face and ran blindly up the course of the brook.

  He had gone perhaps fifty yards when someone gripped his arm. "Kelderek," said the Tuginda's voice, "what has happened?"

  Unable to answer, bemused as the bear itself, he could only point, with a shaking arm, back toward the fall. At once she hastened away, followed by Sheldra and four or five of the girls carrying their bows.

  He listened but could hear nothing. Still full of fear and irresolution, he wondered whether he might yet escape Bel-ka-Trazet by hiding in the forest and later, somehow, contriving to cross to the mainland. He was about to resume his flight when suddenly it occurred to him that he was no longer alone and defenseless against the Baron, as he had been three days before. He was the messenger of Shardik, the bringer of God's tidings to Quiso. Certainly the Tuginda, if she knew what had been attempted and prevented by the pool that morning, would never stand by and allow Bel-ka-Trazet to kill him.

  "We are the Vessels, she and I," he thought. "She will save me. Shardik himself will save me; not for love, or because I have done him any service, but simply because he has need of me and therefore it is ordained that I am to live. God is to shatter the Vessels to fragments and Himself fashion them again to His purpose. Whatever that may mean, it cannot mean my death at the hands of Bel-ka-Trazet."

  He rose to his feet, splashed through the brook and made his way back to the fall. Below him the High Baron, leaning on his staff, was deep in talk with the Tuginda. Neither looked up as he appeared above them. One of the girls had stripped herself to the waist and, on her knees, was staunching with her own garments the flow of blood from the bear's opened wound. The rest were standing together a little distance away, silent and watchful as cattle round a gate.

  "Well, I have done what I could, saiyett," said the Baron grimly. "Yes, if I could I would have killed your bear sure enough, but it was not to be."

  "That in itself should make you think again," she answered.

  "What I think of this business will not change," said he. "I do not know what you intend, saiyett, but I will tell you what I intend. The first has brought a large bear to this island. Bears are mischievous, dangerous creatures, and people who think otherwise come to loss and harm through them. As long as it remains in this lonely place, to risk lives is not worthwhile, but if it moves down the island and begins to plague Ortelga, I promise you I will have it killed."

  "And I intend nothing but to wait upon the will of God," replied the Tuginda.

  Bel-ka-Trazet shrugged again. "I only hope the will of God will not turn out to be your own death, saiyett. But now that you know what I intended, perhaps you have it in mind to tell your women to put me to death? Certainly I am in your power."

  "Since I have no plans and you have been prevented from killing Lord Shardik, you are doing us no harm." She turned away with an air of indifference, but he strode after her.

  "Then two things more, saiyett. First, since I am to live, perhaps you will permit me now to return to Ortelga. If you will give me a canoe, I will see that it returns to you. Then, as for the hunter fellow, I have already told you what he has just done. He is my subject, not yours. I trust you will not hinder me from finding and killing him."

  "I am sending two of the girls to Quiso with a canoe. They will put you off at Ortelga. I cannot spare the hunter. He is necessary to me."

  With this the Tuginda walked away and began speaking to the girls with complete absorption, pointing first up the slope and then down toward the river as she gave her instructions. For a moment the Baron seemed about to follow her again. Then he shrugged his shoulders, turned and climbed the bank, passed Kelderek without a glance and walked on in the direction of the camp. He was suppressing a limp and his terrible face appeared so gray and haggard that Kelderek, who had been preparing to defend himself as best he could, trembled and averted his eyes as though from some fearful apparition. "He is afraid!" he thought. "He knows now that he cannot prevail against Lord Shardik, and he is afraid!"

  Suddenly he sprang forward, calling, "My lord! O my lord, forgive me!" But the Baron, as though he had heard nothing, stalked on and Kelderek stood looking after him--at the livid bruise across the back of his neck and the heavy black pelt swinging from side to side above the grass.

  He never saw Bel-ka-Trazet again.

  13 The Singing

  ALL THAT DAY Shardik lay beside the brook, shaded, as the sun crossed the meridian, by the bank above and the boughs of the melikon. The two girls who had been watching in the pit during the night had acted prudently enough when the bear first struggled to its feet and wandered up the slope. At first they had thought that it was too weak to reach the top, but when it had actually done so and then, though almost exhausted, had begun to make its way downhill toward the brook, the older girl, Muni, had followed it, while her comrade went to wake the Tuginda. In fact, Muni had been only a short distance away when Shardik collapsed beside the pool, but had not seen Kelderek in her haste to return and bring the Tuginda to the place.

  The girls sent to Quiso were back before midnight, for without the long detour across the river their upstream journey was much shorter than the first. They brought fresh supplies of the cleansing ointment, together with other medicines and an herbal narcotic. This the Tuginda immediately administered to the bear herself, soaked in thin segments of tendriona. For some hours the drug had little effect, but by morning Shardik was sleeping heavily and did not stir while the burns were cleaned once more.

  On the afternoon of the following day, as Kelderek was returning from the forest, where he had been setting snares, he came upon Sheldra standing on the open grass a little way from the camp. Following her gaze he saw, some distance off, the figure of an unusually tall woman, cloaked and cowled, striding up the slope beside the brook. He recognized her as the lantern-bearer whom he had met by night upon the shore of Quiso. Still further away, by the river, six or seven other women were evidently setting out for the camp, each carrying a load.

  "Who is that?" asked Kelderek, pointing.

  "Rantzay," replied Sheldra, without turning her eyes toward him.

  There was still not one of the girls with whom Kelderek felt at ease. Even among themselves they spoke little, using words as they used knives or thread, simply as a means to complete their tasks. There was no contempt for him, however, in their somber reticence, which in fact he found daunting for precisely the opposite reason--because it suggested respect and seemed to confer upon him a dignity, even an authority, to which he was unused. They saw him, not as the girls in Ortelga saw a young man but, as they saw everything else, in the light of the cult to which their lives were devoted. Their manner showed that they felt him to be a person of importance, the one who had first seen and recognized Lord Shardik and had then come, at the risk of his life, to bring the news to the Tuginda. Sheldra's present reply was not intended contemptuously. She had answered him as briefly as she would have answered any of her companions and had even, perhaps, forgotten that he, unlike them, did not know the island priestesses by name. He felt it an omission rather than a slight that she should in effect have told him nothing. She had not used as many words as were necessary for informing him, just as she might (though practical and competent) have put too little water in a pail or not enough wood on the fire. Sure of this at least, he summoned the confidence to speak firmly.

  "Tell me who Rantzay is," he said, "and why she and those other women have been brought here."

  For a few moments Sheldra did not answer and he thought, "She is going to ignore me." Then she replied, "Of those who came with the Tuginda, Melathys was the only priestess. The rest of us are novices or servants."

  "But Melathys must have been almost as young as any," said Kelderek.

  "Melathys was not an Ortelgan. She was rescued from a slave camp during the Beklan civil war
s--the wars of the Heldril--and brought to the Ledges when she was a child. She learned many of the mysteries very early."

  "Well?" demanded Kelderek, as the girl said no more.

  "When the Tuginda knew that Lord Shardik had indeed returned and that we must remain here to tend and cure him, she sent for the priestesses Anthred and Rantzay, together with the girls whom they are instructing. When Shardik recovers they will be needed for the Singing."

  She fell silent again, but then broke out suddenly, "Those who served Lord Shardik long ago had need of all their courage and resolution."

  "I believe you," answered Kelderek, looking down to where the bear, like a crag beside the pool, still lay in drugged sleep. Yet in the same moment there rose in his heart an abandoned elation and the conviction that to none but the Tuginda herself had it been given to feel so intensely as he the fierce and mysterious divinity of Shardik. Shardik was more than life to him, a fire in which he was ready--nay, eager--to be consumed. And for that very reason Shardik would transform but not destroy him--this he knew. As though with foreboding, he trembled for an instant in the sultry air, turned and made his way back to the camp.

  That night the Tuginda talked with him again, walking slowly back and forth along the bank above the fall, where stood burning that safe flat, green-rush-shaded lantern that he had followed across the leaping tree trunk in the dark. Rantzay, a head taller than himself, kept pace with them on the Tuginda's other side, and as he saw her checking her long stride out of deference to the Tuginda and himself, he remembered with a certain wry amusement how he had groped and clambered after her through the steep woods. They spoke of Shardik, and the gaunt, silent priestess listened attentively.

  "His wounds are clean," said the Tuginda. "The poison has almost left them. The drugs and medicines always work strongly on any creature, whether human or animal, that has never known them before. We can be almost certain now that he will recover. If you had found him only a few hours later, Kelderek, he would have been past our help."

  Kelderek felt that now at last was the time to ask her the question that had been flickering in his mind for the past three days, vanishing and reappearing like a firefly in a dark room.

  "What are we going to do, saiyett, when he recovers?"

  "I do not know any more than you. We must wait until we are shown."

  He blundered on. "But do you mean to take him to Quiso--to the Ledges?"

  "I mean?" For a moment she looked at him coldly, as she had looked at Bel-ka-Trazet, but then answered in a brisk, matter-of-fact tone, "You must understand, Kelderek, that it is not for us to make schemes and put them into practice upon Lord Shardik. It is true, as I told you, that sometimes, long ago, it was the Tuginda's task to bring Shardik home to the Ledges. But those were days when we ruled in Bekla and all was ordered and sure. Now, at this moment, we know nothing, except that Lord Shardik has returned to his people. His message and his purpose we cannot yet discern. Our work is simply to wait, to be ready to perceive and to carry out God's will, whatever it may be."

  They turned and began to walk back toward the fall.

  "But that does not mean that we are not to think shrewdly and act prudently," she went on. "By the day after tomorrow the bear will no longer be drugged and will begin to recover its strength. You are a hunter. What do you think it will do then?"

  Kelderek felt perplexed. His question had been returned to him without an answer. In spite of what he had heard her say to Bel-ka-Trazet, it had never occurred to him that the Tuginda had not in her mind some plan for bringing Shardik to the Ledges. What had been puzzling him was how it was to be done, for even if the bear were to remain drugged the difficulties seemed formidable. Now he realized, with a shock, that she intended simply to stand by while this enormous wild animal regained its natural strength. If this was indeed--as she evidently believed--the course of humility and faith in God, it was of a kind beyond his experience or understanding. For the first time his trust in her began to waver.

  She read his thoughts. "We are not buying rope in the market, Kelderek, or selling skins to the factor. Nor are we laboring for the High Baron by digging a pit in the forest, or even choosing a wife. We are offering our lives to God and Lord Shardik in pledging ourselves humbly to accept whatever He may vouchsafe to give in return. I asked you--what is the bear likely to do?"

  "It is in a strange place that it does not know, saiyett, and will be hungry after its illness. It will look for food and may well be savage."

  "Will it wander?"

  "I have been thinking that soon we shall all be forced to wander. We have little food left and I cannot hunt alone for so many."

  "Since we can be sure that the High Baron would refuse to send us food from Ortelga, we must do the best we can. There are fish in the river and ducks in the reeds, and we have nets and bows. Choose six of the girls and take them out to hunt with you. There may be little enough to share at first, but there will be more as they learn their business."

  "It can be done for a time, saiyett--"

  "Kelderek, are you impatient? Whom have you left in Ortelga?"

  "No one, saiyett. My parents are dead and I am not married."

  "A girl?"

  He shook his head, but she continued to gaze at him gravely.

  "There are girls here. Commit no sacrilege, now of all times, for the least ill to follow would be our death."

  He broke out indignantly, "Saiyett, how can you think--"

  She only looked steadily at him, holding his eyes, as they paced on and turned about once more under the stars. And before his inward sight rose the figure of Melathys on the terrace; Melathys, dark-haired, white-robed, with the golden collar covering her neck and shoulders; Melathys laughing as she played with the arrow and the sword; trembling and sweating with fear on the edge of the pit. Where was she now? What had become of her? His protest faltered and ceased.

  Next day began a life which he was often to recall in after years--a life as clear, as simple and immediate as rain. If he had ever doubted the Tuginda or wondered what was to come of her humility and faith, he had no time to remember it. At first the girls were so awkward and stupid that he was in despair and more than once on the point of telling the Tuginda that the task was beyond him. On the first day, while they were driving a ketlana toward open ground, Zilthe, a mere child and the youngest of his huntresses, whom he had picked for her quickness and energy, mistook his movement in a thicket for that of the quarry and loosed an arrow that passed between his arm and body. They killed so little all day that he felt compelled to spend the night fishing. In the starlit shallows they netted a great bramba, spine-finned and luminous as an opal. He was about to spear it when the ill-fixed anchor stake carried away and the fish, plunging heavily, took half the net down with it into the deep water. Nito bit her lip and said nothing.

  By the second evening the whole camp was hungry and the thin, ragged bear was kept half-drugged and fed with scraps of fish and ill-spared flour-cakes baked in the ashes.

  But necessity brings out a desperate skill in the clumsiest. Several of the girls were at least passable shots and on the third day they were lucky enough to kill five or six geese. They feasted that night by the fire, telling old stories of Bekla long ago, of the hero Deparioth, liberator of Yelda and founder of Sarkid, and of Fleitil, immortal craftsman of the Tamarrik Gate; and singing together in strange harmonies unknown to Kelderek, who listened with a kind of tremulous unease as their voices followed each other round and down, like the fall of the Ledges themselves between the woods of Quiso.

  Soon, indeed, he had forgotten everything but the life of the moment--the wet grass of early morning, when he stood to pray with hands raised toward the distant river; the smell of the trepsis as they searched beneath its leaves for the little gourds that had ripened since the day before; the green light and heat of the forest and the tense glances between the girls as they waited in ambush with arrows on the string; the scent of jasmine at evening and the chu
nk, chunk, regular as a mill wheel, of the paddles as they made their way upstream to net some likely pool. After the first few days the girls learned quickly and he was able to send them out by twos and threes, some to fish, some to follow a trail in the forest or hide in the reeds for wildfowl. He was kept busy making arrows--for they lost far too many--until he had taught Muni to make them better than he could himself. Ortelga he put from his mind, and his fear of Bel-ka-Trazet's revenge. At first he dreamed vividly of the Baron, who rose out of the ground with a face of broken stones and beckoned him to follow into the forest, where the bear was waiting, or walked upon the shore and threw back his cowl to reveal a face of flickering heat, half-consumed, red and gray as the glowing surface of a log flaking in the fire. But soon his dreams changed, turning to vaporous, elusive impressions of stars and flowers reflected in dark water, or of clouds drifting over ruined walls far off upon an empty plain; or he would seem to hear the Tuginda speaking sorrowfully, accusing him, in words that he could never recall, of some ill deed as yet unperformed. It was not that he had ceased either to fear for his life or to believe that the future held danger. He had simply put these things aside, living, like the other creatures of forest and river, from hour to hour, his senses full of sounds and smells, his mind concerned only with his craft. Often he snatched sleep as a beast snatches it, by night or day wherever he found himself, and would be roused by a grave, breathless girl with news of a flight of ducks off-shore or a band of monkeys approaching through the trees a mile away. All quarry brought in was accepted without question; and often, when Neelith gave him his share out of the iron pot hanging over the fire, he could not imagine what meat it might be, only feeling glad that some of the girls had evidently been successful without his help.

  It was on the fifth or sixth day after Sheldra had returned from Ortelga with his bow (which she had apparently been able to recover without troubling Bel-ka-Trazet) that Kelderek was standing with Zilthe a little inside the forest, about half a mile from the camp. They were in hiding beside a barely visible track that led to the shore, waiting for whatever animal might appear. It was evening and the sunlight had begun to redden the branches above him. Suddenly he heard at a distance the sound of women's voices singing. As he listened, the hair rose on his neck. He remembered the wordless songs by the fire. To his mind those had suggested, transmuted indeed yet still familiar, the sound of wind in leaves, of waves on the river, of the pitching of canoes in choppy water and the falling of rain. What he heard now resembled the movement, over centuries, of things that to men seem motionless only because their own lives are short: the movement of trees as they grow and die, of stars altering their relative places in the heavens, of mountains slowly ground away through millennia of heat, frost and storm. It was like the building of a city. Great, squared blocks of antiphonal sound were sung and lowered into place, one upon another, until the heart stood far below, gazing up at the clouds marching endlessly across the dark line of the completed ramparts. Zilthe was standing with closed eyes and outstretched palms. Kelderek, though he saw nothing and felt afraid, seemed to himself to have been lifted to some plane on which there was no more need of prayer, since the harmony that is continually present to the mind of God had been made audible to his own prostrate, worshiping soul. He had sunk to his knees and his mouth was twisted like that of a man in agony. Still listening, he heard the singing diminish and then slide quickly into silence, like a diver into deep water.