Shardik (61 page)

His thoughts, like a deserted child’s, returning to the memory of loss and grief, came back to Elleroth’s words in the garden. ‘Your bear is dying, Crendrik -‘

‘Shut up and get on,’ said the officer between his clenched teeth.

He did not know that he had spoken aloud. The dust whirled up in a sudden flurry of wind, yet of all the eyes around him not one seemed to close against it. The road was steeper now; they were climbing. He bent forward, dropping his head like an ox drawing a load uphill, looking down at the ground as he dragged himself on. They were leaving the market-place, yet the silence was pulling him backwards, the silence was a spell which held him fast. The weight of the thousands of eyes was a load he could never drag up this hill to the east gate. He faltered and then, stumbling backwards against the captain, turned his head and whispered, ‘I can’t go on.’

He felt the point of the captain’s dagger thrust against his back, just above the waist.

‘Ban of Sarkid or no Ban of Sarkid, I’ll kill you before my men come to any harm. Get on!’

Suddenly the silence was broken by the cry of a child. The sound was like
the
flaring of a flame in darkness. The soldiers, who when he stumbled had stopped uncertainly, gathering about him and the captain, started as though at a trumpet and every head jerked round towards the noise. A
little
girl, perhaps five or six years old, running to cross the road before the soldiers came, had tripped and fallen headlong and now lay crying in the dust, less from pain, perhaps, than from the grim appearance of the soldiers at whose feet she found herself sprawling. A woman stepped out of the crowd, picked her up and bore her away, the sound of her voice, reassuring and comforting the child, carrying plainly back along the lane.

Kelderek raised his head and drew a deep breath into his lungs. The sound had broken the invisible but dreadful web in which,
like a fly bound about with stic
ky thread, he had almost lost the power to struggle. As, when men break open at last a dry trench by the river, in which they have been repairing a canoe, the water comes flooding in, bringing back to the
craft its true element and lifti
ng it until it floats, so the sound of the child’s voice restored to
Kelderek
the simple will and determination of common men to endure and survive, come what may. His life had been spared, no matter why; the sooner he was away from this town the better. B: the people hated him, then he had the answer - he would be gone.

Without further words to the captain he took up his pace once more, spurning the soft sand with his heels as he trudged up the hill. The people were pressing close now, the soldiers keeping them off with the shafts of their spears, the captain shouting ‘Back! Keep back!’ Ignoring them, he turned a corner at the top and at once found himself before the gate tower, the gate standing open, the guard turned out and drawn up on either side to prevent anyone following them out of the town. They tramped under the echoing arch. Without looking round he heard the gate grind and clang to and the bolts shot home.

‘Don’t stop,’ said the captain, close behind him as ever.

Marching down a hill between trees, they came to a rocky ford across a torrent that swept down from the wooded hills on the left. Here the men, without waiting for orders, broke ranks, kneeling to drink or flinging themselves on the grass. The officer once again gripped Kelderek’s shoulder and turned him about, so that they stood face to face.

‘This is the Vrako - the boundary of Kabin province, as I dare say you know. The east gate of Kabin is shut for an hour by the Ban’s orders and I shall be keeping this ford closed for the same length of time. You’re to cross by this ford and after that you can go where you please.’ He paused. ‘One more thing. If the army get orders to patrol east of the Vrako, we shall be looking out for you; and you’ll not escape again.’

He nodded to show that he had no more to say, and
Kelderek
, hearing behind him the growling curses of the soldiers - one threw a stone which struck a rock close by his knee - stumbled his way across
the
ford and so left them.

Book V

39
Across the Vrako

In Bekla he had heard of the country east of Kabin - the midden of the empire, one of his provincial governors had called it - a province with no estates and no government, without revenue and without one city. Forty miles below
Ortelga
the Telthearna turned, in a great bend, to flow southward past the eastern extremity of the Gelt mountains. South of these mountains and west of the Telthearna lay a remote wilderness of wooded ridges, of marshes, creeks and forest
, without roads and with no settleme
nts except a few miserable villages where the inhabitants lived on fish, half-wild pigs and whatever they could scratch from the soil. In such a region, to seek and find a man was all but impossible. Many a fugitive and criminal had disappeared into its wastes. There was a proverb in
Bekla
, ‘I wou
ld kill So-and-So, were it worth
the journey to Zeray.’ Rough, unruly boys would be told by their mothers, ‘You’ll end in Zeray.’ It was rumoured that from this isolated place - for town it co
uld not be called - where the Telthe
arna narrowed to a strait less than a quarter of a mile wide, a man who could pay might be taken across to the eastern shore and no questions asked. In the old days, even the northern army of patrol had fixed
the
eastern limit of its march at Kabin, and no tax-collectors or assessors would cross the Vrako for fear of their lives. Such was the country which Kelderek had now entered and the place in which, by
Elleroth
‘s mercy, he was free to remain alive for as long as he could.

Having taken the fresh shoes from his pack and put them on, he walked fast for some while down the narrow, overgrown track. What more likely, he thought, than that, once the gate and ford were open, some might follow in the hope of overtaking and killing him? For although he knew well enough that he was likely to
the
in this country and indeed could find in himself little desire to save his life, yet he was determined not to lose it at
the
hands of any Yeldashay or other enemy of Shardik. Within an hour he came to a place where an even wilder path branched northward to his left, and this he followed, clambering for a time through the undergrowth beside it to avoid leaving traces on the track itself.

At last, a
little
before noon, having heard and seen no one since his crossing of the Vrako, he sat down by the bank of a creek and,
when he had eaten, fell to considering what he should do. Underlying all his thoughts, like a rock submerged in a swirling pool, was the conviction that he had passed some mysterious but nonetheless real spiritual boundary, over which he could never return. What was
the
meani
ng of the adventure at the Stree
ls of Urtah, the news of which the shepherds had heard
with
so much awe and fear? What had befallen him in his oblivion on
the
battle
field, while he lay at the mercy of the unavenged dead? And why had Elleroth spared the life of one whose rule had brought about the loss of his own son? Pondering these inexplicable happenings, he knew that
they
had quenched
the
strength and faith
that
had burned in the heart of
the
priest-king of Bekla. Litde more
than
a ghost he now felt himself to be, a drained thing haunting a body wasted with hardship.

Deepest bell of all that tolled in his heart was Elleroth’s news of Shardik. Shardik had crossed the Vrako and was believed to be dying - in that
there
could have been no deceit. And if he, Kelderek, still set any value on his life, his best course would be to accept it. In a country of this nature, to look for Shardik would be only to invite such danger and hardship as neither his mind nor his body were capable of withstanding. Either he would be murdered, or he would
the
in the forests of the hills. Shardik, whether alive or dead, was irrecoverable; and for
the
least chance of life he himself ought to head south, contrive somehow to make his way into northern Tonilda and then reach the Ortelgan army.

Yet an hour later he was once more climbing northwards, holding,
with
no attempt at concealment or self-protection, to the track as it wound into the lower hills. Elleroth, he thought bitterly, had rated him accurately enough. ‘Take my word for it, neidier he nor the bear can harm us now.’ No indeed, for he was the priest of Shardik and
nothing
else beside. Afraid of Ta-Kominion’s contempt, and influenced by him to believe that the will of God could be none other than that Shardik should conquer
Bekla
, he had stood by while the Tuginda was bound and led away like a criminal, and had
then
gone on to set himself up as the mediator of Shar
dik’s favour to his people. With
out Shardik he would be
nothing
- a rain-maker mumbling in a drought, a magician whose spells had failed. To return to Zelda and Ged-la-Dan with the news (if
they
did not already know it) that Elleroth was with the Yeldashay and Shardik lost for ever would be to sign his own death-warrant. They would scarcely lose a day in getting rid of such a figure of defeat. Elleroth knew this. Yet he knew more. He had understood, as many an enemy would not, Kelderek’s passionate faith and the integrity of his belief in Shardik. As an experienced master, though privately entertaining contempt for a servant’s personal values and beliefs, can nevertheless perceive that by his own lights that servant is capable of sincerity, even, perhaps, of courage and self-denial; so
Elleroth
, hating Shardik, had known that
Kelderek
, whatever gleams of hope fortune might tempt him with, would be unable to separate his own fate from that of the bear. And
this
was why, since he also knew - or supposed that he knew, thought
Kelderek
with a sudden spurt of forlorn defiance - that Shardik was dying, he had seen no harm in sparing the priest-king’s life. But why had he actually gone about to impose his will in this matter upon those surrounding him? Could it be,
Kelderek
wondered, that he himself had become visibly marked with some sign, perceptible to such as Elleroth, of being accursed, of having passed through merited sufferings to a final inviolability in which he was now to remain, to await the retribution of God? At this thought, shuffling slowly on through the solitude, he sighed and muttered under the burden of his misery, for all the world like some demented old woman in a desolated town, bearing in her arms the weight of a dead child.

Even in
this
notorious no-man’s land he had not expected so complete an emptiness. All day he met never a soul, heard no voice, saw no smoke. As afternoon turned to evening he realized that he would be forced to pass the night without shelter. In the old days, as a hunter, he had sometimes spent nights in the forest, but seldom alone and never without fire or weapons. To send him across
the
Vrako without even a knife and with no means of making a fire - had
this
perhaps been intended, after all, as nothing but a cruel way of putting him to death ? And Shardik - whom he would never find - was Shardik already dead? Sitting with his head in his hands, he passed into a kind of waking oblivion that was not sleep, but rather the exhaustion of a mind unable any longer to grip
thought
, slipping and sliding like wheels in the mud of the rains.

When at last he lifted his head he at once caught sight, among the bushes close by, of an object so familiar that, although it had been carefully concealed, he felt surprise not to have noticed it earlier. It was a trap - a wooden block-fall such as he himself had often set in days gone by- It was baited
with
ca
rrion and dried fruit, but these
had not been touched and the trip-peg was still supporting the block.

The evening wanted no more than two hours to nightfall and, as well he knew, those who leave traps unvisited overnight are apt to find
the
next day that scavenging beasts have reached them first. He scratched out his footprints with a broken branch, climbed a tree and waited.

In less than an hour he heard the sounds of someone approaching. The man who appeared was dark, thick-set and shaggy-haired, dressed
partly
in skins and partly in old, ragged garments. A knife and two or
three
arrows were stuck in his belt and he was carrying a bow. He bent down, peered at
the
trap under the bushes and was already turning away when Kelderek called to him. At this he started, drew his knife in a flash and vanished into the undergrowth.
Kelderek
realized
that
if
he were not to lose him altogeth
er he must take a risk. He scrambled to the ground, calling, ‘I beg you, don’t go! I need help.’