It was the oldest, sickest Sixy that any of them had ever seen.
Chapter Eight
“Crawled away to die,” Stag said, surveying it without passion. Without passion at the thought of either its painful passage hither or the soon approach of death, that is; for in another moment another thought occurred to him and he became passionate enough as he dug the butt end of his javelin into the shabby, scabby flanks which heaved and labored to force air into the sunken lungs. “Damned Sixy!” he cried. “Has it come to spy for more beasts and gear?”
“Dudzn’t know,” the sixy said, in a broken and weak voice, in which, however, the characteristic sixy buzz was fully prominent. The eyes were fallen in and filmy, the mane was thin and tangled — of itself, evidence he had been long from the society of his own kind, whose eternal combing and grooming and braiding of each other’s manes and tails was a byword: one of the few niceties they used. “Wudzn’t … where beaztz and gyear … were … anyi …”
The old, bleared eyes rolled in their sunken sockets, focused or half-focused, the withered lips moved, made silly and ugly noises, then said a word, said it again, said another word and repeated that one.
“Sick.
“Sick.
“Wine.
“Wine.”
The five humans stared at the dying centaur, then at each other, moved by pity, by anger, annoyance, disgust, by amusement.
“Wine, is it?” — this from the bosun. “What next? Sweet cake and honey, perhaps? Comfits of sesame?”
And Rary, never far from her need, her obsession, the wonder only that it had been for several hours unvoiced by her, voiced it now with, “Wine? Blood, you mean — human blood you mean — dirty old beast, where are my children?”
The old beast blinked, moved its pendulous lips, blew them out in the sixy emphatic negative. “Dudzn’t know … dudzn’t zee anyi fourlimb childrenz … Sick … Wine …” The last two words coming as, almost, zich and vine.
Spahana looked down at him, lying there, and no one could tell what her thoughts were. Stag looked down on him, lying there, and anyone could have told what his thoughts were. Scorn was on his face, then bitter anger, then he hefted his javelin, then his free hand passed over his face — miraculously unscarred, and with but a trace of faint redness where it had been burned — he stepped back a pace and his lower lip protruded from the wild blackness of his beard and he seemed to calculate if or not he might safely slay the old sixy without its dread blood spurting on him —
And then all this was superceded by a genuine, if exasperated puzzlement, which burst forth into a question: “Why does it want wine?” That centaurs should speak caused him no astonishment, for all the world knew they could; still … he had never spoken directly to one, nor could he automatically do so, even now, face to face. And it was the augur who told him.
“Water Lord, among we who know the Uplands well it is well-known that certain things of man’s obtaining are much fancied by the sixies, such as milk and bread and salt and wine. And as for wine, while they do drink it as the rougher sort of men do drink it, that is, to get drunk — still, they have another use for it, they use it as medicine — ”
“Medicine!”
“Medicine, Water Lord. They prize it, in certain ailment, far above such herbal remedies as they are well-known to know, and — ”
Stag turned to his bosun. “Get the flask. In the uppermost room. I left it there. What, you are still standing there?” He made a move, but the bosun had gone. And was soon enough back, none meanwhile venturing, in the gathering dimlight, to express any opinion by word or look. None except the old sixy himself, who, slowly, slowly, slowly, dragged himself from the green fennel and propped himself on an elbow, and then lay still, gasping. The flask was made of two pieces of wood, hollowed and curved in the manner of drumwoods, bound together and encased in leather whose pebbled surface had once belonged to some sea-creature. It had been at the captain’s belt and so escaped the loss of all the other wine with the flight of the onagers. No one had seen him drink from it, he had offered none to anyone, perhaps he had forgotten its existence. But, clearly, aloft in the small room with the farthest view, by himself, he had remembered.
“Wine, it wants?” he asked, grimly. “I’ll give it wine.” He tugged out the stopple with his teeth, swished the flask and watched how the sixy’s face opened, how his scalp moved till the ears stood up, how the dry mouth worked. Then he poured a few drops out. They fell upon the ground with the sound of rain. The old sixy lurched on his elbow, tried to crawl, failed, thrust his enpurpled tongue far out, his eyes wide open, thrust out his free hand as though to catch the drops. Bosun laughed. Stag’s upper lip curled and the teeth beneath it showed. Then, with a suddenness which surprised them all, he seized the ancient’s tangled mane and thrust the flask into the centaur’s mouth. Wine ran down upon the beard, wine gurgled, splashed. But the scrannel throat moved. And moved. And moved. Even after Stag had pulled the flask away and held it up and held it over so that all saw that no drop remained, still the throat moved and moved and moved.
“Now, old dung,” said Stag, “if you get better, go and spread the word to, how does it go, ‘colt and crone and cob, yearlion, and stallion, maiden mare and matron mare,’ that for every stolen beast of gear I’ll slay and flay one centaur. And if you die, old dung, lie in wait by the Gate of the Centaurs’ Hell, and when you see them come through, tell who sent them there.” He made for the house, not pausing as he called without a turn of his head, “And why!”
Spahana followed him. The others moved where they stood, but did not walk away, still staring at the old sixy. In the darkening sky of dimlight a thin white line became visible, stretching across the horizon. Then another, parallel to it. A third, crossing both. Absently, the bosun glanced. “Stars,” he murmured. The sixy sighed and the sixy stretched. He moved his haunches. He sternutated. That broke the spell. With an almost unanimous noise of disgust, the three turned and walked away. Behind them, they heard the old sixy grunting and sighing and groaning.
Chapter Nine
Rary hunched by the fire, feeding it with twigs. The old pot of dry grains, roughly pounded in the huge mortar with the pestle large enough to do for a war-mace, was long in cooking. The bosun, used to spending these hours either drinking and trulling or else mending ships’ gear, had found numbers of spoiled ropes about the house and was contentedly cutting and braiding and splicing. At one end the orange-rose sparkles of the fire lit the darkness, irregularly; at the other, a log of gleamwood stood, blue-green-white its phosphorlight. Spahana had chosen a carven stool nearer to that end, and there she sat, so still, so smooth, that she seemed a statue which some sept of priests had clothed in robes for a vigil. Between the two sorts of lights Stag sat on the floor, legs crossed upon an ancient and raddled golden fleece, his hands smoothing down again and again the empty wine-flask, and the augur leaned upon the arm of a bench which had been old in the days when Hennen Hobar had had his use of it.
Castagor was speaking and Stag was listening, now and then asking a question, and then listening again, grave and patient, to the answer. Once, his eyes straying to his woman, as they often did, he caught a glimpse in the polished blue-black lookstone on the yonder wall of himself at the augur’s feet: in the accustomed distortion he seemed shrunken small and the seer both broad and tall: and in that fleeting speck of time before both moved and the image changed again he seemed to see himself at his father’s feet: a boy, rapt. There had not been many such moments; his father had been likelier, when he found his son at his feet, to give him an order and a kick in the ribs than to play the patriarch’s part with sage sayings and grave accounts of this and that.
Stag’s father had been a ship’s captain, too; narrow of temper and broad of hand; and, besides seamanship, the main lesson his son had learned was to leave his father’s deck and hold and strike out on his own (strike being the optimum verb), the sooner he might be the liker him. But with never a thought,
never any thought, of return. Do the cave-lions’ whelps, when they have killed their own meat and mounted their own she, think of return? Big Stag had several sayings he was fond of, and one of them his son had made his own. Women, waves, and land, all are made to be plowed. That all should yield to him, that he should yield to none, this to Stag was but the natural order of all things.
Strange, then, perhaps, to see him sitting now so intent as to bypass mere respect … not to exceed it, but to go by another path beyond it. And although Castagor was his senior, and despite the brief-distorted vision of the lookstone, it was not youth sitting at the feet of age. For truth, youth in the Island Beneath the Earth seldom sits so stilly at the feet of age. Perhaps childhood, but seldom youth: and why, by its own fierce lights, should it? That inertia is the tendency of a body, when cold, to stay cold; and when hot, to stay hot — that during Star-flux the thin white lines which cross and crisscross the skies of night tremble and waver and bend and then, for a long, mad moment, tremble and waver and melt and become compressed into tiny, brilliant points of light, and pulse and throb — that on such occasions wise mariners put never out of port, for how can one steer? — that murrain-eels taint the water, which, once drunk of, turns the drinker into a homophage: rogue, mad, a skulker, solitary, incapable of sustaining his brute life on any food but men’s-flesh, and that but new-dead — that Earth-flux is when that fixed dark corner of the sky which conceals the Gate of Human Hell changes form and moves — Of such bits of wisdom and of weird do old men discourse when senses fade away one by one and the present becomes a blur and there is no more future and only the past is clear. But young men and young women, to whom the future is endless, the past but brief confusion, and all senses sharp and fierce and hot for the lustful present, are minded to heed the old ones not.
Of these things to any who listen do old men speak, old men and augurs. So see now Stag, a sailor and hence of a race to whom soothsayers are but he-whores, bought for brief necessity alone, sitting and toying with his empty wine-flask and now his head bowed and now his eyes raised; but with never a word nor a look nor a breath of scorn. For Gortacas the augur was speaking of the Cap of Grace.
Chapter Ten
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.
Chapter Eleven
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 noti
ced 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.
Chapter Twelve
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.
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