“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….”
Chapter Thirteen
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 an
d 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.
Chapter Fourteen
Far down below, in a deep declivity bordering an even deeper stream, the sound of whose rushing came to them faintly now and then with the fickle wind, three aurochs filed along with ponderous grace: red, dun, white. The bosun looked wistful, expectant, doubtful. “We could have a try,” he suggested. Stag did not even shake his head.
“No time,” he said.
This was not the Bosun’s favorite word. “Time….” he repeated. For some several paces now, the aurochs being out of mind were as well out of sight, he had been looking down and watching his footing carefully, for the way just then was rough. But now it became smoother and a long glance showed it to continue so a good while. He allowed his gaze to rise and scan about the country. They were treading along a broad shelf which by an almost imperceptible decline made its way down the side of one of the half-hills, and here the whole range seemed to part and show a section and a sampling of everything lying between the present point and the distant, distant sea: and each peak and each escarpment, as its edge was outlined against the sky, seemed to have not one clear line marking it but several, distinct yet indistinct, not black alone but gray and pale red and soft violet.
“Time….” the bosun repeated, seeing but not observing this phenomenon, the common thing in his world. “Haste up to these far hills, haste back down to port again, haste back to the hills, and all in quick time. Then to wait. And how much time to wait, Captain Stag?”
For first answer his captain seized up a stone and threw it forcefully into the ravine. The sound of its fall was slow and muted. For second answer he said, “And how in Three Hells should I know? — You gobble too much.”
“Not through yet, even now.”
“Gobble on, then. Tired of haste, not tired of waste? Waste your breath some more.”
“I’ll do it. When we’ve done waiting, then what?”
“That was agreed. We try again.” To this the bosun said nothing. But his silence indicated no pleasurable consent. It was not till they were at the bottom of the grade and the path had turned under stands of flowering-yellow acacia that Stag spoke again. “But we mayn’t go to port. Why should we, if we needn’t? What’s there we’re hot to see that can only be seen there? It’s the gear I want, and it’s the gear I’m bound for, and if I find it three steps this side of port, be sure I won’t go four. And now if you are still set to talk, talk to yourself, for I’ve no ears to — ”
He had ears to hear the bellow which split the air for all about them. There, ahead, in the open glade, a sixy stood. He held his hands up, palms out. He moved slowly in a circle. Something lay on the ground. But nothing which looked like a weapon. Unless he had a cudgel or stones concealed in the leather sack … if it was a leather sack. Automatically, the two men looked quickly behind them. No one and nothing was there. The boles of the acacias were too slender for any to hide behind. The two men went slowly forward. And then both of them, so close together that, if it had not been simultaneous, neither could have said who was first, cried out their astonishment.
The sixy was the same sixy of the evening before, and yet he was very much not the same sixy at all.
The long hairs of his mane and beard and tail, the shorter hairs of his pelt, were all of the same frosted silvery tone; but whereas before the tone was lifeless and dead, the hair and pelt now glowed and rippled with the sheen of life. Yesterday he had been barely able to crawl; today he ambled and he cantered. The filmed eyes were clear now. He had washed in a stream or pond in the meanwhile, too, but evidently he had washed alone, for his hair, where his hands could not reach it at all or conveniently, was still tangled. He was restored to health; to health, not to youth. The body of old being is not the same as that of a young one, however healthy. But the sounds he made were not the sighs and groans of yester-dimlight. Rumbles of wicked amusement alone made his silvery flanks heave, and flashes of it were in his eyes and on his face. He hooted as they came and he even, for a second or two, stood upright on his hind limbs and imitated their cautious approach; then dropped heavily to his natural stance with a grunt. Then slowly backed off as they came.
“Hyah, Fouries, hyoh, Fouries,” he snorted. “Dudzn’t bringz wvines?”
The Bosun’s voice clicked in his astonished throat. “By Rahab and Leviathan! The wine did cure him! But it couldn’t! How could it?”
The sixy turned in a slow and ponderous movement which seemingly had something of mockery in it, lifted his tail at them, then engaged in feinting at a nonexistent other centaur. And all the while he hooted his amusement. “If it wasn’t the wine,” Stag asked, “what was it? And what’s this on the ground?” It was a deer, a small doe, dead; and the sixy gestured them to it, his mouth for a moment too full of acacia pods to talk coherently to them, made motions with his hands; then, spitting out the seeds, he invited them to “make fire and burn meat” — for the sixies have not the word cook.
They looked at the deer, turned it over. It seemed unmarked. Stag said, “How did he kill it?” In another instant his hand gripped the sixy’s wrist as the sixy’s hand was laid in a chopping gesture against his neck. Gripped it, held it hard, knew that if the sixy, old as he was, had meant to crack his neck with that stroke neither his hand nor any man’s hand could have stayed and stopped it. And how swift, how sudden —
“Dthat izz hyow!” the sixy said. Then, with a hoot, and a backward kick which tossed bits of turf upon them, he was off. In a moment the sound of his feet had died away.
“Start the fire,” said Stag, tossing the flint and tinder pouch. He hung the deer on a broken branch, bled and drew and partly skinned it.
The bosun made the fire, but watched the butchering dubiously. Suppose, he suggested, it was poisoned. Stag’s comment, that if the bosun thought it might be he should eat the first bite, did not much reassure him. Afterwards, though, he did say, with a comfortable eructation, “That part of it wasn’t, anyway.”
Stag wiped greasy hands, mouth and beard on a handful of grass, got up and started off. The bosun, with a half-wistful look at the supposedly still suspect half-carcass, followed. In those days, and perhaps as yet, that world was without clocks, and there was no such precise time as midnight. What man could awake and declare it to be such? But midday … noon … anyone not blind could declare. It was the unnatural hour, for it was the hour without shadows. At that time when all creatures became as those accursed through having had their shadows lost or strayed or stolen, whilest the heat was greatest, all creatures’ natural tendency was to seek shelter. Strange things went abroad at noon, when no man’s eye could know that they had no shadows, ever; and strange things were known to happen, which did not happen at other times. Had not, in fact, the attack of yesterday been at noon? And had not some curious and still mysterious augurial hints —
Stag stopped short. He looked around. He walked back, ignoring his sweating bosun, looked around again. So perturbed was his manner that the latter copied his glance. “We aren’t lost, are we?” he asked.
His captain stamped his foot and softly swore. “Worse than just lost. If we’d taken a wrong turning we could go back and expect to take the right turning. But it isn’t we at all who’ve turned. The land has turned.”
His man did not have to ask how it could be, he knew how it could be, for he had heard, as everyone had, of “the gathering-up of the way,” and its cognate happening, “the gathering-up of the day.” Quickly, he looked about him: no, still no shado
ws; it was the same time it had been. But the landscape was different — Stag was right, the land had turned. They were much lower down than they should have been, was that it? Or much higher …? And those were reeds over there, and dragonflies, and there ought by rights to be neither marsh nor bog nor swamp nor fen anywhere around here.
The trees look different, he thought. The rocks were not that shape nor yet that color. He glanced at Stag, and his heart thumped to see the man’s pallor, the skin under the eyes so dark, the cold drops like grease upon his forehead. Stag gripped him and pointed. Everything seemed to waver and he wanted nothing so much as to walk or run or even drop to all fours and crawl away, anywhere away, out of the shadow-stealing sun, under a fallen tree or beneath a ledge of rock. But he looked where Stag’s trembling hand pointed. The air trembled as though it, too, was maze-struck and befeared. The figures seemed to melt a little. But he saw what he saw.
He saw men and he saw centaurs and he saw onagers. The centaurs were attacking the men and the onagers were in flight. “An ambush!” he cried. “They’re beset as we were, yesterday! Come on, Captain!” he cried. “Why are we standing here? Let’s run, let’s help them!”
Stag looked at him with sick and fearful eyes. “I fear we’d never reach that place,” he said, his voice breaking. “But even more, I fear we would….” The tiny figures moved madly about. “Go to them? I’d go to my death, sooner. Don’t you know yet what has happened? If we go down there we may meet ourselves — they are us — today is yesterday — and they are us — us — us! ” His voice rose to a scream, he pressed his hands to his head and fled in the other direction. And the bosun screamed and the bosun fled with him.
The Island Under the Earth Page 5