The Island Under the Earth

by Avram Davidson

  Chapter Fifteen

  Dellatindílla moved with step so light that even those whose ears were accustomed to his kitten tread did not always hear him coming: and then it sometimes went very ill with them, for marry men called Dellatindílla many things, but few men called him kind. His body was over-tall and over-slender for its height, and he seemed to gather up his arms and legs as he walked more like a spider or a longlegs than a man; and those who had an especial fear for those creatures often shuddered as they saw him pass.

  From a distance he gave the appearance of being bald, but he was not: his thin hair was the same dim yellow as his face, and clung to his head like a close-fitting cap. His features seemed preternaturally aged, and yet he had not the familiar features of an old man: his face seemed grooved rather than merely wrinkled; a faint show of down showed against a background light, but beard or moustache he had none; and his eyelids were curious in the way they drooped. He was inquisitive and acquisitive, high and clear of voice, rich in many possessions. Yet no one envied him. He was Dellatindílla the comprador, and he was a eunuch.

  Some said he had been born so and others said he had been made so. None asked him. If he missed or was even aware of the meaning of the loss of manhood, none knew. There were stories that he burned strange herbs and gums and eagerly inhaled the fumes with nose and mouth and that thereafter he would stagger about or lie upon his couch with so ecstatic an expression as might lead one to believe that he was experiencing in his mind that sweet effusion … but no one knew. Only Dellatindílla knew. And he never said.

  Sometimes he kept his house for days, weeks on end, never seen. Sometimes he might be observed peeking through a lattice or peering out a barely-opened door. At other times he rode in his chair through the streets with servants bearing gifts, and made visits. Now and then a late stroller or a non-sleeper saw him passing as silent as a mist through the lamp-dim streets, and sometimes he had his little dwarfs with him and sometimes he had not. But of late he walked alone in level daylight and he drank in the inns and winehouse and he cheapened goods in the market and gear in shops and now and then gave orders for this and that.

  He seemed especially interested in things not always procurable, for fruits and fabrics and woods and other items which came irregularly from abroad, were not staple; and when he saw them not, he did not pass on without more ado, but made further inquiries. Had no one come lately from such-and-such-a-place, where such-and-such-an-item might have been available? Perhaps such a one had brought stuff or ware with him, or even, if not to trade, for private use or transshipment, yet might in the order of things be persuaded to part with what he had for a good price … and who (all agreed with him as he said this) indeed who paid better than Dellatindílla, if he were moved to pay well? And only a few oldwives dared to wag their empty gums at him and ask who paid less than Dellatindílla, if he were moved to pay ill. He laughed his hissing laugh at them, showing all his teeth, as though to taunt them, and passed on.

  He spoke these days with many people, but it was by and by observed and commented on that he showed an especial interest in talking to strangers. And though at this time no wagons or porters passed between his place and that of Tabnath Lo, whenever the eunuch passed this merchant’s place his steps seemed to slow and his neck would crane and his pale, pale eyes look all about. Many of the questions he asked, though not of the merchant himself, dealt with him; yet, when they were reviewed in the absence of either man, the many were reducible to a few. Had not Lo a new partner? Was he a partner in general or in a particular voyage or voyages? Where were these voyages to? What cargo had they brought back? What was the new partner like? Where had this new partner gone lately?

  Why?

  Why?

  Why?

  Chapter Sixteen

  Had there been a cliff in the way of their fearful flight they would have gone over it with no more realization or hesitation than a panicked pair of sheep: fortunately for them the first interruption was in the form of a stream. And, equally fortunately, it was neither too deep nor too swift. It washed off the sweat of terror, washed clean their tear-smeared faces; it was cold, and the cold gave them an excuse for still trembling somewhat. And if the water seemed to laugh as they stood there, up to their breasts in the fortuitous pool, it was a cool and not a mocking laugh. The water was not hostile and it was not friendly, it was indifferent, and perhaps an awareness of the meaning of this helped them to put their fears in a better perspective. It was after they had climbed out and the bosun was wringing his tunic that he seemed to feel a faint tremor not of his own, and, looking up, saw something which made him reach and cover his master’s mouth with one hand while he held the forefinger of the other to his lips. Then he gestured with his eyes and head.

  Through a gap in the overhanging branches they saw a stride of onagers galloping along the ridgeback of a hill, and behind them, at least as many centaurs. The glimpse was brief, and for Stag, even briefer than for his bosun. Scarcely had he sighted them when they were gone from sight. But he was sure that the onagers were laden. And he was sure that they must be his own.

  Seldom had seamen, untrained to spoorcraft, any easier trace to follow. They followed it cautiously, but with far, far easier minds than they had had the hour before. This, at least, was mere danger. They followed the danger down along the ridgeback and through the borders of the marsh, they followed it under great-bolled trees and through open grassland and through trampled thicket. There were shadows now, and birdsong, and all seemed so natural that almost the two were able to avoid perplexing themselves with a wonder as to what the other us were doing on this today which was simultaneously yesterday … and, equally perplexing and more than a shade more alarming, if the other us were forever bound to live or relive the same lives being lived by the this-us … only one day behind … or … or …

  It was better to let that drift as far as it would drift, and to concentrate on the turfs loosened by driving hooves, the occasional and still-smoking heaps of dung, the fresh-torn branches, here and there flies about drops of leaked wine. It was better, when coming near enough to hear the braying of the beasts or the hueing of the sixies, to drop behind and seek a concealment, lest one of the asses break away and double back and be pursued — and the four-limbed pursuers be discovered, and themselves pursued … or worse. On one such wait-a-bit they diverted themselves with the find of a semi-cave, a sunken ledge beneath an overhang of lichen-spotted rock, the floor conveniently deep in soft moss. Here they lay down a while until the sounds ahead should diminish; meanwhile, the rest was grateful.

  Low-voiced, the bosun asked, “How much longer do you think they’ll go?” Stag shrugged. “As far as they went yesterday, I suppose….” and winced before finishing, regretting he had given voice to the unhappy and confusing notion. He gave his head a great shake, then shrugged, put a sprig of sweet grass in his mouth, lay on his side. Thus they waited, and, perhaps against their will, dozed a bit. It was warm without being too warm, it was cool without being too cool, and they had come a long, rough way.

  They came awake with a start together. The voices of the sixies now predominated, but they seemed neither nearer nor farther away. And the shadows were visibly longer. Stag frowned. He slid out. Circumspectly, they made their way in hopes of seeing without being seen. And found that they might have done this a while earlier.

  They found themselves looking down into a great, grassy, bowl-shaped depression. Some of the onagers below had still not been unladen. The sixies — there were about twenty of them — had however unshipped a part of the cargo and piled it together. A few pair were still grooming each other, rubbing haunches with pads of grass, plucking burrs out of tails, and untangling elflocks in manes. Most of the others had already done with these delicate attentions and some of them began a rough, discordant singing or chanting in the centaurs’ language, all buzzes and drones. Now and then they moved in a line and lifted each a foreleg in something like unison.

  The
chorus stopped abruptly as a chestnut-colored sixy lifted a leather sack and held it up before his mouth in both hands. The next one snatched it from him, and was at once attacked — but not before the wine-skin, rescued in mid-air, had been pressed by another pair of hands, and, in an instant, the wine-stream directed into another mouth. Nor was the victor allowed more than a few swallows, and, even while he was guzzling them, two of his fellows charged straight at him, heads down, fists flying. Eyes wide and mouth still open, throat working hard on the wine, he turned to avoid them. One, he might have managed to drive off with his midlimbs while he danced on his hind ones, but two were too many, and he lost the wine. It was hard to tell, from where the four-limbed one lay concealed, what was wine and what was blood. And so the mad game went on: now they did their rude dance and now they fought for the wine-skin, now they sang and stepped together, now they fought each other, now they drank.

  “If they had sense to see,” Stag grumbled, after several sundry curses at the sight of his good vintages going down such savage throats, “there are enough wineskins to give them a few each … then they’d not have to fight.”

  Bosun swallowed, thirstily. “Ah, but then there wouldn’t be near as good sport,” he conceded, a gleam in his eye.

  Stag nodded a slow nod. A good fight and a good drunk: two things easy to appreciate, though of late years he had cared for them increasingly less than before. “They’ll kill each other off, at this rate,” he mused. “Then we’ll have no trouble getting the beasts and gear.” But the bosun shook his head. Weren’t they accompanying each blow with a draught of wine? And wasn’t wine a prime medicine for sixy-ills? Hadn’t they had proof of that? And once again Stag swore — to break off and roll over and half to his feet in anger as first one clod of turf and then another thudded softly upon him. Down from the outer rim of the bowl a face peered at them from the bushes. It leered, bared its teeth in a silent laugh. At first they thought it was a man. Then in another moment they saw it was a sixy … the sixy … the old one … but with a difference.

  “ ‘Speak of rain, and it thunders,’ ” he muttered. Then, with a half-doubtful look, he slid down to where the beckoning arm reached from the high grasses’ fringe.

  “Dthey dztill drinking wvinez?” the sixy asked. Stag nodded. The old centaur lifted his upper lip until the frenum showed. Silent chuckles shook his sides as the man added, “And mashing and bashing each other.”

  Abruptly the centaur’s look changed to one of mock seriousness. He snorted disapprovingly, shook his head. Then his eyebrows shot up and his eyes bulged. The bosun, at whom these mimings were directed, looked down at himself to see what the cause might be. He found out in a moment when the black-palmed hand reached down and patted the ropes wound round his waist, the coil of line he had cobbled together last night back at Stonehouse Hobar. “You gyivez me dthisz,” the sixy said. It was not a request, it was a statement.

  “Let him have it,” said Captain Stag. The command was scarcely a concession, as the old creature already had it. He didn’t bother with more buffoonery, simply vanished into the grass once more. They looked at the place where he had been, then at each other, then returned to their hiding-place of moments ago.

  The games below had entered another stage. Two sixies, each armed with an enormous branch, had stationed themselves not far from the diminished stack of wine-skins. Three of them, arms around each other, stood off, howling something in their own language which scarcely bore any semblance to singing by now; and now and then they picked up their feet and stamped them with an irregular regularity. But most of the centaurs were watching the two with the tree-limbs. Now one of them, a big roan, suddenly detached himself from the mass and, with a bellow which echoed all about the grassy bowl, galloped directly for the heaped-up cargo.

  The sixies fell silent. Only the thud-thud of the charge was heard. His attack, if attack it was, led him right between the two guardians, if guardians they were. They swung at him. One blow fetched him at the breastbone, one at the back of his head. Tump. Tump. His forelimbs collapsed, his hind limbs still galloped, the result spun him around and over, legs kicking, blood gushing from his open mouth. They swung again. Tump. Tump. And one final tump. One leg of the fallen sixy twitched. The rest of him lay motionless.

  The others gave voice in what seemed like one great bray, stamped their four feet each upon the ground, and the ground shook and the air trembled. Stag felt the taste of bile upon his tongue. This was not even his former notion of a good fight. Animals … utter animals … bucks in rut … might maim each other, even kill each other. But not for sport. It was with an effort that he recalled, and nodded silent assent to, words said to him which might have had just such a scene to call them up when they were first framed. 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.

  Something seemed odd, down there in the grassy bowl below. Something seemed to have changed. Were there fewer sixies than before? They swayed to and fro, heads down and lolling about, their arms sometimes on each others’ necks and sometimes hanging loosely; and in that confused mass of them it was hard for him to count them either by heads or hands or legs. He did not know. He did not know. And, along with the confused conviction that something was wrong, there began to grow from deep within him a sick fear that that either the day or the way had been “gathered up” again … and this time perhaps in another, and, if possible, worse form. He clutched the grass with his hands, and lay his face upon the cool earth. And then he felt a tug upon the back of his tunic.

  Once again it was Bosun, and once again he had his fingers to his lips. Stag’s sick fears suddenly were overwhelmed by a feeling of intense irritation. By Rahab and Leviathan! Were they to spend all this day and perhaps other days slithering behind bushes and hushing each other like schoolgirls playing pranks behind the back of a nodding nurse? He squirmed quite around and sat bolt upright, angrily brushing an ant from his nostril. The bosun, having fully gained his master’s attention and knowing well how to read his moods, now thought it prudent to depart a ways — making, as he did so, an apologetic gesture to his left. There at the foot of the hillock which formed on this side the outer part of that great natural bowl, under the dogwood trees, stood the element missing from inside and among the sixies — the line of onagers, still laden, still (or once again) cropping the grateful grass, and now linked together by that same rope which the old sixy had summarily taken from around the Bosun’s waist.

  He and the bosun stared at each other and then, wordlessly, they took the foremost beast by the bridle and led the entire caffle off into the forest.

  Behind them the noise of drunkenness and strife did diminish with distance but did not change in tenor. And, gradually, the dimlight deepened.

  Chapter Seventeen

  After a while, when they judged it safe to speak, but still not safe to speak in other low voices, Stag said, “It was well-done, Bosun. But how did you do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “‘Do what?’ Damn it, don’t bandy words with me! Haven’t I overheard your bragging often enough to know that you have no more modesty than a fish has navel?”

  The bosun said, in a faintly injured tone of voice, “If you mean roping and recovering the asses, I had nothing more to do with it than that I took the old bits of rope and new-fashioned them into one line. Who did do it? Who else could it have been, but the old sixy? I don’t know how. I didn’t see him — ” “No more did I.” “I was looking at the other ones, there in the pit, or whatever it is.” “So was I.” “And then he flung a turf at me, as he did at you … well, it had to be him, but I never saw him … and I turned me around, and, dragons take me, but there they were! And, you know, Captain, it’s an odd thing — ” “What’s that?” “Why, in the whole line running from bridle to bridle, it’s all just loops, you know. Just loops. I mean, it was. I me
an, until I put a few in, there wasn’t one single knot in the entire line!”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Captain Clarb had a deeply uneasy feeling that he ought not to be in the House of Dellatindílla the comprador, but, damn it, there he was! He searched his mind to think of a legitimate (that is, a commercial) reason why he should be there. At the moment he couldn’t think of one, but no doubt it would occur to him by and by. Meanwhile he watched with no small interest as his host’s hand, holding a webby old jug of wine, hovered over the goblets. That, in fact, might be the reason for their being here together, and not at the wine-house, where no such famous vintage as this was available. That is, Clarb assumed it was famous. It had to be. It was old, wasn’t it? It was in one of those red-glazed jugs which cost so damnably much that a coasting captain would never think of buying one. Besides, the winehouse, now. Here he’d patronized it for all these years. Didn’t they know it? Didn’t they value his patronage? When they saw him come in, hadn’t they remembered how long he’d been gone? Didn’t he always have the nicest of the new girls, if there was one around? Wouldn’t you think they’d reserve her for him? And just because he, as any civilized and newly-returned traveler would, had ordered a jug of the house’s best to break the back of his thirst upon instead of being bawdy and demanding to see the new wenches the first step inside the door —

  “I think you will like this, Captain Clarb,” said Dellatindílla. His two dwarfs — odd little bodies, two feet high and dressed in costumes as black and shiny as their huge eyes — nodded and made portentious faces at each other.