“I would ask your kindness, friend,” he said, in an abstracted voice, “to take this sieve and to fill it with a handful or two of soft earth or sand, if there be any hereabouts; in order that I may perform an augury, or auspication.”
A second passed, and then another. Then a hand touched the sieve, then the hand took the sieve, then the hand withdrew. A smile lifted one corner of the augur’s thin mouth, and he rubbed the somewhat flattened tip of his nose, and he sang a wordless song in his nose and he gently shook and rattled the bagget. Then the hand thrust the sieve back at him. “I do thank you, friend,” said Gortecas, in an absent manner. He cleared a patch of ground with a sweep of his hand’s edge and then shook the sieve and shook it and sifted the contents as a housewife sifts meal, till at last and at length only a few small clods and twigs and pebbles were left: these he tossed aside with a deft gesture not unlike that of a goldwasher.
“Gortecas, Gortecas, Gortecas,” he murmured, taking a quick reading on the skies, informing the Elements and Potencies who he was, so they would take no offense. Clearing his throat, with his finger he drew a quick square … or four lines which would do for a square … another look upward … he shifted his position slightly … again … a tiny bit more … Then he looked up. The other was staring at the patterns, openmouthed, white teeth and wet red lips gleaming. Wet red eyes staring. Gortecas glanced down again. Murmured, “Friend, do me the further kindness of stepping back somewhat out of the way….” He gestured. The other moved back.
Calmly and without haste Gortecas reached out his finger and completed the circle around the tree. Then he took up his medicine-bagget and shook it briskly, then put it down to draw another series of lines, these set within the square: arcs, waves, intersecting angles, stars, ox-horns … Then he opened the end of his medicine-bagget and sent its contents sprawling onto the soft-sifted earth. He leaned and looked. The figure behind him licked his lips and lifted his two hands in a clawing gesture towards the augur. Then blinked. Then scowled. Then put his hands down again. Filthy, he was. Dirt grained his skin and mottled his pores. But his fingernails were immaculate. They were also pared to points. His reddened eyes seemed to focus on the figure in front of him, then upon the diagram: half-concerned and half-confused. A growl rose in his throat, but, with an alarmed look, he stifled it. Tried, with an effort, to look unconcerned.
“Mmmm …” The augur pursed his thin lips. “Pebble within shell … something contained in something else … yes … to be sure … What’s this? What’s this? What’s this? Confusion twice takes the throne of order?” He frowned. Muttered angrily. Again the figure behind raised his both hands and this time brought them down. And stared at them, astonished. Then reached out a single hand. Withdrew it. Completely baffled, dug his hands into his tangled hair. Then got to his feet, put his back against the bole of the tree, leaped forward. Fell sidewise. The noise of his fall caused the augur’s head to turn. For a moment the two regarded each other. “You must be more careful, sir friend,” the soothsayer cautioned. “Not only might these exertions occasion you an injury, but the clamor of them bids fair to interrupt my scanning of the configurations.” He returned his gaze to the ground.
Presently the other man got to his feet, and next he commenced doing something rather odd: he proceeded in a circular manner all around the trunk of the tree, with his hands thrust out and his back always to the trunk. Then, coming back where he had started, and with an expression on his unkempt face which mingled anguish and anger in equal proportions, he gave a great leap upwards and forwards.
And fell crashing down once more.
Again and again he repeated his movements, till the soil about the trunk was quite scuffled and torn. Then he squatted and he wept. Then he opened his mouth. At first only inarticulate and uncouth sounds proceeded from him. Then he cleared his throat with a sound of augh! “Aug!” he said. “Aug — Aug — Aug-gur! ”
Gortecas sighed, looked up, said nothing.
“Augur … Can … t … geh … t … ou … t …”
“Not at all?”
“No … t … a … t … all …”
“In that case,” said the augur, wiping out his configurations and placing his medicine things in the sieve and shaking them; “in that case, you clearly require my help. And I,” he said, “shall give it to you.” He shook the sieve once more. He rose. “You must strive,” he said, “to cultivate an attitude of philosophical detachment.”
The creature wailed. “F … ood!” he cried. “N … o … f … ood! S … tar … ve … t … o … d … eath …!”
“Nonsense,” said Gortecas, briskly. “There is food. You have only to know where to look for it. And I hope,” he added, as he prepared to depart, “that this will be a lesson to both of you.” He walked away with swift strides. Behind him, the homophage, squatting on his haunches, lifted up his head and howled. Once. Twice. Then no more. Then, his red eyes glaring like those of a beast in a cage, he watched the dwindling figure. His red lips moved. “G … or … t … eca … s …” he clicked and hissed. “S … o … S … o … G … or … t … eca … s … S … o …
“G … or … t … eca … s …”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The man in the first hall had no particular personal feature which impressed itself on Tabnath Lo’s mind. His manner was dreamy and abstract, and he barely seemed to notice them as they approached. But in his left hand he held a huge and convoluted shell and he had it close to his ear. Said the warder to him, “Repeat what you last heard.”
And he who listened said, “ ‘Espy out the land …’ ”
“Good. What else?”
And he who listened said, “ ‘Allitu … Allitu … Allitu …’ ”
The grayhaired warder turned a look of mild triumph and a look of mild scorn and mild amusement on Lo. It was as it was all too obvious for any greater emotion. Lo felt his gaze faltering, his head sinking. The beginnings of a great uncertainty, a great confusion, oppressed him. Had he, after all, said those words? — lately enough for them to be heard here? Was there, after all, anything unreasonable in his perhaps having said them? A spy in any classical sense he certainly was not, but would it not have been logical for him to want to know what the land was like? And yet and even so, in such a case, why should he feel even faintly guilty?
“Nor is that all,” said grayhair; “but it is all for now. — Of that, that is.” He uttered one or two raw syllables to his golemmeem, he and they moved forward, Lo and his mute perforce followed. “Or perhaps you have been here before?” the warder said, slightly inclining his head over his shoulder, gazed unwinking, raised his eyebrows, then turned full-face forward once more.
And, indeed, there did seem … did there? … did there not? … something familiar? Or was he yielding to mere suggestion? Lo drew himself up and cast a sharper look about the corridors and the chambers opening onto it, whereof some were shut and some not. His mute seemed no longer in any degree disturbed or perturbed. Surely it was a very various sort of place, now richly and smoothly finished and now rough-hewed and coarse; here adorned with carvings and fixtures and there showing the primal brick and stone. Yet, for all of this diversity, if the place did not seem precisely familiar, yet the impression it gave was in no wise strange.
Now the corridors dipped up, and now they descended. From time to time, though he was not able to pause, he could observe people in the various rooms; and sometimes — though brief, brief was his glance — sometimes they seemed to be engaged in noble activities, and sometimes in things ineffably sly and nasty. The warder stopped and turned and beckoned to his prisoner, and he pressed his lips together a bit and nodded rapidly … half as though in amusement and half as though in warning. Then he gestured for silence and then he beckoned his charges through a door. And although Lo had no idea what was to be found therein, and although he was fully sensible of the element of warning, he felt eager to enter, and he did so as quickly as he could. Well it was that the grayhaired
warder put a cautioning hand out then, else Lo would certainly have cried aloud.
It was not clear to him if they were inside the building or outside of it, but, whichever, the natural contours of the ground were still preserved. He looked over a rocky ledge and there in an open space he saw two men and two beasts and once again he had that haunting sense of the familiar and then he saw that the two beasts were one onager and one centaur and next he recognized — and recognized, too, his foreknowledge — the two men as Captain Stag and his bosun. Part inadvertently, and part purposefully enough to whisper: “So you’ve got them, too,” he said.
“Not quite yet,” the warder said, low.
The merchant took a step nearer, rocks gave way beneath his feet, bounded down the side of the hill or clift, he felt his own balance tottering, moved, waved his arms, there was a staff in his hand, it was not a staff, it was a spear, he took a step back onto solid ground and cast the spear with all his might, and took two steps back. He trembled. His guide murmured, “Careful, careful …” but it was not clear in regard to which action his words were meant.
“Oh …” said Lo. “Why …”
He peered carefully over the paved brink, but there was no longer hill or cliff, there was no onager, no centaur, no Stag, no bosun; there was no landscape: only a sort of squared pit, and not very deep. He said, “But …”
The grayhead gave a faintly impatient sigh, and they moved on, through long halls, and came at last to a mighty door. The grayhead said, “Proceed.”
Tabnath Lo said, after pressing upon it, first tentatively, then forcefully, “It is locked.”
“Perhaps you have the key.”
“I? No … Oh …”
For he did have the key, and it looked greatly familiar. Again the eagerness possessed him, and without waiting for a further direction he turned it in the lock, and they all entered. It was a sort of mercantile storeroom, and seemed to contain, for all the world, every item or every sort of item which he knew to be contained in his own storerooms in his own warehouse at home. Item for item, bale for bale, box for box, and sack for sack, the contents seemed identical. And yet, with what a difference. How numerous these same articles had appeared when filling his own premises. And how scant they now appeared, lodged within this great chamber which could have contained a hundred times as much, with room to spare besides. Lo said nothing. They moved on.
They moved on into another chamber, which Lo’s key opened with equal ease, and here there were no sacks of barley, no bolts of cloth or bales of stockfish. Here was a hoard of treasure, jewels gleamed, gold glistered on moon-colored bars of silver; rings, necklaces, armills, rich goblets galore. Lo’s astonished voice broke into a sob before it could form one clear word. Here it was, here it all was, so much risked, so little gained, and now all of it, all of it, rapted and ravined away, and brought here to the hidden treasury of others.
“Allitu, Allitu, Allitu,” mocked the warder.
Tabnath Lo blinked, wiped his blurring eyes. Plunder plundered? No … No, surely not … Were these not the selfsame walls within which he and Stag had mutually hid the plundered riches of the isle? The plundered plunder of the plunderers…. Secreted and secured, walled within walls, deep in the forgotten labyrinth beneath the Old Queen’s Tower, locked inside of ways whose access was locked with double-locks to which only he and Stag had the keys: and there, within the penultimate chamber, where only he and his partner could conjointly go, was the key to the last lock —
The key which he now held within his hand!
Rage took hold of him. He twitched and trembled. Had the grim golem-guards with their massy limbs and sword-pikes not surrounded the grayhaired warder, Lo would have leapt at him. “He has betrayed me … betrayed me …” His voice broke.
“Oh?” — on a rising note. And — “Does that surprise you?”
“No!” the merchant cried. “It surprises me not at all! I always knew that he would! Always!”
“And rightly,” murmured the warder. “And rightly. What is he up to, wandering around the countryside? Conspiring with centaurs, doing who knows what?”
Tabnath Lo’s anger was transmuted by the other’s note of sympathy into a determination which as yet had no fixed form of purpose. He followed, feeding upon his wrath, enjoying its warmth. He was led through room after room. In one lay more treasure, and he felt that it was his … could be his … ought to be his…. In another lay great store of arms and armor. In others were richly wrought robes of state and office: provosts and syndics and bailees might wear these robes — and, curious and yet significantly, all the robes seemed to be his own size. He desired much to touch all these things, the treasures and the armamentures and the robes — and, in rooms after them, the costly furnitures and the house-trappings worthy of a palace — but all were guarded from his touch by walls of crystal secured with what seemed replicas of the same sort of lock-hole. And, much though he tried, he could not make his key to fit in any.
At last, in a muffled, wearied, panting voice, forgetting that he was a prisoner, he asked, “Who has the key?”
In part quizzically but in more part sorrowfully, the warder replied, “Can it be that you do not know?”
They were at a turning in the corridor now, and, as Lo looked back in anguish and perplexity, he saw, as though reflected in a vast box of mirrors, a familiar enough figure in each and every treasure-room, seen clearly through every open door, an immediately familiar figure with a key in his hand. And the figure simultaneously opened each and every lock in every crystal door in every crystal wall. At once the same strange music began to play, but no longer in the least softly or sweetly: it broke into one great clamor of sound. And broke off —
The figure at the doors turned and looked at him.
“Stag!” he cried. “Stag! Stag! Stag!”
He clenched his fists and raised his hands and, face convulsed and muscles tensed, had taken but the first step of implicit attack, when quite silently but quite effectively a crystal wall slid from ceiling to floor and blocked his way. The warder said, as though he had said it a many times before and as though he expected to say it a many times more, “Not here. Not here. It cannot be done here. Not yet. Not quite yet. Not here — ”
Beyond the walls of crystal clear the figure that was so many figures continued to look at him, frozen still. “Then where?” cried Lo. “Where? Where? Where?”
“Outside — ”
The merchant took a great shuddering breath. “Then let me be outside!”
Treasure chambers and treasures and walls and halls and doors and floors, guardian and golem-guards, site and building and bridge and lake, all in that moment vanished away. And yet somehow seemed to be still with him. And yet he stood alone in the wilderness, and only his mute stood with him.
Chapter Thirty
Trebandóndos and Chevantirósos had been berrying by the burn below the pool, and afterwards they had gone and bathed and frolicked. Now they just lay, each under his own tree, doing nothing, pleasantly. They had been so engaged for some while when a certain vibration, first from the ground, and next along the air, caused each to lift head, then ears.
“Coming very fast,” they agreed.
A certain quality in the steps brought them at once to their feet. “A she! A mare! A young one — ” Eyes gleamed and teeth glistened in beard-thickets. “Aye…. Twill soon be season-time … if tisn’t already.” Chevantirósos preened his shag breast and flanks, Trebandóndos kicked his legs.
And then they saw her running by the burn, all gleaming golden in the sun. Trebandóndos without hesitating beat upon his bosom with his palms and, hueing and hallooing, started off after her. Chevantirósos leaped the hillside and cut them both off. She eyed them both with her golden eyes and she toyed uncertainly with her golden mane: seemed both relieved and fearful.
Trebandóndos reared up and turned upon his fellow, now beating his black breast with his fists. “Get thee gone!” he bellowed. “I followed first!
Get th’ gone!”
At once Chevantirósos scooped up a rock. “Tis Ananarusa, maiden-mare — ‘Maiden,’ dost hear me? Un-stopple thy burry lugs, or I’ll mash them and do’t for thee, then may be thou’lt hear!”
The other centaur-stallion whirled about and surveyed her, then turned back. “If I mayn’t mount she without she will, then I’ll persuade she to will,” he declared. “Get thee gone, I say, an’ I’ll court she — ”
But Ananarusa, maiden-mare, cantered somewhat forward and waved her hands, palms down. “Nay, brothers,” she said, her husky voice somewhat trembulous; “this is no place nor time for courtships and such. Me wouldst we were at the High Far Glades, that ye might court and contend for me — soon enough twill be — ”
Trebandóndos growled, flung out his arm. “Then get thine uncoupled cunny thanderwards,” he directed, “an’ I’ll follow thee an’ save it from this one’s twisted pizzle-swipe, fitter to ope an onager than a sweet Sixlimb she like thee, Ananarusa, maid — ”
“Ass-tupper thyself, rogue roan!”
“Soot-eater!”
“Thy sire were a foury and thy dam — ”
Closer and closer had they gotten. Ananarusa stepped between them and seized each one by the beard. “Brothers, brothers, be ye still and hear to me. Me’s come a long way and ha’ run uncommon swift the way, besides, so hear to me, now! Else I’ll mash both your muzzles together! So — Brothers, there are Fourlimbs loose into our land, dostye hear? Me’s lost their count, by one here, by two there, and a three in nother place … it crawls wi’ them, like ants, brothers! My breath’s spent, so tis for ye both to make at all full speed an’ rouse the herd — and yet wait one bit more — a wonder me did see today, for all me tarried not for he: Drogorógos did me see!”
The Island Under the Earth Page 13