Shardik

by Richard Adams

  35 Shardik's Prisoner

  LITTLE BY LITTLE THE KNOWLEDGE GREW upon Kelderek that he was a vagabond in strange country, without friends, far from help, straitened by need and moving in danger. It was not until later still that he realized also that he had become the prisoner of Shardik.

  It was plain that the bear had been further weakened by its latest wound. Its pace was slower, and although it continued toward the hills--now clearly visible on the northern horizon--with the same resolution, it stopped to rest more often and from time to time showed its distress by sudden wincings and unnatural, sharp movements. Kelderek, who now feared less the sudden onset of its swift, inescapable charge, followed it more closely, sometimes actually calling, "Courage, Lord Shardik!" or "Peace, Lord Shardik, your power is of God!" Once or twice it seemed to him that Shardik recognized his voice and even took comfort from it.

  The night came on sharp and although Shardik rested for several hours, lying in full view on the open ground, Kelderek for his part could not remain still, but paced about, watching from a distance until, when the night was nearly over, the bear suddenly got up, coughing pitifully, and set off once more, its labored breathing clearly audible across the silence.

  Kelderek's hunger grew desperate and later that morning, seeing in the distance two shepherds setting a fold of hurdles, he ran half a mile to them, intending to beg anything--a crust, a bone--while still keeping Shardik in sight. To his surprise they proved friendly, simple fellows, plainly pitying his want and fatigue and ready enough to help him when he told them that, although bound by a religious vow to follow the great creature which they could see in the distance, he had desperate need to send a message to Bekla. Encouraged by their goodwill, he went on to tell them of his escape the day before. As he finished, he looked up to see them staring at one another in fear and consternation. "The Streels! God have mercy!" muttered one. The other put half a loaf and a little cheese on the ground and backed away, saying, "There's food!" and then, like the man with the spear, "Do us no harm, sir--only go!" Yet here, indeed, they were more prompt than Kelderek, for thereupon both of them took to their heels, leaving their trimming knives and mallets lying where they were among the hurdles.

  That night Shardik made for a village and through this Kelderek passed unchallenged and seen of none, as though he had been some ghost or cursed spirit of legend, condemned to wander invisible to earthly eyes. On the outskirts Shardik killed two goats, but the poor beasts made little noise and no alarm was raised. When he had eaten and limped away Kelderek ate too, crouching in the dark to tear at the warm, raw flesh with fingers and teeth. Later he slept, too tired to wonder whether Shardik would be gone when he woke.

  The singing of birds was in his ears before he opened his eyes, and at first this seemed natural and expected, the familiar sound of daybreak, until he recalled, with an instant sinking of the heart, that he was no more a lad in Ortelga, but a wretched man alone and lying on the Beklan plain. Yet on the plain, as well as he knew, there were scarcely any trees and therefore no birds, save buzzards and larks. At this moment he heard men talking nearby and, without moving, half-opened his eyes.

  He was lying near the track down which he had followed Shardik in the night. Beside him the flies were already crawling on the goat leg which he had wrenched off and carried away with him. The country was no longer plain-land, but an arboreous wilderness interspersed with small fields and fruit orchards. At a little distance, the wooden rails of a bridge showed where the track crossed a river, and beyond lay a thick, tangled patch of woodland.

  Four or five men were standing about twenty paces off, talking together in low voices and scowling in his direction. One was carrying a club and the others rough, hoe-like mattocks, the farming peasant's only tool. Their angry looks were mixed with a kind of uncertainty, and as it came to Kelderek that these were no doubt the owner of the goats and his neighbors, he realized also that he must indeed have become a figure of fear--armed, gaunt, ragged and filthy, his face and hands smeared with dried blood and a haunch of raw flesh lying beside him.

  He leapt up suddenly and at this the men started, backing quickly away. Yet peasants though they were, he had still to reckon with them. After a little hesitation they advanced upon him, halting only when he drew Kavass's sword, set his back against a tree and threatened them in Ortelgan, caring nothing whether they understood him, but taking heart from the sound of his own voice.

  "You just put that sword down, now, and come with us," said one of the men gruffly.

  "Ortelgan--Bekla!" cried Kelderek, pointing to himself.

  "It's a thief you are," said another, older man. "And as for Bekla, it's a long way off and they'll not help you, for they've trouble enough of their own, by all accounts. You're in the wrong, now, whoever you are. You just come with us."

  Kelderek remained silent, waiting for them to rush him, but still they hesitated, and after a little he began to retreat watchfully down the track. They followed, shouting threats in their patois, which he could barely understand. He shouted angrily back and, feeling with his left hand the rails of the bridge close behind him, was about to turn and run when suddenly one of them pointed past him with a triumphant laugh. Looking quickly round, he saw two men approaching the bridge from the other side. Evidently there had been a wide hunt for the goat thief.

  The bridge was not high and Kelderek was about to vault the parapet--though this could have done little more than prolong the hunt--when all the men, both those in front of him and those close behind, suddenly cried out and ran, pelting away in all directions. Unassailable and conclusive as nightfall on a battlefield, Shardik had come from the wood and was standing near the track, peering into the sunlight and miserably fumbling at his wounded neck with one huge paw. Slowly and as though in pain, he made his way to the edge of the stream and drank, crouching not more than a few paces from the far end of the bridge. Then, dull-eyed, with dry muzzle and staring coat, he limped away into the cover of the thicket.

  Still Kelderek stood on the bridge, oblivious of whether or not the peasants might return. At the commencement of this, the fourth day since he had left Bekla, he felt an almost complete exhaustion, beyond that merely of the body--a total doubting of the future and a longing like that which comes upon the hard-pressed soldiers of an army which is losing, but has not yet lost, a battle, at any cost to desist from further struggle for the moment, to rest, let come what may, although they know that to do so means that the fight can be renewed only at greater disadvantage. The calf muscle of his right leg was strained and painful. Two of Mollo's stab wounds, those in his shoulder and hip, throbbed continually. But more dispiriting even than these was the knowledge that he had failed in his self-appointed task, inasmuch as Shardik could not now be recaptured before he reached the hills. Looking northward over the trees, he could see clearly the nearer slopes, green, brown and shadowy purple in the morning light. They might perhaps be six, eight miles away. Shardik too must have seen them. He would reach them by nightfall. Weeks--perhaps months--would now have to be spent in hunting him through that country--an old bear, grown cunning and desperate by reason of earlier capture. There was no remedy but that the Ortelgans would have to undertake the most wearisome of all labor--that which has to be performed in order to put right what should never have gone amiss.

  That morning he had escaped certainly injury, possibly death, for it was unlikely that the rough justice of the peasants would have spared an Ortelgan; and who now would believe that he was the king of Bekla? An armed ruffian, forced to beg or rob in order to eat, could pursue his way only at the risk of life and limb. Of what use, indeed, was it for him now to continue to follow Shardik? The paved road could not be more than half a day's journey to the east--perhaps much less. The time had come to return, to summon his subjects about him and plan the next step from Bekla. Had Elleroth been caught? And what news had come from the army in Tonilda?

  He set off southward, deciding to follow the stream for a time an
d turn east only when he was well away from the village. Soon his pace grew slower and more hesitant. He had gone perhaps half a mile when he stopped, frowning and slashing at the bushes in his perplexity. Now that he had actually left Shardik, he began to see his situation in a different and daunting light. The consequences of return were incalculable. His own monarchy and power in Bekla were inseparable from Shardik. If it was he who had brought Shardik to the battle of the Foothills, it was Shardik who had brought him to the throne of Bekla and maintained him there. More than that, the fortune and might of the Ortelgans rested upon Shardik and upon the continuance of his own strange power to stand before him unharmed. Could he safely return to Bekla with the news that he had deserted the wounded Shardik and no longer knew where he was or even whether he was dead or alive? With the war in its present state, what effect would this have on the people? And what would they do to him?

  Within an hour of leaving the bridge, Kelderek had returned to it and made his way upstream to the northern end of the wood. There were no tracks and he concealed himself and waited. It was not until afternoon, however, that Shardik appeared once more and continued upon his slow journey--encouraged now, perhaps, by the smell of the hills on the northwest wind.

  36 Shardik Gone

  BY AFTERNOON OF THE NEXT DAY Kelderek was on the point of collapse. Hunger, fatigue and lack of sleep had worked upon his body as beetles work upon a roof, rust on a cistern or fear on the soldier's heart--always taking a little more, leaving a little less to oppose the forces of gravity, of weather, of danger and fear. How does the end come? Perhaps an engineer, arriving at last to inspect and check, discovers that he can pierce with his finger the pitted, paper-thin plates of iron. Perhaps a comrade's jest or a missile narrowly missing its mark causes him who was once an honest soldier to bury his head in his hands, weeping and babbling, just as rotten purlins and rafters become at last no more than splinters, wormholes and powder. Sometimes nothing occurs to precipitate the catastrophe and the slow decay, unhastened from without--of the water tank in the windless desert or the commander of the lonely, precarious garrison--continues without interruption till nothing is left that can be repaired. Already the king of Bekla was no more, but this the Ortelgan hunter had not yet perceived.

  Shardik had reached the edge of the Foothills a little after dawn. The place was wild and lonely, the country increasingly difficult. Kelderek clambered upward through dense trees or among tumbled rocks, where often he could not see thirty paces ahead. Sometimes, following an intuitive feeling that this must be the way the bear had taken, he would reach a patch of open ground only to conceal himself as Shardik came stumbling from the forest behind him. At almost any time he might have lost his life. But a change had come upon the bear--a change which, as the hours passed, became more plain to Kelderek, piercing his own sufferings with pity and at last with actual fear of what would befall.

  As in the splendid house of some great family, where once lights shone in scores of windows at night and carriages bearing relatives, friends and news came and went, the very evidence and means of grandeur and authority over all the surrounding countryside, but where now the lord, widowed, his heir killed in battle, has lost heart and begun to fail; as in such a house a few candles burn, lit at dusk by an old servant who does what he can and must needs leave the rest, so fragments of Shardik's strength and ferocity flickered, a shadow suggesting the presence that once had been. He wandered on, safe indeed from attack--for what would dare to attack him?--but almost, or so it seemed, without strength to fend for himself. Once, coming upon the body of a wolf not long dead, he made some sorry shift to eat it. It seemed to Kelderek that the bear's sight was weaker, and of this, after a time, he began to take advantage, following closer than he or the nimblest of the girls would have dared in the old days on Ortelga; and thus he was able to prolong his endurance even while his hope diminished of finding, in this wilderness, any to help him or carry his news to Bekla.

  In the afternoon they climbed a steep valley, emerging on a ridge running eastward above the forests, and along this they continued their slow and mysterious journey. Once Kelderek, rousing himself from a waking fancy in which his pains seemed torpid flies hanging upon his body, saw the bear ahead of him on a high rock, clear against the sky and gazing over the Beklan plain far below. It seemed to him that now it could go no farther. Its body was hunched unnaturally and when at length it moved, one shoulder drooped in a kind of crippled limping. Yet when he himself reached the rock, it was to see Shardik already crossing the spur below and as far away as before.

  Coming to the foot of the ridge, he found himself at the upper end of a bleak waste, bounded far off by forest like that through which they had climbed the day before. Of Shardik there was no sign.

  It was now, as the light began to fail, that Kelderek's faculties at last disintegrated. Strength and thought alike failed him. He tried to look for the bear's tracks, but forgot what ground he had already searched and then what it was that he was seeking. Coming upon a pool, he drank and then, thrusting his feet for ease into the water, cried out at the fierce, stinging pain. He found a narrow path--no more than a coney's track--between the tussocks and crept down it on hands and knees, muttering, "Accept my life, Lord Shardik," though the meaning of the words he could not recall. He tried to stand, but his sight grew clouded and sounds filled his ears, as of water, which he knew must be unreal.

  The path led to a dry ravine and here for a long time he sat with his back against a tree, gazing unseeingly at the black streak of an old lightning flash that had marked the rock opposite with the shape of a broken spear.

  Dusk had fallen when at last he crawled up the farther side. His physical collapse--for he could not walk--brought with it a sense of having become a creature lacking volition, passive as a tree in the wind or a weed in the stream. His last sensation was of lying prostrate, shivering and trying to drag himself forward by clutching the fibrous grasses between his fingers.

  When he woke it was night, the moon clouded and the solitude stretching wide and indistinct about him. He sat up, coughing, and at once suppressed the sound with an arm across his mouth. He was afraid--partly of attracting some beast of prey, but more of the empty night and of his new dreadful loneliness. Following Shardik, he had feared Shardik and nothing else. Now Shardik was gone; and as when some severe and demanding leader, whom his men both respected and feared, is reported lost, they loiter silently, addressing themselves with assumed diligence to trivial or futile duties in attempts to evade the thought that none will utter--that they are now without him whom they trusted to stand between them and the enemy--so Kelderek rubbed his cold limbs and coughed into the crook of his elbow, as though by concentrating on the ills of his body he could make himself immune to the silence, the desolate gloom and the sense of something hovering, glimpsed in the tail of his eye.

  Suddenly he started, held his breath and turned his head, listening incredulously. Had he indeed heard, or only imagined, the sound of voices, far off? No, there was nothing. He stood up, and found that he could now walk, though slowly and with pain. But which way should he go, and with what purpose? Southward, for Bekla? Or should try to find some refuge and remain until daylight, in the hope of coming once more upon Shardik?

  And then beyond all doubt he heard, for no more than an instant, a distant clamor of voices in the night. It was come and gone; but that was no wonder, for it had been far off, and what had reached his ear might well have been some momentary, louder outcry. If the distance or his own weakness had not deceived him, there had been many voices. Could the noise have come from a village where some gathering was being held? There was no light to be seen. He was not even sure from which direction the sound had come. Yet at the thought of shelter and food, of resting in safety among fellow men and of an end to his loneliness and danger, he began to hasten--or rather, to stagger--in any direction and in none until, realizing his foolishness, he sat down once more to listen.

  At length
--after how long he could not tell--the sound reached him again, perceived and then dying on the ear, like a wave, spent among tall reeds, that never breaks upon the shore. Released and at once quenched, it seemed, as though a door far off had opened for a moment and as suddenly closed upon some concourse within. Yet it was a sound neither of invocation nor of festival, but rather of tumultuous disorder, of riot or confusion. To him, this in itself mattered little--a town in uproar would be nevertheless a town--but what town, in this place? Where was he, and could he be sure of help once it was known who he was?

  He realized that he was once more groping his way in what now seemed to him the direction of the sound. The moon, still obscured among clouds, gave little light, but he could both see and feel that he was going gently downhill, among crags and bushes, and approaching what seemed a darker mass in the near-darkness--woodland it might be, or a confronting hillside.

  His cloak caught on a thornbush and he turned to disentangle it. At this moment, from somewhere not a stone's throw away in the dark, there came an agonized cry, like that of a man dealt some terrible wound. The shock, like lightning striking close at hand, momentarily bereft him of reason. As he stood trembling and staring into the dark, he heard a quick, loud gasp, followed by a few choking words of Beklan, uttered in a voice that ceased like a snapped thread.

  "She'll give me a whole sackful of gold!"

  At once the silence returned, unbroken by the least noise either of struggle or of flight.

  "Who's there?" called Kelderek.

  There was no answer, no sound. The man, whoever he might be, was either dead or unconscious. Who--what--had struck him down? Kelderek dropped on one knee, drew his sword and waited. Trying to control his breathing and the loosening of his bowels, he crouched still lower as the moon gleamed out a moment and vanished again. His fear was incapacitating and he knew himself too weak to strike a blow.