Shardik

by Richard Adams

  Was it Shardik who had killed the man? Why was there no noise? He looked up at the dimly luminous cloud bank and saw beyond it a stretch of open sky. Next time the moon sailed clear he must be ready on the instant to look about him and act.

  Below, at the foot of the slope, the trees were moving. The wind among them would reach him in a few moments. He waited. No wind came, yet the sound among the trees increased. It was not the rustling of leaves, it was not the boughs that were moving. Men were moving among the trees! Yes, their voices--surely--but they were gone--no, there they were once more--the voices he had heard--beyond all doubt now, human voices! They were the voices of Ortelgans--he could even catch a word here and there--Ortelgans, and approaching!

  After all his dangers and sufferings, what an unbelievable stroke of good fortune! What had happened, and where was this place that he had reached? Either in some inexplicable way he had come upon soldiers of the army of Zelda and Ged-la-Dan--which might, after all, have marched almost anywhere during the past seven days--or else, more probably, these were men of his own guard from Bekla, searching for him and for Shardik as they had been ordered. Tears of relief came to his eyes and his blood surged as though at a lovers' meeting. As he stood up, he saw that the light was increasing. The moon was nearing the edge of the clouds. The voices were closer now, descending the hill through the trees. With a shout he stumbled down the slope toward them, calling, "I am Crendrik! I am Crendrik!"

  He was on a road, a trodden way leading down toward the woods. Plainly, the night-marching soldiers were also on this road. He would see their lights in a moment, for lights they must surely be carrying. He tripped and fell, but struggled up at once and hastened on, still shouting. He came to the foot of the slope and stopped, looking up, this way and that, among the trees.

  There was silence: no voices, no lights. He held his breath and listened, but no sound came from the road above. He called at the top of his voice, "Don't go! Wait! Wait!" The echoes faded and died.

  From the open slope behind him came a surge of voices shouting in anger and fear. Strangely unimmediate they were, fluctuating, dying and returning, like the voices of sick men trying to tell of things long gone by. At the same moment the last veil of cloud left the moon, the ground before him started up into misty light and he recognized the place where he was.

  In nightmare a man may feel a touch upon his shoulder, look around and meet the glazed but hate-filled eyes of his mortal enemy, whom he knows to be dead; may open the door of his own familiar room and find himself stepping through it into a pit of graveworms; may watch the smiling face of his beloved wither, crumble and putrefy before his eyes until her laughing teeth are surrounded by the bare yellow skull. What if such as these--so impossible of occurrence, so ghastly as to seem descried through a window opening upon hell--were found no dreams but, destroying as a stroke every fragment of life's proved certainty, were to carry the mind, as the crocodile its living prey, down to some lower, unspeakable plane of reality, where sanity and reason, clutching in frenzy, feel all holds give way in the dark? There in the moonlight ran the road from Gelt, up the bare, sloping plateau, among scattered crags and bushes, to the crest over which showed faintly the rocks of the gorge beyond. To the right, in shadow, was the line of the ravine that had protected Gel-Ethlin's flank, and behind him lay those woods from which, more than five years before, Shardik had burst like a demon upon the Beklan leaders.

  Dotted about the slope were low mounds, while some way off appeared the dark mass of a larger tumulus, on which grew two or three newly sprung trees. Beside the road stood a flat, squared stone, roughly carved with a falcon emblem and a few symbols of script. One of these, common in inscriptions about the streets and squares of Bekla, carried the meaning "At this place--" All about, with never a man to be seen, faint sounds of battle swelled and receded like waves, resembling the noises of day and life as a foggy dawn resembles clear noon. Shouts of anger and death, desperate orders, sobbing, prayers for mercy, the ring of weapons, the trampling of feet--all light and half-sensed as the filamentary legs of a swarm of loathsome insects upon the face of a wounded man lying helpless in his blood. Kelderek, his arms clutched about his head, swayed, uttering cries like the blarings of an idiot--speech enough for converse with the malignant dead, and words enough in which to articulate madness and despair. As a leaf that, having lived all summer upon the bough, in autumn is plucked off and swept through the turbulent, roaring air toward the sodden darkness below, so severed, so flung down, so spent and discarded was he.

  He fell to the ground, babbling, and felt a rib cage of unburied bones snap beneath his weight. He lurched in the white light, over graves, over rusty, broken weapons, over a wheel covering the remains of some wretch who once, years before, had crept beneath it for vain protection. The bracken that filled his mouth was turned to worms, the sand in his eyes to the stinking dust of corruption. His capacity to suffer became infinite as, rotting with the fallen, he dissolved into innumerable grains suspended among the wave-voices, sucked back and rolled forward to break again and again upon the shore of the desolate battlefield where, upon him more dreadfully than upon any who had ever strayed there, unwarned to shun it, the butchered dead discharged their unhouseled misery and malice.

  Who can describe the course of suffering to the end where no more can be endured? Who can express the unendurable vision of a world created solely for horror and torment--the struggling of the half-crushed beetle glued to the ground by its own entrails; the flapping, broken fish pecked to death by gulls upon the sand; the dying ape full of maggots, the young soldier, eviscerated, screaming in the arms of his comrades; the child who weeps alone, wounded for life by the desertion of those who have gone their selfish ways? Save us, O God, only place us where we may see the sun and eat a little bread until it is time to die, and we will ask nothing more. And when the snake devours the fallen fledgling before our eyes, then our indifference is Thy mercy.

  In the first gray light, Kelderek stood up a man newborn of grief--lost of memory, devoid of purpose, unable to tell night from morning or friend from foe. Before him, along the crest, translucent as a rainbow, stood the Beklan battle line, sword, shield and axe, the falcon banner, the long spears of Yelda, the gaudy finery of Deelguy: and he smiled at them, as a baby might laugh and crow, waking to see about her cot rebels and mutineers come to add her murder to those of the rest. But as he gazed, they faded like pictures in the fire, their armor transformed to the first glitter of morning on the rocks and bushes. So he wandered away in search of them, the soldiers, picking as he went the colored flowers that caught his eye, eating leaves and grass and stanching, with a strip torn from his ragged garments, a long gash in his forearm. He followed the road down to the plain, not knowing his whereabouts and resting often, for though pain and fatigue now seemed to him the natural condition of man, yet still it was one that he sought to ease as best he could. A band of wayfarers who overtook him threw him an old loaf, relieved to perceive that he was harmless, and this, when he had tried it, he remembered to be good to eat. He cut himself a staff which, as he went, tapped and rattled on the stones, for the cold of extreme shock was upon him all day. Such sleep as he had was broken, for he dreamed continually of things he could not entirely recall--of fire and a great river, of enslaved children crying and a shaggy, clawed beast as tall as a rooftree.

  How long did he wander, and who were they who gave him shelter and helped him? Again, they tell tales--of birds that brought him food, of bats that guided him at dusk and beasts of prey that did him no harm when he shared their lairs. These are legends, but perhaps they scarcely distort the truth that he, capable of nothing, was kept alive by what was given him unsought. Pity for distress is felt most easily when it is plain that the sufferer is not to be feared, and even while he remained armed, none could fear a man who limped his way upon a stick, gazing about him and smiling at the sun. Some, by his clothes, thought him to be a deserting soldier, but others said no, he must
be some three-quarter-witted vagabond who had stolen a soldier's gear or perhaps, in his necessity, stripped the dead. Yet none harmed him or drove him away--no doubt because his frailty was so evident and few care to feel that denial on their part may hasten a man to his death. One or two, indeed, of those who suffered him to sleep in sheds or outhouses--like the gatekeeper's wife at the stronghold of S'marr Torruin, warden of the Foothills--tried to persuade him to rest longer and then perhaps find work, for the war had taken many. But though he smiled, or played awhile with the children in the dust, he seemed to understand but little, and his well-wishers would shake their heads as at length he took his staff and went haltingly on his way. Eastward he went, as before, but each day only a few miles, for he sat much in the sun in lonely places and for the most part kept to less-frequented country along the edge of the hills, feeling that here, if at all, he might happen once more upon that mighty, half-remembered creature which, as it seemed to him, he had lost and with whose life his own was in some shadowy but all-important respect bound up. Of the sound of distant voices he was greatly afraid and seldom approached a village, though once he allowed a tipsy herdsman to lead him home, feed him and take from him, either in robbery or payment, his sword.

  Perhaps he wandered for five days, or six. Longer it can hardly have been when one evening, coming slowly over a shoulder of the lower hills, he saw below him the roofs of Kabin--Kabin of the Waters--that pleasant, walled town with its fruit groves on the southwest and, nearer at hand on the north, the sinuous length of the reservoir running between two green spurs, the surface wrinkling and sliding under the wind, suggesting some lithe animal caged behind the outfall dam with its complex of gates and sluices. The place was busy--he could see a deal of movement both within and outside the walls; and as he sat on the hillside, gazing down at a cluster of huts and the smoke that filled the meadows outside the town, he became aware of a party of soldiers--some eight or nine--approaching through the trees.

  At once he jumped to his feet and ran toward them, raising one hand in greeting and calling, "Wait! Wait!" They stopped, staring in surprise at the confidence of this tattered vagrant, and turning uncertainly toward their tryzatt, a fatherly veteran with a stupid, good-natured face, who looked as though, having risen as high as he was likely to get in the service, he was all for an easy life.

  "What's this, then, tryze?" asked one, as Kelderek stopped before them and stood with folded arms, looking them up and down.

  The tryzatt pushed back his leather helmet and rubbed his forehead with one hand.

  "Dunno," he replied at length. "Some beggar's trick, I suppose. Come on, now," he said, laying one hand on Kelderek's shoulder, "you'll get nothing here, so just muck off, there's a good lad."

  Kelderek put the hand aside and faced him squarely.

  "Soldiers," he said firmly. "A message--Bekla--" He paused, frowning as they gathered about him, and then spoke again.

  "Soldiers--Senandril, Lord Shardik--Bekla, message--" He stopped again.

  "Havin' us on, ain't he?" said another of the men.

  "Don't seem that way, not just," said the tryzatt. "Seems to know what he wants all right. More like he knows we don't know his language."

  "What language is it, then?" asked the man.

  "That's Ortelgan," said the first soldier, spitting in the dust. "Something about his life and a message."

  "Could be important, then," said the tryzatt. "Could be, if he's Ortelgan, and come to us with a message from Bekla. Can you tell us who you are?" he asked Kelderek, who met his eye but answered nothing.

  "I reckon he's come from Bekla, but something's put things out of his mind, like--shock and that," said the first soldier.

  "That'll be it," said the tryzatt. "He's an Ortelgan--been working secretly for Lord Elleroth One-Hand maybe; and either those swine in Bekla tortured him--look what they did to the Ban, burned his bloody hand off, the bastards--or else his wits are turned with wandering all this way north to find us."

  "Poor devil, he looks all in," said a dark man with a broad belt of Sarkid leatherwork bearing the corn-sheaves emblem. "He must have walked till he dropped. After all, we couldn't be much farther north if we tried, could we?"

  "Well," said the tryzatt, "whatever it is, we'd better take him along. I've got to make a report by sunset, so the captain can sort him out then. Listen," he said, raising his voice and speaking very slowly, in order to make sure that the foreigner standing two feet away from him could understand a language he did not know, "you--come--with us. You--give--message--captain, see?"

  "Message," replied Kelderek at once, repeating the Yeldashay. "Message--Shardik." He stopped and broke into a fit of coughing, leaning over his staff.

  "All right, now don't you worry," said the tryzatt reassuringly, buckling his belt, which he had slackened for the purpose of talking. "We"--he pointed, miming with his hands--"take--you--town--captain--right? You'd better lend him a hand," he added to the two men nearest him. "We'll be 'alf the mucking night else."

  Kelderek, his arms drawn over the soldiers' shoulders for support, went with them down the hill. He was glad of their help, which was given respectfully enough--for they were uncertain what rank of man he might be. He for his part understood hardly a word of their talk and was in any case preoccupied in trying to remember what message it was that he had to send, now that he had at last found the soldiers who had vanished so mysteriously in the dawn. Perhaps, he thought, they might have some food to spare.

  The main part of the army was encamped in the meadows outside the walls of Kabin, for the town and its inhabitants were being treated with clemency and in such dwellings as had been commandeered there was room for no more than the senior officers, their aides and servants and the specialist troops, such as scouts and pioneers, who were under the direct control of the commander in chief. The tryzatt and his men, who belonged to these, entered the town gates just as they were about to be shut for the night and, ignoring questions from comrades and bystanders, conducted Kelderek to a house under the south wall. Here a young officer wearing the stars of Ikat questioned him, first in Yeldashay and then, seeing that he understood very little, in Beklan. To this Kelderek replied that he had a message. Pressed, he repeated "Bekla" but could say no more; and the young officer, unwilling to browbeat him and pitying his starved and filthy condition, gave orders to let him wash, eat and sleep.

  Next morning, as one of the cooks, a kindly fellow, was again washing his gashed arm, a second, older officer came into the room, accompanied by two soldiers, and greeted him with straightforward civility.

  "My name is Tan-Rion," he said in Beklan. "You must excuse our haste and curiosity, but to an army in the field time is always precious. We need to know who you are. The tryzatt who found you says that you came to him of your own accord and told him that you had a message from Bekla. If you have a message, perhaps you can tell me what it is."

  Two full meals, a long and comfortable night's sleep and the attentions of the cook had calmed and to some extent restored Kelderek.

  "The message--should have gone to Bekla," he answered haltingly, "but the best chance--is lost now."

  The officer looked puzzled. "To Bekla? You are not bringing a message to us, then?"

  "I--have to send a message."

  "Is your message to do with the fighting in Bekla?"

  "Fighting?" asked Kelderek.

  "You know that there has been a rising in Bekla? It began about nine days ago. As far as we know, fighting is still going on. Have you come from Deelguy, or where?"

  Confusion descended again upon Kelderek's mind. He was silent and the officer shrugged his shoulders.

  "I am sorry--I can see that you are not yourself--but time may well be very short. We shall have to search you--that for a start."

  Kelderek, who had become no stranger to humiliation, stood unresisting as the soldiers, not ungently and with a kind of rough courtesy, set about their task. They placed their findings on the window ledge--a st
ale crust, a strip of cobbler's leather, a reaper's whetstone which he had found lying in a ditch two days before, a handful of dried aromatic herbs which the gatekeeper's wife had given him against lice and infection, and a talisman of red-veined stone which must once have belonged to Kavass.

  "All right, mate," said one of the soldiers, handing him back his jerkin. "Steady, now. Nearly done, don't worry."

  Suddenly the other soldier whistled, swore under his breath and then, without another word, held out to the officer on the palm of his hand a small, bright object which glittered in the sunlight. It was the stag emblem of Santil-ke-Erketlis.

  37 Lord One-Hand

  THE OFFICER, STARTLED, TOOK THE EMBLEM and examined it, drawing the chain through the ring and fastening the clasp carefully, as though to allow himself time to think. At length, with an uncertainty that he had not shown before, he said, "Will you be good enough to--to tell me--I am sure you will understand why I have to know--whether this is your own?"

  Kelderek held out his hand in silence but the officer, after a moment's hesitation, shook his head.

  "Have you come here in search of the commander in chief himself? Perhaps you are a member of his household? If you can tell me it will make my task easier."

  Kelderek, to whom the memory was now beginning to return of much that had befallen him since leaving Bekla, sat down upon the bed and put his head in his hands. The officer waited patiently for him to speak. At last Kelderek said, "Where is General Zelda? If he is here, I must see him immediately."

  "General Zelda?" replied the officer in bewilderment.

  One of the soldiers spoke to him in a low voice and together they went to the far end of the room.

  "This man's an Ortelgan, sir," said the soldier, "or else I'm one myself."

  "I know that," replied Tan-Rion. "What of it? He's some agent of Lord Elleroth who's lost his wits."

  "I doubt he is, sir. If he's an Ortelgan, then clearly he's not a household officer of the commander in chief. You heard him ask for General Zelda. I agree it's plain that some shock's confused his mind, but my guess is that he's made his way into the middle of the wrong army without realizing it. If you come to think of it, he'd hardly be expecting to find us here in Kabin."