Elleroth's son--his heir--had fallen into the hands of an unlicensed slave dealer? He himself knew--who better?--how possible it was. He had heard of these men--had received many complaints of their activities in the remoter parts of the Beklan provinces. He knew that within the Ortelgan domains slaves were captured illegally who never reached the market at Bekla, being driven north through Tonilda and Kabin or west through Paltesh to be sold in Katria or Terekenalt. Although the prescribed penalties were heavy, as long as the war lasted the probability of an unlicensed dealer's capture was remote. But that this man Genshed, whoever he might be, should have taken the son and heir of the Ban of Sarkid! No doubt he meant to demand a ransom if ever he got him safe to Terekenalt. But for what conceivable reason, with such a grief in his heart and such a wrong to lay to the charge of the hated priest-king of Bekla, had Elleroth insisted on sparing his life? For a while he pondered this riddle but could imagine no answer. His thoughts returned to Shardik, but at last he almost ceased to think at all, drowsing where he sat and hearing, sharper than the noise of the crowd, the plangent drip of water into a butt outside the window.
The guard commander returned and with him a burly, black-bearded officer, armed and helmeted, who stared at Kelderek, slapping his scabbard against his leg with nervous impatience.
"Is this the man?"
The guard commander nodded.
"Come on, then, you, for God's sake, while we've still got them under some sort of control. I want to live, if you don't. Take this pack--shoes and two days' food--that's the Ban's orders. You can put the shoes on later."
Kelderek followed him down the passage and through the courtyard to the gatekeeper's lodge. Under the arch behind the shut gate, some twenty soldiers were drawn up in two files. The officer led Kelderek to a central place between them and then, taking up his own position immediately behind him, gripped him by the shoulder and spoke in his ear.
"Now you do as I say, do you see, or you'll never even have the chance to wish you had. You're going to walk across this blasted town to the east gate, because if you don't, I don't, and that's why you're going to. They're quiet now because they've been told it's the Ban's personal wish, but if anything provokes them, we're as good as dead. They don't like slave traders and child butchers, you see. Don't say a word, don't wave your bloody arms, don't do any damned thing; and above all, keep moving, do you understand? Right!" he shouted to the tryzatt in front. "Get on with it, and God help us!"
The gate opened, the soldiers marched forward and Kelderek stepped at once into dazzling sunlight shining directly into his eyes. Blinded, he stumbled, and instantly the captain's hand was in his armpit, supporting and thrusting him on.
"You stop and I'll run you through."
Colored veils floated before his eyes, slowly dissolving and vanishing to disclose the road at his feet. He realized that he was bowed, neck thrust forward, peering down like a beggar on a stick. He straightened his shoulders, threw back his head and looked about him.
The unexpected shock was so great that he stopped dead, raising one hand before his face as though to ward off a blow.
"Keep moving, damn you!"
The square was packed with people--men, women and children, standing on either side of the road, crowded at the windows, clinging to the roofs. Not a voice spoke, not a murmur was to be heard. All were staring at him in silence, each pair of eyes following only him as the soldiers marched on across the square. Some of the men scowled and shook their fists, but none uttered a word. A young girl, dressed as a widow, stood with folded hands and tears unwiped upon her cheeks, while beside her an old woman shook continually as she craned her neck, her fallen-in mouth working in a palsied twitching. His eyes met for a second the round, solemn stare of a little boy. The people swayed like grass, unaware of their swaying as they moved their heads to keep him in their gaze. The silence was so complete that for a moment he had the illusion that these people were far away, too far to be heard from the lonely place where he walked between the soldiers, the only sound in his ears their regular tread that crunched upon the sand.
They left the square and entered a narrow, stone-paved street, where their footsteps echoed between the walls. Trying with all his will to look nowhere but ahead, he still felt the silence and the gaze of the people like a weapon raised above him. He met the eyes of a woman who threw up her arm, making the sign against evil, and dropped his head once more, like a cowering slave who expects a blow. He realized that he was breathing hard, that his steps had become more rapid than the soldiers', that he was almost running to keep his place among them. He saw himself as he must appear to the crowd--haggard, shrinking, contemptible, hastening before the captain like a beast driven up a lane.
The street led into the marketplace and here, too, were the innumerable faces and the terrible silence. Not a woman was haggling, not a trader crying his wares; as they approached the fountain basin--Kabin was full of fountains--the jet faltered and died away. He wondered who it was that had timed it so surely, and whether he had had orders to do so or had acted of his own accord; then tried to guess how far it might now be to the east gate, what it would look like when they reached it and what orders the captain would give. The cheek of the soldier beside him bore a long, white scar and he thought, "If my right foot is the next to dislodge a stone, he got it in battle. If my left, then he got it in a fight when he was drunk."
Not that these thoughts could come for an instant between his horror of the silence and of the eyes which he dared not meet. If it were not some sick fancy of his own fear and anguish, there was in this crowd a mounting tension, like that before the breaking of the rains. "We must get there," he muttered. "At all costs, Lord Shardik, we must get there before the rains break."
A cloud of flies flew up before his face, disturbed from a piece of offal lying in the road. He thought of the gylon fly, with its transparent body, hovering among the reeds along the Telthearna. "I have become a gylon fly--their eyes pass through me--through and through me--meeting those of others that pass through me from the other side. My bones are turning to water. I shall fall.
He came, he came by night,
Silence lay all about us.
A sword passed through me, I am changed for ever.
Senandril na kora, senandril na ro."
His thoughts, like a deserted child's, returning to the memory of loss and grief, came back to Elleroth's words in the garden.
"Your bear is dying, Crendrik--"
"Shut up and get on," said the officer between his clenched teeth.
He did not know that he had spoken aloud. The dust whirled up in a sudden flurry of wind, yet of all the eyes around him not one seemed to close against it. The road was steeper now; they were climbing. He bent forward, dropping his head like an ox drawing a load uphill, looking down at the ground as he dragged himself on. They were leaving the marketplace, yet the silence was pulling him backward, the silence was a spell which held him fast. The weight of the thousands of eyes was a load he could never drag up this hill to the east gate. He faltered and then, stumbling backward against the captain, turned his head and whispered, "I can't go on."
He felt the point of the captain's dagger thrust against his back, just above the waist.
"Ban of Sarkid or no Ban of Sarkid, I'll kill you before my men come to any harm. Get on!"
Suddenly the silence was broken by the cry of a child. The sound was like the flaring of a flame in darkness. The soldiers, who when he stumbled had stopped uncertainly, gathering about him and the captain, started as though at a trumpet and every head jerked around toward the noise. A little girl, perhaps five or six years old, running to cross the road before the soldiers came, had tripped and fallen headlong and now lay crying in the dust, less from pain, perhaps, than from the grim appearance of the soldiers at whose feet she found herself sprawling. A woman stepped out of the crowd, picked her up and bore her away, the sound of her voice, reassuring and comforting the child, carrying plainly b
ack along the lane.
Kelderek raised his head and drew a deep breath into his lungs. The sound had broken the invisible but dreadful web in which, like a fly bound about with sticky thread, he had almost lost the power to struggle. As when men break open at last a dry trench by the river, in which they have been repairing a canoe, the water comes flooding in, bringing back to the craft its true element and lifting it until it floats, so the sound of the child's voice restored to Kelderek the simple will and determination of common men to endure and survive, come what may. His life had been spared, no matter why; the sooner he was away from this town the better. If the people hated him, then he had the answer--he would be gone.
Without further words to the captain he took up his pace once more, spurning the soft sand with his heels as he trudged up the hill. The people were pressing close now, the soldiers keeping them off with the shafts of their spears, the captain shouting, "Back! Keep back!" Ignoring them, he turned a corner at the top and at once found himself before the gate tower, the gate standing open, the guard turned out and drawn up on either side to prevent anyone following them out of the town. They tramped under the echoing arch. Without looking around he heard the gate grind and clang to and the bolts shot home.
"Don't stop," said the captain, close behind him as ever.
Marching down a hill between trees, they came to a rocky ford across a torrent that swept down from the wooded hills on the left. Here the men, without waiting for orders, broke ranks, kneeling to drink or flinging themselves on the grass. The officer once again gripped Kelderek's shoulder and turned him about, so that they stood face to face.
"This is the Vrako--the boundary of Kabin province, as I dare say you know. The east gate of Kabin is shut for an hour by the Ban's orders and I shall be keeping this ford closed for the same length of time. You're to cross by this ford and after that you can go where you please." He paused. "One more thing. If the army gets orders to patrol east of the Vrako, we shall be looking out for you, and you'll not escape again."
He nodded to show that he had no more to say; and Kelderek, hearing behind him the growling curses of the soldiers--one threw a stone which struck a rock close by his knee--stumbled his way across the ford and so left them.
BOOK V
Zeray
39 Across the Vrako
IN BEKLA HE HAD HEARD OF THE COUNTRY east of Kabin--the midden of the empire, one of his provincial governors had called it--a province with no estates and no government, without revenue and without one city. Forty miles below Ortelga the Telthearna turned, in a great bend, to flow southward past the eastern extremity of the Gelt Mountains. South of these mountains and west of the Telthearna lay a remote wilderness of wooded ridges, of marshes, creeks and forest, without roads and with no settlements except a few miserable villages where the inhabitants lived on fish, half-wild pigs and whatever they could scratch from the soil. In such a region, to seek and find a man was all but impossible. Many a fugitive and criminal had disappeared into its wastes. There was a proverb in Bekla, "I would kill So-and-So, were it worth the journey to Zeray." Rough, unruly boys would be told by their mothers, "You'll end in Zeray." It was rumored that from this isolated place--for town it could not be called--where the Telthearna narrowed to a strait less than a quarter of a mile wide, a man who could pay might be taken across to the eastern shore and no questions asked. In the old days, even the northern army of patrol had fixed the eastern limit of its march at Kabin, and no tax collectors or assessors would cross the Vrako for fear of their lives. Such was the country which Kelderek had now entered and the place in which, by Elleroth's mercy, he was free to remain alive for as long as he could.
Having taken the fresh shoes from his pack and put them on, he walked fast for some while down the narrow, overgrown track. What more likely, he thought, than that once the gate and ford were open, some might follow in the hope of overtaking and killing him? For although he knew well enough that he was likely to die in this country and indeed could find in himself little desire to save his life, yet he was determined not to lose it at the hands of any Yeldashay or other enemy of Shardik. Within an hour he came to a place where an even wilder path branched northward to his left, and this he followed, clambering for a time through the undergrowth beside it to avoid leaving traces on the track itself.
At last, a little before noon, having heard and seen no one since his crossing of the Vrako, he sat down by the bank of a creek and, when he had eaten, fell to considering what he should do. Underlying all his thoughts, like a rock submerged in a swirling pool, was the conviction that he had passed some mysterious but nonetheless real spiritual boundary, over which he could never return. What was the meaning of the adventure at the Streels of Urtah, the news of which the shepherds had heard with so much awe and fear? What had befallen him in his oblivion on the battlefield, while he lay at the mercy of the unavenged dead? And why had Elleroth spared the life of one whose rule had brought about the loss of his own son? Pondering these inexplicable happenings, he knew that they had quenched the strength and faith that had burned in the heart of the priest-king of Bekla. Little more than a ghost he now felt himself to be, a drained thing haunting a body wasted with hardship.
Deepest bell of all that tolled in his heart was Elleroth's news of Shardik. Shardik had crossed the Vrako and was believed to be dying--in that there could have been no deceit. And if he, Kelderek, still set any value on his life, his best course would be to accept it. In a country of this nature, to look for Shardik would be only to invite such danger and hardship as neither his mind nor his body were capable of withstanding. Either he would be murdered, or he would die in the forests of the hills. Shardik, whether alive or dead, was irrecoverable; and for the least chance of life he himself ought to head south, contrive somehow to make his way into northern Tonilda and then reach the Ortelgan army.
Yet an hour later he was once more climbing northward, holding, with no attempt at concealment or self-protection, to the track as it wound into the lower hills. Elleroth, he thought bitterly, had rated him accurately enough. "Take my word for it, neither he nor the bear can harm us now." No indeed, for he was the priest of Shardik and nothing else besides. Afraid of Ta-Kominion's contempt, and influenced by him to believe that the will of God could be none other than that Shardik should conquer Bekla, he had stood by while the Tuginda was bound and led away like a criminal, and had then gone on to set himself up as the mediator of Shardik's favor to his people. Without Shardik he would be nothing--a rainmaker mumbling in a drought, a magician whose spells had failed. To return to Zelda and Ged-la-Dan with the news (if they did not already know it) that Elleroth was with the Yeldashay and Shardik lost forever would be to sign his own death warrant. They would scarcely lose a day in getting rid of such a figure of defeat. Elleroth knew this. Yet he knew more. He had understood, as many an enemy would not, Kelderek's passionate faith and the integrity of his belief in Shardik. As an experienced master, though privately entertaining contempt for a servant's personal values and beliefs, can nevertheless perceive that by his own lights that servant is capable of sincerity, even, perhaps, of courage and self-denial, so Elleroth, hating Shardik, had known that Kelderek, whatever gleams of hope fortune might tempt him with, would be unable to separate his own fate from that of the bear. And this was why, since he also knew--or supposed that he knew, thought Kelderek with a sudden spurt of forlorn defiance--that Shardik was dying, he had seen no harm in sparing the priest-king's life. But why had he actually gone about to impose his will in this matter upon those surrounding him? Could it be, Kelderek wondered, that he himself had become visibly marked with some sign, perceptible to such as Elleroth, of being accursed, of having passed through merited sufferings to a final inviolability in which he was now to remain, to await the retribution of God? At this thought, shuffling slowly on through the solitude, he sighed and muttered under the burden of his misery, for all the world like some demented old woman in a desolated town, bearing in her arms the w
eight of a dead child.
Even in this notorious no-man's-land he had not expected so complete an emptiness. All day he met never a soul, heard no voice, saw no smoke. As afternoon turned to evening he realized that he would be forced to pass the night without shelter. In the old days, as a hunter, he had sometimes spent nights in the forest, but seldom alone and never without fire or weapons. To send him across the Vrako without even a knife and with no means of making a fire--had this perhaps been intended, after all, as nothing but a cruel way of putting him to death? And Shardik--whom he would never find--was Shardik already dead? Sitting with his head in his hands, he passed into a kind of waking oblivion that was not sleep, but rather the exhaustion of a mind unable any longer to grip thought, slipping and sliding like wheels in the mud of the rains.
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