Shardik

by Richard Adams

  When at last he lifted his head he at once caught sight, among the bushes close by, of an object so familiar that although it had been carefully concealed, he felt surprise not to have noticed it earlier. It was a trap--a wooden block-fall such as he himself had often set in days gone by. It was baited with carrion and dried fruit, but these had not been touched and the trip peg was still supporting the block.

  The evening wanted no more than two hours to nightfall and, as well he knew, those who leave traps unvisited overnight are apt to find the next day that scavenging beasts have reached them first. He scratched out his footprints with a broken branch, climbed a tree and waited.

  In less than an hour he heard the sounds of someone approaching. The man who appeared was dark, thickset and shaggy-haired, dressed partly in skins and partly in old, ragged garments. A knife and two or three arrows were stuck in his belt and he was carrying a bow. He bent down, peered at the trap under the bushes and was already turning away when Kelderek called to him. At this he started, drew his knife in a flash and vanished into the undergrowth. Kelderek realized that if he were not to lose him altogether he must take a risk. He scrambled to the ground, calling, "I beg you, don't go! I need help."

  "What you want, then?" answered the man, invisible among the trees.

  "Shelter--advice too. I'm a fugitive, exile--whatever you like. I'm in trouble."

  "Who isn't? You're this side the Vrako, aren't you?"

  "I'm unarmed. Look for yourself." He threw down the pack, raised his arms and turned one way and the other.

  "Unarmed? Then you're mad." The man stepped out from the bushes and came up to him. He was indeed a ruffian of frightening appearance, swarthy and scowling, with a yellow, mucous discharge of the eyes and a scar from mouth to neck which reminded Kelderek of Bel-ka-Trazet.

  "I'm in no state to play tricks or drive a bargain," said Kelderek. "This pack's full of food and nothing else. Take it and give me shelter for tonight."

  The man picked up the pack, opened and looked into it, tossed it back to Kelderek and nodded. Then, turning, he set off in the direction from which he had come. After a time he said,

  "No one after you?"

  "Not since the Vrako."

  They walked on in silence. Kelderek was struck by the complete absence of that friendly curiosity which usually finds a place in strangers' meetings. If the man wondered who he was, whence he had come and why, he evidently did not intend to ask; and there was that about him which made Kelderek think better of putting any questions on his own account. This, he realized, must be the nature of acquaintance in this country of shame for the past and hopelessness for the future--the courtesy of the prison and the madhouse. However, some kinds of question were apparently permissible, for after a time the man jerked out, "Thought what you're going to do?"

  "Not yet--die, I dare say."

  The man looked sharply at him and Kelderek realized that he had spoken amiss. Here men were like beasts at bay--defiant until they were torn to pieces. The whole country, like a brigands' cave, was divided into bullies and victims--the last place in which to speak of death, whether in jest or acceptance. Confused, and too weary to dissimulate, he said,

  "I was joking. I've got a purpose, though I dare say that to you it may seem a strange one. I'm looking for a bear that's believed to be in these parts. If I could find it--"

  He stopped, for the man, his mouth and jaw thrust forward, was staring at him from his oozing eyes with a mixture of fear and rage--the rage of one who attacks whatever he does not understand. He said nothing, however, and after a moment Kelderek stammered, "It--it's the truth. I'm not trying to make a fool of you--"

  "Better not," answered the man. "So you're not alone, then?"

  "I've never been more alone in my life."

  The man drew his knife, seized him by the wrist and forced him to his knees. Kelderek looked up into the snarling, violent face.

  "What's this about the bear, then? What you up to--what you know about the other one--the woman, eh?"

  "What other one? For God's sake, I don't know what you mean!"

  "Don't know what I mean?"

  Panting, Kelderek shook his head and after a moment the man released him.

  "Better come and see, then: better come and see. You mind now, I don't take to tricks."

  They went on again, the man still clutching his knife and Kelderek half minded to run from him into the woods. Only his exhaustion held him back, for the man would probably pursue, overtake and perhaps kill him. They crossed a ridge and descended steeply toward a dreary, stagnant creek. Smoke hung in the trees. A patch of ground along the shore, cleared after a fashion, was littered with bones, feathers and other rubbish. At one side, too near the water, stood a lopsided, chimneyless hovel of poles, branches and mud. There were clouds of flies. Three or four skins were pegged out to dry, and some black birds--crows or rooks--were huddled in a wooden pen on the marshy ground. The place, like a song out of tune, seemed an offense against the world, for which the only possible remedy was obliteration.

  The man again grasped Kelderek's wrist and half-led, half-dragged him toward the hut. A curtain of dusty skins hung across the entrance. The man jerked his head and gestured with his knife but Kelderek, stupid with fatigue, fear and disgust, did not understand that he was to enter first. The man, seizing his shoulder, pushed him so that he stumbled against the curtain. He pulled it aside, ducked his head and went in.

  The walls surrounded a single, evil-smelling space, at the farther end of which a fire was smoldering. There was little light, for apart from the curtained door and a hole in the roof, through which some of the smoke escaped, there was no opening; at the farther end, however, he made out a human shape, wrapped in a cloak and sitting, back toward him, on a rough bench beside the fire. As he peered, bending forward and flinching from the knife at his back, the figure rose and turned to face him. It was the Tuginda.

  40 Ruvit

  SUDDENLY TO BE CONFRONTED with a shameful deed from the past, a deed accomplished yet uneffaced, like the ruins of a poor man's house destroyed by some selfish lord to suit his own convenience, or the body of an unwanted child cast up by the river on the shore: to stumble unexpectedly upon an accusation that no bravado can defy nor glib tongue turn aside; an accusation made not aloud, to the ears of the world, but quietly, face to face, without anger, perhaps even without speech, to one unprepared for the surge of his own confusion, guilt and regret. The harp of Binnorie named its murderess, and the two pretty babes in the ballad answered the cruel mother under her father's castle wall. Stones have been known to move and trees to speak. Yet never a word said Banquo's ghost. Though few can have touched a murdered corpse and seen the wounds burst open and bleed, yet many, coming alone upon old letters thrust into a drawer, have reread them weeping for pardon; or again, burning with self-contempt, have learned from chance remarks how unforgotten has been the misery, how crushing the disappointment brought by themselves upon those who never spoke of it. The deeply wronged, like ghosts, have no need to speak to their oppressors or accuse them before crowds. More terrible by far is their unexpected and silent reappearance in some secluded place, at some unguarded hour.

  The Tuginda stood beside the bench, her eyes half-closed against the smoke. For some moments she did not recognize him. Then she started, jerking up her head. At the same instant Kelderek, with a sudden, sharp sob, thrust his hand between his teeth, turned and was already halfway through the entrance when he was pushed violently backward and fell to the ground. The man, knife in hand, was staring down at him, gnawing his lip and panting with a kind of feral excitement. This, Kelderek realized on the ghastly instant, was one to whom murder must once have been both trade and sport. In his clouded mind violence hung always, precarious as a sword by a hair; by another's fear or flight it was excited as uncontrollably as a cat by the scuttling of a mouse. This was some bandit survivor with a price on his head, some hired assassin who had outlived his usefulness to his employers
and run for the Vrako before the informer could turn him in. How many solitary wanderers had he killed in this place?

  The man, bending over him, was breathing in low, rhythmic gasps. Kelderek, supporting himself on one elbow, tried in vain to return the maniac glare with a look of authority. As his eyes fell, the Tuginda spoke from behind him.

  "Calm yourself, Ruvit! I know this man--he is harmless. You are not to hurt him."

  "Hiding in the woods, talked about the bear. 'Up to tricks,' I thought, 'up to tricks. Make him go in, don't tell him anything, ah, that's it. Find out what he's up to, find out what he's up to--'"

  "He won't hurt you, Ruvit. Come and make up the fire, and after supper I'll bathe your eyes again. Put your knife away."

  She led the man gently to the fire, talking as though to a child, and Kelderek followed, not knowing what else to do. At the sound of her voice the tears had sprung to his eyes, but he brushed them away without a word. The man took no further notice of him and he sat down on a rickety stool, watching the Tuginda as she knelt to blow the fire, put on a pot and stirred it with a broken spit. Once she looked across at him, but he dropped his eyes; and when he looked up again she was busy over a clay lamp, which she trimmed and then lit with a kindled twig. The wan, single flame threw shadows along the floor and as darkness fell seemed less to brighten the squalid hut than to serve, with its guttering and wavering in the drafts that came through the ill-made walls, as a reminder of the defenselessness of all who might have the misfortune to be, like itself, solitary and conspicuous in this sad country.

  She had aged, he thought, and had the look of one who had endured both loss and disappointment. Yet she was unextinguished--a fire burned low, a tree stripped by a winter gale. In this horrible place, beyond help or safety, alone with one man who had betrayed her and another who was half-crazy and probably a murderer, her authority asserted itself quietly and surely, in part as mundane as that of some shrewd, honest farmer talking with those whom he makes feel that it will be better not to try to cheat him. But beyond this open foreground of the spirit he could perceive, as he had perceived long ago--as he knew that even poor, murderous Ruvit could sense, in the same way that a dog is aware of the presence of joy or grief in a house--the deeper, more mysterious country of her strength. She was possessed of the immunity not only of priestess, pilgrim and doctor, but also of that conferred by the mystery whose servant she was--by the power which he had felt before ever he met her, when he had sat slumped in the canoe drifting down to Quiso in the dark. No wonder, he thought, that Ta-Kominion had died. No wonder that the headlong, fiery ambition which had blinded him to the strength in her had also poisoned him beyond recovery.

  He began to consider the manner of his own death. Some, or so he had heard, had dragged out their lives beyond the Vrako until the prices on their heads and even the nature of their crimes had been forgotten and nothing but their own despair and addled wits prevented their return to towns where none was left who could recall what they had done. Such survival was not for him. Shardik, if only he could find him, would at last take the life which had been so often offered to him--would take his life before the contemptible desire to survive on any terms could transform him into a creature like Ruvit.

  Lost in these thoughts, he heard little or nothing of whatever passed between Ruvit and the Tuginda as she finished preparing the meal. Vaguely, he was aware that although Ruvit had become quiet he was nevertheless afraid of the fall of darkness, and that the Tuginda was reassuring him. He wondered how long the man had lived here, facing nightfall alone, and what it was that had made this life--a hard one, surely, even for a fugitive beyond the Vrako--the only one he dared to live.

  After a time the Tuginda brought him food, and as she gave it to him, laid her hand for a moment on his shoulder. Still he said nothing, only nodding wretchedly, unable to meet her eyes. Yet when he had eaten, as is the way, some shreds of spirit involuntarily returned to him. He sat closer to the fire, watching as the Tuginda swabbed the discharge from Ruvit's eyes and bathed them with some herbal infusion. With her he was quiet and amenable, and at moments almost resembled what he might have been if evil had not consumed him--a decent, stupid drover, perhaps, or the hard-handed tapster of an inn.

  They slept clothed, on the ground, as needs they must, the Tuginda making no complaint of the dirt and discomfort, or even of the vermin that gave them no peace. Kelderek slept little, mistrusting Ruvit on both his own account and the Tuginda's; but it seemed rather that the poor wretch welcomed the chance of a night's sleep free from his superstitious fears, for he never moved till morning.

  Soon after first light Kelderek blew up the fire, found a wooden pail and, glad to get into the fresh air, made his way to the shore, washed and then returned with water for the Tuginda. He could not bring himself to rouse her, but went outside again into the first sunlight. His resolve was unchanged. Indeed, he now saw in himself a gulf like that into which he had gazed from the plain of Urtah. The blasphemous wrong, in which he had participated, inflicted by Ta-Kominion upon the Tuginda, was but a part of that wider, far-reaching evil of his own committing--the sacrilege against Shardik himself and all that had followed from it. Rantzay, Mollo, Elleroth, the children sold into slavery in Bekla, the dead soldiers whose voices had flickered about him in the dark--they came thrusting, jagged and sharp, into his mind as he stood beside the creek. When the Tamarrik Gate had finally collapsed, he remembered, there had been a great central breach, from which had radiated splintered fissures and rifts, fragments of exquisitely carved wood, shards of silver sagging inward, shattered likenesses no longer recognizable in the ruin. The Ortelgans had cheered and shouted, smashing their way forward through the wreckage with cries of "Shardik! Shardik!"

  His tears fell silently. "Accept my life, Lord Shardik! O God, only take my life!"

  He heard a step behind him and, turning, saw that his prayer was answered. A few feet away Ruvit stood looking at him, knife in hand. He knelt down, offering his throat and heart and opening his arms as though to a guest.

  "Strike quickly, Ruvit, before I have time to feel afraid!"

  Ruvit stared at him a moment in astonishment; then, sheathing his knife, he stepped forward with a shifty, lopsided grin, took Kelderek's hand and pulled him to his feet.

  "Ay, ay, old feller, mustn't take it that way, ye know. Comes hard to start with, eels get used to skinning, know what they say, never look back across the Vrako, drive ye crazy. Just on me way to kill a bird. Some wrings their necks, I always cuts their heads off." He looked over his shoulder toward the door behind him and whispered, "You know what? That's a priestess, that is. Ever gets back, she's going to put in a word for me. Thought yesterday she wanted you dead, but she don't. Ah--put in a word for me, she says. That the truth, think that's the truth, eh?"

  "It's the truth," answered Kelderek. "She could get you a pardon in any city from Ikat to Deelguy. It's for me she can't."

  "Got to forget it here, lad, forget it, that's it. Five year, ten year, call the lice your friends after ten year, ye know."

  He killed the bird, plucked and drew it, left the guts lying on the ground and together they returned to the hovel.

  Two hours later Kelderek, having given to Ruvit what was left of the food he had brought from Kabin, set out with the Tuginda along the shore of the creek.

  41 The Legend of the Streels

  STILL HE COULD NOT BRING HIMSELF to speak of the past. At last he said,

  "Where are you going, saiyett?"

  She made no immediate answer, but after a little asked,

  "Kelderek, are you seeking Lord Shardik?"

  "Yes."

  "With what purpose?"

  He startled, remembering her strange power of discerning more than had been spoken. If she had perceived the intention which he had formed, she would no doubt try to dissuade him, though God knew she of all people had little reason to wish to prolong his life. Then he realized of what it was that she must be thinking.
>
  "Lord Shardik will never return to Bekla," he said. "That's certain enough--and neither shall I."

  "Are you not king of Bekla?"

  "No longer."

  They left the creek and began to follow a track leading eastward over the next ridge. The Tuginda climbed slowly and more than once stopped to rest. "She has no strength now for this life," he thought. "Even were there no danger, she ought not to be here." He began to wonder how he could persuade her to return to Quiso.

  "Saiyett, why have you come here? Are you also seeking Shardik?"

  "I received news in Quiso that Lord Shardik was gone from Bekla and then that he had crossed the plain to the hills west of Gelt. Naturally I set out in search of him."

  "But why, saiyett? You should not have undertaken such a journey. The hardship--"

  "You forget, Kelderek." Her voice was hard. "As Tuginda of Quiso I am bound to follow Lord Shardik while that is possible--that is, while the Power of God is not subjected to the power of men."

  He was silent, full of shame; but later, as she was leading the way downhill, he asked,

  "But your women--the other priestesses--you did not leave Quiso alone?"

  "No, I received news also of the advance north of Santil-ke-Erketlis. I had known already that he meant to march in the spring and that he intended to take Kabin. Neelith and three other girls set out for Kabin with me. We planned to seek Lord Shardik from there."

  "Did you speak with Erketlis?"

  "I spoke with Elleroth of Sarkid, who told me how it came about that he escaped from Bekla. He was well-disposed toward me because some time ago I cured his sister's husband of a poisoned arm. He told me also that Lord Shardik had crossed the Vrako in the foothills north of Kabin, not two days before."

  "You say Elleroth treated you as a friend--and yet he allowed you to go alone and unescorted across the Vrako?"

  "He does not know that I have crossed the Vrako. Elleroth was friendly to me, but on one thing I could not move him. He would lend me no help to find Lord Shardik or save his life. To him and his soldiers Shardik means nothing but the god of their enemies and of all that they are fighting against." She paused and then, with a momentary tremor in her voice, added, "He said--the god of the slave traders."