Shardik

by Richard Adams

  The Sarkid contingent also remained, some quartered in Tissarn and some where he had first seen them, guarding the approaches to the Linsho Gap. Tan-Rion, asked the reason, explained that the Yeldashay were still patroling the province for fugitive slave traders, from the confluence of the Vrako and Telthearna to the Gap itself, the Sarkid troops forming the heel of the net. The following evening two more slave traders were brought in, each alone and in the last stages of want and exhaustion, having fled north for days before the advancing curtain of soldiers. Next morning the patroling troops themselves reached Linsho and the hunt was over.

  A few days later Kelderek was returning with Melathys from an hour's fishing--he could manage no more--when they met Elleroth and Tan-Rion not far from the place where Shardik's funeral raft had lain. Despite what Elleroth had said at their last meeting, he and Kelderek had not talked together since. It had not occurred to Kelderek, however, to regard this as a lapse on Elleroth's part. The Ban of Sarkid had been absent for several days among his various outposts and bivouacs; but in any case Kelderek was well aware that he himself was in no position to expect warmth from Elleroth or any repetition of the punctilious courtesy shown on the morning of his arrival. By chance it had so happened that the ex-king of Bekla had suffered in company with Elleroth's son and helped to save his life. This had saved his own; but nevertheless he was now of no use or value whatever to the Ban of Sarkid, who had already done fully as much as anyone would consider incumbent upon him.

  Elleroth greeted them with his usual urbanity, inquired after Kelderek's recovery and expressed his hope that Melathys did not find life in the village unduly rough and comfortless. Then he said, "Most of my men--and I too--are leaving for Zeray the day after tomorrow. I suppose you'll both wish to come? I personally am traveling by river and I'm sure we can find places for you."

  "We shall be grateful," answered Kelderek, conscious, despite himself, of his sense of inferioity to this man and of his utter dependence on his goodwill. "It's time now that we were returning to Zeray, and I'm afraid I'm not strong enough to march with the troops. You say 'most of your men.' Aren't they all going?"

  "I should have explained to you earlier," replied Elleroth. "Under the terms agreed with the Ortelgans, we are taking control of this province--all land east of the Vrako. That is perfectly just and reasonable, as Bekla certainly never controlled it and the last--indeed the only--Baron of Zeray, the Ortelgan Bel-ka-Trazet, specifically invited us to annex it only a few months ago. For some little while, until we have the place settled, there will be a force of occupation, with outposts at suitable places."

  "I'm only surprised you think it's worth your while," said Kelderek, determined to express some view of his own. "Will there be any profit at all?"

  "The profit we shall owe to Bel-ka-Trazet," answered Elleroth. "I never knew him, but he must have been a remarkable man. If I'm not mistaken, it was he who first conceived what I believe is going to prove an innovation of the greatest importance."

  "He was a remarkable man," said Melathys. "He was a man who could pluck advantage from an acre of ashes."

  "He advised us," said Elleroth, "that it would be practicable to construct a ferry across Zeray strait, and even outlined to us how it might be done--an idea entirely of his own devising, as far as I can make out. Our pioneers, together with men from Deelguy, are engaged on the work now, but we have sent to ask for the help of some Ortelgan rope-makers. That will be most important. No one understands the uses and qualities of ropes like Ortelgans. When the ferry is complete, Zeray is bound to become a commercial town of importance, for there will be a new and direct route, both for Ikat and for Bekla, across the Telthearna and on to the east. Whatever countries may lie there, the ferry is bound to open up entirely new markets." He paused. "If I recall, Crendrik, you were interested in trade, weren't you, when you were in Bekla? No, no--" he held up his hand "--I didn't intend any malice, or to wound your feelings, I assure you. Please don't think that. Isn't it true, though, that you played a large part in directing the empire's policy in commerce?"

  "Yes, that's true," answered Kelderek. "I'm not an aristocrat, as you know. I've never owned land; and to those who are neither farmers nor soldiers, trade's vital if they're to thrive at all. That was what I could understand about Bekla that our generals couldn't. It was from that that the evil came--" he paused "--but there was good as well."

  "Yes, I see," said Elleroth rather abstractedly, and began to talk to Melathys about the probable needs of the Tuginda.

  The villagers learned with regret that the soldiers were leaving, for on the whole they had behaved well and paid honestly enough for whatever they had had. Besides, they brought welcome change and excitement to the normal squalor of life in Tissarn. There was the usual bustle as arms and equipment were got together and inspected, quarters relinquished, loads apportioned and an advance party dispatched to prepare the first night's camp (for only Elleroth and a few other officers, with their servants, were to go by water, available canoes being scarce).

  During the afternoon Kelderek, weary of the racket and commotion, took a line and some bait and set off along the waterside. He had not gone far when he came upon nine or ten of the slave children splashing about the shore. Joining them, he found them in rather better spirits than he had come to expect, and even began to derive some pleasure from their company, which now reminded him a little of old days on Ortelga. One of the boys, a dark, quick-moving lad about ten years old, was teaching them a singing game from Paltesh. This led to others, until at length Kelderek, being teased and challenged to contribute something, showed them the first Ortelgan game that came into his head.

  Cat catch a fish in the river in the foam;

  Cat catch a fish and he got to get it home.

  Run, cat, run, cat, drag it through the mire--

  As he scratched out the lines with a stick and laid down a green branch for the fish, he felt once more, as he had not for years, the exhilaration of that spontaneity, directness and absorption that had once led him to call children "the flames of God."

  Take it to the pretty girl that's sitting by the fire!

  And away he went, hobbling and shuffling slowly enough, for as he had told Elleroth, he was still far from healed; yet in his heart he went as once in the days when he had been a young simpleton who would rather play with the children than drink with the men.

  When it was no longer his turn to be the cat, he dropped out. He was resting unobtrusively behind a rock when he realized that the boy loitering near him was Shouter, but so haggard and pale that at first he had not recognized him. He was playing no part in the game, but staring moodily at the ground, pacing one way and another and jabbing viciously at the stones with a stick. A second glance showed Kelderek that if he was not actually weeping, he was probably as close to it as was possible for any boy who had spent several months in the service of Genshed.

  "Are you feeling better?" asked Kelderek as Shouter came a little nearer.

  "--be mucking stupid," answered Shouter, barely turning his head.

  "Come here!" said Kelderek sharply. "What's brought you out here? What's the matter?" The boy made no reply and he took him by the arm and said again, "Come on, tell me, what's the matter?"

  "Glad to be going, aren't they?" said Shouter, in a kind of savage gasp. "Either they're lucky or they're too bloody stupid to know they're not."

  "Why, aren't they going home?" asked Kelderek.

  "Home? There's half of them's never had any home. If they had, they wouldn't have been here, would they?"

  "Go on," said Kelderek, still gripping his arm. "Why wouldn't they?"

  "You know's well as I do; kids whose mothers don't want 'em, fathers have mucked off, they live how they can, don't they, one day someone sells 'em for forty meld to get rid of 'em--same as they did me--best thing ever happened to some of them, next to being dead. Slaves--they was slaves all along, wasn't they?"

  "Where do you think they'll go now, then
?"

  "How the hell should I know?" bawled Shouter, with something like a return to his old form. "Leg-By-mucking-Lee, I shouldn't wonder. Why don't you let me alone? I'm not afraid of you!"

  Kelderek, forgetting his line and bait, left the boys and made his way back to Dirion's house. Melathys met him at the door, wearing her Yeldashay metlan with the corn-sheaves emblem.

  "You missed Elleroth," she said. "The Ban in person. He's invited us to dine with him tonight and says he very much hopes you won't be too tired. There'll be no one else and he's looking forward to seeing you, which from him amounts to a pressing invitation, I should think." After a few moments she added, "He stayed here a little while, in case you returned, and I--I took the opportunity to tell him how things are between you and me. I dare say he knew already, for the matter of that, but he had the good manners to pretend he didn't. I told him how I came to be in Zeray and about Bel-ka-Trazet. He asked what we intended to do now and I explained--or tried to explain--what Lord Shardik's death had meant to us. I told him you were quite decided that there could be no question of your ever returning to Bekla."

  "I'm glad you told him," said Kelderek. "You talk more easily to him and his like than ever I shall. He reminds me of Ta-Kominion, and he was too much for me. Elleroth might help us, I suppose, but I don't intend to ask him. I owe him my life, yet all the same I can't bring myself to give any of these Yeldashay the chance to tell me that I'm lucky to be alive. But--but--"

  "But what, my darling?" she asked, raising her lips and kissing the pierced lobe of his ear.

  "You said, 'It will be shown us what we are to do,' and I've a kind of inkling that something may happen before we leave Tissarn."

  "What?"

  "No," he said, smiling. "No, it's you that's the clairvoyante priestess from Quiso, not I."

  "I'm not a priestess," answered the girl gravely.

  "The Tuginda said differently. But you'll be able to ask her again tomorrow night, and Ankray too for that matter."

  "'Well, saiyett, the Baron, now he always used to say--' "It was an excellent imitation, but she broke off suddenly. "Never mind, here comes Dirion. Now let me change that bandage on your arm. Whatever have you been doing up the river? It's far too dirty to go out to dinner with Elleroth."

  It was pleasant to have so much light in the room, thought Kelderek, watching Elleroth's servant renew the lamps and sweep up the hearth. Not since Bekla had he seen a room so bright after dark. True, the light served to reveal no finery or display--little, indeed, but the poverty of the place, for Elleroth's quarters were much like his own--a wooden, shedlike house near the waterside, with two bare rooms on each floor--but it also showed that Elleroth, as might be expected, liked to be generous, even lavish, to his guests, and that, too, without thought of return, for, as he had promised, no one was present besides himself, Melathys, Tan-Rion, another officer and Radu. The boy, though still pale and emaciated in appearance, had changed as a musician changes when he sets hand to his instrument. As in an old tale, the wretched slave boy had turned back into the heir of Sarkid, a young gentleman, brought up to be deferential to his father, gracious to his father's officers, silently attentive to the conversation of his elders and in every way equal to his station. Yet it was not all courtier, for he talked earnestly to Kelderek for some time about the slave children and also about the ceremony on the shore; and when Elleroth's servant, having cut up his one-handed master's meat, was about to do the same for Kelderek, Radu forestalled him, setting aside Kelderek's protest with the remark that it was less than Kelderek had done for him.

  The dinner had been as good as competent soldier-servants could produce on active service--fish (he himself could have caught better), duck, stringy pork with watercress, hot bannock's and goat's cheese, and an egg sillabub with nuts and honey. The wine, however, was Yeldashay, southern, full and smooth, and Kelderek smiled inwardly as he thought of Elleroth, in desperate haste to start his forced march from Kabin in response to the news that his son was alive, finding time to give orders that plenty of it was to be brought along. That Elleroth, for all his aristocratic detachment, had a magnanimous and sincere heart he had had ample proof and indeed could be said to be alive to testify: nor was he himself so envious or mean as to suppose that wealth and style necessarily denoted indifference to the feelings of poorer men. If Elleroth was an aristocrat, he felt an aristocrat's obligations, and that a good deal more warmly than Ta-Kominion or Ged-la-Dan. His soldiers would have followed him into the Streels of Urtah. And yet Kelderek, for all his real gratitude to this man, who had set aside their former enmity and treated him as a friend and guest, still found himself out of accord with Elleroth's smooth self-possession, with the even, controlled tone of his voice and his capacity for deftly converting Kelderek's rather anecdotal manner of conversation into his own style of detached, impersonal comment. He had been most courteous and considerate, but to Kelderek his talk and bearing nevertheless contained more than a suggestion of the ambassador entertaining half-civilized foreigners in the way of duty. Had there, perhaps, been some unrevealed purpose behind his invitation? Yet what purpose could there be, now that all was resolved and settled? Radu was alive--and Shardik was dead. Ikat and Bekla were at peace and Melathys and he were free to go where they might. So were Shouter and the slave children--free as flies, free as autumn leaves or as wind-borne ashes. No, there could be no more strands to unravel now.

  It was fortunate, he thought, that Melathys, at any rate, had some stomach for the party. Even remembering all that she had suffered, yet in one way she had been lucky, for despite her devotion to the Tuginda and her determination to vindicate her long-ago treachery to Shardik, she was not and never had been made for the seclusion of an island priestess. She was flirting with Tan-Rion at this moment--embroidering upon some banter of how she would visit Sarkid and reveal all that he had done while he had been on active service. Kelderek felt no jealousy, but only gladness. He knew her to be warm-hearted, mercurial, even passionate. She was working out her own way of overcoming the evil that had been done to her and meanwhile he could be patient, despite the kindling of desire which told him that his body at least was recovering.

  Yes, he reflected, his body was recovering. His heart would hardly do so. He had seen into the depth of a Streel lower than Urtah, a devil's hole where Shara lay meaninglessly murdered and Shouter loitered cursing in the wasteland. That was the human world--the world which Elleroth saw primarily in terms of a ruler's problems of law and order--the world in which Lord Shardik had given his sacred life to save children condemned to slavery by human selfishness and neglect.

  Elleroth was speaking again now, of the balance of power between Ikat and Bekla, of the prospects for peace and the need to overcome all remaining feelings of enmity between the two peoples. Prosperity, he was saying, was a great warmer of hearts and hearths, and to this self-evident truth Kelderek felt safe in nodding assent. Then, pausing, Elleroth gazed downward, as though deliberating with himself. He swirled the remains of his wine round and round his cup, but waved aside the attentive soldier who, misunderstanding, stepped forward to refill it, and a few moments later he gave him leave to go. As the man went out, Elleroth looked up with a smile and said,

  "Well, Crendrik--or Kelderek Zenzuata, as Melathys tells me I ought to call you--you've given me a great deal to think about: or at all events I have been thinking, and you have much to do with it."

  Kelderek, at something of a loss but fortified by the Ikat wine, made no reply, yet was at least able to return his host's gaze with courteous expectancy and some degree of self-possession.

  "One of our problems--and that not the least--is going to be, first, establishing proper control over Zeray, and then developing this whole province. If you were ever right about one thing, Kelderek, it was when you spoke of the necessity of trade to the prosperity of ordinary people. Zeray is going to become an important trade route, both for Bekla and for Ikat. We couldn't monopolize it even if we wished, fo
r the trade will have to come through Kabin as well and the Kabinese don't want to become independent of Bekla. So we're going to need someone to look after Zeray, preferably not a complete foreigner, but one who favors neither Bekla nor Ikat; someone who's keen on trade and understands its great importance."

  "I see," said Kelderek politely.

  "And then, of course, we really need someone with personal experience of the Telthearna," went on Elleroth. "You might not be aware of this, Kelderek, being so familiar with it yourself, but it's not everyone who knows how to pay the necessary attention and respect to the ways of a great river, its droughts and floods and fogs and currents and shoals--a river where a vital trade ferry crosses a swift and dangerous strait. That calls for experience, and knowledge that's become second nature."

  Kelderek drained his wine. His cup was wooden, of peasant workmanship, almost certainly turned, he thought, here in Tissarn. In the bowl, someone had taken a good deal of trouble over a very passable likeness of a kynat in flight.

  "Then, again, it would be highly desirable for this governor to have had some previous experience of ruling and exercising authority," resumed Elleroth. "Even with military help, Zeray's likely to be a tough business for a time, considering its present state and that of the whole province. And I think the appointment really calls for someone who knows something about fairly rough people at first hand--someone who's knocked about, as you might say, and knows how to rough it a bit himself. I doubt whether we'd find a landowning aristocrat, or even a professional officer, prepared to take the job on. They almost all despise trade, and anyway who would be ready to leave land and estates to go to Zeray? And what existing provincial governor would want to make the move? Difficult, Tan-Rion, isn't it?"