Paul O Williams - [Pelbar Cycle 02]

by The Ends of the Circle (v0. 9) (epub)

  “If I tell you why, will you tell me about her?”

  Stel didn’t answer. Scule repeated the question. Stel still didn’t answer.

  “More thirst, then?”

  “Old man, you may kill me with thirst if you want to, though I don’t wish it. But there are some things I will not discuss with you.”

  Scule pondered this. Somehow he knew Stel meant it. Something switched in him. Somehow he didn’t want to kill Stel. It was himself on the floor below, being tortured by himself. Well, didn’t he deserve torture?

  “Then tell me of Pelbarigan. How is it there? Do they withstand the outside tribes as well as they did?”

  Stel sat up. He told Scule of the fight at Northwall, the Pelbar united with both Shumai and Sentani to free the slaves of the Tantal. With the old man’s questions, he talked for much of the day about the city. Scule was a blood relation of his cousin, Ruudi, as he found out, though none of Stel’s.

  Finally, toward evening, Stel said, “Old man, I saw, fn the mountains, a giant beast, dark and shaggy. It stood up in front of me like a man, though taller, with long claws.

  Then it dropped down again on all four feet and walked down the mountain.”

  Scule said nothing for a time. Eventually he said, “You are'lying. There is no such beast.”

  “I saw it. I thought you might know it. It makes no great difference, though I have dreamed of it. It could crush a man like an egg.”

  “There is no such beast. It is the devil beast flag of the Commuters. You say you came from the east. How did you get around to the west?”

  “It was just as I told you.”

  “You must be taught not to lie.”

  “As you wish, but please, no more thirst. Try some other way. You will see. I have not lied.”

  Scule hesitated. “I will cut your food ration.”

  “It is already slender enough.”

  “I will withdraw myself from you.”

  “As you wish. You are touchy company. Touchy unlucky. I wish you would touch the latch key.”

  From above there was more silence. Stel sighed to himself. How long, now, in how many situations, had people tried to dominate him? This was the worst. This made the Dahmens seem kind. It made McCarty seem reasonable.

  In the morning the half-rations began. Stel had carefully counted his strips of dried beef the night before. There were forty-seven. He would chew a half-strip each night, in the dark. That would help his hunger.

  The silence from above persisted for twenty-two days. Stel grew more listless and withdrawn. The routine of blankness and cold made him simply await the change in mood he felt eventually would come. Meanwhile winter set in more deeply. Stel was never really warm. The numbing chill seemed to make him shrink further into himself.

  For a time he seemed the only man in the world, a speck of heat in a whirl of cold—single, remote, unique. So this was what aloneness was. Real aloneness. Cut from past, future, warmth, relation. He would shrink like a dying fire, to one ember, then go out. A drift of smoke would rise to nowhere and disappear. Was this, then, the consequence of leaving Pelbarigan? To step into chaos, then into nothing? No. There was always Aven. And there are the consequences of Aven in human behavior. Somewhere. Could they be here? If he were to burn out like the ember, then he would burn out giving light, giving heat to the uncaring darkness, even to the mad Scule.

  Finally, Scule spoke again. “I am going to cut your rations further,” he said abruptly one morning. There followed for Stel a period of deeper hunger and cold. He finally lost track of the days, forgetting to cut the notches into the wall with the tip of his short-sword. He dreamed again of the great beast, but it did not change into Ahroe. It seemed to loom and loom, growing and fading. Finally Stel began chewing a whole strip of beef at night, but still the darkness brought with it racing fantasies. Stel had even stopped playing the flute. He tried to think the songs to himself.

  At last, when his beef, even so rationed, was running short, he saw in the pitch darkness, as he huddled and shivered with cold, that he was in error. He must give out himself. If the old man withheld what he needed, that was none of his affair. So he was to die alone here. He would die being himself, not only himself, but the best of Stel he knew. He tried to play, sitting up, curled in the sack. His fingers refused to work right, even on slow songs. The results were clumsy beyond belief. Stel laughed to himself, then aloud. He tried again, but it was no better. He played the hymn to the spring river rise, that brought the Pelbar so much wood in the time of hostilities that it seemed like a blessing from Aven. Then he played it again.

  The third time through, Scule’s voice came from above. “Stop. If you are going to play it, play it right or not at all.”

  “My hands are too cold.”

  “Then stop.”

  “What if I don’t? Will you cut off my rations altogether?”

  “I may.”

  “I will stop.”

  “You need not stop. Play it right.”

  “You seem not to understand. I would if I could. I am too cold and hungry. You are, you know, slowly killing me. But since it offends you, I will stop. I will listen to the sounds inside me, where they don’t depend on my fingers.”

  From above, after a silence, Scule said, “I saw them.” “What?”

  “How can you be hungry? Why do you return? I saw the tracks.”

  “What tracks?”

  “The devil beast. You are the devil beast. You make the tracks, then return to mock me.”

  “No, old man. You are the devil beast. He is within you. He will never let you alone because you nurture him.” Stel suddenly felt recklessly playful. “At night, when the moon grows, you become the beast. You breathe down at me, slathering, and saying to yourself, ‘What now can I do to Stel to torture him? I am a Dahmen. I must torture people. I know no other way. Touch is torture. My hands are claws. I must slash and lash. I was silly enough to put Stel behind these stone walls, so I must use the claws of hunger, of cold, of silence, of any cruelty, to reach him with those.’ You are the beast. But I have now gone beyond you. I am in the mist. Your claws rake through it and cannot wound it. Only the body bleeds. Not the soul. I know now what you fear and have always feared. You don’t fear the Dahmens. You don’t fear me. You don’t even fear the great beast. You fear yourself. You have come here to the mountains hoping never to be found, yet preparing elaborately for it, because you fear what you might do. That is what Visib did for you—or to you. You may have thought you killed her. But you must kill her over and over every day in your thought, in your horror at it all. I see now that you never did the unspeakable. You fear only its possibility and what you did do, in your desperation. And I thank you for it.”

  “You lie again,” Scule shouted down through the hole. Then, “Why do you thank me?”

  “It is guilt, Scule. I see it now. I saw the beast as Ahroe. My wife, Ahroe. I saw it as myself. But it is not. It is really circumstance, and perhaps weakness in us, so it is what we do, what rises up within us when bad times come. But when spring comes, we shed our shaggy coats. When it is time to eat again, we do so because we have used up the last meal and are done with it. I am free of you now, though you have still imprisoned me.” Stel laughed, shivering with cold.

  “You are crazy.”

  Stel laughed again with the irony of this. “No, old man. There was a beast. I saw him. You saw his tracks. I mean a real beast. But he is just a beast. The one we fear is the one we fear we are. It is the one our mothers redeem when they forgive us as children, dropping their tears on us. And as men we must forgive ourselves. Forgive yourself, Scule. And give me something to eat.”

  “It is the middle of the night.”

  “Nonetheless, I am hungry. Feed me.”

  “You are crazy.”

  “And you are not guilty. Now, feed me.”

  Above there was a slight rustle, but after a while a small light appeared, and a stew was lowered through the hole, with hot tea.
Stel took it, thanking Scule, and ate it slowly and with relish.

  “That was good. Delicious. Now how about an old blanket. Surely you have one to spare. I am freezing down here. When my blanket comes, that much more of the devil beast will leave you.”

  “You are crazy,” Scule said again. But he forced a robe made of small, sewn animal furs down the hole.

  “Thank you again,” Stel said. “And now good night. May you sleep in safety and the comfort of Aven.”

  Stel lay down. He had, at last, some direction. He would do what he could to entertain, amuse, educate, and cure this old man. Perhaps he would save himself as well. But inadvertently he had released himself from his own sense of guilt. At least, most of it. He was in, after all, a Pelbar society, small and queer as it might be. He would see if he could free the old man from the long memory of Dahmen cruelty and his own weakness.

  In the ensuing days, and weeks, Stel not only amused himself by cutting splints from his snow sliders to make drumsticks, with which he drummed out patterns of sound on the stone floor, but even got Scule to lower him material for another flute. Since no drill and no pithy wood were available, Stel got Scule to burn a hole in the flute shaft with hot metal, then shaped the instrument, put the finger boles in it, trimmed it, and tested it, finally giving the old man lessons.

  Occasionally, when Scule wanted him to confess his mission from the Dahmens, the relationship grew tense again. But Stel knew that there was a finality to that, and that if Scule ever became convinced that his delusion was fulfilled by Stel, the old man would probably abandon him to starve. So Stel tossed off his confession agreeably enough so that Scule knew he was just saying it. Eventually, Stel could see that the old hermit had ceased to believe his long-held myth that the Dahmens would get him.

  Winter continued, but Stel was warmer now. He agreed to sew up a pair of fur mittens for the old man if Scule would give him materials for a pair of his own. Eventually Stel made socks as well, for both, with fur inside.

  But he was not free. One night he strapped the thin remains of his snow sliders near the ends and tried to reach the keystones by the roof hole of his room. They barely reached. He could exert no force. He carefully dismantled the makeshift probe. Nothing else came to mind, though he pondered his problem endlessly.

  Winter deepened. Stel got Scule to stuff the high window with a sack of leaves, but this so dimmed the interior of the room that it seemed to plunge him into a continuous night. Scule told him that the snow had drifted nearly to the height of the window, as it generally did. The old man was used to such winters, and spent much of the warm season preparing for them, but the endless cold, wind, and snow appalled Stel, intensifying his isolation.

  One day toward evening, as he was idly decorating his drumsticks with fine carving in the dim light, almost working by feel, he heard a sound at the window. The sack pushed in, followed by a great, furry arm, claw-tipped. It was the mountain beast. The animal held, and tugged, as the drift outside sagged under him. Finally the paw slipped back outside.

  Stel shouted for Scule, repeating his shouts until finally the old Pelbar came to the roof hole.

  “What is it now?”

  “He was here. The mountain beast. He was at the window.”

  Scule disappeared and was gone a long time. Then he returned. “I saw him going down through the trees. So you did tell the truth.”

  “Yes. For once I am glad the walls are strong.”

  “He wanted you. What have you done that the devil beast should want you?”

  “It is only an animal, big and hungry. It must have smelled your cooking.”

  “I think it wanted you.”

  “Are you secure up there? Have you any windows large enough for it?”

  “They are too high, even in the drifts.”

  “Can you bar them?”

  “Why should you worry about that?”

  “If you die, so do I.”

  “Remember that.”

  “I don’t ever forget it. You are my jailer and jeerer, cook and lock, watcher and witherer, mother and smoth-erer.”

  “Enough. Your rattling on gets too much after my years of silence.”

  Though that ended the incident, Stel continued to worry. The great arm of the beast was the most visible living thing Stel had seen now in almost four months. Scule remained dimly above his hole. He took care to exercise every day, especially after he discovered he could not pull his longbow.

  Winter and monotony continued. Scule continued to feed Stel well enough. He took his daily flute lesson down through the roof hole, though he showed little talent for it. His old fingers would never be very nimble. But Stel could hear him practicing above at times, working through slow, measured songs. The two seemed to be becoming an odd sort of domestic couple, jailer and jailed, like many marriages, Stel wryly thought.

  The crisis came suddenly. A storm of even greater fury than usual blew snow outside. Stel had exercised, cleaned his cell, prayed, played his hymns, and eaten. Somehow he felt uneasy. Something was wrong. He didn’t know quite why, but he strung his longbow, which he could draw again. From above he heard a sudden rending of the hide windows of Scule’s room. The old man shrieked. The wooden frames cracked and splintered. Sudden smoke and snow blew down the roof hole. Stel nocked an arrow. A heavy growl told him the beast was forcing his way into the room overhead. He must have the old man trapped, judging from the cries of terror. A rending of frames told Stel the animal must have muscled his way into the room and rushed across it. Stel saw a great foot fall through the roof hole. Instantly he drew and shot, piercing the foot before the beast could wrench it up again. He heard a roar and shriek, as the beast tugged against the stout arrow. His foot filled the hole, giving him no purchase against the shaft to snap it.

  Stel saw that the beast would do what he himself had sought for so long. He was tearing out the keystones. In the dimness Stel put another arrow through the foot, drew his short-sword, and stood back against the wall as the beast’s foot came free, tearing out the stones. As the whole end of the room thundered down, the beast came with it, roaring into the dark hole.

  In an instant Stel was climbing over beast and stones, slashing the animal once in the face, then throwing the sword up into the room above, leaping to grab the edge of the floor, scrambling up, turning, and heaving loose edge stones down on the beast scrabbling up the stones below him. It was no use. The beast was too big. Stel turned, grabbed his short-sword, and, as the animal put one forepaw on the rim of the hole, Stel hacked at it repeatedly. The beast sank back, then tried the other foot. Stel chopped mercilessly across it, and the wounded animal fell back into Stel’s prison with a rumble. He could see it in the dim light, rising and falling, a great shape writhing in pain, its front paws now useless.

  Stel turned to Scule. The old man was lying in a corner where the beast had swept him. He turned the wounded man over. Blood welled in lines from his side, and a little frothed on his lips. He groaned. Stel ignored the beast, stuffing the window hole with bedding as well as he could while snow and cold poured into the room. Then he built up the fire, laid the old man down on his straw-filled mattress, covered him with a coat, and heated water on the fire. He found some old cloth, which he put in the hot water, then found a short bow, old and slack, with seven arrows.

  With these he shot the wounded beast slowly and deliberately, until it sank down in a corner. Then, shuddering, Stel again went down into his prison and brought his own gear up, returning to skin the great beast. He placed the giant pelt, hair side down, over the hurt man.

  Scule had said nothing. He lay moving his arm vaguely, breathing with difficulty. Stel bathed the wounds in his side as gently as possible, but Scule winced and writhed weakly. Stel could do nothing but try to make him comfortable, bathing and binding. Returning to the beast, Stel cut meat from the carcass and boiled it, feeding Scule the broth. He himself ate the first free and unportioned meal he had had in the whole winter. The meat was gamy and t
ough, but nourishing.

  Finally, late that night, Scule stirred and opened his eyes. He seemed to recognize Stel. “The beast,” he murmured.

  “I killed it. It is in the pit. You are lying under his skin. You have eaten broth from him. He was only a beast, and now he is dead.”

  “You have me now.”

  “What? Oh. What do I want you for? I am not from the Dahmens. You know that by now, don’t you?”

  “Had believed it for so long. Suppose I knew. Then it is not true?”

  “No. Things are as I said they were. Now lie still. You will be fine. But it will take time.”

  “No. Am all broken. Can feel it. It is just as well.” He sighed faintly. “Bequeath all this to you.”

  “What?”

  “All my things. My house. Stores.”

  “Wait now. You are . . .”

  “No. Now we will both tell nothing but truth. There is no need to shroud . . . my dying from me. Not a grave matter. Am glad to have met you. Would not have liked simply to die, after all that waiting.” He fell silent for a time. “There is a shining sea,” he added. “Could not make it across the dry country. But there is one. Some have made it. The Commuters know of it. You must go there for me. Should have gone. Feared the Dahmens. All was open in the dry country. Felt safe in the mountains.”

  “Quiet now. I will go, eventually, when you are all right. Perhaps you will come, too. But not now.”

  Scule smiled oddly. “Stel, you know the old woman, Ahroe, for whom your wife, Ahroe, was named?”

  Stel was puzzled. “Yes, a bitter old woman who died five or six winters ago.”

  “She . . . she was ... I used to know her.”

  “She must have been young.”

  “But just as bitter. Stel. .

  “Yes.”

  “It was she I meant to kill, not Visib. Knew I would get someone. You have made these days hard for me telling me it was Visib. Loved her, Stel. Even though she . . .” He stopped. Tears welled in Stel’s eyes. So this was the end of a story of bad human workmanship. Scule had participated, been murderous. But he was also the victim. How weary and sad it all was.