Shardik (57 page)

Dusk had fallen when at last he crawled up the further side. His physical collapse - for he could not walk - brought with it a sense of having become a creature lacking volition, passive as a tree in the wind or a weed in the stream. His last sensation was of lying prostrate, shivering and trying to drag himself forward by clutching the fibrous grasses between his fingers.

When he woke it was night, the moon clouded and the solitude stretching wide and indistinct about him. He sat up, coughing, and at once suppressed the sound with an arm across his
mouth
. He was afraid;
partly
of attracting some beast of prey, but more of the empty night and of his new and dreadful loneliness. Following Shardik, he had feared Shardik and nothing else. Now Shardik was gone; and as, when some severe and demanding leader, whom his men both respected and feared, is reported lost, they loiter sil
ently
, addressing themselves
with
assumed diligence to trivial or futile duties, in attempts to evade the thought that none will utter - that they are now without him whom they trusted to stand between them and the enemy - so
Kelderek
rubbed his cold limbs and coughed into
the
crook of his elbow, as though by concentrating on
the
ills of his body he could make himself immune to the silence,
the
desolate gloom and
the
sense of something hovering, glimpsed in the tail of his eye.

Sudd
enly he started, held his breath
and turned his head, listening incredulously. Had he indeed heard, or only imagined, the sound of voices, far off? No, there was nothing. He stood up; and found that he could now walk, though slowly and with pain. But which way should he go, and with what purpose? Southward, for
Bekla
? Or should he try to find some refuge and remain until daylight, in the hope of coming once more upon Shardik?

And then beyond all doubt he heard, for no more than an instant, a distant clamour of voices in the night. It was come and gone; but that was no wonder, for it had been far off, and what had reached his car might well have been some momentary, louder outcry. If
the
distance or his own weakness had not deceived him, there had been many voices. Could
the
noise have come from a village where some gathering was being held? There was no light to be seen. He was not even sure from which direction the sound had come. Yet at the thought of shelter and food, of resting in safety among fellow men and of an end to his loneliness and danger, he began to hasten - or rather, to stagger - in any direction and in none until, realizing his foolishness, he sat down once more to listen.

At length - after how long he could not tell - the sound reached him again, perceived and then dying on the ear, like a wave, spent among tall reeds, that never breaks upon the shore. Released and at once quenched it seemed, as
though
a door far off had opened for a moment and as suddenly closed upon some concourse within. Yet it was a sound neither of invocation nor of festival, but rather of tumultuous disorder, of riot or confusion. To him, this in itself mattered
little
- a town in uproar would be nevertheless a town -but what town, in this place? Where was he, and could he be sure of help once it was known who he was?

He realized
that
he was once more groping his way in what now seemed to him
the
direction of the sound. The moon, still obscured among clouds, gave
little
light, but he could both see and feel that he was going g
ently
downhill, among crags and bushes, and approaching what seemed a darker mass in the near-darkness - woodland it might be, or a confronting hillside.

His cloak caught on a thorn-bush and he turned to disentangle it. At this moment,
from somewhere not a stone’s th
row away in
the
dark, there came an agonized cry, like that of a man dealt some terrible wound. The shock, like lightning striking dose at hand, momentarily bereft him of reason. As he stood trembling and staring into the dark, he heard a quick, loud gasp, followed by a few choking words of Beklan, uttered in a voice that ceased like a snapped thread.

‘She’ll give me a whole sackful of gold!’

At once the silence returned, unbroken by the least noise either of struggle or of flight. ‘Who’s there?’ called
Kelderek
.

There was no answer, no sound. The man, whoever he might be, was either dead or unconscious. Who - what - had struck him down?
Kelderek
dropped on one knee, drew his sword and waited. Trying to control his breathing and the loosening of his bowels, he crouched still lower as the moon gleamed out a moment and vanished again. His fear was incapacitating and he knew himself too weak to strike a blow.

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 tree
s increased. It was not the rustl
ing of leaves, it was not the boughs that were moving.
Men
were moving among the trees. Yes, the
ir 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 —
Ortelga
ns, 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 towards them, calling ‘I am Crendrik! I am Crendrik!’

He was on a road, a trodden way leading down towards 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 f
ear. Strangely unimme
diate 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 round 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 grave-worms; 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 im
possible of occurrence, so ghastl
y as to seem descried through a window opening upon hell - were found no dreams but, destroying at 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 t
he crest over which showed faintl
y 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 fila
mentary legs of a swarm of loath
some 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 towards 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 sti
nking 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
battle
field where, upon him more dreadfully
than
upon any who had ever strayed there, unwarned to shun it, the butcher
ed dead discharged their unhouselle
d 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 b
eetl
e 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
di
e
, 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 grey light,
Kelderek
stood up a man new-born 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 armour 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 coloured flowers that caught his eye, eating leaves and grass and staunching, 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 cat. 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 roof-tree.

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 other
s 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 out-houses - like the gate-keeper’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 a while 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 soun
d of distant voices he was greatl
y 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 south-west 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 smoke
that
filled
the
meadows outside the town, he became aware of a party of soldiers - some eight or nine -approaching through the trees.