Shardik

  "Leave Kabin? I'm not likely to be able to do that for at least a year or two, though you're very kind."

  "You never know, you never know. It's all a question of what you can--er--bear, as it were. How straight the smoke is going up; and the swifts are high, too. Perhaps the weather is going to be kinder during our stay than I dared to hope."

  26 The King of Bekla

  THE BARE HALL, BUILT AS A MESS for common soldiers, was gloomy and ill-ventilated, for the only windows were at clerestory level, the place having been intended for use principally at evening and after nightfall. It was rectangular and formed the center of the barracks building, its four arcades being surrounded by an ambulatory, off which lay the storerooms and armories, the lockup, lavatories, hospital, barrack rooms and so on. Almost all the bays of the arcades had been bricked up by the Ortelgans nearly four years ago and the raw, unrendered brickwork between the stone columns not only added to the ugliness of the hall but imparted also that atmosphere of incongruity, if not of abuse, which pervades a building clumsily adapted for some originally unintended purpose. Across the center of the hall, alternate flagstones of one course of the floor had been prised up and replaced by mortar, into which had been set a row of heavy iron bars with a gate at one end. The bars were tall--twice as high as a man--and curved at the top to end in downward-pointing spikes. The tie bars, of which there were three courses, overlapped one another and were secured by chains to ringbolts set here and there in the walls and floor. No one knew the full strength of Shardik, but with time and the full resources of Gelt at his disposal, Baltis had been thorough.

  At one end of the hall the central bay of the arcade had been left open and from each side of it a wall had been built at right angles, intersecting the ambulatory behind. These walls formed a short passage between the hall and an iron gate set in the outer wall. From the gate a ramp led down into the Rock Pit.

  Between the gate and the bars the floor of the hall was deep in straw and a stable-smell of animal's manure and urine filled the air. For some days past, Shardik had remained indoors, listless and eating little, yet starting suddenly up from time to time and rambling here and there, as though goaded by pain and seeking some enemy on whom to avenge it. Kelderek, watching nearby, prayed continually in the same words that he had used more than five years ago in the forest darkness, "Peace, Lord Shardik. Sleep, Lord Shardik. Your power is of God. Nothing can harm you."

  In the fetid twilight he, the priest-king, was watching over the bear and waiting for news that Ged-la-Dan had reached the city. The Council would not begin without Ged-la-Dan, for the provincial delegates had been assembled first for the purpose of satisfying the Ortelgan generals about contributions of troops, money and other supplies required for the summer campaign, and secondly to be told as much as was considered good for them about Ortelgan plans for the enemy's defeat. Of these plans Kelderek himself as yet knew nothing, although they had already, no doubt, been formulated by Zelda and Ged-la-Dan with the help of some of the subordinate commanders. Before the commencement of the Council, however, and certainly before any step was taken to put the plans into effect, the generals would seek his agreement in the name of Lord Shardik; and anything which, in his prayer and pondering, he might dislike or doubt, he could if he wished require them to alter in Shardik's name.

  Since that day when Shardik had struck down the Beklan commanders and disappeared into the rainy nightfall of the Foothills, Kelderek's authority and influence had become greater than Ta-Kominion's could ever have been. In the eyes of the army it was plainly he who had brought about the miracle of the victory, he who had first divined the will of Shardik and then acted in obedience to it. Baltis and his men had told everywhere the tale of his apparent folly in insisting upon the construction of the cage and of the single-mindedness with which he had conducted the desperate march over the hills, completed by less than half of those who had begun it. The breach broken through the Tamarrik Gate could hardly have been carried against a leader like Santil-ke-Erketlis, had it not been for the fanatical belief of every Ortelgan that Shardik, in mystic communion with Kelderek, was invisibly present, leading the assault and striking unseen at the hearts and arms of Bekla. Kelderek himself had known beyond doubt that he and none other was the elect of Shardik, whom he was ordained to bring to the city of his people. On his own authority he had ordered Sheldra and the other girls to set out with him, as soon as spring should come, to seek Shardik until he was found. The Ortelgan barons, while they did not dispute this authority, had vehemently opposed the idea of his magical presence leaving the city as long as Santil-ke-Erketlis remained undefeated in the citadel on Crandor; and Kelderek, impatient of delay as the warm days returned, had suppressed his personal revulsion at the methods by which Zelda and Ged-la-Dan had compelled the Beklan general to vacate his stronghold. Such revulsion, he considered, while it might be natural enough to the common man that he had once been, was altogether unworthy of a king, whose contempt and lack of pity for the enemy was a necessity for his own people, or how could wars be won? In any case the matter was below the sphere of his authority, for he was a magical and religious king, concerned with the perception and interpretation of the divine will; and certainly no religious question was involved in Ged-la-Dan's decision to erect a gallows within view of the citadel and to hang two Beklan children every day until Santil-ke-Erketlis should agree to leave it. Only when Ged-la-Dan had told Kelderek that he ought to attend each hanging in the name of Shardik had he exercised his own will in the matter, replying curtly that it was he and not Ged-la-Dan who had been appointed by God to discern where and on what occasions there might be a need for his presence and for the manifestation of the power conferred on him by Shardik. Ged-la-Dan, secretly fearing that power, had said no more and Kelderek, for his part, had profited by what had been done without having to witness it. After some days the Beklan general had agreed to march south, leaving Kelderek free to seek Shardik in the hills west of Gelt.

  THE KING'S HOUSE

  From that long and arduous search neither the bear nor the king had returned unchanged. Shardik, snarling and struggling in his chains till he lay exhausted and half-strangled, had been drawn into the city by night and under an enforced curfew, lest the people should see what might appear to them as the humiliation of the Power of God. The chains had inflicted wounds on one side of his neck and beneath the joint of the left foreleg; and these healed slowly, leaving him with something of a limp and with an awkward, unnatural carriage of his great head which, in walking, he now moves slowly up and down, as though still feeling the pressure of the chain that was no longer there. Often during the first months he was violent, battering at the bars and walls with enormous blows that thudded through the building like a smith's hammer. Once the new brickwork closing one of the bays split and collapsed under his anger and for a time he wandered in the ambulatory beyond, beating, until he was weary, at the outer walls. Kelderek had divined from this a portent of success for an toward Ikat; and in fact the Ortelgans, following his divination, had forced Santil-ke-Erketlis to retreat southward through Lapan, only to be compelled once more to halt their advance on the borders of Yelda.

  In less than a year, however, Shardik had grown sullen and lethargic, afflicted with worms and plagued by a canker which caused him to scratch dolefully at one ear until it was ragged and misshapen. Lacking both Rantzay and the Tuginda, and hampered by the confined space and the continual gloomy savagery of the bear, Kelderek abandoned the hope he had once entertained of recommencing the Singing worship. Indeed all the girls, though assiduous in feeding Shardik, ministering to his needs and cleaning and tending the building that had become his dwelling, now feared him so greatly that little by little it became accepted that to come near him, unless protected by the bars, no longer formed any part of their services. Only Kelderek, of all their company, still knew in his heart that he must stand before him, offering his life for no reward and uttering again and again his prayer of self-dedica
tion, "Senandril, Lord Shardik. Accept my life. I am yours and ask nothing of you in return." Yet even as he prayed he answered himself, "Nothing--except your freedom and my power."

  During the long months of searching, in the course of which two girls had died, he had contracted a malarial fever, and this returned from time to time, so that he lay shivering and sweating, unable to eat and--particularly when the rains were beating on the wooden roof above--seeming to himself, in confused dreams, to be once more following Shardik out of the trees to destroy the appalled and stricken hosts of Bekla; or again, he would be seeking Melathys, plung down the Ledges in the starlight toward a fire which receded before him, while from among the trees the voice of the Tuginda called, "Commit no sacrilege, now of all times."

  He came to know the days when he could be sure that Shardik would make no move--the days when he could stand beside him as he lay brooding and speak to him of the city, of the dangers that beset it and its need of divine protection. At times, unpredictably, there would return upon him the inward sense of being elevated to some high plane beyond that of human life. But now, instead of attaining to that pinnacle of calm, shining silence from which he had once looked down upon the outskirts of the Ortelgan forest, it seemed that he joined Lord Shardik upon the summit of some terrible, cloud-swirling mountain, a place of no-life, solitary and distant as the moon. Through the darkness and icy vapor, from the pit of stars flaring in the black sky, there would sound rolling thunder, the screaming of birds, half-heard voices--unintelligible cries of warning or fierce triumph. These were borne to him crouching on the edge of a visionary and dreadful precipice, enduring this world of suffering without refuge. From pole to pole there was none left in the world to suffer but he; and always, in this trance, he was powerless to move--perhaps no longer human, but changed to a rock buried under snow or split by lightning, an anvil hammered by a cold power in regions unendurable to human life. Usually his sense of this awful sphere was mercifully dulled--superimposed, as it were, upon a continuing recollection of fragments of his lucid self, like reflections upon the visible bed of a river: as that he was king of Bekla, that sharp blades of straw were pricking the flesh of his legs, that the open gate to the Rock Pit was forming a square of bright light at the far end of the dark hall. Once or twice, however, he had become enclosed and locked altogether, like a fish in ice, among the gulfs of time where the mountains lived out their lives and crumbled and the stars, in millennia, were consumed away to darkness; and, falling to the ground, had lain oblivious beside the shaggy body of Shardik until at last, hours later, waking with a profound sense of grief and desolation, he had limped his way out of the hall to stand in the sun with the exhausted, undemanding relief of one cast up from shipwreck.

  Unable to comprehend whatever truth might lie hidden in this terrible place to which, as by a compass needle, he was guided by his unaltered devotion to Shardik, he would nevertheless seek, clumsily and conscientiously, to derive from what he suffered some meaning, some divine message applicable to the fortunes of the people and the city. Sometimes he knew in himself that these soothsayings were contrived, all but mendacious, the very stuff of a mountebank. Yet often, those which he knew most surely to have been cobbled out of incomprehension, self-reproach and a mere sense of duty would appear later to have been fulfilled, to have borne actual fruit, or at all events were received by his followers as evident truth, while the nebulous searchings of his integrity to compass in words what lay, like a half-remembered dream, beyond his power to recall or express would evoke only shaken heads and shrugged shoulders. Worst of all, in its effect on others, was the honest silence of humility.

  Shardik absorbed him night and day. The spoils of Bekla--to the barons, the soldiers and even to Sheldra and her companions so precious and gratifying an end in themselves--were no lure to him. The honor and state devised for the king he accepted, and the role which gave heart and assurance to barons and people he fulfilled with a profound sense both of their need and his own fitness through election by God. And yet, musing in the gaunt, echoing hall, watching the bear in its fits of rage and of torpor, he was filled with the conviction that, after all, what he had accomplished--all that seemed miraculous and near-divine in human terms--was of no importance in contrast to what remained to be revealed. Once, in the days when he had been concerned with no more than to get his hunter's living, he had thought only of what was necessary to that narrow purpose, like a peasant leaving unconsidered the whole world beyond his own strip of land. Then the power of Shardik had touched him and in the eyes of himself and others he had entered upon the world as an emissary of God, seeing plainly and certainly, through the knowledge divinely imparted to him, both the nature of his task and what was needed for its performance. As the instrument of Shardik he had been accorded a unique perception, self-sufficient and free from all ignorance and uncertainty. In the light of that perception everything had been found by others to have the value which he himself attached to it: and everything had fallen into the place to which he had appointed it. The High Baron of Ortelga had proved to be of small moment, yet all-important his own apparently suicidal determination to carry to Quiso the news of Shardik's coming. But now, though Shardik was lord in Bekla, this perception no longer seemed, to himself, sufficient. Continually, he was haunted by an intuitive sense that all that had happened as yet had scarcely touched the fringe of the truth of God, that he himself was still blind and that some great disclosure remained to be sought and found, to be prayed for and granted--a revelation of the world in the light of which his own state and monarchy would signify as little to himself as to the huddled creature in the cage, with its staring pelt and evil-smelling dung. Once in a dream he found himself robed and crowned for the festival of victory held every year upon the onset of the rains, but paddling his hunter's raft along the southern shore of Ortelga. "Who is Shardik?" called the beautiful Melathys, walking among the trees. "I cannot tell," he called back. "I am only an ignorant, simple man." At this she laughed, took off her great golden collar and tossed it easily to him across the reeds; but he, in the act of catching it, knew it to be worthless and let it fall into the water. Waking to see Shardik rambling back and forth beyond the bars, he rose and, as the dawn lightened, stood a long while in prayer. "Take back all else, Lord Shardik, my power and kingdom if you will. But give me fresh eyes to perceive your truth--that truth to which I cannot yet attain. Senandril, Lord Shardik. Accept my life if you will, but grant, at whatever cost, that I may find what I still seek."

  It was this all-demanding austerity of preoccupation which, more than his readiness to confront the bear, more than prophecy or any other attribute, maintained his power and authority over the city and established the awe felt for him not only by the people but also by those very barons who could not forget that he had once been nothing but an Ortelgan hunter. There was none to whom it was not plain that he was in truth the prisoner of his own all-consuming integrity, that he took no pleasure in the jewels and wine, the girls and flowers and feasting of Bekla. "Ah, he speaks with Lord Shardik!" they said, watching as he paced through the streets and squares to the soft beat of the gong. "We live in the sun, for he takes the darkness of the city on himself." "Gives me the cold shivers, he does," said the courtesan Hydraste to her pretty friend as they leaned from her window in the hot afternoon. "You couldn't do even that much, to him," replied the friend, flicking a ripe cherry down upon a young man passing below, and leaning a little farther over the sill.

  To himself, his integrity was unforced, rooted in the compulsion to seek, to discover a truth which he felt to lie far beyond the fortune he had made for Ortelga, far beyond his own role of priest-king. In his prophecies and interpretations he was less betraying this integrity than compounding with necessity in the face of his need for more time if he was to attain to what he sought--just as a doctor, feeling himself on the brink of discovering at last the true cause of a disease, may nevertheless continue to treat it by accepted methods, not from any
intention to deceive or exploit, but because until he succeeds in his great aim there is nothing better. Kelderek, who might have drugged Shardik to be sure of standing safely before him on appointed days in the presence of the people, who might have introduced human sacrifice or elaborate forms of compulsory worship, so great was the veneration in which he was held, endured instead the danger of death and the twilit solitude of the hall where he prayed and meditated continually on an uncomprehended mystery. Something there was to be discovered, something attainable only at great cost, the one thing worth attaining, beside which all older religious notions would appear pathetic fragments of superstition, an esotericism as shallow as the whispered secrets of children. This it was that would constitute Shardik's supreme gift to men. And thus he himself knew that his priesthood, which seemed to others incapable of further magnification and therefore essentially procedural and unchanging in its nature, a matter of service and rites performed in due season, was in reality an all-demanding search, during which time was always passing and his steps never covered the same ground twice. This it was which by its tremendous nature would transcend--even justify--all wrong done in the past, all violence to the truth, even--even--and here the trend of his thoughts would fail, giving place to the picture of the road to Gelt at moonset and himself standing silent while Ta-Kominion led his prisoner away down the valley. Then he would groan and fall to striding up and down outside the bars, beating fist on palm as he strove to break his train of thought, and tossing his head as though in imitation of the afflicted Shardik.

  For the memory of the Tuginda gave him no peace, even though the event had made it plain that Ta-Kominion must have been right and that she would have thwarted the miraculous gift of victory and frustrated the conquest of Bekla. After Shardik had been brought to the city and all but the southerly provinces around Ikat had recognized the rule of the conquerors, the barons had decided, with Kelderek's full agreement, that it would be both magnanimous and prudent to send messengers to assure the Tuginda that her error of judgment had been forgotten and that the time was now ripe for her to take her place beside them; for notwithstanding all that Kelderek had come to signify, no Ortelgan could lose that numinous awe for Quiso with which he had been instilled from birth, and not a few were uneasy that in their new prosperity their leaders should evidently have set aside the Tuginda. It was known that two priestesses had been killed between the coming of Shardik and the battle of the Foothills, and as long as the conquest of Bekla remained to be consolidated by subduing the provinces, the barons had been able to tell their followers that they had begged the Tuginda to remain in Quiso for her own safety. Many had expected that Shardik, once recovered, would be taken to Quiso, as in days long ago. Kelderek, however, from the time when he had set out from Bekla to find the bear, had never intended this; for if he were to go with Shardik to the Tuginda's island he must forfeit his supremacy as priest-king, while without the actual presence of Shardik he could not expect to reign in Bekla. With Shardik in Bekla and the northerly provinces subdued, there could no longer be any plausible reason for the Tuginda's absence except her own refusal to come, and the messengers--of whom Neelith had been one--had been instructed to stress to her the harm that might well be done to the people's confidence and to the fighting power of the army were she to continue to grudge Kelderek his superior power of divining the will of Shardik, and to show petty spite by sulking in Quiso and thereby depriving the people of all she meant to them.