Kelderek had not thought that he could suffer more bitterly.
"He told me of his son," went on the Tuginda, "and after that I asked nothing more of him. He told me, too, that some of his soldiers had come upon Lord Shardik in the hills and felt sure that he was dying. I asked him why they had not killed him and he replied that they had been afraid to attempt it. So I do not myself believe that Lord Shardik is dying."
At this he was about to speak, but she went on,
"I had hoped that Elleroth might give me some soldiers to conduct us across the Vrako, but when I saw that it was useless to ask, I let him believe that we meant to return to Quiso, for he would certainly have stopped me from crossing the Vrako alone."
"But would none of the girls come with you, saiyett?"
"Do you think that I would bring them into this country--the thieves' kitchen of the world? They begged to come. I told them to return to Quiso, and since they are bound by oath to obey me, they went. After that I bribed the guards at the ford and once across the river I turned north, as you did."
"Saiyett, where do you mean to go now?"
"I believe that Shardik is trying to return to his own country. He is making for the Telthearna and will cross it if he can. Therefore I am going to Zeray, to seek help in watching for him along the western shore. Or if he has already swum the Telthearna, we may learn of it in Zeray."
"Elleroth, perhaps, was right. Shardik may indeed be dying, for since leaving Bekla he has once more been wickedly and cruelly wounded."
She stopped, turned and stared up at him. "Did Elleroth tell you that?"
He shook his head.
She sat down but said no more, only continuing to look at him with eyes full of uncertainty and questioning. Seeking for further words, he burst out,
"Saiyett, the Streels of Urtah--what is their mystery and their meaning?"
At this she gave a quick, low gasp, as it were of dread and consternation; but then, recovering herself, answered, "You had better tell me what you know yourself."
He told her how he had followed Shardik out of Bekla and of their crossing of the plain. She listened silently until he came to the adventure at Urtah, but as he spoke of his awakening and of the wounded Shardik climbing from the Streel to scatter his attackers, she began to weep bitterly, sobbing aloud, as women mourn for the dead. Appalled by this passionate grief in one whom he had hitherto thought of as stretching out her scepter over all ills besetting the heart of man, he waited with a hopeless, leaden patience, not presuming to intrude upon her sorrow, since he perceived that it flowed from some bitter knowledge which he, too, must presently possess.
At length, becoming calmer, she began to speak; her voice was like that of a woman who, having learned of some terrible bereavement, understands that henceforth her life will be a waiting for death.
"You asked me, Kelderek, about the Streels of Urtah. I will tell you what I know, though that is little enough, for the cult is a close secret inherited by each generation, and such is the fear of it that I never heard of any who dared to pry into those mysteries. But though, thank God, I have never seen the Streels, a little I know--the little I have been told because I am the Tuginda of Quiso.
"How deep the Streels are no one knows, for none has ever descended into their depths and returned. Some say they are the mouths of hell, and that the souls of the wicked enter them by night. They say, too, that only to look down and cry aloud into the Streels is sufficient to awaken a torment that will drive a man mad."
Kelderek, his eyes on her face, nodded. "It is true."
"And how old the cult is no one knows, or what it is they worship. But this I can tell you. Always, for hundreds of years, their mystery at Urtah has been the bringing of retribution upon the wicked--those, that is, for whom such retribution has been ordained by God. Many are wicked, as well you know, yet not all the wicked find their way to the Streels. This--or so I have always understood--is the way of that dreadful business. The evildoer is one whose crime cries out to heaven, beyond restitution or forgiveness; one whose life, continuing, defiles the very earth. And it is always by some accident that he appears to come to Urtah: he is in ignorance of the nature of the place to which his journey has led him. He may be attended or he may be alone, but always he himself believes that it is chance, or some business of his own, which has brought him to Urtah of his own free will. Yet those who watch there--those who see him come--they recognize him for what he is and know what they have to do.
"They speak him fair and treat him courteously, for however foul his crime it is none of their duty to hate him, any more than the lightning hates the tree. They are but the agents of God. And they will not trick him either. He must be shown the place and asked whether he knows its name. Only when he answers 'No' do they persuade him toward the Streels. Even then he must--"
She stopped suddenly and looked up at Kelderek.
"Did you enter the Streel?"
"No, saiyett. As I told you, I--"
"I know what you told me. I am asking you--are you sure that you did not enter the Streel?"
He stared at her, frowning, then nodded. "I am sure, saiyett."
"He must enter the Streel of his own accord. Once he has done that, nothing can save him. It becomes their task to kill him and cast his body into the depths of the Streel.
"Some who have died there have been men of rank and power, but all have been guilty of some deed whose vileness and cruelty prey upon the very minds of those who hear it. You will have heard of Hypsas, for he came from Ortelga."
Kelderek closed his eyes, beating one hand upon his knee.
"I remember. Would to God I did not."
"Did you know that he died in the Streels? He intended to escape to Bekla or perhaps to Paltesh, but it was to Urtah that he came."
"I didn't know. They say only that he vanished."
"Very few know what I have told you--priests and rulers for the most part. There was King Manvarizon of Terekenalt, he that was grandfather of King Karnat the Tall. He burned alive his dead brother's wife, together with her little son, his nephew, the rightful king, whose life and throne he had sworn to defend. Five years later, being on the plain of Bekla at the head of his army, he came to Urtah with a few followers, his purpose, so he thought, being to spy out that land for himself. He ran screaming into the Streel, flying from none but a little herd-boy who was driving sheep--or perhaps from some other little boy that no one else could see. They saw him draw his sword, but he flung it to the ground as he ran, and there no doubt it lies to this day, for no possession of a victim is ever taken, buried or destroyed."
"You say that all who enter the Streels must die?"
"Yes, from that moment their death is certain. One respite only there may be, but it is very rare--almost unknown. Once in a hundred years, perhaps, it may happen that the victim comes alive from the Streel: and then they will not touch him, for that is a sign that God has sanctified him and intends to make use of his death for some blessed and mysterious purpose of His own. Long, long ago, there was a girl who fled with her lover across the Beklan plain. Her two brothers--hard, cruel men--were following, for they meant to kill them both, and she saw that her lover was afraid. She was determined to save him and she stole away by night and came upon her brothers as they slept; and for his sake, because she dared not kill them, she blinded them both in their sleep. Later--how, I do not know--she came alone to Urtah and there she was stabbed and thrown down as she lay in the Streel. But that night she climbed out alive, though wounded almost to death. They let her go, and she died in giving birth to a boy. That boy was the hero U-Deparioth, the liberator of Yelda and the first Ban of Sarkid."
"And that is why Elleroth knows what you have told me?"
"He would know that and more besides, for the House of Sarkid has been honored by the priests of Urtah from that day to this. He would certainly have received news of what befell Lord Shardik and yourself at Urtah."
"How is it that I never learned
of the Streels in Bekla? I knew much, for men were paid to tell me all; yet this I never knew."
"Few know, and of them none would tell you."
"But you have told me!"
She began to weep once more. "Now I believe what Elleroth said to me at Kabin. I know why his men did not hurt Lord Shardik and why he spared your life also. No doubt he was not told that you yourself had not entered the Streel. He would indeed be insistent that your life must be spared, for once he knew that Lord Shardik--and you, as he supposed--had come alive from the Streels, he would know, too, that neither must be touched on pain of sacrilege. Shardik's death is appointed by God, and it is certain--certain!" She seemed exhausted with grief.
Kelderek took her hand.
"But saiyett, Lord Shardik is guilty of no evil."
She lifted her head, staring out over the dismal woods.
"Shardik has committed no evil." She turned and looked full into his eyes. "Shardik--no: Shardik has committed no evil!"
42 The Way to Zeray
WHERE THE TRACK WAS LEADING he did not know, or even whether it still ran eastward, for now the trees were thick and they followed it in half-light under a close roof of branches. Several times he was tempted to leave altogether the faint thread of a path and simply go downhill, find a stream and follow it--an old hunter's trick which, as he knew, often leads to a dwelling or village, though it may be with difficulty. But the Tuginda, he saw, would not be equal to such a course. Since resuming their journey she had spoken little and walked, or so it seemed to him, like one going where she would not. Never before had she appeared to him subdued in spirit. He recalled how, even on the Gelt road, she had stepped firmly and deliberately away down the hillside, as though undaunted by her shameful arrest at the hands of Ta-Kominion. She had trusted God then, he thought. She had known that God could afford to wait, and therefore so could she. Even before he himself had caged Shardik at the cost of Rantzay's life, the Tuginda had known that the time would come when she would be called once more to follow the Power of God. She had recognized, when it came, the day of Shardik's liberation from the imprisonment to which he himself had subjected him. What she had not foreseen was Urtah--the destination ordained for the bloody beast-god of the Ortelgans, in whose name his followers had--
Unable to bear these thoughts, he flung up his head, striking one hand against his brow and slashing at the bushes with his stick. The Tuginda seemed not to notice his sudden violence, but walked slowly on as before, her eyes on the ground.
"In Bekla," he said, breaking their silence, "I felt many times that I was close to a great secret to be revealed through Lord Shardik--a secret which would show men at last the meaning of their lives on earth, how to safeguard the future, how to be secure. We would no longer be blind and ignorant, but God's servants, knowing how He meant us to live. Yet though I suffered much, both waking and sleeping, I never learned that secret."
"The door was locked," she answered listlessly.
"It was I who locked it," he said, and so fell silent once more.
Late in the afternoon, emerging at last from the woods, they came to a miserable hamlet of three or four huts beside a stream. Two men who could not understand him, but muttered to each other in a tongue he had never heard, searched him from head to foot but found nothing to steal. They would have handled and searched the Tuginda also had he not seized one by the wrist and flung him aside. Evidently they thought that whatever chance of gain there might be was not worth a fight, for they stood back, cursing, or so it seemed, and gesturing to him to be off. Before the Tuginda and he had gone a stone's throw, however, a gaunt, ragged woman came running after them, held out a morsel of hard bread and, smiling with blackened teeth, pointed back toward the huts. The Tuginda returned her smile, accepting the invitation with no sign of fear and he, feeling that it mattered little what might befall him, made no objection. The woman, scolding shrilly at the two men standing a little distance off, seated her guests on a bench outside one of the huts and brought them bowls of thin soup containing a kind of tasteless gray root that crumbled to fibrous shreds in the mouth. Two other women gathered and three or four rickety, potbellied children, who stared silently and seemed to lack the energy to shout or scuffle. The Tuginda thanked the woman gravely in Ortelgan, kissing their filthy hands and smiling at each in turn. Kelderek sat as he had sat the night before, lost in his thoughts and only half-aware that the children had begun to teach her some game with stones in the dust. Once or twice she laughed and the children laughed too, and by and by one of the surly men came and offered him a clay bowl full of weak, sour wine, first drinking himself to show there was no harm. Kelderek drank, gravely pledging his host; then watched the moon rise and later, invited into one of the huts, once more lay down to sleep upon the ground.
Waking in the night, he went out and saw another man sitting cross-legged beside a low fire. For a time he sat beside him without speaking, but at length, as the man bent forward to thrust one end of a fresh branch into the glow, he pointed toward the nearby stream and said, "Zeray?" The man nodded and, pointing to him, repeated, "Zeray?" and, when he nodded in his turn, laughed shortly and mimicked one in flight looking behind him for pursuers. Kelderek shrugged his shoulders and they said no more, each sitting by the fire until daybreak.
There was no path beside the stream and the Tuginda and he followed its course with difficulty through another tract of forest, from which it came out to plunge in a series of falls down a rocky hillside. Standing on the brow, he looked out over the plain below. Some miles away on their left the mountains still ran eastward. Following the chain with his eye he glimpsed, far off in the east, a thin, silver streak, dull and constant in the sunlight. He pointed to it.
"That must be the Telthearna, saiyett."
She nodded, and after a few moments he said, "I doubt whether Lord Shardik will ever reach it. And if we cannot trace him when we get there, I suppose we shall never know what became of him."
"Either you or I," she answered, "will find Lord Shardik again. I saw it in a dream."
After gazing intently for a little toward the southeast, she began to lead the way downhill among the tumbled boulders.
"What did you see, saiyett?" he asked when next they rested.
"I was looking for some trace of Zeray," she replied, "but of course there is nothing to be seen from so far." And he, acquiescing in the misunderstanding--whether deliberate on her part or otherwise--questioned her no further of Shardik.
From the foot of the hillside there stretched a wide marsh that mired them to the knees as they continued to follow the stream among pools and reed-clumps. Kelderek began to entertain a kind of fancy that he, like one in an old tale, was bewitched and changing, not swiftly, but day by day, from a man to an animal. The change had begun at the Vrako and continued imperceptibly until now, when he wandered like a beast in a field, pent within land not of his own choosing and where neither places nor people had names. The power of speech was gradually leaving him too, so that already he was able through long, waking hours, not only to be silent, but also actually to think nothing, his human awareness retracted to the smallest of points, like the pupil of a cat's eye in sunlight; while his life, continued by the sufferance of others, had become a meaningless span of existence before death. And more immediate to him now than any human regret or shame were simply the sores and other painful places beneath the sweat-stiffened hide of his clothes.
Crossing the marsh after some hours, they came at last upon a track and then to a village, the only one he had seen east of the Vrako, and the poorest and most wretched he could remember. They were resting a short distance outside it when a man carrying a faggot of brushwood passed them and Kelderek, leaving the Tuginda sitting beside the track, overtook him and asked once more the way to Zeray. The man pointed southeastward, answering in Beklan, "About half a day's journey: you'll not get there before dark." Then, in a lower tone and glancing across at the Tuginda, he added, "Poor old woman--the likes o
f her to be going to Zeray!" Kelderek must have glanced sharply at him for he added quickly, "No business of mine--she don't look well, that's all. Touch of fever, maybe," and at once went on his way with his burden, as though afraid that he might already have said too much in this country where the past was sharp splinters embedded in men's minds and an ill-judged word a false step in the dark.
They had hardly reached the first huts, the Tuginda leaning heavily upon Kelderek's arm, when a man barred their way. He was dirty and unsmiling, with blue tattoo marks on his cheeks, and the lobe of one ear pierced by a bone pin as long as a finger. He resembled none that Kelderek could remember to have seen among the multiracial trading throngs of Bekla. Yet when he spoke it was in a thick, distorted Beklan, one word making do for another.
"You walk from?"
Kelderek pointed northwestward, where the sun was beginning to set.
"High places trees? All through you walk?"
"Yes, from beyond the Vrako. We're going to Zeray. Let me save you trouble," said Kelderek. "We've nothing worth taking, and this woman, as you can see, is no longer young. She's exhausted."
"Sick. High places trees much sick. Not sit down here. Go away."
"She's not sick, only tired. I beg you--"
"Not sit down," shouted the man fiercely. "Go away!"
The Tuginda was about to speak to him when suddenly he turned his head and uttered a sharp cry, at which other men began to appear from among the huts. The tattooed man shouted, "Woman sick," in Beklan, and then broke into some other language, at which they nodded, responding, "Ay! ay!" After a few moments the Tuginda, relinquishing Kelderek's arm, turned and began walking slowly back up the track. He followed. As he reached her side a stone struck her on the shoulder, so that she staggered and fell against him. A second stone pitched into the dust at their feet and the next struck him on the heel. Shouting had broken out behind them. Without looking around, he bowed his head against the falling stones, put his arm around the Tuginda's shoulders and half-dragged, half-carried her back in the direction from which they had come.