At length the bear stood up and, gazing in one direction and another, stared for a moment directly up at the mass of roots among which Kelderek lay in hiding. But it seemed to see nothing and, as he still watched it through a narrow opening like a loophole, the belief grew in him that it was concerned less with what it could see than with scenting the air and listening. Although it had not perceived him in his hiding place, yet something else--or so it appeared--was making it uneasy, something not far off in the forest. If this were so, however, it was evidently not so much disturbed as to run off. For some while it remained in the shallows, more than once dropping its head as before, with the object, as Kelderek now perceived, of bathing and cooling the wound in its neck. Then, to his surprise, it began to wade from the pool into deeper water. He watched, puzzled, as it made toward a rock some little way out in the river. Its chest, broad as a door, submerged, then its shoulders and finally, though with difficulty, it swam to the rock and dragged itself out upon a ledge. There it sat, facing, across the river, the distant eastern shore. After a time it made as though to plunge into midstream, but twice stopped short. Then a listlessness seemed to come upon it. Scratching dolefully, it lay down upon the rock as some old, half-blind dog might crouch in the dust, and covered its face with its forepaws. Kelderek remembered what the Tuginda had said--"He is trying to return to his own country. He is making for the Telthearna and will cross it if he can." If such a creature could weep, then Shardik was weeping.
To see strength failing, ferocity grown helpless, power and domination withered by pain as plants by drought--such sights give rise not only to pity but also, and as naturally, to aversion and contempt. Our sorrow for our dying captain is sincere enough, yet we must nevertheless make haste to leave this sunken fire before the increasing cold can overtake our own fortunes. For all his glorious past, it is only right that he should be abandoned, for we have to live--to thrive if we can--and setting aside all other considerations, the truth is that he has become irrelevant to the things that should now properly concern us. How odd it is that until now no one, apparently, should have perceived that after all he was never particularly wise; never particularly brave; never particularly honest, particularly truthful, particularly clean.
Upon Kelderek's inward eye flashed once more the figure of Melathys standing in the light of the sunset, she the once unattainable, who but two days before had held him in her arms and told him with tears that she loved him; she whose gay courage had made light of the foul danger and evil amidst which he had been compelled against his will to leave her to take her chance; she who in herself more than outweighed his lost kingdom and ruined fortunes. Hatred rose up in him against the mangy, decrepit brute on the rock, the very source and image of that superstition which had made of Melathys a brigands' whore and of Bel-ka-Trazet a fugitive; had brought the Tuginda close to death and now stood between him and his love. That this wretched creature should still have power to thwart him and drag him down together with itself! As he thought of all that he had lost and all that he still might lose--probably would lose--he shut his eyes and gnawed at his wrist in his angry frustration.
"Curse you!" he cried silently in his heart. "Curse you, Shardik, and your supposed Power of God! Why don't you save us from Zeray, we who've lost all we possessed for your sake, we whom you've ruined and deceived? No, you can't save us: you can't save even the women who've served you all their lives! Why don't you die and get out of the way? Die, Shardik, die, die!"
Suddenly there came to his ear what seemed like faint sounds of human speech from somewhere within the forest. Fear came upon him, for since the night on the battlefield there had remained with him a horror of the distant voices of persons unseen. Strange sounds were these, too, mysterious and hard to account for, resembling less the voices of men than of children--crying, it seemed, in pain or distress. He sprang up and as he did so heard, louder than the voices, a heavy splashing close at hand. Looking behind him, he recoiled in terror to see the bear wading ashore at the very foot of the bank below. It was glaring up at him, shaking the water from its pelt and snarling savagely. In panic he turned and began to force his way through the undergrowth, snatching and tearing at the bushes and creepers in his way. Whether the bear was pursuing him he could not tell. He dared not look back, but plunged on over the top of the hillock, scarcely feeling the grazes and scratches that covered his limbs. Suddenly, as he forced his way through a tangle of branches, he found no ground beneath his feet. He clutched at a branch which broke under his weight, lost his balance and pitched forward down the steep bank of the creek bounding the promontory on its landward side. His forehead struck a tree root and he rolled over and lay unconscious, supine and half-submerged in mud and shallow water.
49 The Slave Dealer
PAIN, THIRST, A GREEN DAZZLE of light and a murmur of returning sound. Kelderek allowed his half-opened eyes to shut again and, frowning as he did so, felt something tight and rough pressed round his head. Raising one hand, he found his fingers rubbing against a band of coarse cloth and followed it around one temple, above the eyebrow. He pressed it and pain blazed up like a flame behind his eyeballs. He moaned and let fall his hand.
Now he remembered the bear, yet felt no more fear of it. Something--what?--had already told him that the bear was gone. The daylight, what little he could endure beneath his eyelids, was older--it must be some time since he had fallen--but it was not this that had reassured him. His mind began to clear and as it did so he became aware once more of the roughness of the cloth upon his forehead. And as an ominous sound, heard first faintly at a distance and then more loudly nearby, at the moment of repetition thrusts its startling meaning upon him who originally heard it with indifference, so, as Kelderek's returning senses grew keener, the significance of the cloth forced itself upon him.
He turned his head, shaded his eyes and opened them. He was lying on the bank of the creek, close to the muddy shallow into which he had fallen. The impression of his body was still plain in the mud, and the furrows evidently made by his feet as he was dragged to the spot where he now lay. On his other, shoreward side a man was sitting, watching him. As Kelderek's eyes met his the man neither spoke nor altered his gaze. He was ragged and dirty, with bristling, sandy hair and a rather darker beard, heavy eyelids and a white scar on one side of his chin. His mouth hung a little open, giving him an abstracted, pensive air and showing discolored teeth. In one hand he was holding a knife, with the point of which he kept idly stroking and pressing the fingertips of the other.
Kelderek smiled and, despite the stabbing pain behind his eyes, raised himself on his elbows. Spitting out mud and speaking with some difficulty, he said in Beklan,
"If it was you who pulled me out of there and put this bandage on my head, thank you. You must have saved my life."
The other nodded twice, very slightly, but gave no other sign that he had heard. Although his eyes remained fixed on Kelderek, his attention seemed concentrated on pressing rhythmically with the knife point the ball of each finger in turn.
"The bear's gone, then," said Kelderek. "What brought you here? Were you hunting or are you on a journey?"
Still the man made no reply and Kelderek, recalling that he was beyond the Vrako, cursed himself for being so foolish as to ask questions. He still felt weak and giddy, but it might pass off once he was on his feet. His best course now would be to get back to Lak before sunset and see what he was fit for after a meal and a night's sleep. He held out one hand and said, "Will you help me up?"
After a few moments the man, without moving, said in broken but intelligible Ortelgan, "You're a long way from your island, aren't you?"
"How did you know I'm an Ortelgan?" asked Kelderek.
"Long way," repeated the man.
It now occurred to Kelderek to feel for the pouch in which he had been carrying the money he had brought from Zeray. It was gone and so were his food and his knife. This did not altogether surprise him, but certain other things did. Since he
had robbed him, why had the man dragged him out of the creek and bound up his head? Why had he stayed to watch him and why, since he was clearly not an Ortelgan himself, had he spoken to him in Ortelgan? He said once more, this time in Ortelgan, "Will you help me up?"
"Yes, get up," said the man in Beklan, as though answering a different question. His previously half-abstracted interest seemed to have become more direct and he leaned forward alertly.
Kelderek, supporting himself on one hand and beginning to draw up his left leg, felt a sudden tug at his right ankle. He looked down. Both ankles were shackled and between them ran a light chain about the length of his forearm.
"What's this?" he asked, with a sudden spurt of alarm.
"Get up," repeated the man. He rose and took two or three steps toward Kelderek, knife in hand.
Kelderek got to his knees and then to his feet, but would have fallen if the man had not gripped him by the arm. Shorter than Kelderek, he looked up at him sharply, straddle-legged, knife held ready. After a few moments, without moving his eyes, he jerked his head to one side.
"That way," he said in Ortelgan.
"Wait," said Kelderek. "Wait a moment. Tell me--"
As he spoke the man seized his left hand, jerked it forward and with the point of his knife pierced him beneath one fingernail. Kelderek cried out and snatched his hand away.
"That way," said the man, jerking his head once more and moving the knife here and there before Kelderek's face, so that he flinched first to one side and then to the other.
Kelderek turned and, with the man's hand on his arm, began to stumble through the mud. At each step, the chain, pulled taut between his ankles, checked the natural length of his stride. Several times he tripped and at length fell into a kind of shuffle, watching the ground for any protrusion that might throw him down. The man, walking beside him, kept up a tuneless whistling through his teeth, the sound of which, intensified suddenly at random moments, made Kelderek start in anticipation of some further attack. Indeed, had it not been for this he would probably have collapsed from weakness and the nausea induced by the wound under his fingernail.
What kind of man might this be? From his dress and ability to speak Ortelgan it seemed unlikely that he was a Yeldashay soldier. What was the explanation of his having taken the trouble to save from a swamp, in lonely country, a destitute stranger whom he had already robbed? Kelderek sucked his finger, which was oozing blood from beneath the severed nail. If the man were a maniac--and why not, beyond the Vrako? What else had Ruvit been?--all he could do was to keep alert and watch for any chance that might offer itself. But the chain would be a grave handicap and the man himself, despite his short stature, was plainly the ugliest of adversaries.
He raised his eyes at the sudden sound of voices. They could not have walked far--perhaps not much more than a bowshot from the creek. The ground was still marshy and the forest thick. Ahead was a glade among the trees and here he could make out people moving, though he could see no fire or any of the usual features of a camp. The man uttered a single, wordless cry--a kind of bark--but waited for no answer, merely guiding him forward as before. They had reached the glade when the chain again tripped him and Kelderek fell to the ground. The man, leaving him to lie where he had fallen, walked on.
Breathless and caked in mud, Kelderek rolled over and looked up sideways from where he lay. The place, he realized at once, was full of a considerable number of people, and in fear that after all he had once again fallen into the hands of the Yeldashay, he sat up and stared quickly about him.
Save for the man himself, now sitting a little distance away and rummaging in a leather pack, all those in the glade were children. None appeared to be more than thirteen or fourteen years old. A boy nearby, with a harelip and sores round his chin, was staring at Kelderek with vacant, sleepy attention, as though he had just awakened. Farther off, a child with a continuous twitching of the head gazed up wide-eyed, his mouth gaping in a kind of rictus of startled alarm. As Kelderek looked this way and that he realized that many of the children were blemished or deformed in one manner or another. All were thin and dirty and had about them an air of listless ill-being, like half-starved cats on a rubbish heap. Almost all, like himself, were chained at the ankles. Of the two he could see who were not, one had a withered leg, while above the ankles of the other the cracked weals left by the removed shackles were pustulant with sores. The children sat or lay silent on the ground, one asleep, one crouching to excrete, one shivering continually, one searching the grass for insects and eating them. They imparted to the green-lit place an eerie quality, as though it were a pool and they fishes in a world of silence, each occupied entirely with his own preservation and paying no more attention to others than this might require.
The man, then, must be a slave trader dealing in children. The number of these permitted to work in the Beklan empire had been fixed, each being authorized by Kelderek, after inquiries made of the provincial governors, to buy specified quotas at approved prices in this place and that, a second quota not being allowed to be taken from the same place until a stated period had elapsed. The traders worked through the provincial governors and under their protection, being required to satisfy them that they had taken no more than their quotas and paid the approved prices, and in return receiving, where necessary, armed escorts for their journeys to the markets at Bekla, Dari-Paltesh or Thettit-Tonilda. It seemed likely that this man, while journeying with a party of child slaves bound for Bekla, had been cut off by the Yeldashay advance and in view of the value of his stock had decided, rather than abandon them, to flee beyond the Vrako. That would account for the children's shocking condition. But which of the dealers was this? No great number of warrants had been issued and Kelderek, who, intent on learning as much as possible about the yield to be expected and the trade's taxable worth, had himself talked to most of the traders at one time or another, now tried to recall their individual faces. Of those he was able to remember, none corresponded to this man. At no time had more than seventeen authorizations been valid in the empire, and of these scarcely any, once granted, had been transferred to a second holder; for who, once he had got his hands on it, would surrender so lucrative an occupation? Out of twenty names at the most, he could not recall this man's. Yet surely he must be one or other of them? Or was he--and here Kelderek felt a sudden qualm of misgiving--could he be an unauthorized slaver, one of those he had been warned about and had declared liable to the heaviest penalties, who got their slaves where they could, sometimes by kidnaping, sometimes by bluff and terror in remote villages, or again by purchasing the half-witted, deformed or otherwise unwanted from those who were prepared to sell them; and, bringing them across country as little observed as possible, sold them secretly, either to the authorized dealers or else to anyone ready to buy? That such men had been operating in the empire he knew, and had known also their reputation for ruthlessness and cruelty, for unscrupulous double-dealing and taking what they could get wherever they might find it. "All slave traders are dealers in wretchedness," a captured Yeldashay officer had once said to him while being questioned, "but there are some--those of whom you pretend to know nothing--who creep about the land like filthy rats, scraping up the very dregs of misery for trifling profits; and for these, too, we hold you answerable, for he who builds a barn knows that rats will come." Kelderek had let him talk and later, becoming still more indignant, the officer had unintentionally revealed a good deal of useful information.
Suddenly Kelderek's recollections were broken by the most unexpected of sounds--the laughter of an infant. He looked up to see a little girl, perhaps five years old, unchained, running across the glade and looking back over her shoulder at a tall, fair-haired lad. This boy, in spite of his chain, was pursuing her, evidently in sport, for he was hanging back and pretending, as people do when playing with quite little children, that she was succeeding in escaping from him. The child, though thin and pale, looked less wretched than the boys among whom she was runn
ing. She had almost reached Kelderek when she tripped and fell forward on her face. The tall lad, overtaking her, picked her up, holding her in his arms and tossing her up and down to comfort her and distract her from crying. Thus occupied, he turned for a moment toward Kelderek and their eyes met.
He who catches suddenly the lilt of a song which he has not heard for years or the scent of the flowers that bloomed by the door where once he played in the dust, finds himself swept back, whether he will or no and sometimes with tears, into the depth of time past, recovering for a few moments the very feeling of being another person, upon whom life used to press with other, lighter fingers than those which he has since learned to endure. With no less a shock did Kelderek feel himself once more the Eye of God, Lord Crendrik the priest-king of Bekla, and recall on the instant the smells of fog and of smoldering charcoal, the sour taste in his mouth and the murmur from behind him as he faced the bars in the King's House, trying to gaze into eyes that he could not meet, the eyes of the condemned Elleroth. Then the fit was gone and he was staring in perplexity at a youth tossing a yellow-haired child in his arms.
At this moment the slave dealer stood up, calling, "Eh! Shouter! Bled! Get moving!" Leaving his pack on the ground, he strode down the length of the glade, snapping his fingers to bring the children to their feet and, without speaking again, hustling them into a group at the farther end. He stopped beside the tall youth, who stood looking at him with the little girl still held in his arms. She cowered away, hiding her face, and as she did so the youth put one hand on her shoulder.