PENGUIN BOOKS

SHARDIK

Richard Adams was born in Berkshire in 1920, and studied history at Bradfield and Worcester College, Oxford. He served in the Second World War and in 1948 joined the Civil Service. In the mid-sixties he completed his first novel, Watership Down, the story of which he originally told to his children to while away a long car journey. Watership Down was awarded both the Carnegie medal and the Guardian award for children's fiction in 1972.

Early in 1974 he retired from the Civil Service to devote himself entirely to writing, and published Shardik, his second novel. Since then he has collaborated on Nature Through the Seasons (with Max Hooper and David A. Goddard; 1976) and has written the poetry for The Tyger Voyage illustrated by Nicola Bayley (1976). His latest book is The Plague Dogs (1977). He lives on the Isle of Man with his wife Elizabeth, who is an expert on English ceramic history, and his two daughters, Juliet and Rosamond. As well as English literature he is fond of music, chess, beer and shove-ha'penny, bird-song, folk-song and country walking.

Penguin Books Ltd, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England Penguin Books, 625 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10022, U.S.A. Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 2801 John Street, Markham, Ontario, Canada L3R 1B4 Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand

First published by Allen Lane in association with Rex Collings 1974 Published in Penguin Books, 1976 Reprinted 1976 (five times), 1977,197S (twice), 1979

Copyright © Richard Adams, 1974 All rights reserved

Made and printed in Great Britain by Richard Clay (The Chaucer Press) Ltd Bungay, .Suffolk Set in Linotype Granjon

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

To my one-time Ward in Chancery

ALICE PINTO

with sincere affection always.

Contents

BOOK I ORTELGA

1. The Fire 15

2. The River 18

3. The Hunter 20

4. The High Baron 25

5. To Quiso by Night 37

6. The Priestess 44

7. The Ledges 46

8. The Tuginda 50

9. The Tuginda's Story 56

1. The Finding of Shardik 68

2. Bel-ka-Trazet's Story 78

3. The Baron's Departure 86

4. The Singing 89

5. Lord Kelderek 97

6. Ta-Kominion 100

7. The Point and the Causeway 108

   BOOK II GELT

1. The Road to Gelt 117

2. Rantzay 133

3. Night Messengers 140

4. Gel-Ethlin 145

5. The Passes of Gelt 153

6. The Cage 162

7. The Battle of the Foothills 172

   BOOK III BEKLA

1. Elleroth 183

2. The Green Grove 198

3. The King of Bekla 210

4. Zelda's Advice 225

5. Elleroth Shows His Hand 232

6. The Fire Festival 239

7. Elleroth Condemned 246

8. The Live Coal 251

BOOK IV URTAH: AND KABIN

1. The Postern 267

2. The Village 273

3. The Streels of Urtah 277

4. Shardik's Prisoner 288

5. Shardik Gone 292

6. Lord One-Hand 303

7. The Streets of Kabin 307

   BOOK V ZERAY

1. Across the Vrako 319

2. Ruvit 324

3. The Legend of the Streels 328

4. The Way to Zeray 333

5. The Priestess's Tale 341

6. The Heart's Disclosure 350

7. In Zeray 356

8. The Kynat 368

9. Ankray's News 378

   BOOK VI GENSHED

1. Beyond Lak 387

2. The Slave-Dealer 394

3. Radu 412

4. The Gap of Linsho 415

5. The Ruined Village 428

6. Night Talk 433

7. The Cloven Rock 440

BOOK VII THE POWER OF GOD

1. Tissarn 459

2. The Passing of Shardik 466

3. Elleroth's Dinner Party 481

4. Siristrou 495

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I acknowledge with gratitude the help I have received from my friends Reg. Sones and John Apps, who read the book before publication and made valuable criticisms and suggestions.

The manuscript was typed by Mrs Margaret

Apps and Mrs Barbara Cheeseman.

I thank them warmly for their patience and

accuracy.

The map in this edition is redrawn after a map by Mrs Marilyn Hemmett in the Allen Lane edition of this book.

NOTE

Lest any should suppose that I set my wits to work to invent the cruelties of Genshed, I say here that all lie within my knowledge and some - would they did not - within my experience.

Behold, I will send my messenger . .. But who may abide the day of his coming? And who shall stand when he appeareth? For he is like a refiner's fire.

Malachi. Chapter III

Superstition and accident manifest the will of God.

C. G.Jung

Book I

1 The Fire

Even in the dry heat of summer's end, the great forest was never silent. Along the ground - soft, bare soil, twigs and fallen branches, decaying leaves black as ashes - there ran a continuous flow of sound. As a fire burns with a murmur of flames, with the intermittent crack of exploding knots in the logs and the falling and settling of coal, so on the forest floor the hours of dusky light consumed away with rustlings, patterings, sighing and dying of breeze, scuttlings of rodents, snakes, lizards and now and then the padding of some larger animal on the move. Above, the green dusk of creepers and branches formed another realm, inhabited by the monkeys and sloths, by hunting spiders and birds innumerable -creatures passing all their lives high above the ground. Here the noises were louder and harsher - chatterings, sudden cacklings and screams, hollow knockings, bell-like calls and the swish of disturbed leaves and branches. Higher still, in the topmost tiers, where the sunlight fell upon the outer surface of the forest as upon the upper side of an expanse of green clouds, the raucous gloom gave place to a silent brightness, the province of great butterflies flitting across the sprays in a solitude where no eye admired nor any ear caught the minute sounds made by those marvellous wings.

The creatures of the forest floor - like the blind, grotesque fish that dwell in the ocean depths - inhabited, all unaware, the lowest tier of a world extending vertically from shadowless twilight to shadcless, dazzling brilliance. Creeping or scampering upon their furtive ways, they seldom went far and saw little of sun and moon. A thicket of thorn, a maze of burrows among tree-trunks, a slope littered with rocks and stones - such places were almost all that their inhabitants ever knew of the earth where they lived and died. Born there, they survived for a while, coming to know every inch within their narrow bounds. From time to time a few might stray further — when prey or forage failed, or more rarely, through the irruption of some uncomprehended force from beyond their daily lives.

Between the trees the air seemed scarcely to move. The heat had thickened it, so that the winged insects sat torpid on the very leaves beneath which crouched the mantis and spider, too drowsy to strike. Along the foot of a tilted, red rock a porcupine came nosing and grubbing. It broke open a tiny shelter of sticks and some meagre, round-cared little creature, all eyes and bony limbs, fled across the stones. The porcupine, ignoring it, was about to devour the beetles scurrying among the sticks when suddenly it paused, raised its head and listened. As it remained motionless a brown, mongoose-like creature broke quickly through the bushes and disappeared down its hole. From further away came a sound of scolding birds.

A moment later the porcupine too had vanished. It had felt not only the fear of other creatures near by, but also something of the cause - a disturbance, a vibration along the forest floor. A little distance away, something unimaginably heavy was moving and this movement was beating the ground like a drum. The vibration grew until even a human ear could have heard the irregular sounds of ponderous movement in the gloom. A stone rolled downhill through fallen leaves and was followed by a crashing of undergrowth. Then, at the top of the slope beyond the red rock, the thick mass of branches and creepers began to shake. A young tree tilted outwards, snapped, splintered and pitched its length to the ground, springing up and down in diminishing bounds on its pliant branches, as though not only the sound but also the movement of the fall had set up echoes in the solitude.

In the gap, half-concealed by a confused tangle of creepers, leaves and broken flowers, appeared a figure of terror, monstrous beyond the nature even of that dark, savage place. Huge it was - gigantic -standing on its hind legs more than twice as high as a man. Its shaggy feet carried great, curved claws as thick as a man's fingers, from which were hanging fragments of torn fern and strips of bark. The mouth gaped open, a steaming pit set with white stakes. The muzzle was thrust forward, sniffing, while the blood-shot eyes peered short-sightedly over the unfamiliar ground below. For long moments it remained erect, breathing heavily and growling. Then it sank clumsily upon all fours, pushed into the undergrowth, the round claws scraping against the stones - for they could not be retracted -and smashed its way down the slope towards the red rock. It was a bear - such a bear as is not seen in a thousand years - more powerful than a rhinoceros and heavy as eight strong men. It reached the open ground by the rock and paused, throwing its head uneasily to one side and the other. Then once more it reared up on its hind legs, sniffed the air and on the instant gave a deep, coughing bark. It was afraid.

Afraid - this breaker of trees, whose tread shook the ground - of what could it be afraid? The porcupine, cowering in its shallow burrow beneath the rock, sensed its fear with bewilderment. What had driven it wandering through strange country, through deep forest not its own? Behind it there followed a strange smell; an acrid, powdery smell, a drifting fear.

A band of yellow gibbons swung overhead, hand over hand, whooping and ululating as they disappeared down their tree-roads. Then a pair of genets came trotting from the undergrowth, passed close to the bear without a glance and were gone as quickly as they had come. A strange, unnatural wind was moving, stirring the dense mass of foliage at the top of the slope, and out of it the birds came flying - parrots, barbets and coloured finches, brilliant blue and green honeycreepers and purple jackdaws, gentuas and forest kingfishers -all screaming and chattering down the wind. The forest began to be filled with the sounds of hasty, pattering movement An armadillo, apparently injured, dragged itself past; a peccary and the flash of a long, green snake. The porcupine broke from its hole, almost under the bear's feet, and vanished. Still the bear stood upright, towering over the flat rock, sniffing and hesitating. Then the wind strengthened, bringing a sound that seemed to stretch across the forest from end to end - a sound like a dry waterfall or the breathing of a giant - the sound of the smell of the fear. The bear turned and shambled away between the tree-trunks.

The sound grew to a roaring and the creatures flying before it became innumerable. Many were almost spent, yet still stumbled forward with open mouths set in snarls and staring eyes that saw nothing. Some tripped and were trampled down. Drifts of green smoke appeared through gaps in the undergrowth. Soon the glaucous leaves, big as human hands, began to shine here and there with the reflection of an intermittent, leaping light, brighter than any that had penetrated that forest twilight. The heat increased until no living thing - not a lizard, not a fly - remained in the glade about the rock. And then at last appeared a visitant yet more terrible than the giant bear. A single flame darted through the curtain of creepers, disappeared, returned and flickered in and out like a snake's tongue. A spray of dry, sharp-toothed leaves on a zeltazla bush caught fire and flared brightly, throwing a dismal shine on the smoke that was now filling the glade like fog. Immediately after, the whole wall of foliage at the top of the slope was ripped from the bottom as though by a knife of flame and at once the fire ran forward down the length of the tree that the bear had felled. Within moments the place, with all its features, all that had made a locality of smell, touch and sight, was destroyed for ever. A dead tree, which had leaned supported by the undergrowth for half a year, fell burning across the red rock, splintering its cusps and outcrops, barring it with black like a tiger's skin. The glade burned in its turn, as miles of forest had burned to bring the fire so far. And when it had done burning, the foremost flames were already a mile downwind as the fire pursued its way.

2 The River

The enormous bear wandered irresolutely on through the forest, now stopping to glare about at its unknown surroundings, now breaking once more into a shambling trot as it found itself still pursued by the hiss and stench of burning creepers and the approach of the fire. It was sullen with fear and bewilderment. Since nightfall of the previous day it had been driven, always reluctant yet always unable to find any escape from danger. Never before had it been forced to flight. For years past no living creature had stood against it. Now, with a kind of angry shame, it slunk on and on, stumbling over half-seen roots, tormented with thirst and desperate for a chance to turn and fight against this flickering enemy that nothing could dismay. Once it stood its ground at the far end of a patch of marsh, deceived by what seemed a faltering at last in the enemy's advance; and fled just in time to save itself from being encircled as the fire ran forward on either side. Once, in a kind of madness, it rushed back on its tracks and actually struck and beat at the flames, until its pads were scorched and black, singed streaks showed along its pelt. Yet still it paused and paced about, looking for an opportunity to fight; and as often as it turned and went on, slashed the tree-trunks and tore up the bushes with heavy blows of its claws.

Slower and slower it went, panting now, tongue protruding and eyes half-shut against the smoke that followed closer and closer. It struck one scorched foot against a sharpened boulder, fell, and rolled on its side, and when it got up became confused, made a half-turn and began to wander up and down, parallel to the line of the on-coming flames. It was exhausted and had lost the sense of direction. Choking in the enveloping smoke, it could no longer tell even from which side the fire was coming. The nearest flames caught a dry tangle of quian roots and raced along them, licking across one fore-paw. Then from all sides there sounded a roaring, as though at last the enemy were coming to grips. But louder still rose the frenzied, angry roaring of the bear itself as it turned at last to fight.

Swinging its head from side to side and dealing tremendous, spark-showering blows upon the blaze around it, it reared up to its full height, trampling back and forth until the soft earth was flattened under its feet and it seemed to be actually sinking into the ground beneath its own weight. A long flame crackled up the thick pelt and in a moment the creature blazed, all covered with fire, rocking and nodding in a grotesque and horrible rhythm. In its rage and pain it had staggered to the edge of a steep bank. Swaying forward, it suddenly saw below, in a lurid flash, another bear, shimmering and grimacing, raising burning paws towards itself. Then it plunged forward and was gone. A moment later there rose the sound of a heavy splash and a hissing, quenching after-surge of deep water.

In one place and another, along the bank, the fire checked, diminished and died, until only patches of thicker scrub were left burning or smouldering in isolation. Through the miles of dry forest the fire had burned its way to the northern shore of the Telthearna river and now, at last, it could burn no further.

Struggling for a foothold but finding none, the bear rose to the surface. The dazzling light was gone and it found itself in shadow, the shadow of the steep bank and the foliage above, which arched over, forming a long tunnel down the river's marge. The bear splashed and rolled against the bank but could get no purchase, partly for the steepness and the crumbling of the soft earth under its claws, and partly for the current which continually dislodged it and carried it further downstream. Then, as it clutched and panted, the canopy above began to fill with the jumping light of the fire as it caught the last branches, the roof of the tunnel. Sparks, burning fragments and cinders dropped hissing into the river. Assailed by this dreadful rain, the bear thrust itself away from the bank and began to swim clumsily out from under the burning trees towards the open water.

The sun had begun to set and was shining straight down the river, tingeing to a dull red the clouds of smoke that rolled over the surface. Blackened tree-trunks were floating down, heavy as battering-rams, driving their way through the lesser flotsam, the clotted masses of ash and floating creeper. Everywhere was plunging, grinding and the thump and check of heavy masses striking one another. Out into this foggy chaos swam the bear, labouring, submerging, choking, heaving up again and struggling across and down the stream. A log struck its side with a blow that would have stove in the ribs of a horse and it turned and brought both fore-paws down upon it, half clutching in desperation, half striking in anger. The log dipped under the weight and then rolled over, entangling the bear in a still-smouldering branch that came slowly down like a hand with fingers. Below the surface, something unseen caught its hind-paws and the log drifted away as it kicked downwards and broke free. It fought for breath, swallowing water, ashy foam and swirling leaves. Dead animals were sweeping by - a striped makati with bared teeth and closed eyes, a terrian floating belly uppermost, an ant-eater whose long tail washed to and fro in the current. The bear had formed some cloudy purpose of swimming to the further shore - a far-off glimpse of trees visible across the water. But in the bubbling, tumbling midstream this, like all else, was swept away and once more it became, as in the forest, a creature merely driven on, in fear of its life.

Time passed and its efforts grew weaker. Fatigue, hunger, the shock of its burns, the weight of its thick, sodden pelt and the continual buffeting of the driftwood were at last breaking it down, as the weather wears out mountains. Night was falling and the smoke clouds were dispersing from the miles of lonely, turbid water. At first the bear's great back had risen clear above the surface and it had looked about it as it swam. Now only its head protruded, the neck bent sharply backwards to lift the muzzle high enough to breathe. It was drifting, almost unconscious and unaware of anything around it. It did not see the dark line of land looming out of the twilight ahead. The current parted, sweeping strongly away in one direction and more gently in the other. The bear's hind feet touched ground but it made no response, only drifting and tripping forward like a derelict until at length it came to rest against a tall, narrow rock sticking out of the water; and this it embraced clumsily, grotesquely, as an insect might grasp a stick.

Here it remained a long time in the darkness, upright like some tilted monolith, until at last, slowly relaxing its hold and slipping down upon all fours in the water, it splashed through the shallows, stumbled into the forest beyond and sank unconscious among the dry, fibrous roots of a grove of quian trees.

3 The Hunter

The island, some twenty-five miles long, divided the river into two channels, its upstream point breaking the central current, while that 20 downstream lay close to the unburned shore which the bear had failed to reach. Tapering to this narrow, eastern end, the strait flowed out through the remains of a causeway - a rippling shallow, dangerously interspersed with deep holes - built by long-vanished people in days gone by. Belts of reeds surrounded most of the island, so that in wind or storm tie waves, instead of breaking directly upon the stones, would diminish landwards, spending their force invisibly among the shaking reed-beds. A little way inland from the upstream point a rocky ridge rose clear of the jungle, running half the length of the island like a spine.

At the foot of this ridge, among the green-flowering quian, the bear slept as though it would never wake. Below it and above, the reed-beds and lower slopes were crowded with fugitive creatures that had come down upon the current Some were dead - burned or drowned — but many, especially those accustomed to swim — otters, frogs and snakes - had survived and were already recovering and beginning to search for food. The trees were full of birds which had flown across from the burning shore and these, disturbed from their natural rhythms, kept up a continual movement and chatter in the dark. Despite fatigue and hunger, every creature that knew what it was to be preyed upon, to fear a hunting enemy, was on the alert. The surroundings were strange. None knew where to look for a place of safety: and as a cold surface gives off mist, so this lostness gave off everywhere a palpable tension - sharp cries of fear, sounds of blundering movement and sudden flight — much unlike the normal, stealthy night-rhythms of the forest. Only the bear slept on, unmoved as a rock in the sea, hearing nothing, scenting nothing, not feeling even the burns which had destroyed great patches of its pelt and shrivelled the flesh beneath.

With dawn the light wind returned, and brought with it from across the river the smell of mile upon mile of ashes and smouldering jungle. The sun, rising behind the ridge, left in shadow the forest below the western slope. Here the fugitive animals remained, skulking and confused, afraid to venture into the brilliant light now glittering along the shores of the island.

It was this sunshine, and the all-pervading smell of the charred trees, which covered the approach of the man. He came wading knee-deep through the shallows, ducking his head to remain concealed below the feathery plumes of the reeds. He was dressed in breeches of coarse cloth and a skin jerkin roughly stitched together down the sides and across the shoulders. His feet were laced round the ankles into bags of skin resembling ill-shaped boots. He wore a necklace of curved, pointed teeth, and from his belt hung a long knife and a quiver of arrows. His bow, bent and strung, was carried round his neck to keep the butt from trailing in the water. In one hand he was holding a stick on which three dead birds - a crane and two pheasants - were threaded by the legs.

As he reached the shadowed, western end of the island he paused, raised his head cautiously and peered over the reeds into the woods beyond. Then he began to make his way to shore, the reeds parting before him with a hissing sound like that of a scythe in long grass. A pair of duck flew up but he ignored them, for he seldom or never risked the loss of an arrow by shooting at birds on the wing. Reaching dry ground, he at once crouched down in a tall clump of hemlock.

Here he remained for two hours, motionless and watchful, while the sun rose higher and began to move round the shoulder of the hill. Twice he shot, and both arrows found their mark - the one a goose, the other a ketlana, or small forest-deer. Each time he left the quarry lying where it fell and remained in his hiding-place. Sensing the disturbance all around him and himself smelling the ashes on the wind, he judged it best to keep still and wait for other lost and uprooted creatures to come wandering near. So he crouched and watched, vigilant as an Eskimo at a seal-hole, moving only now and then to brush away the flies.

When he saw the leopard, his first movements were no more than a quick biting of the lip and a tightening of his grasp on his bow. It was coming straight towards him through the trees, pacing slowly and looking from side to side. Plainly it was not only uneasy, but also hungry and alert - as dangerous a creature as any solitary hunter might pray to avoid. It came nearer, stopped, stared for some moments straight towards his hiding-place and then turned and padded across to where the kedana lay with the feathered arrow in its neck. As it thrust its head forward, sniffing at the blood, the man, without a sound, crept out of concealment and made his way round it in a half-circle, stopping behind each tree to observe whether it had moved. He turned his head away to breathe and carefully placed each footstep clear of twigs and loose pebbles.

He was already half a bowshot away from the leopard when suddenly a wild pig trotted out of the scrub, blundered against him and ran squealing back into the shadows. The leopard turned, gazed intently and began to pace towards him.

He turned and walked steadily away, fighting against the panic impulse to go faster. Looking round, he saw that the leopard had broken into a padding trot and was overtaking him. At this he began to run, flinging down his birds and making towards the ridge in the hope of losing his terrible pursuer in the undergrowth on the lower slopes. At the foot of the ridge, on the edge of a grove of quian, he turned and raised his bow. Although he knew well what was likely to come of wounding the leopard, it seemed to him now that his only, desperate chance was to try, among the bushes and creepers, to evade it long enough to succeed in shooting it several times and thus either disable it or drive it away. He aimed and loosed, but his hand was unsteady with fear. The arrow grazed the leopard's flank, hung there for a moment and fell out. The leopard bared its teeth and charged, snarling, and the hunter fled blindly along the hillside. A stone turned beneath his foot and he pitched downwards, rolling over and over. He felt a sharp pain as a branch pierced his left shoulder and then the breath was knocked out of him. His body struck heavily against some great, shaggy mass and he lay on the ground, gasping and witless with terror, looking back in the direction from which he had fallen. His bow was gone and as he struggled to his knees he saw that his left arm and hand were red with blood.

The leopard appeared at the top of the steep bank from which he had fallen. He tried to keep silent, but a gasp came from his spent lungs and quick as a bird its head turned towards him. Ears flat, tail lashing, it crouched above him, preparing to spring. He could see its eye-teeth curving downward, and for long moments hung over his death as though over some frightful drop, at the foot of which his life would be broken to nothing.

Suddenly he felt himself pushed to one side and found that he was lying on his back, looking upwards. Standing over him like a cypress tree, one haunch so close to his face that he could smell the shaggy pelt, was a creature; a creature so enormous that in his distracted state of mind he could not comprehend it. As a man carried unconscious from a battlefield might wake bemused and, glimpsing first a heap of refuse, then a cooking-fire, then two women carrying bundles, might tell that he was in a village: so the hunter saw a clawed foot bigger than his own head; a wall of coarse hair, burned and half-stripped to the raw flesh, as it seemed; a great, wedge-shaped muzzle outlined against the sky; and knew that he must be in the presence of an animal. The leopard was still at the top of the bank, cringing now, looking upwards into a face that must be glaring terribly down upon it. Then the giant animal, with a single blow, struck it bodily from the bank, so that it was borne altogether clear, turning over in the air and crashing down among the quian. With a growling roar that sent up a cloud of birds, the animal turned to attack again. It dropped on all fours and as it did so its left side scraped against a tree. At this it snarled and shrank away, wincing with pain. Then, hearing the leopard struggling in the undergrowth, it made towards the sound and was gone.

The hunter rose slowly to his feet, clutching his wounded shoulder. However terrible the transport of fear, the return can be swift, just as one may awaken instantly from deep sleep. He found his bow and crept up the bank. Though he knew what he had seen, yet his mind still whirled incredulously round the centre of certainty, like a boat in a maelstrom. He had seen a bear. But in God's name, what kind of bear? Whence had it come? Had it in truth been already on the island when he had come wading through the shallows that morning; or had it sprung into existence out of his own terror, in answer to prayer? Had he himself perhaps, as he crouched almost senseless at the foot of the bank, made some desperate, phantom journey to summon it from the world beyond ? Whether or not, one thing was sure. Whencesoever it had come, this beast, that had knocked a full-grown leopard flying through the air, was now of this world, was flesh and blood. It would no more vanish than the sparrow on the branch.

He limped slowly back towards the river. The goose was gone and his arrow with it, but the kedana was still lying where it had fallen and he pulled out the arrow, heaved it under his good arm and made for the reeds. It was here that the delayed shock overtook him. He sank down, trembling and silently weeping by the water's edge. For a long time he lay prone, oblivious of his own safety. And slowly there came to him - not all at once, but brightening and burning up, littl by little, like a new-lit fire - the realization of what - of who - it must truly be that he had seen.

As a traveller in some far wilderness might by chance pick up a handful of stones from the ground, examine them idly and then, with mounting excitement, first surmise, next think it probable and finally feel certain that they must be diamonds; or as a sea-captain, voyaging in distant waters, might round an unknown cape, busy himself for an hour with the handling of the ship and only then, and gradually, realize that he - he himself - must have sailed into none other than that undiscovered, fabled ocean known to his forbears by nothing but legend and rumour; so now, little by little, there stole upon this hunter the stupefying, all-but-incredible knowledge of what it must be that he had seen. He became calm then, got up and fell to pacing back and forth among the trees by the shore. At last he stood still, faced the sun across the strait and, raising his unwounded arm, prayed for a long time: a wordless prayer of silence and trembling awe. Then, still dazed, he once more took up the ketlana and waded through the reeds. Making his way back along the shallows, he found the raft which he had moored that morning, loosed it and drifted away downstream.

4 The High Baron

It was late in the afternoon when the hunter, Kelderek, came at last in sight of the landmark he was seeking, a tall zoan tree some distance above the downstream point of the island. The boughs, with their silver-backed, fern-like leaves, hung down over the river, forming an enclosed, watery arbour inshore. In front of this the reeds had been cut to afford to one seated within a clear view across the strait. Kelderek, with some difficulty, steered his raft to the mouth of the channel, looked towards the zoan and raised his paddle as though in greeting. There was no response, but he expected none. Guiding the raft up to a stout post in the water, he felt down its length, found the rope running shorewards below the surface and drew himself towards land.

Reaching the tree, he pulled the raft through the curtain of pendent branches. Inside, a short, wooden pier projected from the bank and on this a man was seated, staring out between the leaves at the river beyond. Behind him a second man sat mending a net. Four or five other rafts were moored to the hidden quay. The look-out's glance, having taken in the single kedana and the few fish lying beside Kelderek, came to rest upon the weary, blood-smeared hunter himself.

'So. Kelderek Play-with-the-Children. You have little to show and less than usual. Where are you hurt?'

'The shoulder, shendron: and the arm is stiff and painful.' 'You look like a man in a stupor. Are you feverish?' The hunter made no reply. 'I asked, "Are you feverish?" ' He shook his head. 'What caused the wound?'

Kelderek hesitated, then shook his head once more and remained silent,

'You simpleton, do you suppose I am asking you for the sake of gossip? I have to learn everything — you know that. Was it a man or an animal that gave you that wound?'

'I fell and injured myself.'

The shendron waited.

'A leopard pursued me,' added Kelderek.

The shendron burst out impatiently. 'Do you think you are telling tales now to children on the shore? Am I to keep asking "And what came next?" Tell me what happened. Or would you prefer to be sent to the High Baron, to say that you refused to tell?'

Kelderek sat on the edge of the wooden pier, looking down and stirring a stick in the dark-green water below. At last the shendron said, 'Kelderek, I know you are considered a simple fellow, with your "Cat Catch a Fish" and all the rest of it. Whether you are indeed so simple I cannot tell. But whether or not, you know well enough that every hunter who goes out has to tell all he knows upon return. Those are Bel-ka-Trazet's orders. Has the fire driven a leopard to Ortelga? Did you meet with strangers? What is the state of the western end of the island? These are the things I have to learn.'

Kelderek trembled where he sat but still said nothing.

'Why,' said the net-mender, speaking for the first time, 'you know he's a simpleton — Kelderek Zenzuata - Kelderek Play-with-the-Children. He went hunting - he hurt himself - he's returned with littl to show. Can't we leave it at that? Who wants the bother of taking him up to the High Baron?'

The shendron, an older man, frowned. 'I am not here to be trifled with. The island may be full of all manner of savage beasts; of men, too, perhaps. Why not? And this man you believe to be a simpleton - he may be deceiving us. With whom has he spoken today? And did they pay him to keep silent?'

'But if he were deceiving us,' said the net-mender, 'would he not come with a tale prepared? Depend upon it, he -'

The hunter stood up, looking tensely from one to the other.

'I am deceiving no one: but I cannot tell you what I have seen today.'

The shendron and his companion exchanged glances. In the evening quiet, a light breeze set the water clop-clopping under the platform and from somewhere inland sounded a faint call, 'Yasta! The firewood!'

'What is this?' said the shendron. 'You are making difficulties for me, Kelderek, but worse - far worse - for yourself.'

'I cannot tell you what I have seen,' repeated the hunter, with a kind of desperation.

The shendron shrugged his shoulders. 'Well, Taphro, since it seems there's no curing this foolishness, you'd better take him up to the Sindrad. But you are a great fool. Kelderek. The High Baron's anger is a storm that many men have failed to survive before now.' 'This I know. God's will must be done.'

The shendron shook his head. Kelderek, as though in an attempt to be reconciled to him, laid a hand on his shoulder; but the other shook it off impatiently and returned in silence to his watch over the river. Taphro, scowling now, motioned the hunter to follow him up the bank.

The town that covered the narrow, eastern end of the island was fortified on the landward side by an intricate defensive system, part natural and part artificial, that ran from shore to shore. West of the zoan tree, on the further side from the town, four lines of pointed stakes extended from the water-side into the woods. Inland, the patches of diicker jungle formed obstacles capable of little improvement, though even here the living creepers had been pruned and trained into almost impenetrable screens, one behind another. In the more open parts thorn-bushes had been planted — trazada, curlspike and the terrible ancottlia, whose poison burns and irritates until men tear their own flesh with their nails. Steep places had been made steeper and at one point the outfall of a marsh had been damned to form a shallow lake - shrunk at this time of year - in which small alligators, caught on the mainland, had been set free to grow and become dangerous. Along the outer edge of the line lay the so-called 'Dead Belt', about eighty yards broad, which was never entered except by those whose task it was to maintain it. Here were hidden trip-ropes fastened to props holding up great logs; concealed pits filled with pointed stakes - one contained snakes; spikes in the grass; and one or two open, smooth-looking paths leading to enclosed places, into which arrows and other missiles-could be poured from platforms constructed among the trees above. The Belt was divided by rough palisades, so that advancing enemies would find lateral movement difficult and discover themselves committed to emerge at points where they could be awaited. The entire line and its features blended so naturally with the surrounding jungle that a stranger, though he might, here and there, perceive that men had been at work, could form little idea of its full extent. This remarkable closure of an open flank, devised and carried out during several years by the High Baron, Bel-ka-Trazet, had never yet been put to the proof. But, as Bel-ka-Trazet himself had perhaps foreseen, the labour of making it and the knowledge that it was there had created among the Ortelgans a sense of confidence and security that was probably worth as much as the works themselves. The line not only protected the town but made it a great deal harder for anyone to leave it without the High Baron's knowledge.

Kelderek and Taphro, turning their backs on the Belt, made their way towards the town along a narrow path between the hemp fields. Here and there women were carrying up water from among the reeds, or manuring ground already harvested and gleaned. At this hour there were few workers, however, for it was nearly supper time. Not far away, beyond the trees, threads of smoke were curling into the evening sky and with them, from somewhere on the edge of the huts, rose the song of a woman:

'He came, he came by night.

I wore red flowers in my hair.

I have left my lamp alight, my lamp is burning.

Senandril na kora, senandril na ro.'

There was an undisguised warmth and satisfaction in the voice. Kelderek glanced at Taphro, jerked his head in the direction of the song, and smiled.

'Aren't you afraid?' asked Taphro in a surly tone.

The grave, preoccupied look returned to Kelderek's eyes.

'To go before the High Baron and say that you persisted in refusing to tell the shendron what you know? You must be mad I Why be such a fool ?'

'Because this is no matter for concealment or lying. God -' he broke off.

Taphro made no reply, but merely held out his hand for Kelderek's weapons - knife and bow. The hunter handed them to him without a word.

They came to the first huts, with their cooking, smoke and refuse smells. Men were returning from the day's work and women, standing at their doors, were calling to children or gossiping with neighbours. Though one or two looked curiously at Kelderek trudging acquiescently beside the shendron's messenger, none spoke to him or called out to ask where they were going. Suddenly a child, a boy perhaps seven or eight years old, ran up and took his hand. The hunter stopped.

'Kelderek,' asked the child, 'are you coming to play this evening?'

Kelderek hesitated. 'Why - I can't say. No, Sarin, I don't think I shall be able to come this evening.'

'Why not?' said the child, plainly disappointed. 'You've hurt your shoulder - is that it?'

'There's something I've got to go and tell the High Baron,' replied Kelderek simply.

Another, older boy, who had joined them, burst out laughing.

'And I have to see the Lord of Belda before dawn - a matter of life and death. Kelderek, don't tease us. Don't you want to play tonight?'

'Come on, can't you?' said Taphro impatiently, shuffling his feet in the dust.

'No, it's the truth,' said Kelderek, ignoring him. 'I'm on my way to see the High Baron. But I'll be back: either tonight or - well, another night, I suppose.'

He turned away, but the boys trotted beside him as he walked on.

'We were playing this afternoon,' said the little boy. 'We were playing "Cat Catch a Fish". I got the fish home twice.'

'Well done’ said the hunter, smiling down at him.

'Be off with you!’ cried Taphro, making as though to strike at them. 'Come on — get out!' You great dunder-headed fool,' he added to Kelderek, as the boys ran off. 'Playing games with children at your age!'

'Good night!' called Kelderek after them. 'The good night you pray for - who knows?'

They waved to him and were gone among the smoky huts. A man passing by spoke to Kelderek but he made no reply, only walking on abstractedly, his eyes on the ground.

At length, after crossing a wide area of rope-walks, the two approached a group of larger huts standing in a rough semi-circle not far from the eastern point and its broken causeway. Between these, trees had been planted, and the sound of the river mingled with the evening breeze and the movement of the leaves to give a sense of refreshing coolness after the hot, dry day. Here, not only women were at work. A number of men, who seemed by their appearance and occupations to be both servants and craftsmen, were trimming arrows, sharpening stakes and repairing bows, spears and axes. A burly smith, who had just finished for the day, was climbing out of his forge in a shallow, open pit, while his two boys quenched the fire and tidied up after him.

Kelderek stopped and turned once more to Taphro.

'Badly-aimed arrows can wound innocent men. There's no need for you to be hinting and gossiping about me to these fellows.'

'Why should you care?'

‘I don't want them to know I'm keeping a secret,' said Kelderek.

Taphro nodded curdy and went up to a man who was cleaning a grindstone, the water flying off in a spiral as he spun the wheel.

'Shendron's messenger. Where is Bel-ka-Trazet?'

'He? Eating.' The man jerked his thumb towards the largest of the huts.

'I have to speak to him.'

'If it'll wait,' replied the man, 'you'd do better to wait Ask Numiss - the red-haired fellow - when he comes out. He'll let you know when Bel-ka-Trazet's ready.'

Neolithic man, the bearded Assyrian, the wise Greeks, the howling Vikings, the Tartars, the Aztecs, the samurai, the cavaliers, the anthropophagi and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders: there is one thing at least that all have known in common — waiting until someone of importance has been ready to see them. Numiss, chewing a piece of fat as he listened to Taphro, cut him short, pointing him and Kelderek to a bench against the wall. There they sat. The sun sank until its rim touched the horizon upstream. The flies buzzed. Most of the craftsmen went away. Taphro dozed. The place became almost deserted, until the only sound above that of the water was the murmur of voices from inside the big hut. At last Numiss came out and shook Taphro by the shoulder. The two rose and followed the sen-ant through the door, on which was painted Bel-ka-Trazet's emblem, a golden snake.

The hut was divided into two parts. At the back were Bel-ka-Trazet's private quarters. The larger part, known as the Sindrad, served as both council-chamber and mess-hall for the barons. Except when a full council was summoned it was seldom that all the barons were assembled at once. There were continual journeys to the mainland for hunting expeditions and trade, for the island had no iron or other metal except what could be imported from the Gelt mountains in exchange for skins, feathers, semi-precious stones and such artifacts as arrows and rope; whatever, in fact, had any exchange value. Apart from the barons and those who attended upon them, all hunters and traders had to obtain leave to come and go. The barons, as often as they returned, were required to report their news like anyone else and while living on the island usually ate the evening meal with Bel-ka-Trazet in the Sindrad.

Some five or six faces turned towards Taphro and Kelderek as they entered. The meal was over and a debris of bones, rinds and skins littered the floor. A boy was collecting this refuse into a basket, while another sprinkled fresh sand. Four of the barons were still sitting on the benches, holding their drinking-horns and leaning their elbows on the table. Two, however, stood apart near the doorway — evidently to get the last of the daylight, for they were talking in low tones over an abacus of beads and a piece of smooth bark covered with writing. This seemed to be some kind of list or inventory, for as Kelderek passed, one of the two barons, looking at it, said, 'No, twenty-five ropes, no more,' whereupon the other moved back a bead with his fore-finger and replied, 'And you have twenty-five ropes fit to go, have you?'

Kelderek and Taphro came to a stop before a young, very tall man, with a silver torque on his left arm. When they entered he had had his back to the door, but now he turned to look at them, holding his horn in one hand and sitting somewhat unsteadily on the table with his feet on the bench below. He looked Kelderek up and down with a bland smile, but said nothing. Confused, Kelderek lowered his eyes. The young baron's silence continued and the hunter, by way of keeping himself in countenance, tried to fix his attention on the great table, which he had heard described but never before seen. It was old, carved with a craftsmanship beyond the skill of any carpenter or woodworker now alive on Ortelga. Each of the eight legs was pyramidal in shape, its steeply-tapering sides forming a series of steps or ledges, one above another to the apex. The two corners of the board that he could sec had the likeness of bears' heads, snarling, with open jaws and muzzles thrust forward. They were most life-like. Kelderek trembled and looked quickly up again.

'And what ekshtra work you come give us?' asked the young baron cheerfully. 'Want fellows repair causeway, zattit?’

'No, my lord,' said Numiss in a low voice. 'This is the man who refused to tell his news to the shendron.'

'Eh ?' asked the young baron, emptying his horn and beckoning to a boy to re-fill it. 'Man with shensh, then. No ushe talking shendrons. Shtupid fellowsh. All shendrons shtupid fellowsh, eh?' he said to Kelderek.

'My lord,' replied Kelderek, 'believe me, I have nothing against the shendron, but - but the matter

'Can you read?' interrupted the young baron.

'Read? No, my lord.'

'Neither c'n I. Look at old Fassel-Hasta there. What's he reading? Who knows? You watch out; he'll bewitch you.'

The baron with the piece of bark turned with a frown and stared at the young man, as much as to say that he at any rate was not one to act the fool in his cups.

'I'll tell you,' said the young baron, sliding forward from the table and landing with a jolt on the bench, 'all 'bout writing - one word -'

'Ta-Kominion,' called a harsh voice from the further room, 'I want to speak with those men. Zelda, bring them.'

Another baron rose from the bench opposite, beckoning to Kelderek and Taphro. They followed him out of the Sindrad and into the room beyond, where the High Baron was sitting alone. Both, in token of submission and respect, bent their heads, raised the palms of their hands to their brows, lowered their eyes and waited.

Kelderek, who had never previously come before Bel-ka-Trazet, had been trying to prepare himself for the moment when he would have to do so. To confront him was in itself an ordeal, for the High Baron was sickeningly disfigured. His face - if face it could still be called - looked as though it had once been melted and left to set again. Below the white-seamed forehead the left eye, askew and fallen horribly down the cheek, was half buried under a great, humped ridge of flesh running from the bridge of the nose to the neck. The jaw was twisted to the right, so that the lips closed crookedly; while across the chin stretched a livid scar, in shape roughly resembling a hammer. Such expression as there was upon this terrible mask was sardonic, penetrating, proud and detached -that of a man indestructible, a man to survive treachery, siege, desert and flood.

The High Baron, seated on a round stool like a drum, stared up at the hunter. In spite of the heat he was wearing a heavy fur cloak, fastened at the neck with a brass chain, so that his ghastly head resembled that of an enemy severed and fixed on top of a black tent. For some moments there was silence - a silence like a drawn bow-string. Then Bel-ka-Trazet said, 'What is your name?'

His voice, too, was distorted; harsh and low, with an odd ring, like the sound of a stone bounding over a sheet of ice.

'Kelderek, my lord.'

'Why are you here?'

'The shendron at the zoan sent me.'

'That I know. Why did he send you?'

'Because I did not think it right to tell him what befell me today.'

'Why does your shendron waste my time?' said Bel-ka-Trazet to Taphro. 'Could he not make this man speak? Are you telling me he defied you both? '

'He - the hunter - this man, my lord,' stammered Taphro. 'He told us - that is, he would not tell us. The shendron - he asked him about - about his injury. He replied that a leopard pursued him, but he would tell us no more. When we demanded to know, he said he could tell us nothing.'

There was a pause.

'He refused us, my lord,' persisted Taphro. 'We said to him –‘

'Be silent.'

Bel-ka-Trazet paused, frowning abstractedly and pressing two fingers against the ridge beneath his eye. At length he looked up.

'You are a clumsy liar, Kelderek, it seems. Why trouble to speak of a leopard? Why not say you fell out of a tree?'

'I told the truth, my lord. There was a leopard.'

'And this injury,' went on Bel-ka-Trazet, reaching out his hand to grasp Kelderek's left wrist, and gently moving his arm in a way that suggested that he might pull it a good deal harder if he chose, 'this trifling injury. You had it, perhaps, from someone who was disappointed that you had not brought him better news? Perhaps you told him, "The shendrons are alert, surprise would be difficult," and he was displeased?'

'No, my lord.'

‘Well, we shall see. There was a leopard, then, and you fell. What happened then?'

Kelderek said nothing.

'Is this man a half-wit?' asked Bel-ka-Trazet, turning to Zelda.

'Why, my lord,' replied Zelda, 'I know little of him, but I believe he is known for something of a simple fellow. They laugh at him - he plays with the children -'

'He does what?'

'He plays with children, my lord, on the shore.' ‘What else?'

'Otherwise he is solitary, as hunters often are. He lives alone and harms no one, as far as I know. His father had hunter's rights to come and go and he has been allowed to inherit them. If you wish, we can send to find out more.'

'Do so,' said Bel-ka-Trazet: and then to Taphro, 'You may go.'

Taphro snatched his palm to his forehead and was gone like a candle-flame in the wind. Zelda followed him with more dignity.

'Now, Kelderek,' said the twisted mouth, slowly, 'you are an honest man, you say, and we are alone, so there is nothing to hinder you from telling your story.'

Sweat broke out on Kelderek's face. He tried to speak, but no words came.

'Why did you tell the shendron a few words and then refuse to tell more?' said the High Baron. 'What foolishness was that? A rogue should know how to cover his tracks. If there was something you wished to conceal, why did you not invent some tale that would satisfy the shendron?'

'Because — because the truth - ' The hunter hesitated. 'Because I was afraid and I am still afraid.' He stopped, but then burst out suddenly, 'Who can lie to God? - '

Bel-ka-Trazet watched him as a lizard watches a fly.

' Zelda P he called suddenly. The baron returned.

'Take this man out, put his arm in a sling and let him eat Bring him back in half an hour - and then, by this knife, Kelderek -' and he drove the point of his dagger into the golden snake painted on the lid of the chest beside him - 'you shall tell me what you know.'

The unpredictable nature of dealings with Bel-ka-Trazet were the subject of many a tale. With Zelda's hand under his shoulder, Kelderek stumbled out into the Sindrad and sat huddled on a bench while the boys brought him food and a leather sling.

When next he faced Bel-ka-Trazet night had fallen. The Sindrad outside was quiet, for all but two of the barons had gone to their own quarters. Zelda sat in the firelight, looking over some arrows which the fletcher had brought Fassel-Hasta was hunched on another bench at the table, slowly writing, with an inked brush on bark, by the light of a smoky earthenware lamp. A lamp was burning also on the lid of Bel-ka-Trazet's chest. In the shadows beyond, two fire-flies went winking about the room. A curtain of wooden beads had been let fall over the doorway and from time to time these clicked quietly in the night breeze.

The distortion of Bel-ka-Trazet's face seemed like a trick of the lamplight, the features monstrous as a devil-mask in a play, the nose appearing to extend to the neck in a single, unbroken line, the shadows under the jaw pulsing slightly and rhythmically, like the throat of a toad. And indeed it was a play they were now to act^ thought Kelderek, for it accorded with nothing in life as he had known it A plain man, seeking only his living and neither wealth nor power, had been mysteriously singled out and made an instrument to cross the will of Bel-ka-Trazet

'Well, Kelderek,' said the High Baron, pronouncing his name with a slight emphasis that somehow conveyed contempt, 'while you have been filling your belly, I have learned as much as there is to be known about a man like you - all, that is, but what you are going to tell me now, Kelderek Zenzuata. Do you know they call you that? *

'Yes, my lord.'

'Kelderek Play-with-the-Children. A solitary young man, with no taste for taverns, it seems, and an unnatural indifference towards girls: but known nevertheless for a skilful hunter, who often brings in game and rarities for the factors trading with Gelt and Bekla.'

'If you have heard so much, my lord -'

'So that he is allowed to come and go alone, much as he pleases, with no questions asked. Sometimes he is gone for several days at a time, is he not?'

'It is necessary, my lord, if the game -

'Why do you play with the children? A young man unmarried - what sort of nonsense is that?' Kelderek considered.

'Children often need friends,' he said. 'Some of the children I play with are unhappy. Some have been left with no parents - their parents have deserted them -'

He broke off in confusion, meeting the gaze of Bel-ka-Trazet's distorted eye over the ridge. After some minutes he muttered uncertainly, 'The flames of God -'

'What? What did you say?'

'The flames of God, my lord. Children - their eyes and ears are still open - they speak the truth -'

'And so shall you, Kelderek, before you are done. You'd be thought a simple fellow, then, soft in the head perhaps, a stranger to drink and wenches, playing with children and given to talk of God; for no one would suspect such a man, would he, of spying, of treachery, of carrying messages or treating with enemies on his lonely hunting expeditions -'

'My lord -'

'Until one day he returns injured and almost empty-handed from a place believed to be full of game, too much confused to have been able to invent a tale -'

'My lord!' The hunter fell on his knees.

'Did you displease the man, Kelderek, was that it? Some brigand from Deelguy, perhaps, or slimy slave-trader from Terekenalt out to make a little extra money by carrying messages during his dirty travels? Your information was displeasing, perhaps, or the pay was not enough?'

'No, my lord, no!'

'Stand up!'

The beads clicked in a gust that flattened the lamp-flame and made the shadows dart on the wall like fish startled in a deep pool. The High Baron was silent, collecting himself with the air of a man repulsed by an obstacle but still determined to overcome it by one means or another. When he spoke again it was in a quieter tone.

'Well, so far as I am any judge, Kelderek, you may be an honest man, though you are a great fool with your talk of children and God. Could you not have asked for one single friend to come here, to testify to your honesty?'

'My lord -'

'No, you could not, it seems, or else it never occurred to you. But let us assume that you are honest, and that something took place today which for some reason you have neither concealed nor revealed. If you had gone about with ginning to conceal it altogether, I suppose you would not have been compelled to come here — you would not be standing here now. No doubt, then, you know very well that it is something that is bound to come to light sooner or later, so that it would have been foolish for you to try to hide it.'

'Yes, I am sure enough of that, my lord,' replied Kelderek without hesitation.

Bel-ka-Trazet drew his knife and, like a man idly passing the time while waiting for supper or a friend, began to heat the point in the lamp-flame.

'My lord,' said Kelderek suddenly, 'if a man were to return from hunting and say to the shendron, or to his friends, "I have found a star, fallen from the sky to the earth," who would believe him?'

Bel-ka-Trazet made no reply, but went on turning the point of the knife in the flame.

'But if that man had indeed found a star, my lord, what then? What should he do and to whom should he bring it?'

'You question me, and in riddles, Kelderek, do you? I have no love for visionaries or their talk, so be careful.'

The High Baron clenched his fist but then, like a man determined to exercise patience, let it fall open and remained staring at Kelderek with a sceptical look.

'Well?' he said at length.

'I fear you, my lord. I fear your power and your anger. But the star that I found - it is from God, and this, too, I fear. I fear it more. I know to whom it must be revealed -' his voice came in a strangled gasp - 'I can reveal it - only to the Tuginda!'

In an instant Bel-ka-Trazet had seized him by the throat and forced him to the floor. The hunter's head bent sharply backwards, away from the hot knife-point thrust close to his face.

'I will do this -1 can do only that! By the Bear, you will no longer choose what you will do when your bow-eye is out! You'll end in Zeray, my child!'

Kelderek's hands stretched upwards, clutching at the black cloak bending over him and pressing him backwards from knee to wounded shoulder. His eyes were closed against the heat of the knife and he seemed about to faint in the High Baron's grasp. Yet when at length he spoke - Bel-ka-Trazet stooping close to catch the words - he whispered,

'It can be only as God wills, my lord. The matter is great -greater, even, than your hot knife.' The beads clashed in the doorway. Without relinquishing his hold the Baron peered over his shoulder into the gloom beyond the lamp. Zelda's voice said,

'My lord, there are messengers from the Tuginda. She would speak with you urgently, she says. She requests that you go to Quiso tonight.'

Bel-ka-Trazet drew in his breath with a hiss and stood straight, shaking off Kelderek, who fell his length and lay without moving. The knife slipped from the High Baron's hand and stuck in the floor, transfixing a fragment of some greasy rubbish, which began to smoulder with an evil smell. He stooped quickly, recovered the knife and trod out the fragment. Then he said quietly,

'To Quiso, tonight? What can this mean? God protect us! Are you sure?'

'Yes, my lord. Would you speak yourself with the girls who brought the message?'

'Yes - no, let it be. She would not send such a message unless -Go and tell Ankray and Faron to get a canoe ready. And see that this man is put aboard.'

'This man, my lord?'

'Put aboard.'

The bead curtain clashed once more as the High Baron passed through it, across the Sindrad and out among the trees beyond. Zelda, hurrying across to the servants' quarters, could sec in the light of the quarter moon the conical shape of the great fur cloak striding impatiently up and down the shore.

5 To Quiso by Night

Kelderek knelt in the bow, now peering into the speckled gloom ahead, now shutting his eyes and dropping his chin on his chest in a fresh spasm of fear. At his back the enormous Ankray, Bel-ka-Trazet's servant and bodyguard, sat silent as the canoe drifted with the current along the south bank of the Telthearna. From time to time Ankray's paddle would drop to arrest or change their course, and at the sound Kelderek started as though the loud stir of the water were about to reveal them to enemies in the dark. Since giving the order to set out Bel-ka-Trazet had said not a word, sitting hunched in the narrow stern, hands clasped about his knees. More than once, as the paddles fell, the swirl and seethe of bubbles alarmed some nearby creature, and Kelderek jerked his head towards the clatter of wings, the splash of a dive or the crackle of undergrowth on the bank. Biting his lip and clutching at the side of the canoe, he tried to recall that these were nothing but birds and animals with which he was familiar - that by day he would recognize each one. Yet beyond these noises of flight he was listening always for another, more terrible sound and dreading the second appearance of that animal to whom, as he believed, the miles of jungle and river presented no obstacle. And again, shrinking from this, his mind confronted dismally another life-long fear - the fear of the island for which they were bound. Why had the Baron been summoned thither and what had that summons to do with the news which he himself had refused to tell?

They had already travelled a long way beneath the trees overhanging the water, when the servants evidently recognized some landmark. The left paddle dropped once more and the canoe checked, turning towards the centre of the river. Upstream, a few faint lights on Ortelga were just visible, while to their right, far out in the darkness, there now appeared another light, high up; a flickering, red glow that vanished and re-emerged as they moved on. The servants were working now, driving the canoe across the stream while the current, flowing more strongly at this distance from the bank, carried them down. Kelderek could sense in those behind him a growing uneasiness. The paddlers' rhythm became short and broken. The bow struck against something floating in the dark, and at the jolt Bel-ka-Trazet grunted sharply, like a man on edge. 'My lord -' said Ankray. 'Be silent!' replied Bel-ka-Trazet instantly.

Like children in a dark room, like wayfarers passing a graveyard at night, the four men in the canoe filled the surrounding darkness with the fear from their own hearts. They were approaching the island of Quiso, domain of the Tuginda and the cult over which she ruled, a place where men retained no names - or so it was believed - weapons had no effect and the greatest strength could spend itself in vain against incomprehensible power. On each fell a mounting sense of solitude and exposure. To Kelderek it seemed that he lay upon the black water helpless as the diaphanous gylon fly, whose fragile myriads clotted the surface of the river each spring; inert as a felled tree in the forest, as a log in the timber-yard. All about them, in the night, stood the malignant, invisible woodmen, disintegrators armed with axe and fire. Now the log was burning, breaking up into sparks and ashes, drifting away beyond the familiar world of day and night, of hunger, work and rest. The red light seemed close now, and as it drew nearer still and higher above them he fell forward, striking his forehead against the bow.

He felt no pain from the blow; and to himself he seemed to have become deaf, for he could no longer hear the lapping of the water. Bereft of perceptions, of will and identity, he knew himself to have become no more than the fragments of a man. He was no one; and yet he remained conscious. As though in obedience to a command, he closed his eyes. At the same moment the paddlers ceased their stroke, bowing their heads upon their arms, and the canoe, losing way entirely, drifted with the current towards the unseen island.

Now into the remnants of Kelderek's mind began to return all that, since childhood, he had seen and .learned of the Tuginda. Twice a year she came to Ortelga by water, the far-off gongs sounding through the mists of early morning, the people waiting silent on the shore. The men lay flat on their faces as she and her women were met and escorted to a new hut built for her coming. There were dances and a ceremony of flowers: but her real business was first, to confer with the barons and secondly, in a session secret to the women, to speak of their mysteries and to select, from among those put forward, one or two to return with her to perpetual service on Quiso. At the end of the day, when she left in torchlight and darkness, the hut was burned and the ashes scattered on the water.

When she stepped ashore she was veiled, but in speaking with the barons she wore the mask of a bear. None knew the face of the Tuginda, or who she might once have been. The women chosen to go to her island never returned. It was believed that there they received new names; at all events their old names were never spoken again in Ortelga. It was not known whether the Tuginda died or abdicated, who succeeded her, how her successor was chosen, or even, on each occasion of her visit, whether she was, in fact, the same woman as before. Once, when a boy, Kelderek had questioned his father with impatience, such as the young often feel for matters which they perceive that their elders regard seriously and discuss little. For reply his father had moistened a lump of bread, moulded it to the rough shape of a man and put it to stand on the edge of the fire. 'Keep away from the women's mysteries, lad,' he said, 'and fear them in your heart, for they can consume you. Look the bread dried, browned, blackened and shrivelled to a cinder - 'do you understand?' Kelderek, silenced by his father's gravity, had nodded and said no more. But he had remembered.

What had possessed him, tonight, in the room behind the Sindrad? What had prompted him to defy the High Baron? How had those words passed his lips and why had not Bel-ka-Trazet killed him

instantly? One thing he knew - since he had seen the bear, he had not been his own master. At first he had thought himself driven by the power of God, but now chaos was his master. His mind and body were unseamed like an old garment and whatever was left of himself lay in the power of the numinous, night-covered island.

His head was still resting on the bow and one arm trailed overside in the water. Behind him, the paddle dropped from Ankray's hands and drifted away, as the canoe grounded on the upstream shore, its occupants slumped where they sat, tranced and spell-stopped, not a will, not a mind intact. And thus they stayed, driftwood, flotsam and foam, while the quarter moon set far upstream and darkness fell, broken only by the gleam of the fire still burning inland, high among the trees.

Time passed - a time marked only by the turning of the stars. Small, choppy river-waves chattered along the sides of the canoe and once or twice, with a rising susurration, the night wind tossed the branches of the nearest trees: but never the least stir made the four men in the canoe, huddled in the dark like birds on a perch.

At length a nearer, smaller light appeared, green and swaying, descending towards the water. As it readied the pebbly shore there sounded a crunching of footsteps and a low murmur of voices. Two cloaked women were approaching, carrying between them, on a pole, a round, flat lantern as big as a grindstone. The frame was of iron and the spaces between the bars were panelled with plaited rushes, translucent yet stout enough to shield and protect the candles fixed within.

The two women reached the edge of the water and stood listening. After a little they perceived in the dark the knock of the water against the canoe - a sound distinguishable only by ears familiar with every cadence of wind and wave along the shore. They set down the lantern then, and one, drawing out the pole from the ring and splashing it back and forth in the shallows, called in a harsh voice, ‘Wake!’

The sound came to Kelderek sharp as the cry of a moorhen. Looking up, he saw the wavering, green light reflected in the splashed water inshore. He was no longer afraid. As the weaker of two dogs presses itself to the wall and remains motionless, knowing that in this lies its safety, so Kelderek, through total subjection to the power of the island, had lost his fear.

He could hear the High Baron stirring behind him. Bel-ka-Trazet muttered some inaudible words and dashed a handful of water across his face, yet made no move to wade ashore. Turning his head for a

QUISO

NORTHERN SHORE

moment, Kelderek saw him staring, as though still bemused, towards the dimly-shining turbulence in the shallows.

The woman's voice called again, 'Come!' Slowly, Bel-ka-Trazet climbed over the side of the canoe into the water, which reached scarcely to his knees, and waded towards the light. Kelderek followed, splashing clumsily through the slippery pools. Reaching the shore, he found confronting him a tall, cloaked woman standing motionless, her face hidden in her cowl. He too stood still, not daring to question her silence. He heard the servants come ashore behind him, but the tall woman paid them no heed, only continuing to gaze at him as though to perceive the very beating of his heart. At last - or so he thought — she nodded, and thereupon at once turned about, stooped and passed the pole through the iron ring on the lantern. Then she and her companion took it up between them and began to walk away, unstumbling over the loose, yielding stones. Not a man moved until, when she had gone perhaps ten paces, the tall woman, without turning her head, called 'Follow!' Kelderek obeyed, keeping his distance behind them like a servant.

Soon they began to climb a steep path into the woods. He was forced to grope among the rocks for hand-holds, yet the women went up easily, one behind the other, the taller raising the pole above her head to keep the lantern level. Still they climbed and still he followed breathlessly in the dark until, the way growing less steep and at last level, he thought that they could not be far below the very summit of the island. The trees grew thickly and he could no longer see the light ahead. Groping among the ferns and drifts of leaves he could hear — louder as he went on — the sound of cascading water and suddenly found himself standing on a spur of rock overlooking a ravine. On the opposite side lay a stone-paved terrace, in the middle of which were glowing the embers of a fire. This, he felt sure, must be the source of that light, high up, which he had seen from the river - a beacon lit to guide them. Beyond, a wall of rock rose into the dark, and this he could see plainly, for round the edges of the terrace stood five tripods, each supporting a bronze bowl from which rose translucent flames, yellow, green and blue. There was little smoke, but the air was filled with a resinous, sweet scent.

More disturbing and awe-inspiring than the empty terrace, with its basins of flame, was the square opening cut in the rock wall behind. A carved pediment overhung it, supported by a pillar on either side, and to him it seemed that the black space between was gazing upon him inscrutably, like the unseen face of the cowled woman on the shore. Disturbed, he turned his eyes away, yet still, like a prisoner standing in a crowded court, felt himself watched; and, looking back once more, saw again only the flame-lit terrace and the opening beyond.

He stared downwards into the ravine. A little to his right, scarcely visible in the flickering darkness, he could make out a waterfall, not sheer, but cascading steeply over rocks until lost in the deep cleft below. In front of this, close to the falling water and gleaming wet with spray, a felled tree-trunk, no thicker than a man's thigh, spanned the ravine from bank to bank. The upper side had been roughly planed; and upon this, with no hand-rail, the two women were now crossing as easily as they had walked over the shore. The pliant trunk sprang beneath their weight and the lantern tossed upon its pole, yet they moved with an unhurried grace, like village girls at evening carrying their pitchers from the well.

Slowly Kelderek descended from the spur. Coming to the nearer end of the bridge he began, fearfully, to put one foot before the other. The cascade at his elbow showered him with its cold spray; the invisible water below sent up its echoes about him; after a few steps he crouched upon his knees, fumbling one-handed along the undulating tree-trunk. He dared not raise his eyes to look ahead. Staring down at his own hand, he could see besides nothing but the grain of the wood, knot after knot coming into his circle of vision and disappearing under his chin as he edged forward. Twice he stopped, panting and digging his nails into the curved under-side as the trunk swayed up and down.

When at last he reached the further end, he continued groping blindly along the ground on his hands and knees, until by chance he caught and crushed a handful of creeping locatalanga and, with that pungent scent about him, came to himself and realized that he was no longer clutching and tossing above the water. He stood up. Ahead, the women were crossing the centre of the terrace, one behind the other as before. Watching, he saw them reach the edge of the heap of embers within their fleece of ash. Without a pause they stepped into it, lifting the hems of their cloaks exactly as though wading a ford. As the hindmost raised her hem he glimpsed for a moment her bare feet. Ash and sparks rose in a fine dust, as chaff rises about the feet of a miller. Then they were pacing on beyond, leaving behind them an exposed, dull-red track across the circle of the dying fire.

Kelderek, moaning, sank to the ground and buried his face in the crook of his arm.

This, then, was the manner of his coming to the Upper Temple upon Quiso of the Ledges - this bringer of the tidings that generations had awaited but never heard: injured, drenched, grovelling and half-hysterical, shutting out what lay before his eyes, determined — strange determination - only upon the surrender of whatever shreds of will-power the island had left him. When at length the High Baron and his servants came to the edge of the ravine and in their turn tottered like cripples along the leaping tree, they found him lying prone on the edge of the terrace, cackling and gasping with a sound more dreadful than the laughter of the deaf and dumb.

6 The Priestess

As Kelderek became quiet and seemed to fall asleep where he lay, a light appeared within the opening in the rock wall. It grew brighter and two young women came out, each carrying a burning torch. They were sturdy, rough-looking girls, bare-footed and dressed in coarse tunics: but no baron's wife could have matched the half of their ornaments. Their long ear-rings, which swung and clicked as they walked, were formed of separate pieces of carved bone, strung together in pendants. Their triple necklaces, of alternate penapa and ziltate, shone rose and tawny in the firelight On their fingers were wooden rings, carved to resemble plaiting and stained crimson. Each wore a broad belt of bronze plates with a clasp fashioned like the head of a bear; and on the left hip an empty dagger-sheath of green leather, whorled like a shell, in token of perpetual virginity.

On their backs they carried wicker baskets filled with fragments of a resinous gum and a black fuel hard and fine as gravel. At each tripod they stopped and, taking handfuls from each other's panniers, threw them into the bowls. The fuel fell with a faint, ringing sound, lingering and overtoned: and the girls, as they worked, paid no more attention to the waiting men than if they had been tethered beasts.

They had almost finished their task and the terrace was bright with fresh light, when a third young woman came pacing slowly from the darkness of the cave. She was dressed in a pleated, sheathlike robe of white cloth, finer than any woven in Ortelga, and her long, black hair hung loose at her back. Her arms were bare and her only ornament was a great collar of fine gold links, more than a span broad, which completely covered her shoulders like a vestment.

As she appeared the two girls slipped their baskets from their backs and took up places side by side upon the edge of the ashes.

Bel-ka-Trazet raised his eyes to meet those of the young woman. He said nothing, however, and she returned his look with an impassive air of authority, as though every man had a face like his and they were all one to her. After a few moments she jerked her head over her shoulder and one of the girls, coming forward, led the servants away, disappearing into the darkness under the trees near the bridge. At the same moment the hunter stirred and rose slowly to his feet Ragged and dirty, he stood before the beautiful priestess with an air less of callowness than of simple unawareness either of his appearance or his surroundings.

Like the tall woman on the beach, the priestess stared intently at Kelderek, as though weighing him in some balance of her mind. At length she nodded her head two or three times with a kind of grave, comprehending recognition, and turned once more towards the High Baron.

'It is meant, then', she said, 'that this man should be here. Who is he?'

'One whom I have brought, saiyett,' replied Bel-ka-Trazet briefly, as though to remind her that he too was a person of authority.

The priestess frowned. Then she stepped close to the High Baron, put her hand upon his shoulder and, assuming the air of a wondering and inquisitive child, drew his sword from the scabbard and examined it, the Baron making no attempt to stop her.

'What is this?' she asked, moving it so that the light of the flames flashed along the blade.

'My sword, saiyett,' he answered, with a touch of impatience.

'Ah, your -' she paused, hesitating a moment, as though the word were new to her -'sword. A pretty thing, this - this sword. So - so -so -' and, pressing hard, she drew the edge three or four times across her forearm. It made no cut and left no mark whatever. 'Sheldra,' she called to the remaining girl, 'the High Baron has brought us a — a sword! The girl approached, took the sword in both hands and held it out horizontally at the height of her eyes, as though admiring the sharpness of the edge.

'All, now I see,' said the priestess lightly. Drawing the flat of the blade against her throat and motioning the girl to hold it firmly, she made a little jump, swung a few moments by her chin on the sharp edge and then, dropping to the ground, turned back to Bel-ka-Trazet.

'And this?' she asked, plucking his knife from his belt This time he made no reply. Assuming a puzzled look, she drove the point into her left arm, twisted it, drew it out bloodless, shook her head and handed it to the girl.

'Well - well - toys.' She stared coldly at him.

'What is your name?' she asked.

The Baron opened his mouth to speak, but after a moment the twisted lips closed askew and he remained looking at her as though she had not yet spoken.

'What is your name?' she said to Kelderek in the same tone.

As though in a dream, the hunter found himself perceiving on two planes. A man may dream that he is doing something - flying, perhaps - which, even in the dream, he knows that he cannot do. Yet he accepts and lives the illusion, and thus experiences as real the effects following from the discounted cause. In the same way Kelderek heard and understood the priestess's words and yet knew that they had no meaning. She might as well have asked him, 'What is the sound of the moon?' Moreover, he knew that she knew this and would be satisfied with silence for an answer.

'Come!' she said, after a pause, and turned on her heel.

Walking before them - the grim, mutilated Baron and the bewildered hunter - she led them out of the circle of blue-flaming bowls and through the opening in the rock.

7 The Ledges

The darkness was broken only by the indirect flame-light from the terrace outside; but this was sufficient to show Kelderek that they were in a square chamber apparently cut out of the living rock. The floor beneath his feet was stone and the shadows of himself and his companions moved and wavered against a smooth wall. On this he glimpsed a painting which seemed, as he thought, to represent some gigantic creature standing upright. Then they were going on into the dark.

Feeling his way after the priestess, he touched the squared jamb of an opening in the wall and, groping upwards - for he feared to strike his head - could find no transom above. Yet the cleft, if tall, was narrow enough - scarcely as wide as a man - and to save his injured shoulder he turned sideways and edged into it, right arm first. He could see nothing - only those mysterious, faintly-coloured clouds and vaporous screens that swim before our eyes in darkness, seeming exhaled, as it were, from our own sightlessness as mists rise from a marsh.

The floor sloped steeply downwards underfoot. He stumbled on, groping against the wall as it curved away to the right. At last he could make out, ahead, the night sky and, outlined against it, the figure of the waiting priestess. He reached her side, stopped and looked about him.

It was not long after midnight by the stars. He was high up in some spacious, empty place, standing on a broad ledge of stone, its surface level but the texture so rough that he could feel the grains and nodules under the soles of his feet. On either side were wooded slopes. The ledge stretched away to the left in a long, regular curve, a quarter-circle a stone's throw across, ending among banks of ivy and the trunks of trees. Immediately below it extended another, similar ledge and below that fell away many more, resembling a staircase for giants or gods. The pitch was steep - steep enough for a fall to be dangerous. The faintly-shining, concentric tiers receded downwards until the hunter could no longer distinguish them in the starlight. Far below, he could just perceive a glimmering of water, as though from the bottom of a well: and this, it seemed to him, must be some land-locked bay of the island. All around, on either side, great trees towered, an orderly forest, the spaces between them free from the creepers and choking jungle of the mainland. As he gazed up, the night wind freshened and the rustling of leaves became louder and higher, with a semblance of urgent repetition - 'Yess! Yess, yess!' followed by a dying fall - 'Sshow! — Sssh-ow!’ Mingled with this whispering came another sound, also liquid and continuous, but unaltering in pitch, lower and lightly plangent. Listening, he recognized it for the trickling and dropping of water, filling all the place no less than the sound of the leaves. Whence might this come? He looked about.

They were standing near one end of the uppermost tier. Further along its length a shallow stream - perhaps that of the ravine he had crossed earlier that night - came whelming smoothly out of the hillside and across the ledge. Here, no doubt because of some tilting of the stones, it spread in either direction, to become at the edges a mere film of water trickling over the rough, level surface. Thence, it oozed and dripped and splashed its way downward, passing over one terrace after another, spreading all abroad, shallow as rain on the pitch of a roof. This was the cause of the faint shining of the ledges in the starlight and of the minute, liquid sounds sparkling faindy about them, myriad as windy heather on a moor or crickets in a meadow.

Struck with amazement, Kelderek realized that this vast place was an artifact. He stood trembling - with awe indeed, but not with fear. Rather, he was filled with a kind of wild and expansive joy, like that of dance or festival, seeming to himself to be floating above his own exhaustion and the pain in his shoulder.

'You have never seen the Ledges?' said the priestess at his elbow. 'We have to descend them - are you able?'

At once, as though she had commanded him, he set off down the wet slabs as confidently as though upon level ground. The Baron called to him sharply and he stayed himself against the solitary island of a bank of ivy, smiling back at the two still above him for all the world as though they were comrades in some children's game. As the priestess and the Baron approached carefully, picking their way down the wet stones, he heard the latter say, 'He is light-headed, saiyett - a simple, foolish fellow, as I am told. He may fall, or even fling himself down.'

'No, the place means him no harm, Baron,' she replied. 'Since you brought him here, perhaps you can tell why.'

'No,' replied the Baron shortly.

'Let him go,' she said. 'On the Ledges, they say, the heart is the foot's best guide.'

At this, Kelderek turned once more and bounded away, splashing sure-footed down and down. The dangerous descent seemed a sport, exhilarating as diving into deep water. The pale shape of the inlet below grew larger and now he could see a fire twinkling beside it. He felt the steep hillside ever higher at his back. The curves of the ledges grew shorter, narrowing at last to little more than a broad path between the trees. He reached the very foot and stood looking round him in the enclosed gloom. It was indeed, he thought, like the bottom of a well — except that the air was warm and the stones now seemed dry underfoot. From above he could hear no sound of his companions and after a little began to make his way towards the glow of the fire and the lapping water beyond.

It was irregular, this shore among the trees, and paved with the same stone as the ledges above. As far as he could discern, it was laid out as a garden. Patches of ground between the paving had been planted with bushes, fruit-trees and flowering plants. He came upon a clustering tendriona, trained on trellises to form an arbour, and could smell the ripe fruit among the leaves above him. Reaching up, he pulled one down, split the thin rind and ate as he wandered on.

Scrambling over a low wall, he found himself on the brink of a channel perhaps six or seven paces across. Water-lilies and arrowhead were blooming in the scarcely-moving water at his feet, but in 48 the middle there was a smooth flow and this, he guessed, must be the re-gathered stream from the ledges. He crossed a narrow foot-bridge and saw before him a circular space, paved in a symmetrical pattern of dark and light. In the centre stood a flat-topped stone, roughly ovoid and carved with a star-like symbol. Beyond, the fire was glowing red in an iron brazier.

His weariness and dread returned upon him. Unconsciously, he had thought of the waterside and the fire as the end of the night's journey. What end he did not know; but where there was a fire, might one not have expected to find people - and rest? His impulse on the ledges had been both foolish and impertinent. The priestess had not told him to come here; her destination might be elsewhere. Now there were only the starlit solitude and the pain in his shoulder. He thought of returning, but could not face it. Perhaps, after all, they would come soon. Limping across to the stone, he sat down, elbow on knee, rested his head on his hand and closed his eyes.

He fell into an uneasy, slightly feverish doze, in which the happenings of the long day began to recur, dream-like and confused. He imagined himself to be crouching once more in the canoe, listening to the knock and slap of water in the dark. But it was on the shendron's platform that he landed, and once again refused to tell what he had seen. The shendron grew angry and forced him to his knees, threatening him with his hot knife as the folds of his fur cloak rippled and became a huge, shaggy pelt, dark and undulant as a cypress tree.

'By the Bear!' hissed the Baron. 'You will no longer choose!'

'I can speak only to the Tuginda!' cried the hunter aloud.

He started to his feet, open-eyed. Before him, on the chequered pavement, was standing a woman of perhaps forty-five years of age. She had a strong, shrewd face and was dressed like a servant or a peasant's wife. Her arms were bare to the elbow and in one hand she was carrying a wooden ladle. Looking at her in the starlight, he felt reassured by her homely, sensible appearance. At least there was evidently cooking in this island of sorcery, and a straightforward, familiar sort of person to do it. Perhaps she might have some food to spare.

'Crendro' (I see you), said the woman, using the colloquial greeting of Ortelga.

'Crendro,' replied the hunter.

'You have come down the Ledges?' asked the woman.

'Yes.'

‘Alone?'

'The priestess and the High Baron of Ortelga are following - at least so I hope.' He raised one hand to his head. 'Forgive me. I'm tired out and my shoulder's painful.'

'Sit down again.' He did so.

‘Why are you here - on Quiso?'

'That I must not tell you. I have a message — a message for the Tuginda. I can tell it only to the Tuginda.'

'Yourself? Is it not for your High Baron, then, to tell the Tuginda?’

'No. It is for myself to do so.' To avoid saying more, he asked, ‘What is this stone?'

'It's very old. It fell from the sky. Would you like some food? Perhaps I can make your shoulder more comfortable.'

'It's good of you. I'd like to eat, and to rest too. But the Tuginda -my message -'

'It will be all right Come this way, with, me.'

She took him by the hand and at the same moment he saw the priestess and Bel-ka-Trazet approaching over the bridge. At the sight of his companion the High Baron stopped, bent his head and raised his palm to his brow.

8 The Tuginda

In silence the hunter allowed himself to be led across the circle and past the iron brazier, in which the fire had sunk low. He wondered whether it too had been lit for a signal and had now served its turn, for there seemed to be none to keep it burning. Overtaking them, the baron spoke no word, but again raised his hand to his forehead. It shook slightly and his breathing, though he controlled it, was short and unsteady. The hunter guessed that the descent of the steep, slippery ledges had taxed him more than he cared to show.

They left the fire, ascended a flight of steps and stopped before the door of a stone building, its handle a pendent iron ring made like two bears grappling each with the other. Kelderek had never before seen workmanship of this kind, and watched in wonder as the handle was turned and the weight of the door swung inward without sagging or scraping against the floor within.

Crossing the threshold, they were met by a girl dressed like those who had tended the cressets on the terrace. She was carrying three or four lighted lamps on a wooden tray which she offered to each of them in turn. He took a lamp, but still saw little of what was round him, being too fearful to pause or stare about. From somewhere not far away came a smell of cooking and he realized once again that he was hungry.

They entered a firelit, stone-floored room, furnished like a kitchen with benches and a long, rough table. The hearth, set in the wall, had a cowled chimney above and an ash-pit below, and here a second girl was tending three or four cooking-pots. The two exchanged a few words in low voices and began to busy themselves about the hearth and table, from time to time glancing sideways at the Baron with a kind of shrinking fascination.

Since they had left the paved circle the hunter had been overcome by the knowledge that he had committed sacrilege. Clearly, the stone on which he had sat was sacred. Had he not, indeed, been told that it had fallen from the sky? And the woman - the homely woman with the ladle - she could be only —

As she approached him in the firelight he turned, trembling, and fell upon his knees.

'Saiyett -I -I was not to know -'

'Don't be afraid,' she said. 'Lie down here, on the table: I want to look at your shoulder. Melathys, bring some warm water; and Baron, will you please hold one of the lamps close?'

As they obeyed her, the Tuginda unlaced the hunter's jerkin and began to wash the clotted blood from the gash in his shoulder. She worked carefully and deliberately, cleaned the wound, dressed it with a stinging, bitter-scented ointment and finally bound his shoulder with a clean cloth. From behind the lamp the Baron's disfigured face looked down at him with an expression which made him prefer to keep his eyes shut.

'Now we will eat - and drink too,' said the Tuginda at last, helping him to his feet, 'and you girls may go. Yes, yes,' she added impatiently, to one who was lifting the lid from the stew-pot and lingering by the fire, 'I can ladle stew into bowls, believe it or not.'

The girls scurried out and the Tuginda, picking up her ladle, stirred the various pots and filled four bowls from them. Kelderek ate apart, standing up, and she did nothing to dissuade him, herself sitting on a bench by the hearth and eating slowly and little, as though to make sure that she would finish no sooner and no later than the rest. The bowls were wooden, but the cups into which Melathys poured wine were of thin bronze, six-sided and flat-based, so that, unlike drinking-horns, they stood unsupported without spilling. The cold metal felt strange to the hunter's lips.

When the two men had finished, Melathys brought water for their hands, took away the bowls and. cups and made up the fire. The Baron, with his back against the table, sat facing the Tuginda, while the hunter remained standing in the shadows beyond.

'I sent for you, Baron,' began the Tuginda. 'As you know, I asked you to come here tonight.'

'You have put me to indignity, saiyett,' replied the Baron. 'Why was the fear of Quiso unloosed upon us? Why must we have lain bemused in darkness upon the shore? Why -'

'Was there not a stranger with you?' she answered, in a tone which checked him instantly, though his eyes remained fixed upon hers. 'Why do you suppose you could not reach the landing-place? And were you not armed?'

'I came in haste. The matter escaped me. But in any case, how could you have known these things, saiyett?'

'No matter how. Well, the indignity, as you call it, is ended now. We will not quarrel. The girls who carried my message to Ortelga - they have been looked after?'

'It is hard to reach Ortelga against the current. They were tired. I said they should remain there to sleep.' She nodded.

'My message, as I -suppose, was unexpected, and you have made me an unexpected reply, bringing me a wounded man whom I find sitting alone and exhausted on the Tereth stone.'

'Saiyett, this man is a hunter - a simple fellow whom they call -'

He stopped, frowning.

'I know of him,' she said. 'On Ortelga they call him Kelderek Play-with-the-Children. Here he has no name, until I choose.' Bel-ka-Trazet resumed.

'He was brought to me tonight on his return from a hunting expedition, having refused to tell one of the shendrons whatever it was that he had seen. At first I treated him with forbearance, but still he would say nothing. I questioned him and he answered me like a child. He said, "I have found a star. Who will believe that I have found a star?" Then he said, "I will speak only to the Tuginda." At this I threatened him with a heated knife, but he answered only, "It must be as God wills." And then, in this very moment, saiyett, arrived your message. "So," thought I, "this man, who has said that he will speak only to you - who ever heard a man say this before? - let us take him at his word, if only to make him speak. He had better come to Quiso too - to his death, as I suppose, which he has brought upon himself." And then he sits down upon the Tereth stone, God help us! And we find him face to face and alone with yourself. How can he return to Ortelga? He must die.'

"That is for me to say, while he remains on Quiso. You sec much, Baron, and you guard the people as an eagle her brood. You have seen this hunter and you are angry and suspicious because he has defied you. Have you seen nothing else from your eyrie on Ortelga this two days past?'

It was plain that Bel-ka-Trazet resented being questioned: but he answered civilly enough,

'The burning, saiyett. There has been a great burning.'

'For leagues beyond the Telthearna the jungle has burned. All yesterday it rained ashes on Quiso. During the night animals came ashore from the river - some of kinds never seen here before. A makati comes tame as a cat to Melathys, begging for food. She feeds it and then, following it to the water, finds a green snake coiled about the Tereth. Of whom are these the forerunners? At dawn, the brook in the high ravine left its course and streamed down over the Ledges: but at the foot it gathered itself, flowed back into its channel and did no harm. Why? Why were the Ledges washed, Baron? For the coming of your feet, or my feet? Or was it for the coming of some other feet? What messages, what signs were these?'

The Baron slid his tongue along the jagged edge of one lip and plucked the fur of his cape between his fingers, but answered nothing. The Tuginda turned to face the firelight and remained silent for some time. She sat perfectly still, her hands at rest in her lap, her composure like that of a tree when the wind has dropped. At length she said,

'So I ponder and pray and call upon such little wisdom as I may have acquired over the years, for I know, no more than Melathys, or Rantzay or the girls, what these things may mean. At last I send for you. Perhaps, it seems to me, you may be able to tell me something that you have seen or heard. Perhaps you may give me some clue.

'Meanwhile, if he should come, how should I receive him - he whom God means to send? Not with power or display; no, but as a servant. What else am I? So in case he should come, I dress myself like the ignorant, poor woman that God sees me to be. I know nothing, but at least I can cook a meal. And when the meal is ready I go out to the Tereth, to wait and pray.'

Again she was silent. Melathys murmured,

'Perhaps the High Baron knows more than he has told us.'

'I know nothing, saiyett.'

'But it did not occur to me,' went on the Tuginda, 'that the stranger whom I knew to be with you -'

She broke off and looked across the room to where Kelderek was still standing by himself, away from the light, 'So, hunter, you maintained to the High Baron's hot knife, did you, that you had a message for my ears alone?'

'It is true, saiyett,' he answered, 'and it is true also, as the High Baron says, that I am a man of no rank - one who gets his living as a hunter. Yet I knew — and know now - beyond doubt or gainsaying, that none must hear this news before yourself.'

'Tell me, then, what you could not tell to the shendron or the High Baron.'

He began to speak of his hunting expedition that morning and of the undergrowth full of bewildered, fugitive animals. Then he told of the leopard and of his foolhardy attempt to pass it and escape inland. As he spoke of his ill-aimed arrow, his panic flight and fall from the bank, he trembled and gripped the table to steady himself. One of the lamps had burned dry, but the priestess made no move and the wick remained smoking until it died.

'And then,' said the hunter, 'then there stood over me, where I lay, saiyett, a bear - such a bear as never was, a bear tall as a dwelling-hut, his pelt like a waterfall, his muzzle a wedge across the sky. The leopard was as iron on his anvil. Iron - no - ah, believe me! - when the bear struck him he became like a chip of wood when the axe falls. He spun through the air and tumbled like a pierced bird. It was the bear - the bear who saved me. He struck once and then he was gone.'

The hunter paused and came slowly forward to the fire.

'He was no vision, saiyett, no fancy of my fear. He is flesh and bone - he is real. I saw the burns on his side - I saw that they hurt him. A bear, saiyett, on Ortelga - a bear more than twice as tall as a man!' He hesitated, and then added, almost inaudibly, 'If God were a bear -'

The priestess caught her breath. The Baron stood up, tipping back the bench against the table as his hand clutched at his empty scabbard.

'You had better be plain,' said the Tuginda in a calm, matter-of-fact tone. 'What do you mean, and what is it that you are thinking about the bear?'

To himself the hunter seemed like a man setting down at last a heavy burden which he has carried for miles, through darkness and solitude, to the place where it must go. But more strongly still, he felt once again the incredulity which had filled him that morning on the lonely, upstream shore of Ortelga. How could it be that this was the appointed time, here the place and himself the man? Yet it was so. It could not be otherwise. His eyes met the shrewd, intent gaze of the Tuginda.

'Saiyett,' he replied, 'it is Lord Shardik.'

There was dead silence. Then the Tuginda answered carefully, 'You understand that to be wrong - to deceive yourself and others — would be a sacrilegious and terrible thing? Any man can see a bear. If what you saw was a bear, O hunter who plays with children, for God's sake say so now and return home unharmed and in peace.'

'Saiyett, I am nothing but a common man. It is you that must weigh my talc, not I. Yet as I live, I myself feel certain that the bear that saved me was none other than Lord Shardik.'

'Then,' replied the Tuginda, 'whether you are proved wrong or right, it is plain what we have to do.'

The priestess was standing with palms outstretched and closed eyes, praying silently. The Baron, frowning, paced slowly across to the further wall, turned and paced back, gazing down at the floor. As he reached the Tuginda she laid her hand upon his wrist and he stopped, looking at her from one half-closed and one staring eye. She smiled up at him, for all the world as though no prospect lay before them but what was safe and easy.

'I'll tell you a story,' she said. 'There was once a wise, crafty Baron who pledged himself to guard Ortelga and its people and to keep out all that could harm them: a setter of traps, a digger of pits. He perceived enemies almost before they knew their own intents and taught himself to distrust the very lizards on the walls. To make sure that he was not deceived, he disbelieved everything; and he was right. A ruler, like a merchant, must be full of craft; must disbelieve more than half he hears, or he will be a ruined man.

'But here the task is more difficult. The hunter says, "It is Lord Shardik," and the ruler, who has learned to be a sceptical man and no fool, replies, "Absurd." Yet we all know that one day Lord Shardik is to return. Suppose it were today and the ruler were in error, then what an error that would be! All the patient work of his life could not atone for it.'

Bel-ka-Trazet said nothing.

'We cannot take the risk of being wrong. To do nothing might well be the greatest sacrilege. There is only one thing we can do. We must discover beyond doubt whether this news is true or false; and if we lose our lives, then God's will be done. After all, there are other barons and the Tuginda does not die.'

'You speak calmly, saiyett,' replied the Baron, 'as though of the tendriona crop or the coming of the rains. But how can it be true

'You have lived long years, Baron, with the Dead Belt to strengthen today and the tax to collect tomorrow. That has been your work. And I — I too have lived long years with my work - with the prophecies of Shardik and the rites of the Ledges. Many times I have imagined the news coming and pondered on what I should do if ever it were to come indeed. That is why I can say to you now, "This hunter's talc may be true," and yet speak calmly.'

The Baron shook his head and shrugged his shoulders, as though unwilling to argue.

'Well, and what are we to do?' he asked.

'Sleep,' she replied unexpectedly, going to the door. 'I will call the girls to show you where.'

'And tomorrow?'

'Tomorrow we will go upstream.’

She opened the door and struck once upon a bronze gong. Then she returned and, going across to Kelderek, laid her hand on his sound shoulder.

'Good night,' she said, 'and let us trust that it may indeed be that good night that the children are taught to pray for.'

9 The Tuginda's Story

The narrow passage from the land-locked inlet to the Telthearna bent so sharply that it was only just possible for a canoe to negotiate it. The rocky spurs on either side overlapped, closing the inlet like a wall, so that from within nothing could be seen of the river beyond.

The little bay, running inland between its paved shores, ended, among coloured water-lilies, at the outfall of the channel by the Tereth stone. Waiting with Melathys while the servants loaded the canoes, Kelderek gazed upwards, past the bridge which he had crossed the night before, to where the Ledges opened above, their shape like that of a great arrow-head lying point downward on the hillside between the woods. The stream, he saw, was no longer flowing over them: it must have returned, during the night, to its normal course. High up, he could make out the figures of girls stooping over hoes and baskets, weeding and scouring among the stones.

When the loading of the canoes had begun, the sun had not yet reached this north-facing shore, but now it rose over the Ledges and shone down upon the inlet, changing the opaque, grey water to a depth of slow-moving, luminous green. Sharp shadows fell across the pavements from the small stone buildings standing here and there along the edges, some secluded among the trees, others in the open among grass and flowers.

He wondered how old these buildings might be. There was none such on Ortelga. The whole place could be the work only of people long ago. What sort of people could they have been, who had constructed the Ledges?

Blinking, he turned away from the sun to watch the grave, silent girls loading the canoes. On Ortelga there would have been gossip, banter, songs to lighten the work. These women moved deliberately and spoke only such few words as were needed. They were silent, he supposed, by custom and the rule of the island. What a release it would be to leave this shady, mind-bemusing place of secrets and sorcery! Then he recalled whither they were bound and felt again the clutch of fear in his stomach.

An elderly, grey-haired woman, who had been directing the girls at their work, left the waterside and approached Melathys.

'The loading is done, saiyett,' she said. 'Do you wish to check that all is there?'

'No, I will trust you, Thula,' replied the priestess absently.

The old woman laid a hand on her arm.

'We do not know where you are going, my dear, or for how long,' she said. 'Will you not tell me? Do you remember how I comforted you as a child, when you used to dream of the slave-traders and the war?'

'I know all too well where we are going,' replied Melathys, 'but not when I shall return.'

'A long journey?' persisted the old woman.

'Long or short,' answered Melathys, with a quick, nervous laugh, 'I promise you that whoever may die, I will take good care that I do not.' She stooped, plucked a red flower, held it for a moment to the other's nostrils and then tossed it into the water.

The old woman made a restrained gesture of impatience, like a trusted servant who is privileged to express her feelings.

'There is danger, then, my child?' she whispered, 'Why do you speak of death ?'

Melathys stared a moment, biting her lip. Then she unclasped the broad, golden collar from her neck and put it into the old woman's hands.

'At all events I shall not need this,' she said, 'and if there is danger I shall run faster without the weight of it. Ask me no more, Thula. It is time for us to set out Where are the Baron's servants?'

'He said that they were to return to Ortelga,' replied the old woman. 'They have already taken their canoe and gone.'

'Then go yourself now and tell the Baron that we are ready. Good-bye, Thula. Remember me in your prayers.'

She made her way across the pavement, stepped down into the nearest of the four canoes and motioned to the hunter to take his place behind her. The two girls in the stern dipped their paddles and the canoe drew away from the shore. They crossed the inlet and began to edge their way out through the narrow cleft between the rock spurs.

The bow skirted a curtain of trailing, purple-leaved trazada and Kelderek, knowing how the little thorns tear and smart, dropped his head, shielding his face with his good arm. He heard the stiff leaves clashing against the side of the canoe, then felt a freshness of wind and opened his eyes. They were outside and rocking in a bay of slack water under the northern shore. The green shadow of the woods above them stretched upstream and across the river. Beyond, the water was blue and choppy, glittering in the sun and broken, here and there, into small, white-topped waves. Far off lay the blackened, desolate line of the left bank. He looked back over his shoulder but could no longer discern, among the tangle of green, the cleft from which they had emerged. Then the bow of the second canoe appeared, thrusting through the foliage. Melathys, following his gaze, smiled coldly.

'There is no other landing place on the island where a canoe can come to shore. All else is cliff or shoal, like the place where you landed last night.'

'The Tuginda, then?' he asked. 'Is she not coming with us?'

The priestess, watching the two remaining canoes as they came out, made no immediate reply, but after a while said, 'Do you know the tale of Inanna?'

'Why, yes, saiyett. She went to the underworld to beg for a life and as she passed each gate they took from her her clothes, her jewels and all that she had.'

'Long ago, whenever the Tuginda set out from Quiso to seek Lord Shardik, it was the custom that she should have nothing whatever upon her when she left the island.' She paused and then added, 'The Tuginda does not wish it to be known on Quiso that she is leaving. By the time they learn that she is gone -'

'But if there is no other landing place?' he blurted out, interrupting her.

She spoke to the girls at the paddles.

'Nito! Neelith! We will go up the shore now, as far as the quarries.'

At the westward end of the bay the shore extended to form a point Below this the sheltered water was smooth, but once they had rounded it their progress became laborious, for the head-wind was troublesome and on this side of the island the current ran strongly. They moved slowly upstream, the canoes jumping and bouncing in the choppy water. At length Kelderek could see that some way ahead the steep, green slopes gave place to cliffs of grey rock. The face of these cliffs appeared to have been cut and broken into. There were several straight-sided openings, like great windows, and at the foot of the lowest he noticed a kind of sill - a flat, projecting shelf of rock, perhaps three or four times the height of a man above the water. Through these openings, as they neared, he could catch glimpses of a deep, rock-sided excavation, on the floor of which, here and there, were lying boulders and a few squared slabs of stone; but all seemed neglected and desolate.

Melathys turned her head. 'That is where they quarried the stone for the Ledges.'

'Who, saiyett? When?'

Again she made no answer, merely gazing across at the little waves slap-slapping against the foot of the cliff. Suddenly Kelderek started, so that the canoe rocked sideways and one of the girls struck the water sharply with the flat of her paddle to recover its balance. On the flat shelf above them stood a naked woman, her hair flowing loose over her shoulders. She stepped forward to the edge and for a few moments stood looking down, moving her feet for a firm hold. Then, without hesitation, she dived into the deep water.

As she came to the surface, the hunter realized that this was none other than the Tuginda. She began swimming gently towards the third canoe, which was already cutting across to meet her. The Baron's canoe had turned away. Confused, the hunter first closed his eyes and then, to make sure that the priestess should not rebuke him, buried his face in his hands.

'Crendro, Melathys!' called the Tuginda, whom Kelderek could hear laughing as she climbed into the canoe. 'I thought I had brought nothing with me but a light heart, but now I remember that I have two things more - their names, to be restored to our guests. Bel-ka-Trazet, can you hear me, or are you hastening out of earshot as well as out of sight?'

'Why, saiyett,' answered the Baron gruffly, 'you startled us. And am I not to respect you as a woman?'

'The breadth of the Telthearna is respect indeed. Are your servants not here?'

'No, saiyett. I have sent them back to Ortelga.'

'God be with them. And with Melathys, for her pretty arms have

been scratched by the trazada. Hunter - shy, pondering hunter -what is your name?'

'Kelderek, saiyett,' he replied, 'Kelderek Zenzuata.'

'Well, now we can be sure that we have left Quiso. The girls will enjoy this unexpected trip. Who is with us? Sheldra, Nito, Neelith -'

She began chatting and joking with the girls, who from their answers were clearly convinced that she was in excellent spirits. After a time her canoe drew alongside and she touched Kelderek's arm.

'Your shoulder?' she asked.

'Better, saiyett,' he answered. 'The pain is much less.' 'Good, for we are going to need you.'

Although the Tuginda had kept her departure secret, someone besides Melathys had evidently known what she meant to do and loaded her canoe accordingly, for she was now dressed, as though for hunting, in a tunic of stitched and over-lapping leather panels, with leather greaves and sandals, and her wet hair, coiled about her head, was bound with a light, silver chain. Like the girls, she was carrying a knife at her belt.

'We will not go up the shore of Ortelga, Melathys,' she said. 'The shendrons would see us and the whole town would be talking within the hour.

'How then, saiyett? Are we not making for the western end of the island?'

'Certainly. But we will cross to the further side of the river and then return.'

Their journey, thus extended, lasted almost until evening. As they crossed, the current carried them downstream, especially when they were obliged to give way to avoid the heavy, floating debris still drifting here and there. By the time they had reached the desert of the further bank, with its scorched, ashen smell, the girls were tired. There was little or no true shade and they were forced to rest as best they could, partly in the canoes and partly in the river itself - for they could all swim like otters. Only Melathys, preoccupied and silent, remained in her place, apparently indifferent to the heat They ate selta nuts, goat's cheese and rose-pale tendrionas. The long afternoon was spent in working slowly upstream along the dead bank. It was hard going, for every reach was obstructed inshore with half-burned trees and branches, some submerged, others spreading tangles of twigs and leaves across the surface. There was a continual drift of fine, black grit through the air and the sides of the canoes above the water-line became coated with a froth of ash suspended in the slack water.

The sun was nearing the horizon when the Tuginda at last gave the word to turn left and head out once more across the current. Kelderek, who knew the difficulty of judging the ever-changing currents of the Telthearna, realized that she was evidently an experienced and skilful waterman. At all events her judgment now was excellent, for with little further effort on the part of the weary girls, the river carried them across and down so that they drifted almost exactly upon the tall, narrow rock at the western point of Ortelga.

They waded ashore, dragging the canoes between them through the reeds, and made camp on dry ground among the soft, fibrous root-tangles of a grove of quian. It was a wild shore; and as their fire burned up - so that the shapes of the tree-trunks seemed to waver in its heat - and outside, the sunset faded from the expanse of the river, Kelderek felt again, as he had felt two days before, the unusual restlessness and disturbance of the forest around them.

'Saiyett,' he ventured at last, 'and you, my lord Baron, if I may be allowed to advise you, we should let no one wander away from the fire tonight. If any must do so, let them go to the shore but nowhere else. This place is full of creatures that are themselves strangers, lost and savage with fear.'

Bel-ka-Trazet merely nodded and Kelderek, afraid of having said too much, busied himself in rolling a log to one side of the fire and scraping it clean to make a seat for the Tuginda. On the further side the girl Sheldra was setting up the servants' quarters and allotting them their duties. She had said nothing whatever to Kelderek throughout the day and he, unsure what his place might be, was about to ask her whether he could be of use, when the Tuginda called him and asked him to take the first watch.

As it fell out, he remained on guard half the night. He felt no desire to sleep. What sort of sentries would they make, he asked himself - dicsc silent, self-contained girls, whose lives had been enclosed so long by the solitude of Quiso? Yet he knew that he was merely trying - and failing - to deceive himself; they were reliable enough and this was not the reason for his wakefulness. The truth was that he could not be free - had not been free all day - from the fear of death and the dread of Shardik.

Brooding in the darkness, fresh misgivings came upon him as he thought first of the High Baron and then of Melathys. Both felt fear - of this he was sure; fear of death no doubt, but also - and it was in this that they differed from himself - fear of losing what each already possessed. And because of this fear there lay in both their hearts an actual hope, of which neither would speak before the Tuginda, that he had told them false and that this search would end in nothing: for to each it seemed that even if what he had told them were the truth, he or she stood to gain nothing from it.

It occurred to him - troubling his heart and heightening still further his sense of loneliness - that the High Baron was actually unable to grasp what to himself was plain as flame. There came into his mind the recollection of an old, miserly trader who had lived near his home some years before. This man had amassed a competence by a lifetime of petty, hard bargaining. One night some swaggering young mercenaries, returned to Ortelga from a campaign in the service of Bekla and reluctant to call an end to a drunken frolic, had offered him three great emeralds in return for a jar of wine. The old man, convinced of some trick, had refused them and later had actually boasted of how he had shown himself too sharp for such rogues.

Bel-ka-Trazet, thought Kelderek, had spent years in making Ortelga a fortress, and looked now to reap his harvest - to grow old in safety behind his pits and stakes, his river moat and his shendrons along the shore. In his world, the proper place for anything strange or unknown was outside. Of all hearts on Ortelga, perhaps, his was the least likely to leap and blaze at news of the return of Shardik, the Power of God. As for Melathys, she was already content with her role as priestess and her island sorcery. Perhaps she hoped to become Tuginda herself in time. She was obeying the Tuginda now merely because she could not disobey her. Her heart, he felt sure, shared neither the Tuginda's passionate hope nor the Tuginda's deep sense of responsibility. It was natural, perhaps, that she should be afraid. She was a woman, quick-witted and young, who had already attained to a position of authority and trust. She had much to lose if a violent death should strike her down. He recalled how he had first seen her the night before, asserting her dismaying power on the flame-lit terrace; discerning, among the night-travellers from Ortelga, the presence of the secret lying unspoken in his heart and in none other. At the memory he was overcome by a keen pang of disappointment. The truth was that the incomparable news which he had brought she would have preferred not to learn.

'They are both far above me,' he thought, pacing slowly across the grove, his ears full of the incessant croaking of the frogs along the shore. 'Yet I - a common man - can see plainly that each is clinging - or trying to cling — to that which they fear may now be changed or swept away. I have no such thoughts, for I have nothing to lose; and besides, I have seen Lord Shardik and they have not.

Yet even if we find him again and do not die, still, I believe, they will try by some means or other to deny him. And that I could never do, come of it what might.'

The sudden, harsh cry of some creature in the forest recalled him to the duty he had undertaken, and he turned back to his watch. Crossing the clearing once more, he threaded his way among the sleeping girls.

The Tuginda was standing beside the fire. She beckoned, and as he approached looked at him with the same shrewd, honest smile which he had first seen at the Tereth stone, before he had known who she was.

'Surely, Kelderek, your watch is long over?' she asked. 'If another were to take my place, saiyett, I could not sleep, so why should I not watch?' 'Your shoulder hurts?'

'No - my heart, saiyett.' He smiled back at her. 'I'm ill at ease. There's good cause.'

'Well, I'm glad you're awake, Kelderek Play-with-the-Children, for we need to talk, you and I.' She moved away from the sleepers and he followed her until she stopped and faced him in the gloom, leaning against a quian trunk. The frogs croaked on and now he could hear the waves lapping in the reeds.

'You heard me say to Melathys and the Baron that we ought to act as though your news were true. That was what I said to them: but you yourself, Kelderek, must know this. If I were unable to perceive the truth that flows from a man's heart into his words, I would not be the Tuginda of Quiso. I am in no doubt that it is indeed Lord Shardik that you have seen.'

He could find no reply and after a little she went on, 'So - of all those countless thousands who have waited, we are the ones, you and I.'

'Yes. But you seem so calm, saiyett, and I - I am full of fear -ordinary, coward's fear. Awe and dread I feel indeed, but most, I am afraid simply of being torn to pieces by a bear. They are very dangerous creatures. Are you not afraid too?'

She replied to his question with another.

'What do you know of Lord Shardik?'

He thought for a time and then answered, 'He is from God - God is in him - he is the Power of God - he departed and he is to return. Nay, saiyett, one thinks he knows until another calls for the words. Like all children, I learned to pray for that good night when Shardik will return.'

'But there is such a thing as getting more than we bargain for.

Many pray. How many have really considered what it would mean if the prayers were granted?'

'Whatever may come of it, saiyett, I could never wish that he had not returned. For all my fear, I could not wish that I had never seen him.'

'Nor I, for all mine. Yes, I am afraid too; but at least I can thank God that I have never forgotten the real, the true work of the Tuginda - to be ready, in all sober reality, night and day, for the return of Shardik. How often, by night, have I walked alone on the Ledges and thought, "If this were the night - if Shardik were to come now - what should I do? " I knew I could not but fear, but the fear is less -' she smiled again - 'less than I feared. Now you must know more, for we are the Vessels, you and I.' She nodded slowly, holding his eyes among the shadows. 'And what that means we shall learn, God help us, and in His good time.'

Kelderek said nothing. The Tuginda folded her arms, leaned back once more against the tree and went on.

'It is more than a matter of the people falling flat on their faces - much, much more.' Still he said nothing.

'Do you know of Bekla, that great city ?'

'Of course, saiyett.'

'Have you ever been there?'

'I? Oh no, saiyett. How should a man like me go to Bekla? Yet many of my skins and feathers have been bought by the factors for the market there. It is four or five days' journey to the south, that I know.'

'Did you know that long ago - no one knows how long - the people of Ortelga ruled in Bekla?' ' We were the rulers of Bekla?'

'We were. Of that empire which stretched nordi to the shores of the Telthearna, west to Paltesh and south to Sarkid and Ikat-Yeldashay. We were a great people — fighters, traders and, above all, builders and craftsmen - yes, we who now skulk on an island in thatched sheds and scratch for a living with ploughs and mattocks on a few pebbly miles of the mainland.

'It was we who built Bekla. To this day it is like a garden of sculpted and dancing stone. The Palace of the Barons is more beautiful than a lily pool when the dragon-flies hover over it. The street of the builders was full, then, of rich men's messengers from far and near, offering fortunes to craftsmen to come and work for them. And those who condescended to go travelled swiftly, for there were broad, safe roads to the frontiers.

'In those days, Shardik was with us. He was with us as the Tuginda is with us now. He did not die. He passed from one bodily home to another.'

'Shardik ruled in Bekla?'

'No, not in Bekla. Shardik was worshipped and Shardik blessed us from a lonely, sacred place on the borders of the empire, to which his suppliants journeyed in humility. Where was that, do you think?'

'I cannot tell, saiyett.'

'It was Quiso, where the shreds of Shardik's power still cling like rags on a windy hedge. And it was the craftsmen of Bekla who made of the whole island a temple for Shardik. They built the causeway from the mainland to Ortelga - the causeway that is now broken -for the bands of pilgrims, after they had assembled on the mainland shore among the Two-Sided Stones, would be brought first to Ortelga and thence make the night-journey to Quiso, just as you made it last night Our craftsmen, too, levelled and paved the terrace where Melathys met you; and over the ravine in front of it they made the Bridge of the Suppliants, a span of iron slender as a rope, by which all strangers had to cross or else go back. But that bridge is fallen this many a year - fallen long before we were born, you and I. Behind the terrace, as you know, lies the Upper Temple, which they cut out of the rock. You did not see the interior, for you were in darkness. It is a high chamber, twenty paces square, hewn throughout thirty years, flake by flake out of the living rock. And more than all this, they made -'

'The Ledges!'

'The Ledges: the greatest artifact in the world. Four generations of stone-masons and builders worked for more than a hundred years to complete the Ledges. Those who began it never saw the end. And they paved the shores of the bay below and built the dwellings for the priestesses and the women.'

'And Shardik, saiyett? How was he housed?'

'He was not. He went where he would. He roamed free — sometimes among the woods, sometimes on the Ledges. But the priestesses hunted for him, fed him and looked after him. That was their mystery.'

'But did he never kill?'

'Yes, sometimes he would kill - a priestess in the Singing, if such was God's will, or perhaps some over-bold suppliant who had approached him rashly or provoked him in some way. Also, he knew the truth in men's hearts and could tell when one was secrctly his enemy. When he killed he did so out of his own divining - we did not set him on to kill. Rather it was our mystery and our skill to tend him so that he did not. The Tuginda and her priestesses walked and slept near Shardik - this was their art, the wonder that men came to see, the wonder that gave Bekla its luck and mastery.' 'And was he mated?'

'Sometimes he was mated, but it did not have to be so. Whom God made Shardik was a matter of signs and omens, of His will rather than of human intent. Sometimes, indeed, the Tuginda would know that she must leave Quiso and go into the hills or the forest with her girls, to find and bring back a mate for Shardik. But again, he might live until he seemed to die, and then they would go to find him reborn and bring him home.'

'How?'

'They had ways of which we still know - or hope that we know, for they have been long unused - both drugs and other arts by which he could be controlled, though only for a little time. Yet none of these was sure. When the Power of God appears in earthly form, he cannot be driven here and there like a cow, or where would be the wonder and the awe? Always, with Shardik, there was uncertainty, danger and the risk of death: and that at least is one thing of which we can still be sure. Shardik requires of us all that we have, and from those who cannot offer so much freely, he may well take it by force.'

She paused, gazing unseeingly into the dark jungle, as though remembering the power and majesty of Shardik of the Ledges and his Tuginda long ago. At last Kelderek asked, 'But - those days came to an end, saiyett?'

'They came to an end. The full story I do not know. It was a sacrilege too vile to be fully known or spoken. All I can tell is that the Tuginda of that time betrayed Shardik and betrayed the people and herself. There was a man - no, not fit to be called a man, for who but one lost to God would dare to contrive such a thing? - a wandering slave-trader. She became - with him – ah!' - and here the Tuginda, overcome, stood silent, her body pressed back against the trunk of the quian, shuddering with disgust and horror. At lcngdi, recovering herself, she went on,

'He - he slew Shardik; and many of the sacred women also. The rest he and his men took for slaves, and she who had once been called Tuginda fled with him down the Telthearna. Perhaps they came to Zeray - perhaps to some other place - I cannot say - it does not greatly matter. God knew what they had done and He can always afford to wait.

'Then the enemies of Bekla rose up and attacked it and we were left without heart or courage to fight them. They took the city. The High Baron died at their hands and what was left of the people fled over the plain and the Gelt mountains to the shores of the

Telthearna, for they hoped that if they fled as suppliants to these islands, they might save at least their lives. So they crossed to Ortelga and broke up the causeway behind them. And their enemies left them there, to scratch in the earth and scavenge in the forest, for they had taken their city and their empire and it was not worth their while to attack desperate men in their last stronghold. Quiso too they left them, for they feared Quiso, even though it had become an empty, defiled place. Yet one thing they forbade. Shardik was never to return; and for a long time, until there was no more need, they kept watch to make sure of this.

'The years passed and we became an ignorant, impoverished people. Many Ortelgan craftsmen drifted away to sell their skill in richer places; and those who were left lost their cunning for lack of fine materials and wealthy custom. Now, we venture as far on the mainland as we dare and trade what resources we have - rope and skins - for what we can get from beyond. And the barons dig pits and post shendrons to keep themselves alive on a spit of jungle that no one else requires. Yet still the Tuginda, on her empty island, has work - believe me, Kelderek, she has work - the hardest. Her work is to wait. To be ready, always, for Shardik's return. For one thing has been plainly foretold, again and again, by every sign and portent known to the Tuginda and the priestesses - that one day Shardik will return.'

Kelderek stood for some time looking out towards the moonlit reeds. At length he said,

'And the Vessels, saiyett? You said that we were the Vessels.'

'I was taught long ago that God will bless all men by revealing a great truth through Shardik and through two chosen vessels, a man and a woman. But those vessels He will first shatter to fragments and then Himself fashion them again to His purpose.'

'What does this mean?'

'I don't know,' answered the Tuginda. 'But of this you can be sure, Kelderek Zenzuata. If this is indeed Lord Shardik, as I, like you, believe, then there will be good reason why you and none other have been chosen to find and to serve him — yes, even though you yourself cannot guess what that reason may be.'

'I am no warrior, saiyett. I -'

'It has never been foretold that Shardik's return will necessarily mean that power and rule is to be restored to the Ortelgans. Indeed, there is a saying, "God does not do the same thing twice." '

'Then, saiyett, if we find him, what are we to do?'

'Simply wait upon God,' she replied. 'If our eyes and cars are open in all humility, it will be shown us what we are to do. And you had better be ready, Kelderek, and submit yourself with a humble and honest heart, for the accomplishment of God's purpose may well depend upon that He can tell us nothing if we will not hear. If you and I are right, our lives will soon cease to be our own to do with as we will.'

She began to walk slowly back towards the fire and Kelderek walked beside her. As they readied it she clasped his hand. 'Have you the skill to track a bear?' 'It is very dangerous, saiyett, believe me. The risk -' 'We can only have faith. Your task will be to find the bear. As for me, I have learned in long years the mysteries of the Tuginda, but neither I nor any woman alive has ever performed them, nor ever seen them performed, in the presence of Lord Shardik. God's will be done.'

She was whispering, for they had passed the fire and were standing among the sleeping women.

'You must get some rest now, Kelderek,' she said, 'for we have much to do tomorrow.'

'As you say, saiyett. Shall I wake two of the girls? One alone may give way to fear.'

The Tuginda looked down at the breathing figures, their tranquillity seeming as light, remote and precarious as that of fish poised in deep water.

'Let the poor lasses rest,' she said. 'I will take the watch myself.'

10 The Finding of Shardik

As the sun rose higher and moved southward round the hill, the watery glitter from the reed-beds, reflected into the trees along the shore, was sifted upwards through the translucent leaves, to encounter at last and be dimmed by the direct rays penetrating among the higher branches. A green, faint light, twice-reflected, shone down from the under-sides of the leaves, speckling the bare ground between the tree trunks, placing the faintest of shadows beside fallen twigs, glistening in tiny points upon the domes of pebbles. Dappled by the continual movement of the sunlit water, the leaves seemed stirred as though by a breeze. Yet this apparent disturbance was an illusion: there was no wind, the trees were still in the heat and nothing moved except the river flowing outside. 68

Kelderek was standing near the shore, listening to the sounds from the jungle inland. He could tell that since his adventure of two days before - even since their landing the previous night - the confusion in the forest had lessened and the agitation of movement subsided. There were fewer cries of alarm, fewer stardings of birds and flights of monkeys through the trees. No doubt many of the fugitive creatures had already fallen prey to others. Of those surviving, most must have begun to move eastwards down the island in search of food and safety. Some, probably, had taken to the water again, making for the Telthearna's southern bank on the opposite side of the strait. He had seen prints here and there in the mud and narrow passages broken through the reeds. The thought came to him, 'Suppose he should be gone? Suppose he is no longer on the island?'

'We would be safe then,' he thought, 'and my life, like a stream after a cloudburst, would return between the banks where it ran two days ago.' He turned his head towards the Tuginda who, with Bel-ka-Trazet, was standing a little way off among the trees. 'But I could not become once more the man who fled from the leopard. Two days - I have lived two years! Even if I were to know that Shardik will kill me - and like enough he will - still I could not find it in my heart to pray that we should find him gone.'

The more he considered, however, the more he felt it probable that the bear was not far away. He recalled its clumsy, weary gait as it made off through the bushes and how it had winced in pain when it scraped its side against the tree. Huge and fearsome though it was, there had been something pitiable about the creature he had seen. If he were right and it had been hurt in some way, it would be more than dangerous to approach. He had better put out of his mind for the moment all thought of Shardik the Power of God, and address himself to the daunting task - surely sufficient to the day, if ever a task was - of finding Shardik the bear.

Returning to the Tuginda and the Baron, he told them how he read the signs of the forest. Then he suggested that for a start, they might go over the ground which he had covered two days before, and so come to the place where he had first seen the bear. He showed them where he had come ashore and how he had tried to slip unseen past the leopard and then to walk away from it. They made their way inland among the bushes, followed by Melathys and the girl Sheldra,

Since they had left the camp Melathys had spoken scarcely a word. Glancing behind him, Kelderek saw her drawn face, very pale in the heat, as she lifted a trembling hand to wipe the sweat from her temples. He felt full of pity for her. What work was this for a beautiful young woman, to take part in tracking an injured bear? It would have been better to have left her in the camp and to have brought a second girl from among the servants; one dour and stolid as Sheldra, who looked as though she would not notice a bear if it stood on her toe.

As they approached the foot of the hill he led the way through the thicker undergrowth to the place where he had wounded the leopard. By chance he came upon his arrow and, picking it up, fitted the notch to the string of the bow he was carrying. He drew the bow a little, frowning uneasily, for he disliked it and missed his own. This was the bow of one of the girls - too light and pliant: he might have saved himself the trouble of bringing it. He wondered what that surly fool Taphro had done with his bow. 'If ever we get back,' he thought, 'I'll ask the Baron to order it to be restored to me.'

They went on cautiously. 'This is where I fell, saiyett,' he whispered, 'and see, here are the marks the leopard made.'

'And the bear?’ asked the Tuginda, speaking as quietly as he.

'He stood below, saiyett,' replied Kelderek, pointing down the bank, 'but he did not need to reach up to strike the leopard. He struck sideways - thus.'

The Tuginda gazed down the extent of the steep bank, drew in her breath and looked first at Bel-ka-Trazet and then back at the hunter.

'Are you sure?' she asked.