When at last he lifted his head he at once caught sight, among the bushes close by, of an object so familiar that although it had been carefully concealed, he felt surprise not to have noticed it earlier. It was a trap--a wooden block-fall such as he himself had often set in days gone by. It was baited with carrion and dried fruit, but these had not been touched and the trip peg was still supporting the block.
The evening wanted no more than two hours to nightfall and, as well he knew, those who leave traps unvisited overnight are apt to find the next day that scavenging beasts have reached them first. He scratched out his footprints with a broken branch, climbed a tree and waited.
In less than an hour he heard the sounds of someone approaching. The man who appeared was dark, thickset and shaggy-haired, dressed partly in skins and partly in old, ragged garments. A knife and two or three arrows were stuck in his belt and he was carrying a bow. He bent down, peered at the trap under the bushes and was already turning away when Kelderek called to him. At this he started, drew his knife in a flash and vanished into the undergrowth. Kelderek realized that if he were not to lose him altogether he must take a risk. He scrambled to the ground, calling, "I beg you, don't go! I need help."
"What you want, then?" answered the man, invisible among the trees.
"Shelter--advice too. I'm a fugitive, exile--whatever you like. I'm in trouble."
"Who isn't? You're this side the Vrako, aren't you?"
"I'm unarmed. Look for yourself." He threw down the pack, raised his arms and turned one way and the other.
"Unarmed? Then you're mad." The man stepped out from the bushes and came up to him. He was indeed a ruffian of frightening appearance, swarthy and scowling, with a yellow, mucous discharge of the eyes and a scar from mouth to neck which reminded Kelderek of Bel-ka-Trazet.
"I'm in no state to play tricks or drive a bargain," said Kelderek. "This pack's full of food and nothing else. Take it and give me shelter for tonight."
The man picked up the pack, opened and looked into it, tossed it back to Kelderek and nodded. Then, turning, he set off in the direction from which he had come. After a time he said,
"No one after you?"
"Not since the Vrako."
They walked on in silence. Kelderek was struck by the complete absence of that friendly curiosity which usually finds a place in strangers' meetings. If the man wondered who he was, whence he had come and why, he evidently did not intend to ask; and there was that about him which made Kelderek think better of putting any questions on his own account. This, he realized, must be the nature of acquaintance in this country of shame for the past and hopelessness for the future--the courtesy of the prison and the madhouse. However, some kinds of question were apparently permissible, for after a time the man jerked out, "Thought what you're going to do?"
"Not yet--die, I dare say."
The man looked sharply at him and Kelderek realized that he had spoken amiss. Here men were like beasts at bay--defiant until they were torn to pieces. The whole country, like a brigands' cave, was divided into bullies and victims--the last place in which to speak of death, whether in jest or acceptance. Confused, and too weary to dissimulate, he said,
"I was joking. I've got a purpose, though I dare say that to you it may seem a strange one. I'm looking for a bear that's believed to be in these parts. If I could find it--"
He stopped, for the man, his mouth and jaw thrust forward, was staring at him from his oozing eyes with a mixture of fear and rage--the rage of one who attacks whatever he does not understand. He said nothing, however, and after a moment Kelderek stammered, "It--it's the truth. I'm not trying to make a fool of you--"
"Better not," answered the man. "So you're not alone, then?"
"I've never been more alone in my life."
The man drew his knife, seized him by the wrist and forced him to his knees. Kelderek looked up into the snarling, violent face.
"What's this about the bear, then? What you up to--what you know about the other one--the woman, eh?"
"What other one? For God's sake, I don't know what you mean!"
"Don't know what I mean?"
Panting, Kelderek shook his head and after a moment the man released him.
"Better come and see, then: better come and see. You mind now, I don't take to tricks."
They went on again, the man still clutching his knife and Kelderek half minded to run from him into the woods. Only his exhaustion held him back, for the man would probably pursue, overtake and perhaps kill him. They crossed a ridge and descended steeply toward a dreary, stagnant creek. Smoke hung in the trees. A patch of ground along the shore, cleared after a fashion, was littered with bones, feathers and other rubbish. At one side, too near the water, stood a lopsided, chimneyless hovel of poles, branches and mud. There were clouds of flies. Three or four skins were pegged out to dry, and some black birds--crows or rooks--were huddled in a wooden pen on the marshy ground. The place, like a song out of tune, seemed an offense against the world, for which the only possible remedy was obliteration.
The man again grasped Kelderek's wrist and half-led, half-dragged him toward the hut. A curtain of dusty skins hung across the entrance. The man jerked his head and gestured with his knife but Kelderek, stupid with fatigue, fear and disgust, did not understand that he was to enter first. The man, seizing his shoulder, pushed him so that he stumbled against the curtain. He pulled it aside, ducked his head and went in.
The walls surrounded a single, evil-smelling space, at the farther end of which a fire was smoldering. There was little light, for apart from the curtained door and a hole in the roof, through which some of the smoke escaped, there was no opening; at the farther end, however, he made out a human shape, wrapped in a cloak and sitting, back toward him, on a rough bench beside the fire. As he peered, bending forward and flinching from the knife at his back, the figure rose and turned to face him. It was the Tuginda.
40 Ruvit
SUDDENLY TO BE CONFRONTED with a shameful deed from the past, a deed accomplished yet uneffaced, like the ruins of a poor man's house destroyed by some selfish lord to suit his own convenience, or the body of an unwanted child cast up by the river on the shore: to stumble unexpectedly upon an accusation that no bravado can defy nor glib tongue turn aside; an accusation made not aloud, to the ears of the world, but quietly, face to face, without anger, perhaps even without speech, to one unprepared for the surge of his own confusion, guilt and regret. The harp of Binnorie named its murderess, and the two pretty babes in the ballad answered the cruel mother under her father's castle wall. Stones have been known to move and trees to speak. Yet never a word said Banquo's ghost. Though few can have touched a murdered corpse and seen the wounds burst open and bleed, yet many, coming alone upon old letters thrust into a drawer, have reread them weeping for pardon; or again, burning with self-contempt, have learned from chance remarks how unforgotten has been the misery, how crushing the disappointment brought by themselves upon those who never spoke of it. The deeply wronged, like ghosts, have no need to speak to their oppressors or accuse them before crowds. More terrible by far is their unexpected and silent reappearance in some secluded place, at some unguarded hour.
The Tuginda stood beside the bench, her eyes half-closed against the smoke. For some moments she did not recognize him. Then she started, jerking up her head. At the same instant Kelderek, with a sudden, sharp sob, thrust his hand between his teeth, turned and was already halfway through the entrance when he was pushed violently backward and fell to the ground. The man, knife in hand, was staring down at him, gnawing his lip and panting with a kind of feral excitement. This, Kelderek realized on the ghastly instant, was one to whom murder must once have been both trade and sport. In his clouded mind violence hung always, precarious as a sword by a hair; by another's fear or flight it was excited as uncontrollably as a cat by the scuttling of a mouse. This was some bandit survivor with a price on his head, some hired assassin who had outlived his usefulness to his employers
and run for the Vrako before the informer could turn him in. How many solitary wanderers had he killed in this place?
The man, bending over him, was breathing in low, rhythmic gasps. Kelderek, supporting himself on one elbow, tried in vain to return the maniac glare with a look of authority. As his eyes fell, the Tuginda spoke from behind him.
"Calm yourself, Ruvit! I know this man--he is harmless. You are not to hurt him."
"Hiding in the woods, talked about the bear. 'Up to tricks,' I thought, 'up to tricks. Make him go in, don't tell him anything, ah, that's it. Find out what he's up to, find out what he's up to--'"
"He won't hurt you, Ruvit. Come and make up the fire, and after supper I'll bathe your eyes again. Put your knife away."
She led the man gently to the fire, talking as though to a child, and Kelderek followed, not knowing what else to do. At the sound of her voice the tears had sprung to his eyes, but he brushed them away without a word. The man took no further notice of him and he sat down on a rickety stool, watching the Tuginda as she knelt to blow the fire, put on a pot and stirred it with a broken spit. Once she looked across at him, but he dropped his eyes; and when he looked up again she was busy over a clay lamp, which she trimmed and then lit with a kindled twig. The wan, single flame threw shadows along the floor and as darkness fell seemed less to brighten the squalid hut than to serve, with its guttering and wavering in the drafts that came through the ill-made walls, as a reminder of the defenselessness of all who might have the misfortune to be, like itself, solitary and conspicuous in this sad country.
She had aged, he thought, and had the look of one who had endured both loss and disappointment. Yet she was unextinguished--a fire burned low, a tree stripped by a winter gale. In this horrible place, beyond help or safety, alone with one man who had betrayed her and another who was half-crazy and probably a murderer, her authority asserted itself quietly and surely, in part as mundane as that of some shrewd, honest farmer talking with those whom he makes feel that it will be better not to try to cheat him. But beyond this open foreground of the spirit he could perceive, as he had perceived long ago--as he knew that even poor, murderous Ruvit could sense, in the same way that a dog is aware of the presence of joy or grief in a house--the deeper, more mysterious country of her strength. She was possessed of the immunity not only of priestess, pilgrim and doctor, but also of that conferred by the mystery whose servant she was--by the power which he had felt before ever he met her, when he had sat slumped in the canoe drifting down to Quiso in the dark. No wonder, he thought, that Ta-Kominion had died. No wonder that the headlong, fiery ambition which had blinded him to the strength in her had also poisoned him beyond recovery.
He began to consider the manner of his own death. Some, or so he had heard, had dragged out their lives beyond the Vrako until the prices on their heads and even the nature of their crimes had been forgotten and nothing but their own despair and addled wits prevented their return to towns where none was left who could recall what they had done. Such survival was not for him. Shardik, if only he could find him, would at last take the life which had been so often offered to him--would take his life before the contemptible desire to survive on any terms could transform him into a creature like Ruvit.