"How is it that I never learned
of the Streels in Bekla? I knew much, for men were paid to tell me all; yet this I never knew."
"Few know, and of them none would tell you."
"But you have told me!"
She began to weep once more. "Now I believe what Elleroth said to me at Kabin. I know why his men did not hurt Lord Shardik and why he spared your life also. No doubt he was not told that you yourself had not entered the Streel. He would indeed be insistent that your life must be spared, for once he knew that Lord Shardik--and you, as he supposed--had come alive from the Streels, he would know, too, that neither must be touched on pain of sacrilege. Shardik's death is appointed by God, and it is certain--certain!" She seemed exhausted with grief.
Kelderek took her hand.
"But saiyett, Lord Shardik is guilty of no evil."
She lifted her head, staring out over the dismal woods.
"Shardik has committed no evil." She turned and looked full into his eyes. "Shardik--no: Shardik has committed no evil!"
42 The Way to Zeray
WHERE THE TRACK WAS LEADING he did not know, or even whether it still ran eastward, for now the trees were thick and they followed it in half-light under a close roof of branches. Several times he was tempted to leave altogether the faint thread of a path and simply go downhill, find a stream and follow it--an old hunter's trick which, as he knew, often leads to a dwelling or village, though it may be with difficulty. But the Tuginda, he saw, would not be equal to such a course. Since resuming their journey she had spoken little and walked, or so it seemed to him, like one going where she would not. Never before had she appeared to him subdued in spirit. He recalled how, even on the Gelt road, she had stepped firmly and deliberately away down the hillside, as though undaunted by her shameful arrest at the hands of Ta-Kominion. She had trusted God then, he thought. She had known that God could afford to wait, and therefore so could she. Even before he himself had caged Shardik at the cost of Rantzay's life, the Tuginda had known that the time would come when she would be called once more to follow the Power of God. She had recognized, when it came, the day of Shardik's liberation from the imprisonment to which he himself had subjected him. What she had not foreseen was Urtah--the destination ordained for the bloody beast-god of the Ortelgans, in whose name his followers had--
Unable to bear these thoughts, he flung up his head, striking one hand against his brow and slashing at the bushes with his stick. The Tuginda seemed not to notice his sudden violence, but walked slowly on as before, her eyes on the ground.
"In Bekla," he said, breaking their silence, "I felt many times that I was close to a great secret to be revealed through Lord Shardik--a secret which would show men at last the meaning of their lives on earth, how to safeguard the future, how to be secure. We would no longer be blind and ignorant, but God's servants, knowing how He meant us to live. Yet though I suffered much, both waking and sleeping, I never learned that secret."
"The door was locked," she answered listlessly.
"It was I who locked it," he said, and so fell silent once more.
Late in the afternoon, emerging at last from the woods, they came to a miserable hamlet of three or four huts beside a stream. Two men who could not understand him, but muttered to each other in a tongue he had never heard, searched him from head to foot but found nothing to steal. They would have handled and searched the Tuginda also had he not seized one by the wrist and flung him aside. Evidently they thought that whatever chance of gain there might be was not worth a fight, for they stood back, cursing, or so it seemed, and gesturing to him to be off. Before the Tuginda and he had gone a stone's throw, however, a gaunt, ragged woman came running after them, held out a morsel of hard bread and, smiling with blackened teeth, pointed back toward the huts. The Tuginda returned her smile, accepting the invitation with no sign of fear and he, feeling that it mattered little what might befall him, made no objection. The woman, scolding shrilly at the two men standing a little distance off, seated her guests on a bench outside one of the huts and brought them bowls of thin soup containing a kind of tasteless gray root that crumbled to fibrous shreds in the mouth. Two other women gathered and three or four rickety, potbellied children, who stared silently and seemed to lack the energy to shout or scuffle. The Tuginda thanked the woman gravely in Ortelgan, kissing their filthy hands and smiling at each in turn. Kelderek sat as he had sat the night before, lost in his thoughts and only half-aware that the children had begun to teach her some game with stones in the dust. Once or twice she laughed and the children laughed too, and by and by one of the surly men came and offered him a clay bowl full of weak, sour wine, first drinking himself to show there was no harm. Kelderek drank, gravely pledging his host; then watched the moon rise and later, invited into one of the huts, once more lay down to sleep upon the ground.
Waking in the night, he went out and saw another man sitting cross-legged beside a low fire. For a time he sat beside him without speaking, but at length, as the man bent forward to thrust one end of a fresh branch into the glow, he pointed toward the nearby stream and said, "Zeray?" The man nodded and, pointing to him, repeated, "Zeray?" and, when he nodded in his turn, laughed shortly and mimicked one in flight looking behind him for pursuers. Kelderek shrugged his shoulders and they said no more, each sitting by the fire until daybreak.
There was no path beside the stream and the Tuginda and he followed its course with difficulty through another tract of forest, from which it came out to plunge in a series of falls down a rocky hillside. Standing on the brow, he looked out over the plain below. Some miles away on their left the mountains still ran eastward. Following the chain with his eye he glimpsed, far off in the east, a thin, silver streak, dull and constant in the sunlight. He pointed to it.
"That must be the Telthearna, saiyett."
She nodded, and after a few moments he said, "I doubt whether Lord Shardik will ever reach it. And if we cannot trace him when we get there, I suppose we shall never know what became of him."
"Either you or I," she answered, "will find Lord Shardik again. I saw it in a dream."
After gazing intently for a little toward the southeast, she began to lead the way downhill among the tumbled boulders.
"What did you see, saiyett?" he asked when next they rested.
"I was looking for some trace of Zeray," she replied, "but of course there is nothing to be seen from so far." And he, acquiescing in the misunderstanding--whether deliberate on her part or otherwise--questioned her no further of Shardik.
From the foot of the hillside there stretched a wide marsh that mired them to the knees as they continued to follow the stream among pools and reed-clumps. Kelderek began to entertain a kind of fancy that he, like one in an old tale, was bewitched and changing, not swiftly, but day by day, from a man to an animal. The change had begun at the Vrako and continued imperceptibly until now, when he wandered like a beast in a field, pent within land not of his own choosing and where neither places nor people had names. The power of speech was gradually leaving him too, so that already he was able through long, waking hours, not only to be silent, but also actually to think nothing, his human awareness retracted to the smallest of points, like the pupil of a cat's eye in sunlight; while his life, continued by the sufferance of others, had become a meaningless span of existence before death. And more immediate to him now than any human regret or shame were simply the sores and other painful places beneath the sweat-stiffened hide of his clothes.
Crossing the marsh after some hours, they came at last upon a track and then to a village, the only one he had seen east of the Vrako, and the poorest and most wretched he could remember. They were resting a short distance outside it when a man carrying a faggot of brushwood passed them and Kelderek, leaving the Tuginda sitting beside the track, overtook him and asked once more the way to Zeray. The man pointed southeastward, answering in Beklan, "About half a day's journey: you'll not get there before dark." Then, in a lower tone and glancing across at the Tuginda, he added, "Poor old woman--the likes o
f her to be going to Zeray!" Kelderek must have glanced sharply at him for he added quickly, "No business of mine--she don't look well, that's all. Touch of fever, maybe," and at once went on his way with his burden, as though afraid that he might already have said too much in this country where the past was sharp splinters embedded in men's minds and an ill-judged word a false step in the dark.
They had hardly reached the first huts, the Tuginda leaning heavily upon Kelderek's arm, when a man barred their way. He was dirty and unsmiling, with blue tattoo marks on his cheeks, and the lobe of one ear pierced by a bone pin as long as a finger. He resembled none that Kelderek could remember to have seen among the multiracial trading throngs of Bekla. Yet when he spoke it was in a thick, distorted Beklan, one word making do for another.
"You walk from?"
Kelderek pointed northwestward, where the sun was beginning to set.
"High places trees? All through you walk?"
"Yes, from beyond the Vrako. We're going to Zeray. Let me save you trouble," said Kelderek. "We've nothing worth taking, and this woman, as you can see, is no longer young. She's exhausted."
"Sick. High places trees much sick. Not sit down here. Go away."
"She's not sick, only tired. I beg you--"
"Not sit down," shouted the man fiercely. "Go away!"
The Tuginda was about to speak to him when suddenly he turned his head and uttered a sharp cry, at which other men began to appear from among the huts. The tattooed man shouted, "Woman sick," in Beklan, and then broke into some other language, at which they nodded, responding, "Ay! ay!" After a few moments the Tuginda, relinquishing Kelderek's arm, turned and began walking slowly back up the track. He followed. As he reached her side a stone struck her on the shoulder, so that she staggered and fell against him. A second stone pitched into the dust at their feet and the next struck him on the heel. Shouting had broken out behind them. Without looking around, he bowed his head against the falling stones, put his arm around the Tuginda's shoulders and half-dragged, half-carried her back in the direction from which they had come.