Turning aside, he tore a handful of leaves from a bush and began to eat them. After a moment Kelderek copied him. The leaves were sour and fibrous and he chewed them voraciously.
"Come on! Come on!" bawled Shouter, slapping at the surface of the shallows with his stick. "Get on your mucking feet! Linsho--that's where the grub is, not here!"
Radu stood up, swayed a moment and stumbled against Kelderek.
"It's the hunger," he said. "It'll pass off in a moment." He called to Shara, who came running, with a long strip of colored weed wound like a torque around one thin arm. "If there's one thing I've learned, it's that hunger's a form of torture. If there's more food for overseers than slaves when we get to Linsho, I might become an overseer yet. Cruelty and evil--they're not very far down in anyone. It's only a matter of digging them up, you know."
51 The Gap of Linsho
LATER, IN THE AFTERNOON, they came to a wide bend in the river and Genshed once more struck inland to cut across the peninsula. The humid heat of the forest became a torment. The children, some of whom lacked energy even to brush the flies from their faces, were ordered to come close together and each to grasp his neighbor's shoulder, so that they inched onward like some ghastly pack of purblind cripples, many keeping closed their insect-blackened eyes. The boy in front of Kelderek kept up a low, rhythmic sobbing--" Ah-hoo! Ah-hoo!"--until at length Bled flew at him, uttering a stream of curses and jabbing at his legs with the point of his stick. The boy fell, bleeding, and Genshed was forced to call a halt while he stanched his wounds. This done, he sat down with his back against a tree, whistling through his teeth and rummaging in the depths of his pack.
On an impulse, Kelderek went up to him.
"Can you tell me why you've taken me prisoner and how much you hope to get out of it? I can promise you a large sum to release me--more than you'd get for selling me as a slave."
Genshed did not look up and made no reply. Kelderek bent down, stooping over the slave trader's sandy hair and speaking more urgently.
"You can believe what I say. I'm offering you more than you could get for me in any other way. I'm not what I seem. Tell me how much you want, to let me go."
Genshed closed his pack and rose slowly to his feet, wiping his sweating hands along his thighs. Some of the children nearby looked up, waiting apprehensively for the snap of his fingers. He did not look at Kelderek, who had the odd impression that he heard and did not hear him, as a man might ignore a dog's barking while deep in thoughts of his own affairs.
"You can believe me," persisted Kelderek. "At Ortelga, which I suppose you mean to pass, I--"
Suddenly, with the speed of a fish taking its prey, Genshed's hand shot upward and gripped the pierced lobe of Kelderek's ear between finger and thumb. As his thumbnail dug into the wound Kelderek shrieked and tried to clutch his wrist. Before he could do so, the slave dealer drove his knee into his groin, at the same time releasing his ear to allow him to double up and fall to the ground. Then, stooping, he picked up his pack, put his arms through the straps and hoisted it behind his shoulders.
Two or three of the children tittered uncertainly. One threw a stick at Kelderek. Genshed, still with an air of abstraction, snapped his fingers and, as the children began pulling one another up and Shouter set up his usual bawling, walked away to the head of the line and nodded for the first boy to lay hold of his belt.
Kelderek opened his eyes to find Shara looking down at him.
"He hurt you, didn't he?" she said, speaking in a kind of Yeldashay patois.
He nodded and climbed heavily to his feet.
"He hurts us all," she said. "One day he's going away. Radu told me."
Pain and hunger swirled in him as stirred mud clouds a pool.
"Radu told me," she repeated. "Here's a red stone, look, and I've got a blue one, kind of a blue one. Are you hungry? You find caterpillars, can you? Radu finds caterpillars."
Shouter came up, took hold of Kelderek's hand and put it on Radu's shoulder in front of him.
An hour later they regained the shore and halted for the night. Kelderek found that he could form little idea of how far they might have gone during the day. Ten miles at the most, he supposed. Tomorrow Genshed meant to pass the Gap of Linsho. Would there be food, and would they rest? Surely Genshed could see that they must rest. Hunger closed down upon his mind as rain blots out the view across a plain. His thoughts, sliding like wet fingers, could compass nothing. Would there be food at Linsho? Would there, for a time, be no more shuffling, no more stooping to free the chain? Genshed might refrain from hurting him at Linsho, the pain in his finger would grow less. These were things to hope for--but he must try to look beyond these--consider--must consider what was best to be done--
"What are you thinking?" asked Radu.
Kelderek tried to laugh, and tapped his head.
"Where I was born, they used to say, 'You can tap on the wood, but will the insects run out?'"
"Where was that?"
He hesitated. "Ortelga. But it doesn't matter now."
After a pause, Radu said, "If ever you get back there--"
"All the way, underground," said Kelderek.
"You know what we mean when we say that?"
Shara came running toward them along the bank. She took Radu's hand, chattering faster than Kelderek could understand and pointing in the direction she had come from. A little way off, a thick tangle of creepers, covered with gaudy, trumpetlike flowers, hung like a curtain between the shore and the forest. Looking where Shara pointed, they saw that the whole mass was tremulous, shaking slightly but rapidly, vibrant with some strange, unexplained energy of its own. There was no bird or beast to be seen, yet along an expanse as broad as a hut wall the leaves and blooms quivered spasmodically and the long tendrils undulated with a kind of light, quick violence. The little girl, frightened yet fascinated, stared from behind Radu's shoulder. One or two of the other children gathered about them, also gazing curiously. Radu himself was plainly uncertain whether some strange creature might not be about to appear.
Kelderek picked the little girl up in his arms.
"There's nothing to be afraid of," he said. "I'll show you, if you like. It's only a hunting mantis--several, probably."
Radu followed them along the bank. At close quarters the flowers of the creeper gave off a heavy fragrance and great moths, their dark blue wings broad as the palm of a man's hand, were coming and going in the dusky air. High up, beneath an open bloom, one of these was struggling in the grip of a mantis crouched for prey among the flowers. They could see the long, crural shape of the insect half-hidden in the leaves, its front legs clutching the moth, which it had evidently seized as it hovered at the bloom. Its head turned this way and that with an eerie suggestion of intelligence as it followed the frenzied tugging of its victim, so violent that both the mantis and the surrounding creeper to which it was clinging were shaken in a rhythm light and rapid as the beating of the wings themselves. As often as the moth weakened, the mantis would pull it toward its jaws and again the struggle would break out. As Kelderek and Shara watched, a second moth was caught beneath a bloom some yards away, but after a few seconds tore itself clear, the mantis, as its hold was broken, being jerked forward among the leaves below its perch. Meanwhile the first moth faltered, its beautiful wings ceased at last to beat and in an instant the mantis had pulled it in and begun to devour it. The severed wings, first one and then the other, fluttered to the ground.
"Come back out of there, damn you!" cried Shouter, striding toward them along the bank. "What the hell d'you think you're doing?"
"Don't worry," answered Radu, as they returned and joined the other children already crowding around Shouter for their handfuls of food. "We'd hardly get far, you know."
Darkness fell and the children, lying down for the night, were once more chained through the ears. Kelderek, separated from Radu as before, found himself at the inner end of a chain, on one side of him Shouter himself and on the other the child
who had been savaged by Bled during the afternoon. In the dark the latter resumed his steady, monotonous sobbing, but Shouter, if he heard, presumably thought that no entertainment could be derived from trying to stop him. After a time Kelderek stretched out his hand to the boy, but he only shrank away and, after a few moments' silence, began to sob more loudly. Still Shouter said nothing and Kelderek, afraid of what he might do and too much exhausted and dispirited to persevere with his clumsy attempts at comfort, let his pity and the other fragments of his thoughts dissolve into sleep while the mosquitoes, unhindered, fastened on his limbs.
The old woman of Gelt came hobbling slowly up the shore, her rags speckled in the half-moon's light, her feet noiseless on the stones. Kelderek watched her approach, puzzled at first but then, recognizing her, acquiescent in the knowledge that she was the creature of a dream. Gently, she drew the chain from his ear and he even seemed to feel the pain as the links passed one by one through the inflamed, tender lobe. Then she remained kneeling above him, looking down and mumbling with her sunken mouth.
"Think no one sees, they think no one sees," she whispered. "But God sees."
"What is it, grandmother?" asked Kelderek. "What happened?"
She was carrying the dead child in her arms, as she had carried it years before, but now it was closely wrapped, muffled from head to foot. It was nothing but a shape under her cloak.
"I'm looking for the governor-man from Bekla," she said. "I'm going to tell him--only it's a long time now--"
"You can tell me," he said. "I'm the governor-man from Bekla and all this misery is my doing, all of it."
"Ah," she said. "Ah. Bless you, sir, bless you. Look here, sir, yes, at that rate you'll want to."
She laid her burden on the ground. The wrappings were fastened at the head with the chain from his ear, but this she unwound, coiling it away and drawing apart the covering round the face.
The eyes were closed, the cheeks lusterless and waxen; but the dead child lying on the stones was Melathys. Her lips were a little apart, but nothing stirred the leaf which the old woman held to them. Weeping, he looked up, and saw under her ragged hood that she was Rantzay.
"She's not dead, Rantzay!" he cried. "Wake her, Rantzay, you must wake her!"
Rantzay made no reply, and as her lean fingers grasped and shook his shoulder he understood that she too was dead. He writhed away from her, filled with a dreadful sense of loss and desolation.