"Won't the village be watched? That's why I dodged it."
"We got to try it, Gensh."
"We'll take the boy."
"I don't like thot. I'm wanted man in Deelguy, you know. I don't want onnybody see oss, maybe they gotting to know who the boy is, find out we're slave dealers, you know? It's not legal in Deelguy."
Genshed said nothing.
"Gensh, I'm hurt drodful bad. You my friend, Gensh, you stick by me? You holp me?"
"Yes, of course I'll help you, don't worry."
"No, but you swear it, Gensh? Swear you're my friend, swear you stick by me, holp me always, yoss? Please swear it, Gensh."
Genshed stepped across and clasped his hand.
"I swear I'll be your friend, Lalloc, and I'll stand by you, so help me God."
"Oh, thonk God, Gensh, thonk God I meeting you. We gotting safe all right. We sleep a time now, eh, but roddy we go fost thing what it's daylight. No time to lose, you know."
He wrapped himself clumsily in his cloak, lay down beside the fire and seemed at once to drop, almost to disappear into sleep, like a stone thrown into a pool.
Kelderek turned to crawl away in the darkness, but the pupils of his eyes, contracted by the light of the fire, admitted not the least image from the night about him. He waited, and as he did so realized that not only did he not know where he could go, but that it mattered nothing. Genshed would not sleep--of this he felt sure. He could either crawl away, weaponless, into the forest, to starve until the soldiers found him, or remain to await the will of Genshed at daylight. Should an ox in the abattoir choose to go to the right or the left? "We'll take the boy." But Genshed would not take him, Kelderek, across the Telthearna--there would be no profit to him in doing so. If he did not kill him, he would leave him on the shore to await the soldiers.
A horrible despair seized him, as a beast its prey, and a panic fear--the fear of one who knows that all he has dreaded is even now at hand and inescapable, that the door is fast and the water rising. Standing up, he stretched out his arms, peering into the blackness as he tried to make out the shapes of the ruins about him. One he could perceive--a dark mass to his right, low but just discernible against what appeared to be a gap in the trees. He stooped, and then knelt, to try to see it more clearly against the sky. As he stared, it moved, and at the same moment there came to his nostrils a smell that brought back instantly the straw, the smoky torches and brick-filled arcades of the King's House in Bekla--the rank, fetid smell of the bear.
For long moments it seemed to Kelderek that he must be already dead. The pool and the trepsis he had accepted as a portent of his death. That Genshed knew who he was--had known him from the first--and meant, if occasion offered, to profit by delivering him up to death--this had struck him full of that sense of helplessness which always accompanies the discovery that what we thought was hidden has, in fact, been known all along to our enemy. Now, in this, his last extremity, unseen, unheard, Shardik had appeared out of the miles of forest--Shardik, whom he himself had seen far to the south three days before. To wonder whether he was come in vengeance or in pity did not occur to Kelderek. Simply the terror of the incredible flooded his broken mind.
Again the dark bulk moved against the sky, and now a low growl showed that it was close--closer than it had seemed--only a few strides away. Kelderek, starting back against the wall of the slave traders' shelter, covered his face with his hands, whimpering with dread.
As he did so, a terrible shriek came from within. Another followed, and another; curses, blows, the thudding of some heavy object knocked over, convulsive struggling and finally a long, choking moan. The cloak fastened across the opening was ripped aside and the firelight gleamed out, showing for a moment two red, glowing eyes in the darkness and a great, black shape that turned and shambled away, disappearing between the ruined walls. Then silence returned, broken only by a dragging, jerking sound that finally ceased, and the labored breathing of one who finished his work by fastening once more the cloak across the doorway. The firelight was shut in and Kelderek, conscious of nothing save that Shardik was gone and he himself alive, crept into the first crevice he found and lay there, not knowing whether he slept or woke.
54 The Cloven Rock
BENEATH THE FIRST LIGHT creeping into the sky, the river shone a dull, turbid gray, the surface smooth, its flow imperceptible from that height at which the migrant geese flew on their northward journey. South of Linsho Gap the forest lay motionless, clothing like a shaggy pelt the body of the earth from which it grew. As yet no darting of birds disturbed the stillness. No breeze moved, no reflection of light glittered from the trees. The wings of the great butterflies were folded close.
Here and there the forest pelt was matted brown with clusters of old, dead creeper that had twined and climbed, before dying, through even the topmost tiers; here and there, as though eaten away and mangy, it lay open, showing the dirty skin beneath, callused with rocks, suppurating with bog, scurfy with thorn and scrub, in its illness supporting, like a dying ape full of maggots, an ugly, wriggling life, futile in its involuntary course toward death. In one such open place the gray light revealed a scabby crust, the remains of older, deeper wounds: tumbled stones, broken walls, boulders encircling a pool at the foot of a rock bare as a protruding bone. This crust, too, was crawling with stumbling, filthy creatures--human children--creeping out of the scabs like bugs from wood, moving aimlessly here and there, disgusting in their torpor and misery, inviting cruelty, so plainly were they created helpless in order that they might be the more easily destroyed. Soon the huge creature upon whose body they crawled and fed would feel them as an irritation, scratch itself and crush out their meaningless lives.
The body of Lalloc lay prone outside the doorway from which he had staggered with Genshed's knife in his back. The feet had tripped upon the step and the knees, buckling, had been pressed into the soft earth by the force of the corpulent body's fall. The arms were stretched forward, one along the ground, palm down and fingers digging into the soil, the other sticking up like a swimmer's, but stiffened in death. The head was twisted sideways and the mouth open. Two stabs had almost cut away the left cheek, which hung down below the chin in a ragged flap, exposing the clenched and splintered teeth. The clothes were so much drenched in blood, old and new, that they retained scarcely any other color.
Genshed was kneeling beside the pool, rinsing his arms in the water and cleaning under his nails with the point of his knife. His pack lay open on the ground behind him and from it he had taken two or three ankle chains. These he retained, but various other pieces of gear he threw to one side, evidently meaning to abandon them. Having closed the lightened pack and slung it on his back, he strung his bow, stuck five or six arrows into his belt and then picked up the still-smoldering fire pot, which he replenished by poking in moss and green twigs.
His movements were silent and from time to time he paused uneasily, listening, in the half-light, to the sounds of the awakening forest. When at length he heard a faint noise of footsteps in the undergrowth beyond the pool, he at once moved quickly aside and, with an arrow on the string, was already waiting in concealment when Shouter stepped out from among the trees.
Genshed lowered his bow and walked across to where the boy stood staring at the dead body on the ground. Shouter turned, started and backed away, one hand raised to his mouth.
"Tried to have a walk in the night, Shouter, did you?" said Genshed, almost whispering. "See any soldiers, did you? See any soldiers, Shouter?"
It was plain that Shouter was half-stupefied, either with fear, hunger, lack of sleep, or all three. Though trying to reply, for some moments he uttered nothing intelligible. At length he said, "All right, then; but I come back, didn't I? I want to mucking live, don't I?"
"So that's why you came back?" said Genshed, looking at him with a kind of pausing curiosity.
"Course I come back," cried Shouter. "In the forest--out there--" He stopped, pointing. "That's no living creat
ure," he burst out. "It's come for you--it's been sent for you--" He pitched forward to his knees. "It wasn't me that killed Kevenant. You did that." He broke off, looking quickly back over his shoulder. "That thing--that creature--if it is a creature and not a devil--it was bigger than that rock, I tell you. It shook the mucking ground walking. I nearly come against it in the dark. God, I ran!"
"So that's why you came back?" repeated Genshed, after a pause.
Shouter nodded. Then, getting slowly to his feet, he looked around at the body and said indifferently, "You killed him, then?"
"No good to us, was he?" said Genshed. "Get caught in his company, that'd finish everything, that would. I got his money, though. Come on, get them up, get them moving."
"You're taking them?" asked Shouter, surprised. "For God's sake, why don't we just run, wherever it is?"
"Get them up," repeated Genshed. "Get a chain on the lot of them, wrist to wrist, and keep them quiet while you're doing it."
His domination filled the place like floodwater, uprooting or drowning all other wills. Those children who, dizzy with hunger and privation, had spent the night in the ruins and now, unable to conceive of flight or hiding, obeyed Shouter as they had obeyed him for so long, felt pouring from Genshed, as they tottered into the open, a yet more evil power than he had yet displayed. Now, in the collapse of his fortunes, his cruelty released from the restraints formerly imposed by the hope of gain, he walked among them with an eager, bright-eyed excitement from which they shrank horrified. Kelderek, crawling from the crevice where he had lain, felt this same power draw him first to his feet and then, with faltering steps, to the edge of the pool, where Genshed stood awaiting him. Knowing Genshed's will, he stood silent while Shouter chained him, shackling him by the wrist to a lank-haired boy whose eyes went continually to and fro. This boy, in turn, was chained to another, and so on until all had been fastened together. Kelderek wondered neither why Shouter had returned nor how Lalloc had come to his end. Such things, he realized now, had no need of explanation. They and all else in the world--hunger, illness, misery and pain--came to pass by the will of Genshed.