Lalloc paused in drinking, looking over the top of the wine-skin with raised eyebrows and reflective eyes. Then the wine slopped in its hollow cavern as he shook his head and the skin together.
'That's King Crendrik, that is,' said Genshed. 'Him that used to be the priest-king of Bekla. Him with the bear.'
Lalloc nearly dropped the wine-skin, caught it just in time and lowered it in slow amazement.
'Found him lying senseless in a swamp thirty mile south of here,* said Genshed. 'Don't know how he came there, but I recognized him all right. 'Seen him in Bekla, same as you have. Well, he won't run. He knows the Ikats are out to kill him.' Lalloc stared questioningly.
'It's like this, you see,' said Genshed, stabbing at the fire. 'I'm sharp. I keep him and the boy – leave the rest, but keep those two at all costs. Well now, we know the Ban of Sarkid's fighting for the Ikats. If ever the Ortelgans was to catch me – I got no licence, remember -I can tell them I've got the Ban's son, hand him over to them, very likely they'll be so pleased they'll let me go. But if the Ikats catch us, I can give them Crendrik. Same thing – they'd be glad to get him, 'might let us go. Crendrik's got no other value, of course, but the boy's got plenty if only we can get away. The way the luck's turned out, we look more like being caught by the Ikats than the Ortelgans, so I'm hanging on to Crendrik.' 'Butif the Ikats cotch you with the boy, Gensh?'
'They won't,' said Genshed. 'I'll sec to that. They won't catch me with a single child – or find the bodies, either.'
He stood up brusquely, broke two or three branches across his knee and fed the fire. Kelderek could hear the back of Shara's head thud against the cobbles as she tossed and cried in her sleep.
'What's the scheme, then?' asked Genshed presently. 'How d'you reckon to cross the Telthearna?'
'Well, it's a big rosk, Gensh, but it's only chonce we got. We got to try it, olse we're for the Ikats all right. Down below here there's a vullage – Tissarn they call it – fishing vullage – by the ruwer, you know.' 'I know -I came inland yesterday to avoid it.'
'Woll, vorry soon as day we leave owrything – go straight down there, we find some man, I pay him all I got, he govv us canoe, boat, something, before the Ikats come. We go across, gotting to Deelguy. Current's strong, we go down long way, all the same we gotting across. Onnyway we got to try it.' '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 sec oss, maybe they gotting to know who the boy is, find out we're slave-dealers, you know? It's not legal in Dcelguy.' 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 sec 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, foetid 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 laboured 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 grey, 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, calloused 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 towards death. In one such open place the grey 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 fives. 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 colour.
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.
