Shardik

'You need not wake your mistress,' said Bel-ka-Trazet. 'Take your watch now and be ready for us to return.'

'Should we not be armed, my lord?' asked Kelderek. 'Shall I get a bow?'

'This will do,' replied the Baron, plucking the girl's knife from her belt and striding away into the starlight.

It was easy going to the river, following the course of the brook over the dry, open grass. Bel-ka-Trazet walked with the help of a long thumb-stick which Kelderek remembered to have seen him trimming the evening before. Soon they could hear the night-breeze hissing faintly in the reeds. The Baron paused, gazing about him. Near the water the grass grew long and the girls, in dragging the canoes, had trampled a path through it. This Bel- ka-Trazet and Kelderek followed from the shore to the trees. They found only three canoes, each stowed carefully and covered by the low branches. Near them, a single furrow ran back towards the river. Kelderek crouched down over it. The torn earth and crushed grass smelt fresh and some of the weeds were still slowly moving as they re- erected their flattened leaves.

Bel-ka-Trazet, leaning on his stick like a goat-herd, stood looking out over the river. There was a smell of ashes on the breeze but nothing to be seen. 'That girl had some sense,' he said at length. 'No bear for her.'

Kelderek, who had been hoping against hope that he might be proved wrong, felt a dreary disappointment; an anguish like that of a man who, having been robbed, reflects how easily all might have been prevented; and a sense of personal betrayal by one whom he had admired and honoured, which he knew better than to try to express to the Baron. Why could Melathys not have asked him to help her? She had turned out, he thought sorrowfully, like some beautiful, ceremonial weapon, all fine inlay and jewels, which proved to have neither balance nor cut. 'But where has she gone, my lord? Back to Quiso?'

'No, nor to Ortelga, for she knows they would kill her. We'll never see her again. She'll end in Zeray. A pity, for she could have done more than I to persuade the girls to go home. As it is, we've simply lost a canoe; and one or two other things as well, I dare say.'

They began to make their way back beside the brook. The Baron walked slowly, jabbing with his stick at the turf, like one turning something over in his mind. After a time he said, 'Kelderek, you were watching me when I first looked down into the pit yesterday. No doubt you saw that I was afraid.'

Kelderek thought, 'Does he mean to kill me?' 'When I first saw the bear, my lord,' he answered, 'I threw myself on the ground for fear. I -' Bel-ka-Trazet raised a hand to silence him.

'I was afraid, and I am afraid now. Yes, afraid for myself – to be dead may be nothing, yet who relishes the business of dying? -but afraid for the people also, for there will be many fools like you; and women, too, perhaps, as foolish as those up there,' and he swung the point of his stick towards the camp.

After a little, 'Do you know how I came by my pretty looks?' he asked suddenly. And then, as Kelderek said nothing, 'Well, do you know or not?' 'Your disfigurement, my lord? No – how should I know?' 'How should I know what tales are told in the pot-houses of Ortelga?*

'I'm something of a stranger to those, my lord, as you know, and if there is a tale, I never heard it.'

'You shall hear it now. Long ago, while I was still little more than a lad, I used to go out with the Ortelgan hunters – now with one and now with another, for my father was powerful and could require it of them. He wanted me to learn both what hunting teaches lads and what hunters can teach them; and I was ready enough to learn on my own account. I travelled far from Ortelga. I have crossed the mountains of Gelt and hunted the long-horned buck on the plains south-west of Kabin. And I have crossed to Deelguy and stood two hours up to my neck in the lake of Klamsid to net the golden cranes at dawn.'

They had reached the lower end of a pool into which the brook came down in a little fall something higher than a man. On either side extended a steep bank, and beside the pool a melikon stretched its trim, crisp-leaved branches over the water. This is the tree that the peasants call 'False Lasses'. The bright, pretty berries that follow the flowers are unfit to eat and of no use, but towards summer's end their colour turns to a glinting, powdery gold and they fall of their own accord in the stillest of air. Bel-ka-Trazet stooped, drank from his hands and then sat down with his back against the bank and the long stick upright between his raised knees. Kelderek sat uneasily beside him. Afterwards, he remembered the harsh voice, the slow turning of the stars, the sound of the water and now and again the light plop as a berry fell into the pool.

'I have hunted with Durakkon, and with Senda-na-Say. I was with the Barons of Ortelga thirty years ago, when we hunted the Blue Forest of Katria as the guests of the king of Terekenalt and killed the leopard they called the Blacksmith. That was King Karnat, who was almost a giant. We were merry after the hunt and we weighed him against the Blacksmith; but the Blacksmith turned the scale. The Barons were pleased with the part I had played in the hunt and they gave me the Blacksmith's eye-teeth: but I gave them to a girl later. Yes,' said Bel-ka-Trazet reflectively, 'I gave them to a girl who used to be glad to sec my face.

'Well, it's no matter, lad, what I've seen or known, though I sit here bragging to the stars that saw it long ago and can tell the truth from the lies. By the time I had become a young man there was not a baron or a hunter in Ortelga who was not eager and proud to hunt with me. I hunted with whom I would and declined company that I thought too poor for the name I had made for myself. I was -ah I -' He broke off, thumping the butt of his stick on the grass -'You have heard old, wrinkled women round a fire, have you, talking of their lovers and their beauty?

'One day a lord from Bekla, one Zilkron of the Arrows, came to visit my father with presents. This Zilkron had heard of my father in Bekla – how he drew the best hunters about him and of the skill and courage of his son. He gave my father gold and fine cloth; and the heart of it was that he wanted us to take him hunting. My father did not fancy this soap-using lord from Bekla but, like all the flea-bitten barons of Ortelga, he could not afford to refuse gold; so he said to me, 'Come, my lad, we'll take him across the Telthearna and find him one of the great, savage cats. That should send him home with a tale or two.' '

'Now the truth was that my father knew less than he supposed about the great cats – the cats that weigh twice as much as a man, kill cattle and alligators and rip open the shells of turtles when they come ashore to lay their eggs. The plain truth is that they are too dangerous to hunt, unless one traps them. By this time I knew what could and could not be done and did not need to prove to myself that I was no coward. But I did not want to tell my father that I knew better than he. So I began to think how I could best go to work behind his back to save our lives.

'We crossed the Telthearna and began by hunting the green-and-black water-serpents, the leopard-killers, that grow to four or five times the length of a man. Have you hunted them?' 'Never, my lord,' replied Kelderek.

'They are found by night, near rivers, and they are fierce and dangerous. They have no poison, but kill by crushing. We were resting by day, so that I spent much idle time with Zilkron. I came to know him well, his pride and vanity, his splendid weapons and equipment which he did not know how to use, and his trick of capping hunters' talk with tales he had heard elsewhere. And always I worked on him to make him think that the great cats were not worth his while and that he would do better to hunt some other beast. But he was no coward and no fool and soon I saw that I would have to pay some real price to change his mind, for he had come of set purpose to buy danger of which he could go home and boast in Bekla. At last I spoke of bears. What trophy, I asked, could compare with a bearskin, head and claws and all? Inwardly I knew that the danger would still be great, but at least I knew of bears that they are not constantly savage and that they have poor sight and can sometimes be confused. Also, in rocky or hilly country you can sometimes get above them and so use a spear or an arrow before they have seen you. The long and short of it was that Zilkron decided that what he wanted was a bear and he spoke to my father.

'My father was in two minds, for as Ortelgans we had no business to be killing bears. At first he was afraid of the idea, but we were far from home, the Tuginda would never get to hear and none of us was pious or devout At length we set off for the Shardra-Main, the Bear Hills, and reached them in three days.

' We went up into the hills and hired some villagers as trackers and guides. They led us higher, on to a rocky plateau, very cold. The bears, they said, lived there but often came down to raid farms and hunt in the woods below. No doubt the villagers had learned something from the bears, for they too stole all they could. One of them stole a tortoiseshell comb that Zilkron had given me, but I never found out which was the thief.

'On the second day we found a bear – a big bear that made Zilkron point and chatter foolishly when he saw it moving far off against the sky. We followed it carefully, for I was sure that if it came to feel that it was being driven, it would slip away down one or another side of the mountain, and we would lose it altogether. When we reached the place where we had seen it, it had disappeared, and there was nothing to do but to go higher and hope