was a magical and religious king, concerned with the perception and interpretation of the divine will and certainly no religious question was involved in Ged-la-Dan's decision to erect a gallows within view of the citadel and to hang two Beklan children every day until Santil-ke-Erketlis should agree to leave it Only when Ged-la-Dan had told Kelderek that he ought to attend each hanging in the name of Shardik had he exercised his own will in the matter, replying curtly that it was he and not Ged-la-Dan who had been appointed by God to discern where and on what occasions there might be a need for his presence and for the manifestation of the power conferred on him by Shardik. Gcd-Ia-Dan, secredy fearing that power, had said no more and Kelderek, for his part, had profited by what been done without having to witness it. After some days the Beklan general had agreed to march south, leaving Kelderek free to seek Shardik in the hills west of Gelt
From that long and arduous search neither the bear nor the king had returned unchanged. Shardik, snarling and struggling in his chains till he lay exhausted and half-strangled, had been drawn into the city by night and under an enforced curfew, lest the people should see what might appear to them as the humiliation of the Power of God. The chains had inflicted wounds on one side of his neck and beneath the joint of the left fore-leg; and these healed slowly, leaving him with something of a limp and with an awkward, unnatural carriage of his great head which, in walking, he now moved slowly up and down, as though still feeling the pressure of the chain that was no longer there. Often, during the first months, he was violent, battering at the bars and walls with enormous blows that thudded through the building like a smith's hammer. Once, the new brickwork closing one of the bays split and collapsed under his anger and for a time he wandered in the ambulatory beyond, beating, until he was weary, at the outer walls. Kelderek had divined from this a portent of success for an attack towards Ikat; and in fact the Ortelgans, following his divination, had forced Santil-ke-Erketlis to retreat southward through Lapan, only to be compelled once more to halt their advance on the borders of Yelda.
In less than a year, however, Shardik had grown sullen and lethargic, afflicted with worms and plagued by a canker which caused him to scratch dolefully at one ear until it was ragged and misshapen. Lacking both Rantzay and the Tuginda, and hampered by the confined space and the continual gloomy savagery of the bear, Kelderek abandoned the hope he had once entertained of recommencing the singing worship. Indeed all the girls, though assiduous in feeding Shardik, ministering to his needs and cleaning and tending the building that had become his dwelling, now feared him so greatly that little by little it became accepted that to come near him, unless protected by the bars, no longer formed any part of their services. Only Kelderek, of all their company, still knew in his heart that he must stand before him, offering his life for no reward and uttering again and again his prayer of self- dedication, 'Senandril, Lord Shardik. Accept my life. I am yours and ask nothing of you in return.' Yet even as he prayed he answered himself, 'Nothing -except your freedom and my power.'
During the long months of searching, in the course of which two girls had died, he had contracted a malarial fever, and this returned from time to time, so that he lay shivering and sweating, unable to eat and – particularly when the rains were beating on the wooden roof above – seeming to himself, in confused dreams, to be once more following Shardik out of the trees to destroy the appalled and stricken hosts of Bekla: or again, he would be seeking Melathys, plunging down the Ledges in the starlight towards a fire which receded before him, while from among the trees the voice of the Tuginda called, 'Commit no sacrilege, now of all times.'
He came to know the days when he could be sure that Shardik would make no move – the days when he could stand beside him as he lay brooding and speak to him of the city, of the dangers that beset it and its need of divine protection. At times, unpredictably, there would return upon him the inward sense of being elevated to some high plane beyond that of human life. But now, instead of attaining to that pinnacle of calm, shining silence from which he had once looked down upon the outskirts of the Ortelgan forest, it seemed that he joined Lord Shardik upon the summit of some terrible, cloud-swirling mountain, a place of no-life, solitary and distant as the moon. Through the darkness and icy vapour, from the pit of stars flaring in the black sky, there would sound rolling thunder, the screaming of birds, half-heard voices – unintelligible cries of warning or fierce triumph. These were borne to him crouching on the edge of a visionary and dreadful precipice, enduring this world of suffering without refuge. From pole to pole there was none left in the world to suffer but he; and always, in this trance, he was powerless to move – perhaps no longer human, but changed to a rock buried under snow or split by lightning, an anvil hammered by a cold power in regions unendurable to human life. Usually, his sense of this awful sphere was mercifully dulled – superimposed, as it were, upon a continuing recollection of fragments of his lucid self, like reflections upon the visible bed of a river: as that he was king of Bekla, that sharp blades of straw were pricking the flesh of his legs, that the open gate to the Rock Pit was forming a square of bright light at the far end of the dark hall. Once or twice, however, he had become enclosed and locked altogether, like a fish in ice, among the gulfs of time where the mountains lived out their lives and crumbled and the stars, in millennia, consumed away to darkness: and, falling to the ground, had Iain oblivious beside the shaggy body of Shardik; until at last, hours later, waking with a profound sense of grief and desolation, he had limped his way out of the hall to stand in the sun with the exhausted, undemanding relief of one cast up from shipwreck.
Unable to comprehend whatever truth might lie hidden in this terrible place to which, as by a compass- needle, he was guided by his unaltered devotion to Shardik, he would nevertheless seek, clumsily and conscientiously, to derive from what he suffered some meaning, some divine message applicable to the fortunes of the people and the city. Sometimes he knew in himself that these soothsayings were contrived, all but mendacious, the very stuff of a mountebank. Yet often, those which he knew most surely to have been cobbled out of incomprehension, self-reproach and a mere sense of duty would appear later to have been fulfilled, to have borne actual fruit; or at all events were received by his followers as evident truth; while the nebulous searchings of his integrity to compass in words what lay, like a half-remembered dream, beyond his power to recall or express, would evoke only shaken heads and shrugged shoulders. Worst of all, in its effect on others, was the honest silence of humility.
Shardik absorbed him night and day. The spoils of Bekla – to the barons, the soldiers and even to Sheldra and her companions so precious and gratifying an end in themselves – were no lure to him. The honour and state devised for the king he accepted, and the role which gave heart and assurance to barons and people he fulfilled with a profound sense both of their need and his own fitness through election by God. And yet, musing in the gaunt, echoing hall, watching the bear in its fits of rage and of torpor, he was filled with the conviction that after all, what he had accomplished – all that seemed miraculous and near-divine in human terms – was of no importance in contrast to what remained to be revealed. Once, in the days when he had been concerned with no more than to get his hunter's living, he had thought only of what was necessary to that narrow purpose, like a peasant leaving unconsidered the whole world beyond his own strip of land. Then the power of Shardik had touched him and in the eyes of himself and others he had entered upon the world as an emissary of God, seeing plainly and certainly, through the knowledge divinely imparted to him, both the nature of his task and what was needed for its performance. As the instrument of Shardik he had been accorded a unique perception, self-sufficient and free from all ignorance and uncertainty. In the light of that perception everything had been found by others to have the value which he himself attached to it: and everything had fallen into the place to which he had appointed it. The High Baron of Ortelga had proved to be of small moment; yet all-important his own apparently suicidal determination to carry to Quiso the news of Shardik's corning. But now, though Shardik was lord in Bekla, this perception no longer seemed, to himself, sufficient. Continually, he was haunted by an intuitive sense that all that had happened as yet had scarcely touched the fringe of the truth of God, that he himself was still blind and that some great disclosure remained to be sought and found, to be prayed for and granted – a revelation of the world in the light of which his own state and monarchy would signify as little to himself as to the huddled creature in the cage, with its staring pelt and evil-smelling dung. Once, in a dream, he found himself robed and crowned for the festival of victory held every year upon the onset of the rains, but paddling his hunter's raft along the southern shore of Ortelga. 'Who is Shardik?' called the beautiful Melathys, walking among the trees. 'I cannot tell,' he called back. 'I am only an ignorant, simple man.' At this she laughed, took off her great golden collar and tossed it easily to him across the reeds; but he, in the act of catching it, knew it to be worthless and let it fall into the water. Waking to see Shardik rambling back and forth beyond the bars, he rose and, as the dawn lightened, stood a long while in prayer. 'Take back all else, Lord Shardik; my power and kingdom if you will. But give me fresh eyes to perceive your truth – that truth to which I cannot yet attain. Senandril, Lord Shardik. Accept my life if you will, but grant, at whatever cost, that I may find what I still seek.'
It was this all-demanding austerity of preoccupation which, more than his readiness to confront the bear, more than prophecy or any other attribute, maintained his power and authority over the city and established the awe felt for him not only by the people but also by those very barons who could not forget that he had once been
