Shardik

not go far from Lord Shardik, for if by chance he should wander again, it will be my sacred duty to follow him. Have you a man who can watch beside me and rouse me if need should be?'

'We will go down to that eastern cleft,' replied the old man. 'There you can find a shady place and I will send someone to watch while you sleep.'

Pressing one hand over his aching eyes, Kelderek made a last attempt to break through the other's grave reserve. 'My soldiers – great rewards – your people will bless you – I trust you, sir -' he lost the thread of his thought and faltered in Ortelgan 'lucky I came here -'

'God sent you. It is for us to do His will,' replied the old man. This, Kelderek supposed, must be some idiomatic reply to the thanks of a guest or traveller. He picked up the scrip and took his companion's offered arm. In silence they went down the slope, among the small domes of the ant-hills, the grassy tussocks and coneys' holes, until at length they came to the tall grass surrounding the ravines. Here, without a word, the old man stopped, bowed and was already striding away before Kelderek had grasped that he was going.

'We shall meet again?' he called, but the other gave no sign that he had heard. Kelderek shrugged his shoulders, picked up the scrip and sat down to eat.

The bread was hard and the juice long gone from the fruit. When he had eaten all there was, he felt thirsty. There was no water -unless, indeed, there might be a pool or spring in one of the ravines: but he was too tired to go and search all three. He decided to look into the nearest – it seemed unlikely that Shardik would be alert or attack him – and if he could neither see nor hear water he would simply do without until he had slept.

The tangled grass and weeds grew almost to his waist. In summer, he thought, the place must become almost impassable, a veritable thicket He had gone only a few yards when he stumbled over some hard object, stooped and picked it up. It was a sword, rusted almost to pieces, the hilt inlaid with a pattern of flowers and leaves in long-blackened silver – the sword of a nobleman. He swung idly at the grass, wondering how it came to be there, and as he did so the blade tore across like an old crust and flew into the nettles. He tossed the hilt after it and turned away.

Now that he saw it at close quarters, the lip of the ravine looked even more sharp and precipitous than from a distance. There was indeed something sinister about this place, unhusbanded and yield-less in the midst of the abundant land all about There was something strange, too, about the sound of the breeze in the leaves – an intermittent, deep moaning, like that of a winter wind in a huge chimney, but faint, as though far off. And now, to his sleep-starved fancy, it seemed that the sides of the cleft lay apart like an open wound, like the edges of a deep gash inflicted by a knife. He reached the edge and looked over.

The tops of the lower trees were spread beneath him. There was a hum and dart of insects and a glitter of leaves. Two great butter-flies, newly awakened from winter, were fanning their blood-red wings a yard below his eyes. Slowly his gaze travelled across the uneven expanse of the branches and back to the steep slope at his feet The wind blew, the boughs moved and suddenly – like a man who realizes that the smiling stranger with whom he is conversing is in fact a madman who means to attack and murder him -Kelderek started back, clutching at the bushes in fear.

Below the trees there was nothing but darkness – the darkness of a cavern, a darkness of sluggish air and faint, hollow sounds. Beyond the lowest tree-trunks the ground, bare and stony, receded downwards into twilight and thence into blackness. The sounds that he could hear were echoes; like those in a well, but magnified in rising from some greater, unimaginable depth. The cold air upon his face carried a faint dreadful odour – not of decay, but rather of a place which had never known cither life or death, a bottomless gulf, unlit and unvisited since time began. In a fascination of horror, lying upon his stomach, he groped behind him for a stone and tossed it down among the boughs. As he did so, some dim memory came rising towards the surface of his mind – night, fear and the bringer of an unknown fate moving in the dark; but his present terror was too sharp, and the memory left him like a dream. The stone tore its way down through the leaves, knocked against a branch and was gone. There was no other sound. Soft earth – dead leaves? He threw another, pitching it well out into the centre of the concave leaf-screen. There was no sound to tell when it struck the ground.

Shardik – where was he? Kelderek, the palms of his hands sweating, the soles of his feet tangling with dread of the pit over which he lay, peered into the gloom for the least sign of any ledge or shelf. There was none.

Suddenly, half in prayer, half in desperation, he cried aloud, 'Shardik! Lord Shardik!' And then it seemed as though every malignant ghost and night-walking phantom pent in that blackness were released to come rushing up at him. Their abominable cries were no longer echoes, they owed nothing to his voice. They were the voices of fever, of madness, of hell. At once deep and unbearably shrill, far-off and squealing into the nerves of his ear, pecking at his eyes and clustering in his lungs like a filthy dust to choke him, they spoke to him with vile glee of a damned eternity where the mere spectacle of themselves in the gloom would be torment unbearable. Sobbing, his forearms wrapped about his head, he crawled backwards, cowered down and covered his ears. Little by little the sounds died away, his normal perceptions returned and as he grew calmer he fell into a deep sleep.

For long hours he slept, feeling neither the spring sun nor the flies settling upon his limbs. The amorphous forces active in sleep, profound and inexpressible, moving far below that higher, twilit level where their fragments, drifting upwards, attract to themselves earthly images and become released in the bubbles called dreams, caused in him not the least bodily movement as, without substance, form or mass they pursued their courses within the universe of the solitary skull. When at last he woke, it was to become aware first, of daylight – the light of late afternoon – and then of a confused blaring of human cries, which faintly resembled the terrible voices of the morning. Yet, whether because he was no longer lying over the chasm or because it was not he himself who had cried out, these voices lacked the terror of those others. These, he knew, were the shouts of living men, together with their natural echoes. He raised himself cautiously and looked about him. To his left, out of the southerly end of the ravine, where Shardik had disappeared that morning, three or four men were clambering and running. Little, shaggy men they were, carrying spears – one cast his spear away as he ran – and plainly they were in terror. As he watched, another tripped, fell and rose again to his knees. Then the bushes along the lip were torn apart and Shardik appeared.

As, when villagers have taken away her calf from a strong cow, she bellows with rage, breaks the rails of the stockade and tramples her way through the village, afraid of none and filled only with distress and anger at the wrong she has suffered: the villagers fly before her and in her fury she smashes through the mud wall of a hut, so that her head and shoulders appear suddenly, to those within, as a grotesque, frightening source of destruction and fear; so Shardik burst through the tall weeds and bushes on the edge of the ravine and stood a moment, snarling, before he fell upon the kneeling man and killed him even as he cried out. Then, at once, he turned and began to make his way along the verge, coming on towards the place where Kelderek was lying. Kelderek lay prostrate in the long grass, holding his breath, and the bear passed not ten feet away. He heard its breathing – a liquid, choking sound like that made by a wounded man gasping for air. As soon as he dared, he looked up. Shardik was plodding away. In his neck was a fresh, deep wound, a jagged hole oozing blood.

Kelderek ran back along the edge of the ravine to where the men were gathered about the body of their comrade. As he approached, they picked up their spears and faced him, speaking quickly to each other in a thick argot of Beklan.

'What have you done?' cried Kelderek. 'By God's breath, I'll have you burned alive for this!' Sword in hand, he threatened the nearest man, who backed away, levelling his spear. 'Stand back, sir!' cried the man. 'Else tha'll force us -' 'Ah, kill him now, then!' said another.

'Nay,' put in the third quickly. 'He never went into the Streel. And after what's come about-'

'Where's your damned headman, priest, whatever he calls himself?' cried Kelderek. 'That old man in the blue cloak? He set you on to this. It was him I trusted, the treacherous liarl I tell you, every village on this cursed plain shall burn – Where is he?'

He broke off in surprise as the first man suddenly dropped his spear, went to the edge of the ravine and stood looking back at him, pointing downwards.

'Stand away, then,' said Kelderek. 'No – right away – over there. I don't trust you murderous dirt- eaters.'

Once more he knelt on the edge of the pit. But here, the first yards of the slope below him inclined gently. Not far down, half-concealed among the trees, was a level, grassy ledge with a little pool. Shardik, lying there, had flattened and crushed the grass. Half in the pool, face downwards, lay a man's body, wrapped about with a blue cloak. The back of the skull was smashed open to the brains and near by lay the bloody head of a spear. The shaft was nowhere to be seen. It might, perhaps, have fallen into the abyss.