Crossing the marsh after some hours, they came at last upon a track and then to a village, the only one he had seen east of the Vrako and the poorest and most wretched he could remember. They were resting a short distance outside it when a man carrying a faggot of brushwood passed them and Kelderek, leaving the Tuginda sitting beside the track, overtook him and asked once more the way to Zeray. The man pointed south-eastward, answering in Beklan, 'About half a day's journey: you'll not get there before dark.' Then, in a lower tone and glancing across at the Tuginda, he added, 'Poor old woman – the likes of her to be going to Zeray' Kelderek must have glanced sharply at him for he added quickly, 'No business of mine – she don't look well, that's all. Touch of fever, maybe,' and at once went on his way with his burden, as though afraid that he might already have said too much in this country where the past was sharp splinters embedded in men's minds and an ill-judged word a false step in the dark.
They had hardly reached the first huts, the Tuginda leaning heavily upon Kelderek's arm, when a man barred their way. He was dirty and unsmiling, with blue tattoo-marks on his cheeks and the lobe of one ear pierced by a bone pin as long as a finger. He resembled none that Kelderek could remember to have seen among the multi-racial trading throngs of Bekla. Yet when he spoke it was in a thick, distorted Beklan, one word making do for another. 'You walk from?'
Kelderek pointed north-westward, where the sun was beginning to set.
'High places trees? All through you walk?'. 'Yes, from beyond the Vrako. We're going to Zeray. Let me save you trouble,' said Kelderek. 'We've nothing worth taking: and this woman, as you can see, is no longer young. She's exhausted.' 'Sick. High places trees much sick. Not sit down here. Go away.' 'She's not sick only tired. I beg you -' 'Not sit down,' shouted the man fiercely. 'Go away!'
The Tuginda was about to speak to him when suddenly he turned his head and uttered a sharp cry, at which other men began to appear from among the huts. The tattooed man shouted 'Woman sick,' in Beklan, and then broke into some other language, at which they nodded, responding 'Ay! Ay!' After a few moments the Tuginda, relinquishing Kelderek's arm, turned and began walking slowly back up the track. He followed. As he reached her side a stone struck her on the shoulder, so that she staggered and fell against him. A second stone pitched into the dust at their feet and the next struck him on the heel. Shouting had broken out behind them. Without looking round, he bowed his head against the falling stones, put his arm round the Tuginda's shoulders and half-dragged, half- carried her back in the direction from which they had come.
Helping her to a patch of grass, he sat down beside her. She was trembling, her breath coming in gasps, but after a few moments she opened her eyes and half-rose to her feet, looking back down the road.
'Damn and blast the bastards!' whispered the Tuginda. Then, meeting his stare, she laughed. 'Didn't you know, Kelderek, that there are times when everyone swears? And I had brothers once, long ago.' She put her hand over her eyes and swayed a moment. 'That brute was right, though – I'm not well.' 'You've eaten nothing all day, saiyett-'
'Never mind. If we can find somewhere to lie down and sleep, we shall reach Zeray tomorrow. And there I believe we may find help.'
Wandering over the ground near by, he came upon a stack of turves, and of these made a kind of shelter in which they huddled side by side for warmth. The Tuginda was restless and feverish, talking in her sleep of Rantzay and Sheldra and of autumn leaves to be swept from the Ledges. Kelderek lay awake, tormented by hunger and the pain in his heel. Soon, now, he thought, the change would be complete and as an animal he would suffer less. The stars moved on and at length, watching them, he also fell asleep.
Soon after dawn, for fear of the villagers, he roused the Tuginda and led her away through a ground-mist as white and chill as that through which Elleroth had been brought to execution. To sec her reduced to infirmity, catching her breath as she leaned upon him and compelled to rest after every stone's throw walked at the pace of a blind beggar, not only wrung his heart but filled him also with misgiving – the misgiving of one who observes some portent in the sky, and fears its boding. The Tuginda, like any other woman of flesh and blood, was not equal to the hardship and danger of this land; like any other woman, she could sicken; and perhaps the. Contemplating this possibility, he realized that always, even in Bekla, he had unconsciously felt her to be standing, compassionate and impervious, between himself and the consuming truth of God. He, the impostor, had stolen from her everything of Shardik – his bodily presence, his ceremony, the power and adulation – all that was of men: everything but the invisible burden of responsibility borne by Shardik's rightful mediator, the inward knowledge that if she failed there was none other. She it was and not he who for more than five years had borne a spiritual load made doubly heavy by his own abuse of Shardik. If now she were to die, so that none remained between him and the truth of God, then he, lacking the necessary wisdom and humility, would not be fit to step into her place. He was found out in his pretensions, and the last action of the fraudulent priest-king should be, not to seek death from Shardik, of which he was unworthy, but rather to creep, like a cockroach from the light, into some crevice of this country of perdition, there to await whatever death might befall him from sickness or violence. Meanwhile the fate of Shardik would remain unknown: he would vanish unwatched and unattended, like a great rock dislodged from a mountainside that smashes its way downward, coming to rest at last in trackless forests far below.
Afterwards, of all that took place during that day, he could recall only one incident. A few miles beyond the village they came upon a group of men and women working in a field. A little distance away from the others, two girls were resting. One had a baby at the breast and both, as they laughed and talked, were eating from a wicker basket. Half a mile further on he persuaded the Tuginda to lie down and rest, told her he would return soon and hastened back to the field. Approaching unseen, he crept close to the two girls, sprang suddenly upon them, snatched their basket and ran. They screamed but, as he had calculated, their friends were slow to reach them and there was no pursuit. He was out of sight, had wolfed half the food, thrown away the basket and rejoined the Tuginda almost before they had decided that a silly girl's few handfuls of bread and dried fruit were not worth the loss of an hour's work. As he limped away on his bruised heel, coaxing the Tuginda to swallow the crusts and raisins he had brought back, he reflected that starvation and misery made an apt pupil. Ruvit himself could hardly have done better, unless indeed he had silenced the girls with his knife.
Evening was falling once more when he realized that they must at last be approaching Zeray. They had seen few people all day and none had spoken to or molested them, due no doubt partly to their destitution, which showed them, clearly enough, to be not worth robbing, and partly to the evident sickness of the Tuginda. There had been no more woodland and Kelderek had simply gone south-east by the sun through an open wilderness, broken here and there by sorry pastures and small patches of ploughed land. Finally they had come once more to reeds and sedges, and so to the shore of a creek which he guessed to be an inlet of the Telthearna itself. They followed it a little way inland, rounded the head and so came to the southern bank, along which they made their way. As it grew broader he could see, beyond the creek's mouth, the Telthearna itself, narrower here than at Ortelga and running very strongly, the eastern shore rocky in the distance across the water. Even through his despair a kind of dull, involuntary echo of pleasure stole upon him, a subdued lightening of the spirit, faint as a nimbus of the moon behind white clouds. That water had flowed past Ortelga's reeds; had rippled over Ortelga's broken causeway. He tried to point it out to the Tuginda, but she only shook her head wearily, scarcely able to follow even the direction of his arm. If she were to the in Zeray, he thought, his last duty would be to ensure that somehow the news was carried upstream to Quiso. Despite what she had said, there seemed little hope of their finding help in a remote, squalid settlement, peopled almost entirely (or so he had always understood) by fugitives from the justice of half-a-dozen lands. He could see the outskirts now, much like those of Ortelga – huts and wood-smoke, circling birds and in the evening air, from which the sunlight was beginning to fade, the glitter of the Telthearna.
'Where are we, Kelderek?' whispered the Tuginda. Almost her whole weight was upon his arm and she was grey-faced and sweating. He helped her to drink from a clear pool and then supported her to a little, grassy mound near by. 'This is Zeray, saiyett, as I suppose.' 'But here – this place?'
He looked about him. They were in what seemed a kind of wild, untended garden, where spring flowers were growing and trees stood in bloom. A melikon hung over the water, the peasants' False Lasses, covered with the blossoms which would later turn to golden berries dropping in the still, summer air. Everywhere were low banks and mounds like the one on which they were sitting; and now he saw that several of these had been roughly marked with stones or pieces of wood stuck in the ground. Some looked new, others old and dilapidated. At a little distance were four or five mounds of newly-turned earth, ungrasscd and strewn with a few flowers and black beads.
'This is a graveyard, saiyett. It must be the burial ground of Zeray.'
She nodded. 'Sometimes in these places they have a watchman to keep off animals at night. He might -' She broke off, coughing, but then resumed, with an effort, 'He might tell us something of Zeray.* 'Rest here, saiyett I
