dropping to the ground, turned back to Bel-ka-Trazet.
'And this?' she asked, plucking his knife from his belt This time he made no reply. Assuming a puzzled look, she drove the point into her left arm, twisted it, drew it out bloodless, shook her head and handed it to the girl. 'Well – well – toys.' She stared coldly at him. 'What is your name?' she asked.
The Baron opened his mouth to speak, but after a moment the twisted lips closed askew and he remained looking at her as though she had not yet spoken. 'What is your name?' she said to Kelderek in the same tone.
As though in a dream, the hunter found himself perceiving on two planes. A man may dream that he is doing something – flying, perhaps – which, even in the dream, he knows that he cannot do. Yet he accepts and lives the illusion, and thus experiences as real the effects following from the discounted cause. In the same way Kelderek heard and understood the priestess's words and yet knew that they had no meaning. She might as well have asked him, 'What is the sound of the moon?' Moreover, he knew that she knew this and would be satisfied with silence for an answer. 'Come!' she said, after a pause, and turned on her heel.
Walking before them – the grim, mutilated Baron and the bewildered hunter – she led them out of the circle of blue-flaming bowls and through the opening in the rock.
7 The Ledges
The darkness was broken only by the indirect flame-light from the terrace outside; but this was sufficient to show Kelderek that they were in a square chamber apparently cut out of the living rock. The floor beneath his feet was stone and the shadows of himself and his companions moved and wavered against a smooth wall. On this he glimpsed a painting which seemed, as he thought, to represent some gigantic creature standing upright. Then they were going on into the dark.
Feeling his way after the priestess, he touched the squared jamb of an opening in the wall and, groping upwards – for he feared to strike his head – could find no transom above. Yet the cleft, if tall, was narrow enough – scarcely as wide as a man – and to save his injured shoulder he turned sideways and edged into it, right arm first. He could see nothing – only those mysterious, faintly-coloured clouds and vaporous screens that swim before our eyes in darkness, seeming exhaled, as it were, from our own sightlessness as mists rise from a marsh.
The floor sloped steeply downwards underfoot. He stumbled on, groping against the wall as it curved away to the right. At last he could make out, ahead, the night sky and, outlined against it, the figure of the waiting priestess. He reached her side, stopped and looked about him.
It was not long after midnight by the stars. He was high up in some spacious, empty place, standing on a broad ledge of stone, its surface level but the texture so rough that he could feel the grains and nodules under the soles of his feet. On either side were wooded slopes. The ledge stretched away to the left in a long, regular curve, a quarter-circle a stone's throw across, ending among banks of ivy and the trunks of trees. Immediately below it extended another, similar ledge and below that fell away many more, resembling a staircase for giants or gods. The pitch was steep – steep enough for a fall to be dangerous. The faintly-shining, concentric tiers receded downwards until the hunter could no longer distinguish them in the starlight. Far below, he could just perceive a glimmering of water, as though from the bottom of a well: and this, it seemed to him, must be some land-locked bay of the island. All around, on either side, great trees towered, an orderly forest, the spaces between them free from the creepers and choking jungle of the mainland. As he gazed up, the night wind freshened and the rustling of leaves became louder and higher, with a semblance of urgent repetition – 'Yess! Yess, yess!' followed by a dying fall – 'Sshow! – Sssh-ow!' Mingled with this whispering came another sound, also liquid and continuous, but unaltering in pitch, lower and lightly plangent. Listening, he recognized it for the trickling and dropping of water, filling all the place no less than the sound of the leaves. Whence might this come? He looked about.
They were standing near one end of the uppermost tier. Further along its length a shallow stream – perhaps that of the ravine he had crossed earlier that night – came whelming smoothly out of the hillside and across the ledge. Here, no doubt because of some tilting of the stones, it spread in either direction, to become at the edges a mere film of water trickling over the rough, level surface. Thence, it oozed and dripped and splashed its way downward, passing over one terrace after another, spreading all abroad, shallow as rain on the pitch of a roof. This was the cause of the faint shining of the ledges in the starlight and of the minute, liquid sounds sparkling faindy about them, myriad as windy heather on a moor or crickets in a meadow.
Struck with amazement, Kelderek realized that this vast place was an artifact. He stood trembling – with awe indeed, but not with fear. Rather, he was filled with a kind of wild and expansive joy, like that of dance or festival, seeming to himself to be floating above his own exhaustion and the pain in his shoulder.
'You have never seen the Ledges?' said the priestess at his elbow. 'We have to descend them – are you able?'
At once, as though she had commanded him, he set off down the wet slabs as confidently as though upon level ground. The Baron called to him sharply and he stayed himself against the solitary island of a bank of ivy, smiling back at the two still above him for all the world as though they were comrades in some children's game. As the priestess and the Baron approached carefully, picking their way down the wet stones, he heard the latter say, 'He is light-headed, saiyett – a simple, foolish fellow, as I am told. He may fall, or even fling himself down.'
'No, the place means him no harm, Baron,' she replied. 'Since you brought him here, perhaps you can tell why.' 'No,' replied the Baron shortly.
'Let him go,' she said. 'On the Ledges, they say, the heart is the foot's best guide.'
At this, Kelderek turned once more and bounded away, splashing sure-footed down and down. The dangerous descent seemed a sport, exhilarating as diving into deep water. The pale shape of the inlet below grew larger and now he could see a fire twinkling beside it. He felt the steep hillside ever higher at his back. The curves of the ledges grew shorter, narrowing at last to little more than a broad path between the trees. He reached the very foot and stood looking round him in the enclosed gloom. It was indeed, he thought, like the bottom of a well – except that the air was warm and the stones now seemed dry underfoot. From above he could hear no sound of his companions and after a little began to make his way towards the glow of the fire and the lapping water beyond.
It was irregular, this shore among the trees, and paved with the same stone as the ledges above. As far as he could discern, it was laid out as a garden. Patches of ground between the paving had been planted with bushes, fruit-trees and flowering plants. He came upon a clustering tendriona, trained on trellises to form an arbour, and could smell the ripe fruit among the leaves above him. Reaching up, he pulled one down, split the thin rind and ate as he wandered on.
Scrambling over a low wall, he found himself on the brink of a channel perhaps six or seven paces across. Water-lilies and arrowhead were blooming in the scarcely-moving water at his feet, but in the middle there was a smooth flow and this, he guessed, must be the re-gathered stream from the ledges. He crossed a narrow foot- bridge and saw before him a circular space, paved in a symmetrical pattern of dark and light. In the centre stood a flat-topped stone, roughly ovoid and carved with a star-like symbol. Beyond, the fire was glowing red in an iron brazier.
His weariness and dread returned upon him. Unconsciously, he had thought of the waterside and the fire as the end of the night's journey. What end he did not know; but where there was a fire, might one not have expected to find people – and rest? His impulse on the ledges had been both foolish and impertinent. The priestess had not told him to come here; her destination might be elsewhere. Now there were only the starlit solitude and the pain in his shoulder. He thought of returning, but could not face it. Perhaps, after all, they would come soon. Limping across to the stone, he sat down, elbow on knee, rested his head on his hand and closed his eyes.
He fell into an uneasy, slightly feverish doze, in which the happenings of the long day began to recur, dream- like and confused. He imagined himself to be crouching once more in the canoe, listening to the knock and slap of water in the dark. But it was on the shendron's platform that he landed, and once again refused to tell what he had seen. The shendron grew angry and forced him to his knees, threatening him with his hot knife as the folds of his fur cloak rippled and became a huge, shaggy pelt, dark and undulant as a cypress tree. 'By the Bear!' hissed the Baron. 'You will no longer choose!' 'I can speak only to the Tuginda!' cried the hunter aloud.
He started to his feet, open-eyed. Before him, on the chequered pavement, was standing a woman of perhaps forty-five years of age. She had a strong, shrewd face and was dressed like a servant or a peasant's wife.
