The Island Under the Earth (3 page)

There in the Cold Gray Realm he stumbled along with the other stunned and white-faced dead. Blows fell upon their shoulders if they went to the right or to the left of the path: some unseen but not unfelt daemon scourged unwitting disobedience; abruptly the half-darkness vanished and there was the hot sun and there were the white-waved seas beating at the base of some high-built, stout-girt tower keep: blue seas, orange sun, red flames, coffers full of jewels and sewn skin sacks of sand-of-gold. Eyes watched him as he made away, eyes helpless to do more for now than mark the hated and swift-departing faces, eyes filled with hatred and with menace….

The two of them spoke in soft voices as they dipped the cloths and wrung them out and exchanged them for the one upon the side of his face … that is, the country-dame was speaking, and the other woman now and then answered with a low-toned word.
I was wrong, then
, Stag thought.
Not the first time
.

“… hot water is best, of course,” the other one was saying; “ant-amber melts fastest in hot water … it was luck that flask of water had been getting the sun all the while and was well warm. So first you put in just a bit and you stir it and stir it until you see the water is ‘ginning to turn color, then right away you put in more.” She might have been discussing a recipe for sweetmeal cake. “And luck! Hadn’t I noted that ant-heap back such a short ways! Where would he be now, your poor lord?”
Still in Hell with the other shades
, the poor lord thought.

“Yes, yes…. And not just no ordinary ant-heap, needn’t I tell you, dear. Only the great golden ants do make the amber, then right away they bury it, for they don’t want folk to find it. Ah, and I don’t know why they grudge it, for what else can take the venom out of centaur-blood? Directly saw I that ugly black sixy-brute go fling his filthy hand at your poor lord, off I went, gallop-a-trot, back for to find the ant-heap, yes; what is your own name, dear, for mine is Rary — ”

“Spahana.” He thought:
Yes, that
is
her name…
.

The bosun’s voice: “Here, Captain, should you be sitting up? How d’you feel? How’s that eye?”

Stag blinked through it before hazarding a reply. “No worse — now — than if it had caught a dash of sea-water…. So it’s true, then, goodmother, that the blood of the six-limbed folk is deadly venom to humans — yes,
Earth
Mother! what am I saying! don’t
I
know now it’s true? I’d completely forgotten that I’d ever heard it and when I had heard it I just laughed and said it was another granny-tale. — So then it’s true, too, about the ant-amber?”

She nodded, inclined her head to the few golden granules of it still in her lap. He looked at them, looked at her. She wore the roughspun blouse and plain pantalets of the hill-woman and her hands were almost as calloused as her feet … hands which automatically went on wringing the cloth into the basin … but her eyes already had begun to rove around and her lips were now once again engaged in forming silent words. Names.

He grunted, took the bosun’s hand and jumped to his feet. “All right. I’m healed. Woman — Rary — You gave me my life. I’ll give you your children.” She nodded, gathered up the ambers and wrapped them in a scrap which she tucked in her broad belt; then she got to her feet.

Stag bellowed. “The packtrain! The onagers! Where are they?”

His bosun shook his head and gestured. “Driven off, driven off — what else? That’s what they attacked for, sixlimbed brutes…. Well, Captain, what now? We go back?”

Captain Stag stood scowling and considering. Then his brows unfolded and went up and up and he pointed. The other three turned to fonow his gesture. There, some hundreds of armslengths off, sitting on top of a tall and angular rock, feet crossed and arms folded, a man was watching them. As he caught their glance he raised a hand as though in greeting. After a moment Stag returned the gesture. The man vanished, appeared a moment later on the ground as he stepped from behind the rock, and made his way to them with a somewhat mincing manner of walk.

Stag watched, face at first bleak, then blank; then jerked his head in a way which bluntly demanded, if not full explanation, at least immediate speech.

“May the sun never scorch you and the rains never drown you,” the newcomer said, in a thin and murmur-some voice. “And between Earthflux and Starflux may no sort of ill befall you, so — ”

The rigid mask which Stag’s face had become now vanished. “Damn all you canting soothsayers!” Lower jaw out-thrust, nostrils wide, ugly in wrath and rage, his fingers worked upon the haft of his spear. “I paid you — deny, deny that I paid you! — I paid you to cure the omens!”

The other’s face rippled like a clot of weed in a stream, his head seemed to slide back along a retractable neck and he put his right hand up at right angle to its arm. “
Me
, sealord? Was it
me
you paid?”

Stag made a fist, his lips moved. Then the fist slackened. Once again his brows made the flat black line of intent thought, relaxed again into double arches. He blinked, scowled, looked briefly bewildered. Then: “No…. I see now it wasn’t you. Damn you all, anyway. One augur does for all augurs, well it’s said. Might’ve been your brother or your bastard son. Stouter … Never mind.” His hand flew wide and the augur started and flinched. “Had you anything to do with all
this?
” Gesture encompassed the countryside and meaning engrossed the eventful scenes so lately played there: low rolling ground and exposed boulders and stunted trees, hot blood and agony and the ever-recurrent raging struggle between the folk of four limbs and the folk of six.

The omenscanner seemed now to have gained back both professional and personal confidence. He nodded vigorously as the dignity of his craft allowed, and his face indicated just a trace of well-controlled amusement. “Indeed I had, sealord. For I had taken sight myself this morning, as I do (must I say?) every morning. It was revealed to me that many dangers would concur and coincide at this very place and hour, and that only my presence and artful efforts might prevent the occurrence of great tragedy. Therefore I came regardless of the toll it would take of my own concerns, and placed myself aloft on yonder great rock which afforded the better view and — The sealord says? ‘The better safety’? Well, indeed, we doctorial augurs are men of science, not of war. It would have been of no help had I stayed upon the ground. And although I called out in warning to you, my voice (as alas I knew, but could not refrain from calling, emotion triumphing over reason and cold fact) my voice could not be heard.”

He paused. Stag and the bosun, as though they had rehearsed it, pursed their lips and gave two slow nods. Indeed, no voice from any human throat could have carried over the still-mysterious and inhuman sounds both shrill and deep, and then the gross clamors of the centaurs. All this the augur saw in a glance, immediately next continued: “So I did the best I could, casting a swift spell upon the onagers which made them take flight, knowing that this would make the cursed Sixies follow lest the hoped-for plunder escape them;
feff!
how their stale and dung does stink!”

“And what now?” asked Stag.

It was not merely a question, it was a declaration. No questions about the past, no requests for prophecies of the future, no recriminations, threats: all were to be set aside and left aside, to be ignored as the stale and dung about and over which the mindless flies were now abuzz.

“And what now?” asked Stag.

Stag was captain here as much as he had been upon the sea. No one gainsayed him … openly. But, first the woman Rary, and next the bosun, managed a few clandestine words with the augur Castagor: to each he said, in a confidential murmur, that any augury taken now would be worse than useless: “See me at early dimlight …” Neither was content — surely some other form of signscanning must be known to the man, one which depended not upon any particular time, or would be valid for
this
particular time? — but both had perforce to wait, for persistence served only to turn him somewhat sullen. And indeed he had seemed vexed that no one had supported his strong suggestion that they return to the town.

“Or at least in that direction, sealord,” he urged. “The onagers’ flight will have been arrested, and you shall find them and have your gear again.”

Let onagers and gear reverse their flight and follow after them, was Stag’s dictum. “That coneyhead was hired to bring his beasts and us to the house in the half-hills, and he’ll bring them there or not a pennyweight of pay will he see. If he hasn’t wit enough to cypher that for himself, my partner Lo will cypher it for him. And if they think us dead? — well, they’ll come for the bodies. Which way lies the old place, doctor-priest? The one called Stonehouse Hobar? That way? Good. Fall to, then, you and the rest of you, and gather rocks.” And he set up an arrow-shaped pile pointing in that direction.

And in that direction they were now bound, with Castagor as guide. Unzealous. But guide. It was in vain that he had pointed out as landmark a cluster of three hills, just past which the true woods of the half-hills began, and through which (he declared upon his priestly honor, binding himself to be sundered and severed if his words were not true) wound a trail so well-marked that a blind man could follow it without a staff.

“All the better,” said Stag, trudging on. “You’ll have no hard voyage of it finding your own way back afterwards. — And let me hear no more whining and whimpering, now! Your fellow and your friend and likely your kinsman (One augur does for all augurs), if he’d cured the bad omens, damn him, as he was hired to do …” His voice died away, slowly his mouth relaxed from its one-sided grimace; then —

“Boats!”

The bosun, who had strayed to bring up the rear, and, not precisely furtive, but circumspect, to study the country wife from that as well as other angles … the bosun was suddenly at his captain’s side. “What does this remind you of, Boats?” Stag inclined his head. Bosun followed with his eyes, squinted, pursed his lips. “Remind you of anything?” Stag drew the hairy side of an arm over his sweaty face. “Eh?”

Still the bosun said nothing. Then, slowly, almost grudgingly, and with a side glance and a tone as though he feared a laughter or reproof, said, “Might almost remind you of a beach, like … Beaches …” And, indeed, the way the ground now shelved, now sloped; the way the thin topsoil showed coarse sand beneath where wind had scoured it; the curving lines of thin and shingly rock heaped up in layers, the tangles of uprooted brambles and twigs wavering along beyond and as dead gray-white as though salted by months or years of sea-spray and cast up on any true coast or shallow shore — all this and all of these did indeed give more than just an air of beaches.

A flash of knowing lit up the bosun’s face (ivory-tan to his master’s russet) and he cried, “Aye, Captain! Allitu! If so happened I’d been picked up bodily and set down here facing it so swift I didn’t know there’s no sea at my back, I’d swear by my peril between Starflux and Earth-flux that this is the very beach at Allitu, where the
Dolphin
went aground — that rascal pilot — over the side he went, like an oiled eel — ”

And Stag, with a reflective air: “Didn’t get very far, did he? for all he knew those waters like a babe knows his mother’s tit. Oh, aye, it
does
look beachy, doesn’t it? And it
does
look like Allitu, doesn’t it? — peaceful place, that must have been, before those rascal Mainlanders took it over for their wrecking and pillaging.”

“Grew rich at it, they did.”

“Didn’t stay rich, though, did they? Nay. — You, augur-priest, what are you sniffing and snuffing about for? Want us to squeeze you like an airsucker to hear what you’ve been overhearing? — Where’s my woman?” he asked, abruptly, waving away the soothsayer whose mouth had opened on an unheard protest; and made an almost complete turn before he saw her: Spahana, coming along quite slowly and her hand on Rary’s shoulder.

Who, seeing Stag’s scowly look, said, “She’s not used to these flinty fields, Water Lord. Her shoes are soft, and her feet even so softer.
My
trotters, now, are hard as — ”

But he, indifferent to the comparison, said to the country wife, “Carry her, then, if you like”; and, to Spahana, “Keep up, do you hear?”

“Yes,” she said. And thereafter did, though returning no word to him, a moment after, in his saying that likely they’d find oil and old linen to dress sore feet when they fetched up at Stonehouse Hobar. “And other stores as well. Said there were stores there, Lo said, didn’t he?”

The bosun nodded. “Rough stores, yes, didn’t know how much or just what kind. His wifefather used to keep the place part stocked, he said, but no one’d been there for dolphin’s years and he didn’t know what might be left, or if the Sixies’ve broken in on them or the wee-ants carried them out through the key hole.”

Stag grunted, fumbled round his neck, drew out a black leather thong, hauled on it and came up with an enormous key; pointing to the far-spaced teeth, he said, “A door that thick, they’d need a ram-tower to break in. Unless …” The thought broke out into a scowl: “Unless they’ve picked the lock.”

But Castegor, the augur, in his voice like water running over mossy stones, said that this need give no concern. “A centaur can no more pick a lock than he can sew a seam, Captain. Have you not yourself seen their hands close up? No thumbs, Sealord, no thumbs! Only three full-length digits and a wee-finger on either side. Ah, to be sure, they’ve strength, they can clutch a branch between two hands or scoop up and hold a rock tight and hurl it — but something as slight as needle or pick-lock, no, Captain, no. Dexterity is beyond them. Which is one reason why they fall back and we fourlimb folk advance.
One
reason. For another — ”

“Shut your gobble,” Stag said, not angrily. The augur stopped just the same. When he commenced again, sometime later, it was to reassure some person or persons he did not name, but perhaps including himself … perhaps consisting of himself … that no further present attack by Sixies need be anticipated. Those Sixies involved in the foray at noontide, he said, must certainly comprise all for leagues around, and once they had (so to speak) shot their bolts and dissipated their resolve, it would take long before they could be once again brought to the pitch for another. No. No, No further present attack need be anticipated, he declared with great assurance; and all the while, as the shadows grew longer and darker, he gazed nervously about him, and his fingers played in agitation about his thin lips and the slightly askew end of his thin nose.

By this time they were in the belt of taller trees marking the commencement of the Half-Hills: beech and larch and oak and flowering acacia gave way grudgingly to the path winding between and always upward, path sometimes becoming a ford across a stream and sometimes sunken into a deep furrow like the bed of a dry canal and sometimes winding along the side of an escarpment affording a view of the way they had come or the way they were going — the one seeming as unfamiliar as the other. Here and there a drone-buzzard lopped its slow dull way across the sky. It was a strange thing, perhaps, how that as they passed deeper and further into the unknown, Stag’s spirits seemed to rise and he ceased to scowl; now and then something almost a smile parted his beard and showed his teeth, and once he cleared his throat and began a song.

Then they saw the house.