Ursus of Ultima Thule (20 page)

The courses of Wizardland were dry.

Witchery-Bab crooned a soft song, chanting in the Old Tongue. In each hand he held a branch of rowan with the red berries dried on them. The others had spread out from him without speaking, almost without thinking of it.

When the old man paused, as he did now and then, they all did the same. Now, to the right, an enormous black spire of rock retreated upward at a shallow slant. Vast and irregular red-and-black streaked blocks lay to the left as though tumbled and left there by giants at play. A slight wind rustled the rowan twigs in the old man’s hands and the berries rattled. But there was no wind felt upon them, however slight. Only a chill, a crawling of the skin, a puckering of flesh around erect hairs, as they saw the rowans tremble and move in the old man’s hands, and slowly and slowly shift.

And the old man shifted with them till they ceased to shift further, only they trembled and the dried berries rattled on the dried twigs. And the old man moved on, and they moved on with him.

A canyon of grey rocks all humble-tumble and eaten into a wilderness of holes prepared them gradually for the great inward-slanting cleft in the rock which they saw before them at the time of no shadows, at the canyon’s end. A blind wall of high grey stone faced them, blind, that is, save for the single slant eye of the cavern. And they slumped, all, and stopped, all, and all of them sighed what seemed to be one same and drawn-out sigh.

Now for the first time since they had entered this fey region of rock and sand and cliff and stone, the old man seemed to be slightly uncertain as to what move he must make next, and he stood hesitant, his mouth moving but his song silent, and the rowan twigs still rustling in his hands. In his old uncle’s eyes as they now turned towards him, Arnten read the wish for help. He took two strides and took the rowans and set them flat upon the smooth grey sands of the canyon floor, straightly pointing to the cavern mouth. There was a slight sound in his throat as the medicine-twigs slithered forward the space of the breadth of a few fingers, as though drawn by hands unseen. Then they stopped. A dry susurration as of insects’ wings seemed to sound all round them in the dry, flat air: but if it was still an actual sound or the memory of one, the faces which they wore implied nought but doubt.

Next Arnten merely dropped his burden, and this heavy and simple sound, accompanied by the relieved grunt of a man simply glad to be lighter of a weight, changed the mood. For all of them bore burdens, and they all now hasted to let them slide as they stooped and turned. The old one groped and fumbled his fire-kit, made no objection when Roke, with a murmur, squatted beside him and took up the sticks and the dried fungus and plied his hands rapidly to work. Now Arn and nain-Eër set to work to cut the thigh-bone of the deer from the hip-socket and the flesh of the haunch from the bone, stone knife and iron knife and force and thrust and snap and slash. The liver and a slab of the kidney fat lay neatly wrapped together in a deer pouch.

Fire spurted soon from the pinches of dried fungus fed into the socket of the lower fire-stick, moved to a handful of rush grass, was fed to a cone of thin sticks, ate the heavier firewood they had brought upon their backs to this land devoid of twig or grass or tree … died down into coals. The marrow bone was laid in first to roast, and then the liver and the fat, which fed the fire its own unctuous fuel without the need of more wood. The spittle filled their dried mouths, but none dared as yet even lick a finger.

And still and always the echo of a dry rustling seemed to sound in every ear.

Arnten presently cracked open the steaming marrow-bone and he poked out the soft marrow-core and let it fall upon the clean piece of bark which did for dish. And next to it he set a slice of the crisped fat, and beside that he placed a slice of the liver, bubbling richly in its blood.

“Salt,” he said.

They gave him the bone bottle of sea-salt and he opened the carved stopple and sprinkled the offering with the clean white crystals, six times strained through fine filters. Then he rose to his feet and the bark platter was carefully handed up to him and he and the old man walked with deliberate pace forward, and the others sat where they were, and trembled. And the two walked into the cave and then their feet were heard and then their feet were not.

• • •

The adjustment from light to shadow was gradual, and in the half-light they saw something protruding from the wall of the inner cave which might have been a mummy-bundle, all grey and dusty and clad in wrappings: but mummy-bundles do neither tremble, howsoever faintly, nor do they twitch and rustle. Recognitions came in quick flashes. Two bundles of twigs: hands. Faint gleams as of dew-light on dirty stones: eyes. Ceremonial mask long hung away forgotten, to moulder and gather dust: face. The faint drone, faint rustlings, the faint movements were reminiscent of nothing so much as of the tired and desperate and hopeless motion and sound of an insect somehow still faintly alive in winter.

Arnten first dipped his finger in the bubble-blood and poked it into the dry, dry cavern of the mouth, felt it touch the dry and dusty, faintly trembling tongue. The travesty of a mouth with the least conceivable pressure sucked the seethed blood from the fingertip as though a newborn and dying babe were sucking milk from a teat. Next he smeared the fat of the offering upon the dry, seared lips, the sear cracked lips; and watched them slowly close upon each other, heard the almost inaudible smack of those dead and dusty lips. He wafted the odorous steam of the meal under those dust-choked nose holes. He saw the grey-smeared eyelids quiver, the faint gleam widen.

So, slowly, slowly, slowly, he fed the wizard.

The first thing the wizard said, after a long time: “
Now, my sibs there
…” Even farther into the shadow and the gloom were two other huddled bundles which buzzed and rustled like two dying flies; Arnten perceived how close alike is life’s revival to its conclusion.

So, slowly, slowly, slowly, he fed the wizards.

• • •

They ate the liver, every morsel. They sopped up the marrow, every soft crumble of it. They licked up every congealing drop of fat. By this time it was so far declined from noon, when he had entered, that he could barely make out their nodding heads and wavering hands as they dismissed him. “It was well done,” he was told, in creaking, faltering tones. “And now we would rest a moment, till the daylight come again.”

The empty piece of bark, which Arnten burned upon the barely-living fire, answered the question his companions did not ask. He and his old uncle and counsellor sank down and sighed heavy signs and watched the greasy bark, once clean, blaze brightly in the dying embers. They blinked. After a while Arnten asked, “Have you eaten?”

There was a somewhat incredulous silence. And Corm asked, “Have you?”

“We? We were feeding wizards …” Now it was the turn of Corm, Roke, and Eër-derred-derred-eër to sigh.

“Feeding wizards,” the young nain repeated. He paused. The great part of their journey had been accomplished; for — it seemed to him now — all his life he had been hearing his elders and even his age-peers muttering, “The wizards must be fed”; that, were they but fed, the curse would vanish from iron, the king and the kingsmen would cease to molest, that the forges of Nainland once again would grow hot and their smokes attaint the air: once again all would be as before; hence, all would be well. But now Nainland seemed infinitely far away, and its concerns infinitely remote. In this arid and barren land only one thing now seemed real to him — his hunger. And although his tongue still retained some natural diffidence, his body did not.

The young nain’s enormous and unpremeditated eructation echoed in the all but complete darkness and rolled from canyon wall to wall. For a moment Corm and Roke waited, aghast, for some ghostly wizard, or some wizardly ghost, to avenge the insult. But the echoes died away, and all, for the moment, was silent — but only for a moment. Next Corm’s belly gave a series of warning rumbles, and then from his mouth, too, for a second, blowing aside the wispy moustaches and beard which now proudly obscured it, broke the same impatient sound which had from the nain’s. And next and at once, as though rehearsed, and well-rehearsed, a by far deeper series of growls caused Roke’s taut belly to writhe, and he uttered by far the loudest brunk of the three.

Old Bab slowly and economically laid a twig at the edges of the fire. It fired. He showed what might have been a small old smile on those lips which none there had ever really seen to smile before.

“I wit it not,” said Arnten, slowly shaking his head. “The wizards alone have eaten, all three, and now you three here — Eh. Well.” He reached for the carcass of the deer, drew it towards him and the fire. “Well. Eh. Now, then, do we let eat. And let the wizards …” His voice died away. And presently the drip-drip-drip of fat into the fire caused it to spurt and flare. And Wizardland saw and heard a feast which was neither magic nor symbolic. And afterwards they let the fire die down, and then they all lay near the ashes. And slept.

In the morning an odd and unfamiliar droning sound they heard, but, being both bone-weary and full of meat, they grunted and rolled over and covered their eyes against the interfering sun. The droning increased, became clamorous. They sat bolt upright, all of them. A clear sunlight shone cleanly on the grey sands and grey stones of this canyon in Wizardland. Three figures they saw before them, now standing still, now walking back and forth, now gravely folding their legs under them and sitting, now sedately rising to their feet and waving their arms and now turning their backs, and then at once turning to face them again.

It was the three wizards of the caves, well-awakened from their long and hungry slumbers, and giving tongue and voice to the comments and the conversation and the thoughts and dreams, the unanswered and, indeed, the unasked questions of a hundred years tumbling from their lips — lips no longer sere and cracked but full and red, eyes no longer dull under dusty eyelids but gleaming bright. And mouths no longer dry, and certainly no longer choked with dust and certainly no longer silent. The wizards of Wizardland — at least three of them — had been fed. And these three wizards of Wizardland were now speaking. All at the same time. And they spoke and they spoke and they spoke, and they walked as they spoke and they spoke as they walked.

For three days and for three nights, during which the five companions first looked and listened with astonishment and then with awe, and next tried to sort out any syllables from any other syllables, and at first with diffidence and then with desperation and after that with something close to wrath and then with growing bafflement tried to be heard themselves …

For three days and for three nights the three wizards talked without ceasing and walked as they talked, back and forth. Then as it approached the cold grey dawn when the ghosts all flee, a gradual silence fell. And the walking slowed. And, one by one, with an abrupt but not ungraceful movement each, the wizards sat them down and stayed seated. Red-eyed, not sure if they themselves were asleep or awake, or perhaps doomed to remain and gather dust for a century, weary and confused and not certain of anything, the five watched in silence.

And then the nearest of the wizards, and evidently the one first fed, said in a clear tone, unfatigued, “Men and man-Bear and youngling nain. You have fed us sufficedly, you have listened to us not unpatiently, and you are waiting for us unhastily. This is all according to the natural order and basis of things — and far different — we perceive — from a former age which allowed us to famish: ahah ahah ahah!
That
was not well done! Anumph. We dwell not on that. We have waited and you have waited, and although your wait was not so long as ours, think not that we exact hour for hour. Nay. So. One at a time, then, speak you speaking and we shall hearken. And ask, for here eventually come all answers, undistracted by the false delights of life such as be in other lands and provinces, such as fruits and trees and fair flowers and female flesh and wild beasts and birds for to hazard and for to chase: but here be ne things but stone and sand and clean pure air … and, of course, anumph, we the wizards … Therefore, all wisdom cometh here and all knowledge cometh here and all writings and wottings and all sapiences and powers. To be sure that they adventure forth from their sources and disperse over every land and province and island and main, but in thother places there be such distractions as I did mention priorly, hence all wisdom there does dissipate and all knowledge doth melt and doth dwindle …

“But the spirit and ghost of all thought and learning cometh here in their comings and find ne thing to disadvantage them, and hence we of the wizardry do absorb them as we absorb a sunbeam. Nought do distract us, neither getting nor giving nor delving nor tilling nor trapping nor chasing, of neither kind of venery are we attracted, and we hew no wood, having none to hew. Hence all these wisdoms and wittings and wottings do accumulate amongst us and are but diminished in the very slightly by that we do one time in an undren yearen eat one meal. And if towards the conclusion of that cycle cometh another meal, we scruple ne to eat it also. And if there cometh none, we do but estivate and wait.

“However, we account it as an ill-done thing if none of the folk who dwell in the world of fleshly forms take pain to bring us not so much as a suppance of blood, liver, fat, and marrow sprinkled lightly with clean sea-salt and served as is proper upon a clean piece of bark, not e’en one time in one undren yearen. To speak as to the point, as be our manner, sparingly and sparsingly and without a superfluity of syllables this neglectancy hath disturbed the pure concentrations in which we would prefer to spend our days and times and cycles, it hath happed — that we can recall — but a two or a three times since men began to dwell upon the soil of Ultima Thule, and as for the other Thules and what did and did not occur in those lands and in those days, we chuse not now to speak.

“Who in general hath sent us food but the kings who have set their feet upon the necks of men? For who else hath had power to summons men from fireside and women’s arms and send them upon the journey hither, the distances and perils of which men have alway so exaggerated, as though a swamp or a salamander or a what or a which were all that much matter or marvel? Well, well, it be not for us to bear grudge or execute vengencies; but if the generalty be not reminded they will themselves suffer, thus out of a concern for them greater than our concern for ourselves, we have found it needful and necessary to set forth a doom. No doubt this doom hath vexed a king and he hath been moved to enquire as to what uncare of which natural basis and order of things hath upset the universal balencies. Anumph. Anumph.”