Ursus of Ultima Thule (8 page)

The man’s face had the look of one who kicks a dog not to be rid of it but for the pleasure of kicking it. Then the face changed and the arm released him, raised its spear; the mouth that cursed him gave a sick croak as something snapped which was not the spear. Arntat was there. Arntat was holding, embracing, Arntat was crushing. Ugly sounds of witless fright then, from this other’s mouth. Blood gushing from that mouth. And then other men, many other men, spears and clubs and then ropes, Arntat down on one knee. Arntat releasing limp and bleeding body, Arntat clawing out for a grip upon another. Arnten biting, beating. Arntat down. Arntat growling, roaring. Men cursing as much in fright as wrath. Arntat down. Arntat suddenly silent, save for his breathing in the sudden silence. Arntat bound. Arnten, too.

And after some moments of gasping, recovering breath, slowing hearts, hissing of pain, someone said as though to a question none had heard, “I don’t know — I don’t know — Eh? Ah? Nains?
No!
Nor bears — ”

Another voice. “We be the kingsmen. Let the king say
what
.” And others, others. “Aye! Ah! Let the king say what!”

The red-sickness of all iron flamed into a plague. At first whispered, it was now said openly that the king himself had caught the evil and the ill. Indeed, it seemed to be so. Red blotches were seen about his face and hands and all his face and limbs and frame looked wasted and hollowed. His voice cracked and croaked. His hands shook. In the morning he groaned and staggered. In the late afternoons his eyes would roll up and his eyelids roll down and he folded his legs and lay where he happened to be, servants hastily bringing furs and fleeces and lifting him and settling him again. For the length of time it took for the shadow of the sun-staff to move over two stones the king lay as one dead. And in the late night hours he tended to enrage easily, to shout and strike out and to cast things.

But in the early and middle afternoon and in the early and middle night times he was as well as ever in those days he was well. As to the first of these periods, it was assumed he was passing well, for his voice could be heard talking — talking, not groaning, not yelling — and as for the second of these periods, it was then that he held such gatherings as he held and saw such outsiders as he saw. In the red light of the hearth all men may look reddened and the dancing shadows may make all men look gaunted.

But not all men hide themselves in daylight.

Day by day the couriers trouped in. Night by night the king himself would see them and let himself be seen by them and from them receive the tidings which he had, of course, already received; for did he not sit upon his stool or lie upon his pallet behind the reed curtain while the courier made report upon the other side? Tirlag-usak, grown stout and gray in his service as a first captain of the kingsmen, generally stood forth as the couriers came in, each with the strip of white bark cloth bound about his head, which even toddle-babes knew signified
I am the king’s mouth and I am the king’s eyes and I am the king’s ears. Delay me not — and if I need aid, aid me
.

“Thirty-deer Hill,” the courier might say. Or: “Whalefish Point.”

Tirlag-usak puts out his hand. “Tally,” he says. “Why so slow?”

The courier hands over the cut and carved piece of wood. He pants to show how hard he has run. Of late there had been increasingly less sham in this. Tirlag-usak, of course, knows whence every one of the couriers has come but he sees if the tally stick fits the proper one from his own box.

“Report sightings,” he directs. “Swiftly.”

“Good omens from the flocks of birds,” says the courier. It Would not do to report
No sighting
.

“Eat. Wash. Rest. Return after evening meal.”

The courier retires, sweating but relieved. His tongue may be the king’s tongue but that need not prevent its being cut.

Behind the reed curtain the king’s lips writhe, the king’s hands move convulsively. The king’s face grows redder yet. The red-sickness increases fast upon him. And the red-sickness increases fast upon the iron. The courier has gone. Tirlag-usak remains standing. From behind the reed curtain comes an anguished whisper.

“Iron?
Iron?
”

“The ears of the king hear all things,” says the grizzled first captain. After just a breath, he says, “The king already has heard that it is not better. It is not even as it was.” After three breaths should come the groan or hiss which has come to mean
Go!
but Tirlag-usak today, after only two breaths, repeats, “The ears of the king hear all things.” And says further, “The king has already heard that ten of his men who went north in a search for nains have this day returned with captives.”

“Uhh?”

“One great and one small, as the king already has heard. The eyes of the king have already seen them and it may be that the king’s eyes have already recognized one of them as the king’s kin to whom the king’s mouth will speak more words.”

Tirlag-usak had spoken somewhat more rapidly than usual. Now he waits for the space of many breaths and he hears each of these breaths from behind the reed curtain. But no question now comes from behind the reed curtain and what comes thence at last is a cry of such agony and terror and rage that almost the hand of Tirlag-usak touches the woven reed barrier — almost he stoops to lift it. But he hears other feet, other voices babble and whisper and shuffle and sigh. Then nothing. Then, only then, he departs.

Later, in the enclosure where they were penned, Arnten suddenly looked up. Arntat, his father, did not pause in his shambling and shuffling, shuffling and shambling, back and forth and back and forth, head waving like a snake’s head from side to side. It seemed he did not share his son’s thought, a sudden one which projected into the boy’s mind a picture of the mandrakes dancing to the sound of the small drum in his old uncle’s medicine hut. The recollection was so clear that the boy sat and watched it inside his head for some time.

• • •

Mered-delfin beat the small drum and his mandrakes, which were the mandrakes of the king and queen, danced their witchery-dance and Mered-delfin watched them from the corner of his eyes and the king and queen watched them full front. Every feeling moved across the king’s face, none at all disturbed the face of the queen. The mandrakes moved and the mandrakes moved and they mimed and mimed and they danced. At first, coming forth from their carved wood chest, the mandrakes’ motion kept time to the tune of the witchery-drumlet. But after a while and after Mered-delfin had sung to them and hummed to them and chanted to them, whistled and drummed to them, then the pattern of their moving changed. They led and Mered-delfin followed, his fingers and his palms straining to keep up with them, to maintain the proper tune and rhythm upon the drumhead made from the skin entire of a dwarf deer slain without bruise or blood.

At length, when they had begun to repeat themselves and no chantings or whistlings could prevail upon them to enact any new pattern, Mered-delfin drummed them back and dancing they went, throwing up their root-thin arms they danced backward upon their root-thin legs, and climbed back into their box at last and closed its lid upon them.

Thus the dancing mandrakes. As for the watching mandrakes, they remained in the outer court and would shriek, beshrew, if so much as an unbidden shadow fell. And there they muttered and watched.

The chief witcherer licked his mouth and wiped his arm across his sweat-slick face and quickly rolled his eyes. The other two were not looking at him. Swiftly he set his countenance into its accepted lines. He softly clicked his fingernail against the side of the drum. They looked up toward him.

“It is as we have seen, it is as I have said, they have enacted the lineaments of the dream and mimed for us the finding and sounding of All-Caller, the great fey horn — ”

The king grimaced and showed his sharp teeth. As he leaned forward on his hands and arms he seemed to crouch on all fours. “And where, then,” he asked, “is the great good which you said this dream portended for me?”

Mered-delfin parted his thin beard from lips and mouth and dared to grin. The very daring of the deed made the king draw back, somewhat relax the tenseness of his pose. Witch Mered thrust out his hand and arm and described a quarter-circle in the air and let the hand extend two fingers in a point. “Can it be that the sounding of All-Caller has lured from across the all-circling sea an enemy who is not to be named? And with him a son begat in treacherous exile? Lured them thence and it must be alone?”

His master’s grimace grew into a snarl. His eyes blazed red. He seemed like a creature of the forest about to hurl itself from its den. He gave off the rank and bitter smell of denizen and den. “I shall kill them!” His voice rose into a howl. “I shall have them killed! They shall be killed for me and before me!” His tongue lolled out of his mouth. “Limbs broken” — the howl prolonged itself — “impaled —

“Slayer of Bull Mammonts —

“ — flayed —

“Great Dire Wolf —

“ — disemboweled — ”

The last word hung upon the air. The Orfas panted. His sides heaved. He flung up his head and again he howled. In this howl there were no words, but it rang with a lust for vengeance long delayed. In his narrow pen Arntat heard it and stopped in his mindless pacing and hearkened to it and his arms moved slightly and he stood still. The nain-thralls heard it in their tunnels and turned their massy heads on their short necks. Servants heard it and shivered and tremored. Kingsmen felt flesh pucker and hair rise and let their eyes roll to each other, and almost they clean forgot the tales of the ill-struck king, cloistered and shabby and sick and old.

“The Orfas,” they whispered to one another.

“The wolf! The wolf!

“King Orfas! Great Wolf! King Wolf!”

“ — King Wolf — ”

• • •

Long the wolf-king lay upon his side, panting, wet with sweat. Then he jerked his head and in two silent bounds Mered warlock was crouching at his head. Said the king, “Not kill him?”

Said the witcherer, “Not yet.”

Said the wolf-king, “When, then?”

Said the sage, “When the curse is canceled. When iron is well.”

The king said no word. His eyes rolled up and his lids rolled down. He nodded. He touched his sage’s hand. His queen kneeled beside him and he touched her face. The words last spoken hung upon the air.

And the words unspoken, too.

Arnten and his father were allowed to toil together; one of the guards had said with a guffaw that the two of them were barely equal to one nain. Iron was the nains’ heritage and though they had been used to it in all its workings at their own speed and though timed toil was inhospitable to them, still the nature of mining was not strange. But it was all strange, strange and fell, to Arntat and his son. Only the unswerving friendship of the nains and the fact of his and his son’s being still together relieved the toil at all. And worse by far than the toil was the circumstance of bondage, of confinement, of life now being limited to a set series of motions within severely limited space. All thralldoms are one same thralldom. The unremitting labor of the toil, the unremitting oppression of the guards, the ill food, cramped space, uncleanliness, lack of hope, dull hatred, scanted sleep, infinite heaviness of spirit — are not these the features of all thralldoms?

“It is harder, Bear, for thee than we,” the nains said. “The tunnel fits we as the hoodskin fits the pizzle.”

“Then I stoop,” he said. Stooped, grunted. “I have stooped before.” But his eyes were sunken. And his forehead bruised and scabrous, for he did not always think to stoop, nor they to warn him.

And the nains said, “It is harder, Bear, for thee than we. We be used to the smell of iron dust and fire and have forgot the smell of grass and waterflows.”

“Then I shall grow used to this and shall forget that other, too,” he said. But he did not grow used to it, he often was coughing, and there was that in his eyes and on his face which seemed to show that he was not forgetting. And one night when the begrudged fire burned low and the older nains had begun to creep into their sleepy-holes and kick the crushed bracken-fern into a brief semblance of softness — at last, that night his voice burst loud with, “But I cannot forget! No! No! I cannot forget!”

The older nains crept out from their sleepy-holes, greasy-sided, fetid, close. They laid their hands on his, and on his knees and arms and legs, their huge and calloused hands. And a few did so to Arnten, who had crept close to his father; and the heavy nain-hands were light and gentle. “Since thee cannot forget, Bear, cease to try,” they said. “And speak it out to we.” And the Bear spoke.

Not — at first — of the free life of sun and stars, grass and waterflows, salmon hunts and honey thefts, of timeless days and world without walls. These all, it seemed, though well remembered in general, had become as it were a design bordered in dyed grasses around a basket rim — turn it, turn it, now faster, now slower, and see the same sequences following forever; man’s mind no longer holding in differentiating recollection any one sequence from any other like it — so it seemed, when by and by his talk took up those days.

• • •

But he began with other days, when he was a man’s child among other men’s children, he one and Orfas another and Orfas a little older. Not much difference in age and little if any in status, even after both presently realized that Orfas was in a way an uncle — that Orfas’ father was the other’s grandfather, the other’s father Orfas’ half-brother. Both playing and tumbling and chasing dogs in one familiar yard onto which opened (so it seemed) the doors of many houses, yet all of them family houses. In those days they were but two among many and each father had several sons and neither more of a rival to each other than either was to any others. All the sons and cousins and uncles of that age had cast their reed practice spears and awkwardly fletched their boy-arrows and went creeping and hunting in the mock forests of the great yard. The years had flown away like the wild swans fly away, yet never do the absent years return as do the absent swans.