| Chapter Six
OVER THE BLECK
To Aldred and his companions this encounter later seemed inconsequential – more of a joke than a threat. For Melohtar’s party it was puzzling and disturbing, but again, in terms of consequences (let alone ‘purposes’!) hard to assess. The one obvious consequence was Melohtar’s changed mood. He rode in the lead and said nothing; the whole party rode onward while the light lasted, higher and higher, following a path that wound among the Seven Teeth and up onto a dry stony plateau where there was hardly any shelter from a bitter freezing wind. The riders set up their tents with difficulty, wrapped themselves in their blankets and sat round a small flickering fire. Erum found it hard to go to sleep on the stony ground. He dozed for a little while, then lay awake. Melohtar’s tent was next to his. There seemed to be a faint flicker coming from it. Peeping out, he saw that Melohtar had lit a lamp or a candle inside his tent. The riders, old campaigners, were all snoring except for Hrem who was on the watch; and here he came now, stepping quietly over the loose stones and shale, bulky but catlike under the frosty twinkling stars. Erum clenched his fist involuntarily, but it seemed that he had nothing to worry about this time: Hrem knelt down before Melohtar’s tent, raised the flap and crept inside.
Then what?
Had he come to commiserate with Melohtar over the loss of his beloved hound, or –?
Melohtar sat up: Erum saw his shadow move, not clearly outlined, no more than a patch of contrast against the dim glow of the tent-wall. And there was Hrem opposite him. And a low mutter of voices. And the two shades seemed to come together.
Erum withdrew into his own darkness and covered his ears. He slept no more. He tried to pray to Dru, but that night Dru seemed terribly far away. And in the small hours Erum fancied that he heard the sound of piping, a cold mocking echo amongst the bare rocks.
The next day, the first of February, dawned angry and bleak. A flat splinter of crimson sun showed briefly against the mauve and heavy grey of the clouds. The company breakfasted, packed their bags and led their spiritless horses between tricky screes and gulleys to the farther edge of the plateau. At least they could now see where they were. Before them, below them, lower hills descended into the plain of Enaderth, which stretched away into the distance, an endless waste of dismal grey fen.
‘More swamps?’ said Erum to Melohtar, essaying a little tentative speech.
‘Yes.’ The answer was cold but courteous. ‘There seems to be more marshland all the way down the lower Belechel. But how are we all? Still firm of purpose? No-one’s forgotten themselves?’
‘Everyone’s fine. But you, my lord – I haven’t offered you any condolences on your sad loss of yesterday.’
‘Then don’t!’ Melohtar’s mood was now evident: dark, sullen, resentful anger. It was uncharacteristic of him, and it seemed to lie unnaturally on his spirit like some strange portent, like a fall of black snow. ‘Two things I do indeed desire to forget: the act and the slanders of that foul magician!’
They clattered along the loose path, if path it was. Erum looked down and saw a bright spark struck by one of the shoes of his mare. It glowed golden-red, smouldered and faded.
‘Even so, my lord,’ he said, ‘shouldn’t we take counsel? Some of us heard the music last night. We haven’t spoken of the things Aldred said to us. Whether they be true or – help! Back! Back!’
They had come, with shocking suddenness, to the edge of another precipice. The horses neighed in wild alarm. The ground bent downwards before them. Beyond the drop was only the flat marsh, many hundreds or thousands of feet below. The following riders saw them halt amid a rolling of small stones, then slip and continue to move forward. The bay mare struck out desperately with her hooves, recovered her balance and stood trembling. Erum patted her gratefully. Stirnelach fell, and Melohtar was thrown forward: he skidded on helplessly and was saved only by a lucky lodgement, a firm point of rock that stuck out right at the very edge. The companions dismounted and came on. Stirnelach was secured and led back to the firmer ground. In five minutes the party was safely reunited. They saw that they had come right out on top of a shoulder of the mountain. To left and right were immense vertical bays, from which were thrust out a jumble of knees and buttresses and lower tree-covered spurs.
Melohtar addressed his men in a coldly incisive tone. ‘No need for counsel,’ he said. ‘We’ll divide into three groups, explore for two hours and then report back here. Dirketh, you will search up yonder, along to the left – you see? Lesuil, go back the way we came, then strike out to the right from the head of the gulley. Olrog, you will remain here and guard the horses. Hrem and I will venture down to the left and make for that lower shelf there – do you see? The Bishop will stay with the horses, or accompany one of us, as seems fit to him. We are seeking a way down, preferably one that runs westward. All understood?’
No-one dared to speak against these reckless orders. The troopers drew their swords and saluted. Then Dirketh and Lesuil marched away, each with his two men.
‘I’ll come with you, if I may, my lord,’ said Erum. ‘I’d rather be up and doing.’
On foot, it was fairly easy to descend from the side of the shoulder. The three roped themselves together, jumped, slid and rock-walked down towards the nearest shelf. Here there were trees, twisted thorns and firs with tight-knotted roots growing out of the cracks. The three explorers found themselves in a little alcove at the foot of a crevice, very dark and carpeted with brown needles. In front was a tangle of spiky branches. The stunted close-set trees put up a great deal of resistance. It took half an hour for the three to force their way through to the open grassy space of the shelf. Twenty yards away the dry grass ceded to bare rock, but to the right it continued downwards: they could a path disappearing and reappearing on the ledges of the bay, descending in its passage towards the outlying trees of the Neverglades.
The sky was darker than ever, but the three men stepped forward, glad to be out of the thicket. They stretched their arms and rubbed their scratched hands. Hrem moved up to the edge of the shelf, intending to look over it. There was a faint whizzing sound, and a ‘plunk’, and a slender grey-feathered arrow stood out of the back of his jerkin.
His head tilted back; his knees sagged; he walked on two more paces. His hands dropped, and he tried to turn round.
The other two rushed up to him. His eyes stared. His mouth had bled a little. Erum and Melohtar stared at one another over his warm body – baffled, frightened, somehow complicit, as if roped together by guilt. A few snowflakes drifted down.
‘Stand up.’
There was the archer, above them, on a ledge between two of the taller trees. He had his bow bent and another arrow laid on the string, but for the moment it was pointing down. He wore a grey cloak. His hood was thrown back, and in the dying light his hair gleamed like dull gold. His face was young, beautiful, merciless.
Instead of a sword or a sheath-knife, he carried a recorder thrust into his belt.
Erum and Melohtar stood.
The speech of the Elf was carried through the wintry air like the call of a bird. ‘You are trespassers. You have been warned not to enter here. Your purposes are evil and your lives might well be forfeit. You are spared at the pleading of the friends whom you encountered yesterday. But now you must leave this land, and leave by such a road as will delay you and hinder you from returning. Your followers will be allowed, this time, to use the road they came hither by, but you may not join them.
‘Your way now lies West and a little South, below the forest wall, as far as the great River. When you have crossed it you will be free. This is our King’s mercy. Gladly would I slay you as I have slain this guilty one here.
‘This is your only warning. You will be watched all the way to the River and at every moment. If you wander off the path, or seek to return, you will die.
‘Go!’
In a single movement he raised the bow, sighted and loosed off the arrow. It passed between Erum and Melohtar at neck-height, then skipped off the flat surface behind them. There was a flurry of snowflakes that drove into their eyes. When they looked into the trees again, the Elf had gone.
Impossible to disbelieve that voice. They turned the backs on Hrem the Surveyor and trudged down the path. The first snowflakes that fell on his eyes and eyebrows melted into drops of water; but after a while a snowdrift began to pile up against his body.
‘How far is it to the Bleck?’ asked Erum.
‘Fifty miles at least,’ said Melohtar. ‘I’ve no food in my pack. Have you any?’
‘Yes, as it happens. Some meat and biscuit.’
‘Well, come on.’
They walked on until darkness fell and the snow had stopped. ‘We can’t be expected to find our way in the dark,’ said Melohtar. There was no means of making a fire. They found a dryish space below an overhanging bank, and slept, or tried to sleep back-to-back with the blankets shared. Above the bank rose the eaves of Gladram, the monster-haunted wood.
‘Erum.’
‘Yes?’
‘It’s light. Get up.’
‘I’ve only just got to sleep.’
‘Plague it!’ A grey arrow stood in the earth, a few inches away from Erum’s hand. He staggered to his feet. He surveyed the desolate marsh. The two men ate half the food they had left, and set off.
Their progress was neither fast nor slow. The day’s journey passed without excitement.
By the second evening Erum and Melohtar were starving. They had hardly spoken to one another all day. There were many things to talk about, but all of them were like burdensome casks, large and too difficult to broach. On the third morning, the second after Hrem’s death, the two woke from their dark doze in the knowledge that if they did not reach the Bleck that day, they would not reach it at all. The track had veered away from the woods and was losing itself in an undulating grassland where small birds chirped and piped among the grasses and reeds. Light-headed with hunger, Erum and Melohtar ploughed on through the wet snowy grass until they were soaked and shivering with cold. But the River was not so very far away – their noses, hunger-sharpened, could scent the fresh wide muddy smell; and the sky, an expanse of chased and inlaid silver, seemed to hint along the horizon with a line of extra brightness. And as the two stood looking upward, they saw a dot: a bird that came flying down towards them: a great white gull with a golden beak.
It alighted on the grass and gave a cry, a soft low squawk, curiously mournful and gentle. It flew some way away from them, landed and called again. They followed wearily.
By noon the great watercourse was shining in full view. Erum and Melohtar were led up to a wooden landing-stage, small and fantastically isolated in that wilderness. A man sat on the stage. He held a fishing-rod. The gull flew down and settled on his fore-arm. He bent his head and kissed the beak. He took a small fish out of a bucket that stood by him. He offered the fish to the gull, which snapped it precisely from his fingers. Then the gull spread its wings and flew high into the air. A tremendous screaming and crying broke out from the great flock of gulls that turned and soared overhead.
‘Good day to you,’ said the man. He wore a low hat and shapeless waterproof clothes. His face was dark against the bright background and it was hard to make out his features. Nonetheless he was very solid, very particular, not at all like some dream-phantom or wraith of hunger.
‘Good-day,’ replied the two fugitives. ‘Can you tell us how to cross this River?’
‘I can row you across.’
‘Thank you,’ said they.
‘First tell me your names, and how you come to be in this region.’
‘I am Melohtar Ostendil’s son, of the city of Emynos in Thandor,’ said Melohtar hopelessly. ‘I came here as a leader of those who would invade and despoil this land. Wherefore the Elves bade us walk to you, miles out of our way, seemingly as a punishment.’
‘And I am Erumardil, priest of the Temple of Ruminas,’ said Erum. ‘I came to proclaim the Gospel of Dru to all those who dwell in this land, and to protect our host from bewitchments. But it is not clear to me that our compelled journey hither was a punishment.’
‘Very good,’ said the man. ‘I am the lord of the ferry, and my name is Athelstan. Get into the boat, if you like.’
The weakness of their legs, the rocking of the boat as they settled into it, the intense cold of the river-breeze that blew through their wet clothes: these sensations, and others, convincingly bore witness that this dreamlike experience was actually happening. The ferryman cast off from the jetty and bent to his work. Soon the boat was out in midstream. From here Erum and Melohtar had a somewhat better view of the forest wall and the Rediath, that now marched a few miles away. They could not see anything of the place where the River emerged. Beyond the opposite riverbank rose the first desolate hills of Undor. The outcasts were being thrust deeper and deeper into the wilderness, hundreds of miles from the nearest known habitations of men.
‘Step ashore,’ said Athelstan.
‘Thank you,’ said Erum. ‘Have you any food to give us, please? For we are starving.’
‘I have not. But I advise you: don’t go into the hills. Make for the flat horizon.’
There seemed to be another faint elf-path leading away from the landing-stage on this side.
‘Lead on, O maker of maps,’ said Erum.
‘I thought divine guidance would be more your style,’ retorted Melohtar.
‘Well, where are we?’
They had not dared to lie to the Ferryman, and the truthful answers they had given seemed to have released a spring of truth-telling, the same spring within both of them; and now, as they walked slowly away from the Bleck, conserving their strength, they had a desire for conversation. It would be pleasant to report that this pair, the atheist and the man of God, both so deeply divided within themselves, both guilty and complicit, were able mutually to supply the other’s lack: to find peace, even, within each other’s arms. It would be pleasant to report this, but alas, untrue. They were too cold and hungry, too tired and cross. Though they cuddled together at nightfall, neither’s flesh was soothed by the touch of the other; and during the daytime, as soon as they had crossed the River and for the whole of the next day, their talk was marked by a tone of bickering. It became a series of aimless disagreements, too weak to be called quarrels. In the first place they blamed each other for the death of Hrem and for the disaster that had overtaken them. Melohtar insisted that it was Erum’s job to watch out for hostile presences. With his priestcraft he should have been able to warn that the Elves were close at hand. To this Erum replied that they had already received a clear warning, and that he himself had indeed urged Melohtar to stop and think before going further. They fell silent, then, a slow mile further on, began to talk of Hrem, probing the truth of each other’s relations with him. ‘What was he?’ asked Erum. ‘Where did he come from?’
‘Orogorian. I believe his parents died in the plague. He was taken in, as an orphan, by the guild that used to extract the rock-blood there: that’s how he became a drillwright. He was a good man. I’d used him for years.’
‘Used him, how?’
‘Priestling, you forget yourself!’ said Melohtar, outraged. ‘Even lost in the wilderness, a commoner ought to know better than to insinuate so vilely to a man of rank!’
Erum breathed hard. ‘The question was innocent enough,’ he rejoined: ‘It was your own mind that supplied the insinuation. And now that it has done so, I ask you plainly: was that night, in your tent, the first time?’
Melohtar’s hauteur collapsed. ‘Yes it was. Never before, not with him, nor with any other man. What about you, little bumboy?’
‘Bumboy? Bumboy? Dru hears us, you insolent scoundrel!’
‘Answer the question!’
By degrees Erum was brought to confess, though not as frankly as Melohtar, the extent of the abuse he had suffered. ‘Poor you,’ said Melohtar at last.
‘But what sort of man was he?’ persisted Erum. ‘Would you say that he was truly evil? Is that why the Elf shot him?’
Melohtar considered. ‘I doubt it,’ he said. ‘I think he hadn’t got that much inside him, as a person. I think he was just an opportunist.’
‘How do you feel?’ asked Erum next morning.
‘Surprisingly well.’
‘We’re neither of us sick yet. That’s a great mercy.’
‘A mercy? What’s merciful? Here we are, at the end of everything, starving and dying of cold. We shan’t last another two days. Why bring mercy into it? Why? Tell me why?’
‘You know perfectly well why: and it’s a sore place of your own that makes you so irritable.’
‘It’s not a sore place in me, it’s a blasted offensive provocation in you! …Oh dear me, I must sit down for a bit.’
‘What are those woods?’ asked Erum presently.
‘Woods – forests – trees – I don’t know. Leave me alone!’
The woods were in fact the east end of the enormous forest of Anglad Morwen, through which the Punchkins had followed the fox. Melohtar knew that the great north-south Road passes through Undor, and that if they could find it there was still some hope of being rescued by other travellers; but there was no more flat horizon to aim for, and he was badly out in his reckoning, and indeed the grey sunless weather had made it all but impossible to steer a course.
‘How can you prove it?’ said Melohtar resentfully. ‘Go on, prove to me that He exists. Prove it, and I’ll believe it.’
‘I wouldn’t begin to try,’ said Erum. ‘you yourself saw the miracle of the Eagle in the Temple. If that isn’t good enough for you, I don’t know what would be.’
‘Oh, that bloody Eagle! That wicked prophecy! It’s all a piece of the same corruption!’
‘What corruption?’
‘Your whole filthy temple-religion!’
‘The Temple is undoubtedly somewhat corrupt,’ said Erum after a long pause. ‘Yet I hope that by Dru’s grace it may be cleansed one day.’
‘You go on,’ muttered Erum, sometime after noon: ‘I really am finished now.’
‘No you aren’t. I can see smoke.’
‘Where?’
A thin grey brush-stroke was fading away from the side of a hill.
Slowly, slowly and oh, so painfully, they made their way through the brushwood and the tall dead bracken, and at last approached the glade where the fire was. Someone was with it, squatting on his haunches, stirring a small iron pot. Erum and Melohtar had already smelt the food. Their stomachs were being gnawed and tormented. Their mouths were open and helplessly watering.
‘Good afternoon!’ said a friendly voice, a somewhat familiar voice. ‘Travellers in distress; I see. Good gracious, what a time you must have had. Let me help you.’
A strong arm came round Melohtar’s back and his own arm was drawn round a pair of massive shoulders. He was helped to the fire. His legs then gave way. He lay on his side, propped himself on an elbow and watched their rescuer give Erum the same help. The voice was really a well-known one, a very well-known one indeed. But the man was wrapped up in a cloak and a hood that for the moment obscured his face.
‘Dear me. Deary me,’ he continued gently: ‘Quite a pair of skeletons! Well now, you’d best go easy with the vittles at first. A drop of the soup, and some biscuit: how about that? And no more questions till you’re feeling better.’
Erum was shivering violently. ‘Thank you,’ he managed to say, and Melohtar repeated the two words. Hearing Melohtar’s voice for the first time, their saviour stopped in the act of tilting the soup into a dish. ‘Whoever –?’ he asked, in a tone that was suddenly sharp. ‘Sorry, questions later. One of you can have my spoon and the pot, and the other will have to sup it from the dish. Now, bread. Happy?’
‘Happy’ was the wrong word. The soup was the most marvellous, delicious, life-givingly glorious food that Melohtar had ever tasted, so much so that he felt like bursting into tears: but both the sensation and the feeling had already faded into insignificance beside a huge nameless astonishment: a sense as of some vast overturning, a surprise that was bigger than the whole world. ‘Erum,’ he whispered, ‘have we died?’
‘I see what you mean,’ answered Erum dreamily. ‘The answer’s no. I think not.’
‘Sorry, what’s that?’ asked their puzzled host. He threw a handful of sticks on to the embers and a swarm of bright sparks flew up. He flung back his hood and sat grinning cheerfully at his two guests. His face was ruddy in the firelight; his hair, very full and thick, was a rich red. He frowned a little. ‘It’s a queer thing,’ he said, ‘but I seem to remember you.’
The astonishment was no longer nameless. There was a name. Melohtar forced it out.
‘Swin!’
‘Melohtar,’ said Swin Gumasson, ‘Melohtar, is that you?’
This is the end of Part Two.
| |