The Island Under the Earth (2 page)

A league along the coastal road stood (or lay) the ruins of The Old Queen’s Tower: that is, they were not precisely along the road, but in the fork of a Y formed by the road’s division — one following the out-thrust of the land, the other heading in and away and up, league after league after hundredleague, until (so it was said) it reached The Heartlands, and all that was there.

“What do you stop for?” Stag snapped, speaking for the first time. The onagerer squinted, rubbed his bristly jowls and knobby chin, cleared his throat.

“Trying to think…. Wasn’t nothing in the augur-speech — was there? — warning us to ‘ware of the Old Queen’s Tower — ”

“No! Get on with it.”

The man laughed, uneasy, but determined to have his say. “It just come to me … maybe … The Old Queen … and — and that something about …” He hesitated, eyed the gaunt white stones of the ruins. “… meaning no disrespect — a crone?”

Stag’s suppressed feelings burst out; he called the man by sundry sea-names which made him scowl and wince, concluded, “It’s hours before noontide, coney-brain! Wit-told! Get on with it! Get on!”

The man swallowed, gave a laugh in which sheepishness and resentment were about equally present. They got on with it. They left the road by and by for a well-marked path winding through the hedgerows like a sunken stream. By and by the rows fell away and they observed — Stag and Bosun and the woman, at least — with surprise how high they had already come. Fat farmlands lay below, common-tilth and state-fields. Now the path wound along through pasture, with here and there the golden fleeces of the flocks shining in the sunlight. Stag heard the Bosun draw in his breath and dive upon a (so it at first seemed) rock, but in a moment he saw it was no rock, but some live creature.

The bosun held it almost fearfully. “What thing is this I have here?” he exclaimed. The packtrainman dismounted and had only taken a few steps when he gave a grin of surprise. “A gossip! An airsucker!”

Stag made no objection to the halt, but seemed not pleased; still, he came up to look at the thing, lizard forebody, snakefish aftbody, and face like some caricature of an old woman — It seemed as though some awareness of this resemblance just then occurred to the onagerer: Crone? Crone! — and he looked up hastily. But the sun was by no means at meridian.

And the woman looked up, in her litter, and half-turned to see.

It was as though this action for the first time reminded Stag of her presence. He looked at her with some surprise, but she was not looking at him, she was trying to turn in the cramped space so as to see this creature, gossip or airsucker. Stag took the bosun by the wrist and led him to the litter slung between two stout geldings. The hireling followed. To him, as soon as they were next to her, Stag spoke. “Tell about it,” he said.

“Some call it wyver,” he said. “Wyvern, wyvert, same thing. Another name is gossip, also — look you here — ” He reached out a finger terminating in a nailclaw of uncommon dirtiness and began to do a slow stroking under the creature’s shallow underjaw, and, after a moment, the mouth pursed and a sucking noise was heard and a slow swelling began to grow beneath his stroking. Something like a bladder puffed and kept puffing. The bosun’s feet moved, but he held his hands firm enough. Then the packtrainman gave the swelling a jab with his finger. The air went out, noisily, and a sort of guttural croaking was heard. After a moment, to the astonishment of the three sea-folk and the smirking amusement of their hired man, the croaking resolved itself into something resembling human talk.

Leave a girl alone won’t ye. Always abothering of me.

All four laughed, then hushed.

You’d like it me coney come on there’s a sweet gal. Oh suppose someone was to see. Who’s to see none’s about. Anyway there’s the yan thicket be a sweet gal do.

“Now you know why they’re called airsuckers and gossips; as for th’other names, I’ve no notion … shall I step on it?”

A cry of sorts from the woman, a movement of her hand, the onagerer surprised, three look at the fourth. Stag asks, “Does it bite or do other harm?” “No — just croaks like such you’ve heard. Oh, some says she prognosticates, but others say: No, she don’t, just creeps to folks’s thresholds, listens, talks if you makes her suck air — ” Abruptly Stag says, “Give it to her, Bosun. On with it!” But he says it without rage. The woman, perhaps with the feeling of one captive for another, cuddles the wyvern in her own soft lap, leans over and whispers to it. The party starts off again.

The path becomes a bare track, crawling over hills and across downs. The soil is thinner, trees more seldom, huge rocks push up and lean at crazy angles. They meet the woman crying for her children.

Afterwards, Stag was to think:
A fool was I to have yielded, to have listened, plainly she was a spy, a land-siren and lure-lurly
. Afterwards.

But then, all that any of them knew was that she was heard before she was seen, coming at a gait which was half a trot and half a stumble, but heard, first, in the form of a sort of hoarse crooning which set the hair of their napes on edge. At first they thought, when sight and sound came together and came closer, that it was the form of madness: hair disheveled, eyes wild, hands out and groping, and that dreadful and horrifying voice. But finally she seemed to focus on them and the expression of her face quite changed; her voice formed into coherent syllables: names: childer-names.

“Trenny! Darda!”
she called. Her feet came faster. She wobbled a ghastly caricature of a smile at them, her eyes roved frantically.
“Tren-ny! Dar-da!”
The sing-song sound was unmistakable; even if one had never heard the names it would have been clear that here was a mother calling for her children. “Tren-ny? Dar-da?” Voice and face grew frantic, hands pressed to head.

Stag growled, called out, “There’s no children with us and none been seen by us at all, goodmother — ” He might have saved his breath. She circled round them, the onagers rolling their eyes after her, she moved her dry, cracked lips in silence one fearful moment, then close up she came and (with a glare which defied them) laid her hands upon every pack on every beast, feeling and squeezing. And all the while she called the names — as though hopeful rather than fearful that her two were somewhere enwrapped and concealed. And so she came to the litter and she reached her hands in and, the while she licked her mouth and gaped and peered, lifted the coverlets and groped beneath the cushions …

Then she lifted her face and saw the woman inside and their hands locked and the newcomer’s face broke into a thousand lines and she began to wail and she began to weep.

No one ever said, Let her come along with us … She came. She told her story, and she told it again. She never ceased the flickering back and forth of her eyes over the land and she told her tale and she told it. By and by it became a conversation, or, rather, an argument: rationality and logic versus fury and raw, hot grief.

She would have done better to have stopped nearer home; doubtless the children were still nearby … “They’re not! They’re not! The dog would have found them, for I had him with me when I looked up and down our valley, and they couldn’t have gone past it by themselves before I first missed them: the girl wouldn’t leave the boy, and the boy is lame!” But if the children couldn’t have gotten out of their home valley, how could they have gotten this far? “They never went by themselves, they never! They were taken! They were taken!
The Sixies took them!
” The packtrainman guffawed and Stag and Bosun made scoffs and shook their heads.

“Grannytales, grannytales! What would the Sixies want with your pair brats?” — the packtrainman.

“Likelier, goodmother, ’twas raiders come up from the coast in the dark of night.” — the bosun.

“Yes: and best for you to turn bum and beat a track down to the Town, to tell your tale there, have the Provost sound a hue and hunt, maybe find the raid-vessel hid in a creek, say.” — Stag.

“No.” — from the litter.

Stag’s face went slack, then taut, and dark. His lips drew up, and his hand opened. Then he gave his head a swift, single shake; he said to his woman, “You never said me No before. Why now?”

Her face was pale, but no paler than usual; her voice had been raised to nay-say him, but it was seldom raised at all. “Raiders wouldn’t bother with a lame child. There’d be no market.” The goodmother squinted at this, said it over soundlessly. No one else said a word. The brute-simple logic of the statement left nothing to be said.

Only the sound of the onagers, hooves chopping down, now and then a whinny, was heard a while. Then the goodmother began her calling once more. Stag brushed his hand at his ear, next said, in a good enough humor, “Well, woman, if we run across centaurs and your kids with them, we’ll make them give over — eh, Bosun?”

“Aye, Master,” said he, stoutly. Winks were traded, the packsman made a mowe, but the countrywoman saw nothing of this: she, with a cry, fell down before the captain and embraced his knees. Then, before he could move to kick or catch at her, up she got and threw him one look of gratitude which shut his mouth. Then she set herself to walking with a steady pace quite unlike her former hazard caperings, and all the while she looked leftwards and rightwards and only now and then she called her children’s names, but always she kept her hand on that side on the frame of the litter. And always the woman who sat in it held her own hand upon the other one.

Captain and Bosun fell a bit behind, Bosun squinting his blue eye at the packman’s back. “When and where was that one to pick up the guide, Captain?” he asked. Captain shrugged, supposed: when he needed to. The track was still clear enough.

“Air about here smells odd … dead …” he mused. “If we were at sea — well, but we’re not.”

“… good thing, too,” Bosun muttered. His brown eye met his Captain’s. Who guffawed.

“Nervy, are you,” Captain asked. “Having second thoughts after not having first ones about
‘raiders’?
Forget it. Memories aren’t as long as lives, and lives are short … some lives, to be sure,” Captain Stag said, thoughtfully, “are shorter than others…. Just for the present, we’ll do better in the hills. Nobody will be nosing around up there. Afterwards, when the ashes are cold …” He didn’t finish the sentence. Perhaps he had not meant to finish it. At any rate he stopped … everyone stopped … everything stopped …

For quite a few seconds nothing moved, neither men nor women nor beasts. No breath of wind disturbed the hot air and the very grass upon the ground was still. There was nothing different to be seen, only the towering boulders and here and there a twisted tree, as far as eye could reach. And then they began to hear it … had, probably, been stopped in the first place by having heard it but so low that the mind had not fully perceived the burden of the ear … a low and humming sort of noise … low at first … like the low, dull, swarming sound of bees … like the high, shrill, piercing sound of gnats …

“What — ?” They looked at each other, puzzled.

“What — ?”
They looked at each other, confused.

“What! What!”
They shouted at each other, amazed.

The woman who had lost her children began to scream, there were words in the scream, but they could not make them out, for the maddening noise was louder and louder and was all about them now; the woman who had lost her children began to tug and to pull at Stag’s woman — A rock came hurtling through the air, and another, and then volleys of rocks. One caught Stag and hurled him half off his feet; one knee and one hand on the ground, he saw his woman come tumbling out of her litter, heard a cry of “Sixies! Sixies!
Sixies —
” the last repetition prolonging itself indefinitely upon the troubled air; and the ground shook to the sound of the hooves of the centaurs.

Around and around they went, now thudding on four legs and now up in the air to thud on only two and menace with the other four, bellowing, beating their shag breasts with the flats of their odd-shaped hands, beards flowing into manes, teeth gleaming, eyes rolling — now and again one or two together of them would sally out of the circling swarm and come dashing forward as though bent on riding down the people who had automatically come close together: the bosun with his cutlass drawn, the captain with javelin and sword: but though they snarled and shouted, at each feint of the man-weapons they returned once more to the whirling circle.

It was a shout from the bosun which made Stag turn half around to follow look and gesture: a black centaur-stallion with rage-reddened eyes was rushing in upon them with a boulder held aloft in both his hairy hands. He faltered just a moment, as though upset at not being able to hurl and escape unseen whilst (on the other side of the beleaguered humans) two brindle cob-centaurs were capering and clashing their hooves in evident intent to distract — only a moment — then he came on, came on — but in that moment Stag had loosed his javelin. It struck the half-human in the thicket of his upper flank, where man-trunk joined beast-body, and fell to the torn and trampled soil.

The creature’s eyes widened, he let the boulder fall and struck one hand to his head and the other to his gashed and bleeding side. One moment only he swayed and trembled. Then, with his chest trembling from the deep and endless roar of rage which issued from it, he came hurtling straight at Stag, who raised the sword, and went hurtling past him … but, as he went by, he lifted the hand which had been cupped to his bleeding wound and dashed it at the one who had wounded him: then he followed full among his fellows and was lost from sight.

Stag, meanwhile, saw his own sight obscured by a haze of tears of agony. The centaur’s blood had struck him full on the side of his face, it burned him like a thousand fires. He fell to his knees and screamed his agony aloud. He saw his woman and his man standing, stricken and uncertain, saw the centaurs all streaming away across the rolling landscape, saw the country-dame running as though pursued, and then in the midst of his maddening pain he thought:
She it was who led us into this trap. Her tale was a lie. A fool I was to have yielded, to have listened, plainly she was a spy, a land-siren and lure-lurly …

The poisonous ichor ate at his face like venom. Each breath he forced into his toiling lungs boiled like red-hot acid. Scale formed between his eyes and his eyelids; he forced his fingers in to claw apart the choking scab which grew apace upon his nostrils and across his bubbling lips. The cool hands of death closed upon his heart, and pressed.