The Island Under the Earth

by Avram Davidson

  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.

  Chapter Six

  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 c
ountry 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.

  Chapter Seven

  What labor and unremitted resolve must have gone into the building of it, from quarrying and transporting and cutting and setting, to the final roofing of it with slates only slightly less heavy than the ashlars of the walls: this thought, in varying degrees and kinds, impressed them all. There, with its back set into the hill and its two shuttered upper windows on the nigh side, like eyes, it looked for the moment and for the world like some staunch gray beast defying any number of lesser creatures … and for the world and for the moment they all for very awe felt themselves to be among the latter.

  “Come on, then,” Stag said, and the spell was broken.

  The very shrubs of the vanished garden had grown into trees, and the lilacs now swayed past the rooftop. It was hot and fragrant in the tangled yard, inside — once they had gotten inside, and this was no easy thing, for the massy old key at first refused to turn the ponderous wards; Stag swore and twisted and swore again before he learned the knack: put the key in to its full length and then bear down on it and then turn: easy as easy it moved then — inside was dark and cool and musty, as some newly-opened cave might be.

  Stag entered defiantly, the bosun followed cautiously, the two women (holding each other) proceeded fearfully; the augur, last of all, hopefully. He, as the windows were made, creaking, to open, looked about with an eager face, and his thin nostrils distended and sniffed the cold, dead air. “Look, look,” he exclaimed, “there in the fire-corner, is that not a rack for drying and curing deer-hams? Of a certainty; let us see what luck we have, for, however dry and hard the flesh may be, shave it thin or hack it with an axe if need be, add sufficient water — ”

  Tightly closed as the house had been, yet the small, sly wild things of the woods had been able to slip in: of the deer’s-hams, only bones were left; rags were there, and one small jar of oil unvexed, both enough to bind Spahana’s troubled feet: but of the rest of the country stores, in jars or in sacks, in fire-corner or on rafter-beams, in chests or in whatsoever thing or place, only rot and waste and ruin met their eyes. The woman Rary summed it up without words, though at first she had muttered rapidly about cookpots and firewood: now she merely took up an old besom from a corner, beat it free of cobwebs and ages of dust, began to sweep the rubble out of doors.

  The augur swallowed his disappointment, swallowed it audibly. But he did not whine. He asked if there were such a thing as a bow-string for him to set snares with; there was not. With a brief nod, and a clap to his long knife as though to make sure it was there, he left the house. They could hear him working at something nearby between intervals of departure and return. Once he came with berries and once he came with an armful of sweet grass which Rary scattered on the floor. Once she followed him with the least broken jar and returned with water from the spring. Once he brought springy twigs of evergreen which she made into beds. By this time she had gotten into the turn of things and, her work with the besom done, now took a less gloomy view of the spoiled supplies.

  “Here is a good sieve,” she said, contentedly. “I make no doubt but that I can save enough grain and such to make at least one meal for tonight.” Stag growled that the “grain and such” was not fit for human teeth to touch, but she faced him stoutly. The poor, she said, had often worse provender than that to contend with, and had learned how to make do, and how to make the like of it fit for human teeth to touch. “Besides,” she added, “the berries will give it savor” — no more she said on the subject, but threw a single and significant look at the sealord’s hand, even hovering over the berry pot. He gave one final growl. And withdrew his hand.

  Still, he was not pleased. “Lo will hear of this,” he said, stormily. “And soon. We can’t stay here, without food. One meal for tonight, and a poor enough diet that will be, however well sifted, and then what? No. We must go back. House,” he said, giving a sweeping glance which encompassed the thick walls and thick shutters; “house is well enough…. But we must go back.”

  Dimlight was soon to be upon them, the signs said, and he made no move to leave, strode back and forth and up and down the solid steps; until at last he found a door leading to one tiny uppermost room under the eaves and commanding a farther view than all. Here he stayed, silent, solitary and alone, and none ventured to disturb him of a purpose.

  Though, when the clamor arose below, he came down by himself soon enough … more quietly than he had gone up, and with his javelin in his hand and poised for throw.

  What he found, though, was enough for the whole tenor of his muscles to change, and the striker became at once but a staff.

  The creature had been and must have been there all along. Only a few feet from it the farmwife had cast her sweepings, only an arm’s-length away Castagor the augur had bent to cut his sweet grasses to strew upon the house-floor. Past the thicket even Stag had strode once or t
wice in his mutterings. Yet what lay there had been silent … perhaps in weakness, reviving somewhat in the day’s decline as it cooled … perhaps simply sizing up the situation and peering cautiously (perhaps fearfully) through the brambles and the branches. Had their coming been known, or at least anticipated? Had the hider made a way there out of memories dim or by no means dim that succor might be had where once it had been had, house equalling human equalling help? without reflection or remembrance that nothing human had long lived there? — there, in the old stone place where generations of Hobars had come, with the regularities of the seasons? Or was it none of these, perhaps, and perhaps nothing more than that thus far he had come, and could go no farther, and only an instinctive caution had made him lay himself down in the covert instead of falling in the broad yard?

  Rary it was who had found him, heard his harsh, irregular breathing, she said later, knowing that it was not and could not have been her children, and yet somehow no more fearing than knowing what rough beast might be there behind the wild roses with their open petals, behind the delicate tracery of the fennel and the pale lace of the wild carrot: she stood on her toes and she peered. And, without word or sound more than quick catch of breath, went on her way again: an act of discipline which ended, as soon as she reached the shelter of the house, in a welter of wild, spasmodic screams, gesticulations, ululations, incoherent words, and attempts to bar the windows: but before she was half done at this task she was roughly bade desist by Stag.