Suddenly he started, held his breath and turned his head, listening incredulously. Had he indeed heard, or only imagined, the sound of voices, far off? No, there was nothing. He stood up; and found that he could now walk, though slowly and with pain. But which way should he go, and with what purpose? Southward, for Bekla? Or should he try to find some refuge and remain until daylight, in the hope of coming once more upon Shardik?
And then beyond all doubt he heard, for no more than an instant, a distant clamour of voices in the night. It was come and gone; but that was no wonder, for it had been far off, and what had reached his car might well have been some momentary, louder outcry. If the distance or his own weakness had not deceived him, there had been many voices. Could the noise have come from a village where some gathering was being held? There was no light to be seen. He was not even sure from which direction the sound had come. Yet at the thought of shelter and food, of resting in safety among fellow men and of an end to his loneliness and danger, he began to hasten – or rather, to stagger – in any direction and in none until, realizing his foolishness, he sat down once more to listen.
At length – after how long he could not tell – the sound reached him again, perceived and then dying on the ear, like a wave, spent among tall reeds, that never breaks upon the shore. Released and at once quenched it seemed, as though a door far off had opened for a moment and as suddenly closed upon some concourse within. Yet it was a sound neither of invocation nor of festival, but rather of tumultuous disorder, of riot or confusion. To him, this in itself mattered little – a town in uproar would be nevertheless a town -but what town, in this place? Where was he, and could he be sure of help once it was known who he was?
He realized that he was once more groping his way in what now seemed to him the direction of the sound. The moon, still obscured among clouds, gave little light, but he could both see and feel that he was going gently downhill, among crags and bushes, and approaching what seemed a darker mass in the near-darkness – woodland it might be, or a confronting hillside.
His cloak caught on a thorn-bush and he turned to disentangle it. At this moment, from somewhere not a stone's throw away in the dark, there came an agonized cry, like that of a man dealt some terrible wound. The shock, like lightning striking dose at hand, momentarily bereft him of reason. As he stood trembling and staring into the dark, he heard a quick, loud gasp, followed by a few choking words of Beklan, uttered in a voice that ceased like a snapped thread. 'She'll give me a whole sackful of gold!' At once the silence returned, unbroken by the least noise either of struggle or of flight. 'Who's there?' called Kelderek. There was no answer, no sound. The man, whoever he might be, was either dead or unconscious. Who – what – had struck him down? Kelderek dropped on one knee, drew his sword and waited. Trying to control his breathing and the loosening of his bowels, he crouched still lower as the moon gleamed out a moment and vanished again. His fear was incapacitating and he knew himself too weak to strike a blow.
Was it Shardik who had killed the man? Why was there no noise? He looked up at the dimly luminous cloud-bank and saw beyond it a stretch of open sky. Next time the moon sailed clear he must be ready on the instant to look about him and act.
Below, at the foot of the slope, the trees were moving. The wind among them would reach him in a few moments. He waited. No wind came, yet the sound among the trees increased. It was not the rustling of leaves, it was not the boughs that were moving. Men were moving among the trees. Yes, their voices – surely – but they were gone – no, there they were once more – the voices he had heard – beyond all doubt now, human voices! They were the voices of Ortelgans – he could even catch a word here and there – Ortelgans, and approaching.
After all his dangers and sufferings, what an unbelievable stroke of good fortune! What had happened, and where was this place that he had reached? Either in some inexplicable way he had come upon soldiers of the army of Zelda and Ged-la-Dan – which might, after all, have marched almost anywhere during the past seven days – or else, more probably, these were men of his own guard from Bekla, searching for him and for Shardik as they had been ordered. Tears of relief came to his eyes and his blood surged as though at a lovers' meeting. As he stood up, he saw that the light was increasing. The moon was nearing the edge of the clouds. The voices were closer now, descending the hill through the trees. With a shout he stumbled down the slope towards them, calling 'I am Crendrik! I am Crendrik!'
He was on a road, a trodden way leading down towards the woods. Plainly, the night-marching soldiers were also on this road. He would see their lights in a moment, for lights they must surely be carrying. He tripped and fell, but struggled up at once and hastened on, still shouting. He came to the foot of the slope and stopped, looking up, this way and that, among the trees;
There was silence: no voices, no lights. He held his breath and listened, but no sound came from the road above. He called at the top of his voice, 'Don't go! Wait! Wait!' The echoes faded and died.
From the open slope behind him came a surge of voices shouting in anger and fear. Strangely unimmediate they were, fluctuating, dying and returning, like the voices of sick men trying to tell of things long gone by. At the same moment the last veil of cloud left the moon, the ground before him started up into misty light and he recognized the place where he was.
In nightmare a man may feel a touch upon his shoulder, look round and meet the glazed but hate-filled eyes of his mortal enemy, whom he knows to be dead; may open the door of his own familiar room and find himself stepping through it into a pit of grave-worms; may watch the smiling face of his beloved wither, crumble and putrefy before his eyes until her laughing teeth are surrounded by the bare, yellow skull. What if such as these – so impossible of occurrence, so ghastly as to seem descried through a window opening upon hell – were found no dreams but, destroying at a stroke every fragment of life's proved certainty, were to carry the mind, as the crocodile its living prey, down to some lower, unspeakable plane of reality, where sanity and reason, clutching in frenzy, feel all holds give way in the dark? There, in the moonlight, ran the road from Gelt; up the bare, sloping plateau, among scattered crags and bushes, to the crest over which showed faintly the rocks of the gorge beyond. To the right, in shadow, was the line of the ravine that had protected Gel-Ethlin's flank, and behind him lay those woods from which, more than five years before, Shardik had burst like a demon upon the Beklan leaders.
Dotted about the slope were low mounds, while some way off appeared the dark mass of a larger tumulus, on which grew two or three newly-sprung trees. Beside the road stood a flat, squared stone, roughly carved with a falcon emblem and a few symbols of script One of these, common in inscriptions about the streets and squares of Bekla, carried the meaning. At this place – 'All about, with never a man to be seen, faint sounds of battle swelled and receded like waves, resembling the noises of day and life as a foggy dawn resembles clear noon. Shouts of anger and death, desperate orders, sobbing, prayers for mercy, the ring of weapons, the trampling of feet – all light and half-sensed as the filamentary legs of a swarm of loathsome insects upon the face of a wounded man lying helpless in his blood. Kelderek, his arms clutched about his head, swayed, uttering cries like the blarings of an idiot – speech enough for converse with the malignant dead, and words enough in which to articulate madness and despair. As a leaf that, having lived all summer upon the bough, in autumn is plucked off and swept through the turbulent, roaring air towards the sodden darkness below; so severed, so flung down, so spent and discarded was he. He fell to the ground, babbling, and felt a rib-cage of unburied bones snap beneath his weight. He lurched, in the white light, over graves, over rusty, broken weapons, over a wheel covering the remains of some wretch who once, years before, had crept beneath it for vain protection. The bracken that filled his mouth was turned to worms, the sand in his eyes to the stinking dust of corruption. His capacity to suffer became infinite as, rotting with the fallen, he dissolved into innumerable grains suspended among the wave-voices, sucked back and rolled forward to break again and again upon the shore of the desolate battlefield where, upon him more dreadfully than upon any who had ever strayed there, unwarned to shun it, the butchered dead discharged their unhouselled misery and malice.