The Island Under the Earth Read Online Free Page B

wrapped them in a scrap which she tucked in her broad belt; then she got to her feet.
    Stag bellowed. “The packtrain! The onagers! Where are they?”
    His bosun shook his head and gestured. “Driven off, driven off — what else? That’s what they attacked for, sixlimbed brutes…. Well, Captain, what now? We go back?”
    Captain Stag stood scowling and considering. Then his brows unfolded and went up and up and he pointed. The other three turned to fonow his gesture. There, some hundreds of armslengths off, sitting on top of a tall and angular rock, feet crossed and arms folded, a man was watching them. As he caught their glance he raised a hand as though in greeting. After a moment Stag returned the gesture. The man vanished, appeared a moment later on the ground as he stepped from behind the rock, and made his way to them with a somewhat mincing manner of walk.
    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