The Island Under the Earth by Avram Davidson Read Free Book Online

captain, too; narrow of temper and broad of hand; and, besides seamanship, the main lesson his son had learned was to leave his father’s deck and hold and strike out on his own (
strike
being the optimum verb), the sooner he might be the liker him. But with never a thought, never any thought, of return. Do the cave-lions’ whelps, when they have killed their own meat and mounted their own she, think of return? Big Stag had several sayings he was fond of, and one of them his son had made his own.
Women, waves, and land, all are made to be plowed
. That all should yield to him, that he should yield to none, this to Stag was but the natural order of all things.
    Strange, then, perhaps, to see him sitting now so intent as to bypass mere respect … not to exceed it, but to go by another path beyond it. And although Castagor was his senior, and despite the brief-distorted vision of the lookstone, it was not youth sitting at the feet of age. For truth, youth in the Island Beneath the Earth seldom sits so stilly at the feet of age. Perhaps childhood, but seldom youth: and why, by its own fierce lights, should it? That inertia is the tendency of a body, when cold, to stay cold; and when hot, to stay hot — that during Star-flux the thin white lines which cross and crisscross the skies of night tremble and waver and bend and then, for a long, mad moment, tremble and waver and melt and become compressed into tiny, brilliant points of light, and pulse and throb — that on such occasions wise mariners put never out of port, for how can one steer? — that murrain-eels taint the water, which, once drunk of, turns the drinker into a homophage: rogue, mad, a skulker, solitary, incapable of sustaining his brute life on any food but men’s-flesh, and that but new-dead — that Earth-flux is when that fixed dark corner of the sky which conceals the Gate of Human Hell changes form and moves — Of such bits of wisdom and of weird do old men discourse when senses fade away one by one and the present becomes a blur and there is no more future and only the past is clear. But young men and young women, to whom the future is endless, the past but brief confusion, and all senses sharp and fierce and hot for the lustful present, are minded to heed the old ones not.
    Of these things to any who listen do old men speak, old men and augurs. So see now Stag, a sailor and hence of a race to whom soothsayers are but he-whores, bought for brief necessity alone, sitting and toying with his empty wine-flask and now his head bowed and now his eyes raised; but with never a word nor a look nor a breath of scorn. For Gortacas the augur was speaking of the Cap of Grace.

Chapter Ten
    Tabnath Lo was at his desk, which meant, at his talley-pebbles. Two galleys had come in that same day from Silverstrand and their captains stood before him with their knotted talley-cords in their hands and porters moved between them, from the wharf to the ware-loft; the block-and-tackle creaked an accompaniment to the accounting. “You took thirty bales of stockfish,” he said to the captain who stood one pace foremost; “what did you sell?”
    The captain fingered a cord, his lips moving with his fingers. “Sold twenty-eight,” he reported; “ate two.”
    Lo took pebbles from a pocket. “One, with such good weather, was ample,” he said. “If you want to engage in private trading you must do it with your own goods; you’ve never been denied a discount … yet.” He laid a pebble in a groove and set another one next to it.
Click
. “Bring any passengers?”
    “Two. That is — me one and he one.”
    “Answer for yourself alone. Tree-silk?”
    The fingers moved on the cords, the lips moved. “Six sixes.” More pebbles. Another groove.
Click. Click. Click-etty-click. Click, click
. Later age was to improve upon the system by boring holes in the talley-pebbles and stringing them upon wires set into a frame of wood, but no such alteration had yet come to pass: still,