Lord of the Trees

by Philip José Farmer

  I could see no more than a few feet, but I knew that the country for miles around was as flat as Illinois farmland. A303 ran like a cannon barrel slightly northwest for about a mile and a quarter before crossing an untarred road. To get to Stonehenge, you turned left onto the untarred road and went about an eighth of a mile before passing Stonehenge, which was behind a fence in a field. At the junction of A344 and the small road, you turned left and then almost immediately were at the entrance to the “venerable and stupendous work on Salisbury Plain, vulgarly ascribed to Merlin, the Prophet,” as described by John Wood, architect of Bath, in 1747.

  If the air had been clear, we would have been able to see the white chalk wherever the soil had been cut away.

  Pauncho got out of the car and removed his heavy overcoat. Since I was only a foot from him, I was able to see how he got his nickname. His belly stuck out as round as a gorilla’s after a heavy meal of bamboo shoots. But it gave the impression of being as hard as a gorilla’s chest. His arms were freakishly long, and his legs were very short. Even so, he stood six feet high, unlike his father, who had been not quite five feet high. Pauncho looked as if he weighed three hundred and twenty pounds or so.

  He opened the trunk of his car and passed out the weapons to us. I took a baseball bat, a plastic seven-inch long stiletto, which I put in a sheath at my belt, a short quiver of bolts, also hung from my belt, and a crossbow. This was small and held with one hand, like a pistol, when fired. The bowstring was pulled back by hand, requiring a strong man to pull it all the way back. A catch secured the string, both of which were released when the trigger just ahead of the pistol-like butt was pulled.

  “If the string is set at the extreme of the three positions and shot within a range of three feet,” Pauncho said, “the bow will send a bolt through the armor we’re wearing. Not very far, probably not more’n a half-inch into your flesh. But that’ll smart, and if the bolt hits unprotected flesh, it’ll go almost all the way through you.”

  The grenades looked like tennis balls. From the top of each protruded a half-inch long pin.

  “Twist the pin to the left as far as it’ll go. Pull the pin and then throw,” Pauncho said. “Don’t dillydally. Six seconds later, the mingling of two gases produces an explosion equivalent to one and a quarter pound of TNT. The plastic shell is almost atomized, so these depend on concussion for main effect.”

  Two steps behind him, I followed Pauncho into the field. We sprang over a fence, the wire of which was warming up under the inductor’s field, and walked a few steps. He stopped. The mound of the barrow had loomed out of the fog. Pauncho called softly, “Hey, Doc! It’s me, Pauncho!”

  There was no answer. The others, fanning out around the barrow, called quietly. I went up and over the mound and then along its other side. There was no one there. By bending down with my eyes close to the grass, I could see footprints in the wet earth.

  We returned to the cars. Pauncho swore and blew on his enormous hands. “It’s cold! That fog goes right through my bones!”

  He called out, “Hey, Countess! You any good at warming up a man?”

  Clara laughed softly and said, “You could chase me, my pithecanthropoid friend. That would warm you up! But save your strength!”

  “We’ll talk this over a martini sometime,” he rumbled.

  “I’ll meet you after the fight,” she said.

  “Wait’ll I tell that would-be-swinger, Barney, about this,” Pauncho said, and he chuckled like a troll under a bridge.

  I said, “Silence!”

  Shouts were drifting through the gray wetness. Muffled cracks, as of bats striking bats or armor or, perhaps, bone, disturbed the cloud.

  I called them in around me and told them what we should do for the moment. We started out just as a few more cracking noises came and then a scream which was cut off as if a knife had plunged into the throat. A grenade boomed three seconds later. Then silence returned.

  If there were many people at Stonehenge, they were not conducting a full-scale battle. The sounds gave us the impression of blundering around, of probing activity by men who were not sure even after they had closed with another whether he was enemy or friend.

  “We’ll walk along the road until we’re just opposite the first of the tumuli.”

  “What the hell’s a tumuli?” someone muttered.

  “A tumulus is an artificial mound, a round barrow,” I said. “A grave for the ancients. This area is filled with them. We’ll scout around there, take it easy, because Iwaldi or the Nine may have stationed people there. Keep close together. We don’t want to get separated in this fog. Yes, I know bunching makes us better targets, but that can’t be helped.

  “And don’t fire at the first person you see. He may be one of Doc’s people. Now you’ve gotten the descriptions of Doc and Banks and his cousin. If you can identify them, sing out and identify yourself. Pongo is the code word.”

  “Identify them? In this fog soup?” a man muttered.

  “Do your best,” I said. “Outside of Caliban’s group, everybody is our enemy.”

  I did not really expect Murtagh’s men to refrain from shooting until they were one hundred percent certain. They were all very tough and self-centered characters, and they were not about to wait until hit before they opened up. But at least they knew what their allies were supposed to look like.

  We walked on the edge of the road with me in the lead. I held the butt of the crossbow in my right hand and the bat in my left.

  The sounds had ceased but as soon as we reached the burial barrow three explosions deafened us. All of us dived for the wet ground, even though there was no indication that the grenades were being thrown our way. Then I rose, and, crouching, ran to the ditch around the outer wall of the barrow and dived into it. I fell on top of a man squatting on his heels. He grunted, I grunted, and I broke his jaw with a backhanded blow from the butt end of my bat.

  Somebody nearby in the fog said, “What the hell is that? You all right, Meeters?”

  The man I’d knocked out was not named Meeters, because he answered on my left about ten feet away.

  At that moment Clara and Pauncho appeared in the fog, so I jumped up, yelling, and started swinging with the bat. I kept hold of the crossbow, which was loaded, until I was facing two at one time. One I shot through the mouth with the bolt and the other I knocked down with a blow that broke my bat, his bat, and his skull under his helmet.

  I think I cleared the ditch on my side. But there were men on the other side of the barrow. Instead of charging around the ditch or coming over the top of the barrow, they took off. Somewhere in the fog some of them got down on the ground and began firing bolts back. All these did was to bury themselves in the dirt of the mound. But we scrambled into the ditch as if they could hit us. And of course they might flank us.

  While I checked for dead or wounded among us, and found that only two of us were out of the fight, Murtagh and Pauncho examined the enemy. All ten were dead or unconscious. But there was no way of determining if they were Iwaldi’s or the Nine’s. They were dressed in civilian clothes with a bright yellow band pinned across their chests. All had plastic chain mail shirts under cloth shirts, plastic loinguards, and helmets shaped exactly like ours.

  Gbampwe, a black from Central Africa who said he was a champion spear thrower, and I cast grenades into the fog. I threw mine with a force which should have taken them about four hundred feet. They opened up the fog with a red roar. I couldn’t tell if I hit anything because the only reply was a volley of bolts, some of which hit the soft earth of the barrow above us.

  Somebody far away called. I could not make out the words, which were either garbled by the atmospheric conditions or were purposely distorted.

  I bellowed, “Pongo! Pongo! Pongo!”

  “Pongo your...!” somebody yelled, his last words lost in an uproar of shouts and screams and cracking bats.

  Pauncho growled, “The farmers around here must be screaming their heads off for the pol
ice. And I’ll bet they can hear those grenades clear on the other side of Amesbury. It’s only two miles away.”

  It must have been a strain on the local police to give excuses for the explosions and for the loss of power. They must have wondered themselves just what the secret service was doing out around Stonehenge. But they would, of course, obey their orders. I took it for granted that the same orders had gone to the armed service posts in this area, of which there were many.

  I threw another grenade. It went off almost exactly between the locations of the two previous blasts. Bolts whistled nearby after the explosion, but none struck us. It seemed reasonable that I might have killed the men we’d run out of the ditch, and that these missiles came from another group. On the other hand, they might be holding their fire, hoping we would think just that.

  To our right, approximately at Stonehenge, another flurry of cracking noises came muffled through the fog.

  I gave the order to get out of the ditch and to advance across the field. We would go parallel with the road on a course which would bring us near the so-called “slaughter stone.” This lies outside the circle of the trilithons and sarsens and near the heel stone, which is named thus for no verifiable reason.

  Suddenly, there was not a sound except for the rustle of our feet moving through the wet winter weeds and a slight sucking as feet were pulled up from mud. We were formed in three lines. I was in the lead with Clara, Pauncho, and Murtagh behind me at the limits of my sight. If I had stepped up my pace a trifle, I would have been all alone, as far as my ability to see was concerned. About halfway to the slaughter stone, or at a point which I believed to be halfway, I threw up my hand. The three behind me also signaled, and then the whole body was at rest. There was no more sound than if we had been at the bottom of a deep cave.

  The only thing you could hear was the hum of nervous tension.

  Out there were many men moving slowly, their eyes straining against the gray cloud, their breaths controlled, their feet descending and ascending slowly to avoid the suck of mud and brush of wet grass. Their ears were turning this way and that to catch a betraying sound.

  My hearing and sense of smell are far keener than most humans, for reasons which I have explained in Volume II of my memoirs. But there was not a breath of wind, and the heavy droplet-ridden cloud seemed to be killing both sound and odor. I had a mental picture of enemy all around us, men who, if they knew where we were, could have cut us down with their crossbows or overwhelmed us with numbers alone. The blindness was to our advantage because of our very small force.

  I gestured for us to advance. And then I heard a poofing sound, which I interpreted immediately, and correctly, as it turned out. I turned and gave the signal to hit the earth and then did so.

  No sooner had I hugged the earth than an intensely bright light shot through the cloud above us. Somebody had sent up a flare. It had to be entirely nonmetallic, of course.

  It did not turn night into day, but it did outline a mass of figures beyond the depression in which was the slaughter stone. And it showed me some vague figures gathered around the somewhat tilted sixteen-foot high heel stone to my right near the road.

  There were six or more ahead and about eight to the right. None of them made the signal agreed upon if visibility should be restored.

  But they had seen us stretched out on the ground. They had also seen each other.

  We fired crossbow bolts back at both groups as they fired at us and at each other.

  That seemed to be a signal for bedlam. Beyond, in the gray mists around the circle of Stonehenge, grenades opened the fog with flames. Men behind me screamed, and men ahead of me screamed.

  And then there was silence again except for the groans of the wounded. These were shut up as quickly as we could with our hands over their mouths and then with morphine. I suppose the other groups had done the same, because I could not hear any wounded from any quarter.

  Silence again.

  If those two groups had not moved... I lobbed two grenades in quick order at where I thought they should be. The blasts came one after the other. There were screams and moans after the reverberations had died away. Then answering blasts, the flashes of which I could not see. The wounded quit making noises. By then I was up, crouching, and had told my men to follow me to the left, across the field. I was afraid that those not hit would retaliate with grenades. And while I doubted that anyone of them could throw a grenade as far as I had, we would still be within stunning range. Or one of them might run forward and toss the grenade.

  It was a mistake on my part. A dark body suddenly appeared ahead of me, a crossbow string twanged, others near it let loose, and about six of my men, as I was to find out, were killed. I went down but not because I was shot. I fell forward, shooting my cross-bow as I went. After I had hit the earth, I reloaded my weapon. The men ahead were silenced, and when I crawled forward, cautiously, I found three corpses and one wounded, unconscious. He had a bright yellow strip, splashed with blood, across his chest. I put him out of his misery with my stiletto.

  Our outburst triggered off another in the vicinity of the ruins. Bolts whistled overhead. I think they were strays, but even so, one caught one of my men in the neck.

  I crawled on and came across the first of many bodies within a narrow area. I counted twenty-five.

  “Listen!” I said to Pauncho. “I don’t know what is going on. But I doubt that any of the Nine would expose themselves as we have. They value their wrinkled hides far too much. But they must have come here because they would want to bring Iwaldi out in the open. And they will take chances. So they have to be here. I wonder if they could have exposed themselves long enough to bring Iwaldi’s men out and then cut and run for it? Or they could be holed up in their cars.”

  But, cautious as they were, they were not cowards. And they were completists. They would want to make sure that Iwaldi had been killed. And if they knew that there were other forces operating in the grayness, they would be certain that these would be Doc or I or both. They would not rest until our heads had been brought before them.

  I said, “I’m going to go back to the road and scout along it. You come along as far as the fence. Stay there for twenty minutes. If I’m not back by then, it’s up to you what you do.”

  “Doc probably needs our help!” Pauncho said. “There are a hell of a lot of men out there!”

  As if to prove his statement, the fog was shattered with three grenade explosions somewhere to our left. And then we heard the whoosh of several bolts very near us. Somebody was shooting at random.

  Clara wormed to me and said, “I want to go with you, John! I proved I can fight along with you!”

  “All right,” I said. “Let’s make for the fence.”

  “Doc said I was to be under your orders while I was with you,” Pauncho said. “But he told me I could rejoin him as soon as I got the chance. Well, now I got the chance. And that dumb-dumb Barney, he’d fall down and break his leg if I wasn’t there to hold him up. And Doc may need me. No telling what’s going on out there.”

  “You do whatever you think best,” I said. I appreciated his loyalty and his concern for his comrades, and he had carried out his mission: to get us to the battlefield.

  “Yeah, I’d like to stick with you, but I got a hunch they really need me,” Pauncho said. “So long. Good luck.”

  He crawled away. I led the others to the road and ended up by the heel stone. This tilted to the south as if it were an ancient tombstone and the earth around it had yielded up its dead. Ten corpses lay around it. I looked them over and determined that about five had been killed by a blast, presumably from the grenade I had thrown. These men had yellow bands across their chests.

  Murtagh said, “I would prefer that we all go together. If we don’t, we’re likely to end up shooting each other in this damned fog!”

  At that moment, the firing stopped again for a few seconds, a pistol fired, there was some shouting, and then silence.

  I said
, “Clara and I’ll go down the road. If you hear firing down there, stay here. I’ll give you the code word when I come back. Pauncho knows where you are, so if he finds Doc he may bring them here.”

  Clara and I started to go down the dirt along the right side of the road. We had gone only a few feet when I heard the tires of a car accelerating swiftly, near the vicinity of the crossroads. There was no sound of a motor, so I knew it was a steam-driven car. And immediately after, grenades broke loose across the road from us. I don’t know that they were throwing them directly at us on purpose, because they could not have seen across the road. But Murtagh and his men lobbed their grenades back across the road, and then suddenly figures loomed out of the fog. The roar of the car increased, and then I felt a hard blow against my chest. I looked down, dimly saw a grenade at my feet, leaned down and threw it back. It went off in the air and the grayness became black.

  When I recovered consciousness, I was lying on my side on the cold wet earth. My ears rang, and my head felt as if it had swelled to pumpkin size. I put my hand on my head and felt a stickiness. I tasted my fingers. It was blood running out from a small cut on my throbbing head.

  The noise level around me must have been high, because surely there were men screaming and groaning. Two bodies lay within touching distance, and when I got to my hands and knees and began crawling around, feeling for a club or a crossbow, I came across three more corpses. I found a crossbow and a quiver containing six bolts on a still body. I got to my feet and staggered across the road, stumbled over another body, fell down into a small depression, crawled out, and stopped. Something large and black and metallic-feeling was blocking my way.

  I pulled myself up onto it, and then my senses, slowly clearing, told me it was the plastic steam car. It was lying on its side; the doors on the upper side were open. I looked into it and saw one body huddled down against the lower side in the back. I looked up across the car and saw a few flashes, like fireflies on a broad meadow. They were from grenade explosions, but I could not hear a thing.