“Come on!” she yelled. It was worth noting that the sun was still going down, and in a very short time I wouldn’t be able to see her any more. Unlike Tinkerbell, pixies don’t glow.
“I still can’t fly,” I said.
A howl not at all far behind us nearly convinced me to try flying anyway, but then Ha was redirecting, left and around the precipitous drop and we were away again.
Then I lost sight of her.
“Ha?” I said, my voice slightly elevated but not up at the, everybody here I am, level of loud. I kept running straight and hoped she expected me to do that.
She didn’t. I navigated around a large tree, and on the other side of it was one of the mermen.
He looked essentially just like the one I’d seen a couple of nights earlier: torpedo head, strong arms, large belly, something approximating legs below the waist.
He opened what I guessed was probably his mouth—it was in the right place for it—and unleashed an intolerably loud bellow. The jaw appeared to have no hinges, and his cheeks billowed like sails and expanded like balloons. These features contributed to produce a low bass roar that was probably audible across the entire island. I bet under water, a cry like that carried through the entire ocean.
I was very nearly incapacitated by the sound. I didn’t continue toward him, certainly, but I didn’t go anywhere else either. I stopped in my tracks. To my credit, I didn’t also fall over.
“This way,” Ha said, in my left ear. She also smacked me on the left cheek, in case I’d lost my hearing completely, which was good thinking. I hadn’t, but my ears were rung pretty bad. I wagered she was doing even worse. Pixies have pretty sensitive ears.
I headed left, and the bellowing merman moved to follow, or perhaps to cut me off.
I was still quicker. These things moved in a way I’d never seen anything move before, but there was no substitute for legs with knees when it came to jungle travel. He got only within a few yards before I was past and continuing.
“You may need to keep yelling in my ear, left or right, Ha,” I said. “I can’t see you any more, and I’m not sure how well I can hear you.”
Ha didn’t respond, which I took to be a bad sign. I couldn’t hear my own voice; maybe she couldn’t hear it either.
Once past the merman with the impressive set of lungs, I was okay for about ten minutes of rapid downhill transit, which got us to the other side of sunset, and the discovery that there is a certain advantage to being prey in a jungle full of glowing predators.
I didn’t need a pixie’s help to tell me three mermen were waiting on the other side of the next set of trees. I could see them, or parts of them, just fine. They couldn’t see me.
They could probably smell me though.
I checked behind to verify I wasn’t about to be ambushed by a chaser, then knelt down and opened the cooler again.
“Not this way!” Ha said, in my right ear this time.
“Where do you want me to go?”
“You missed turn, go back.”
“No going back,” I said. “I have another idea.”
I extracted the skin sample from the cooler. It was glowing in the moonlight too, but only faintly. I threw it downhill and to the right, as far as I could. Then I threw the cooler—still open and with that nice note taped to it—uphill in the rough direction I had come.
“Now I go forward,” I said.
“No forward, only back and left.”
“I’m surrounded, you’re saying.”
“No, back and left.”
I knelt down again, and started untying my boots.
“I was thinking I’d go up,” I said.
“You say can’t fly.”
“I can’t.”
“You take off shoes to fly?”
“Not exactly, no.”
* * *
An hour later, it was completely dark, with little help from the moon. I was in a tree, relaxing and enjoying a piece of dried meat and a bottle of water, while my pixie guide was trying to find a polite way to ask, again, if she could go home.
There were four mermen milling around under the tree. It wasn’t necessarily the same four as the ones I spotted earlier; they could have been rotating new ones in. There was really no way to tell, since to my eyes they all looked the same.
Their close-up language was a series of clicks, somewhere between dolphin and Khoikhoi. Their vowel sounds all came out of a hum, like a teeny tiny version of the roar that temporarily deafened me earlier. They were equipped with a different vocalization apparatus than anything on land, this much was clear. Based on the amount of gesturing I saw, much of the nuance that came with aquatic resonance was lost, absent the water.
They hadn’t figured out yet that they should be looking up. The last evidence of my existence was a pair of boots on the hill not far from the tree, and whatever spoor transference occurred when I touched the trunk before climbing, but that wasn’t translating into any effort to gaze skyward.
It appeared they had no necks. Maybe that was the problem.
“I go now,” Ha said.
“But we’re having so much fun.”
The mermen did not appear to have good hearing, which was nice.
“Not fun.”
“I’m joking.”
“I go get help.”
“That’s sweet, are you worried about me?”
“I go get help,” she repeated.
“Who would you get?”
“Di-Di come help.”
“I think Dmitri’s already heading in the other direction, but he’d probably love to come up here with a few guns.”
“So? I go get help.”
“I’m fine.”
“You stuck.”
“I’m not stuck.”
“You can’t climb down. You climb up? You fly?”
I laughed.
“I appreciate your concern, Ha, but I’m exactly where I want to be. Do you see that tree over there? The one whose branches are woven with this one?”
“Uh-huh, sure.”
“Jungle canopies are their own highways if you know what you’re doing. As long as they can’t climb trees I’ll be fine.”
“Oh no!” she said, and then she flew off.
This was a tiny bit disconcerting. I held my breath until she returned, which was only after a minute.
“You trepping!” she said sternly.
“I am?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Dmitri’s land reaches this far?”
“Not Dmitri, other.”
“You know all the property lines up here?”
“Uh-huh.”
“That means they’re trespassing too,” I said. “And so are you.”
“I too small, they animals.”
“They aren’t animals, Ha. They’re like people, but people from the water.”
“Walking fish.”
“Swimming people.”
“Hm, okay. I should go.”
“Why now?”
“I tell about treppers.”
“Tell who?”
“Pixies.”
“You’re all like a tiny little security force up here.”
“Uh-huh,” she said, with a teeny shrug. “I go?”
“How many pixies are we talking about?”
“Dunno.”
“What are you guys supposed to do when you encounter a trespasser?”
“Tell owner.”
“That’s all? What if the owner isn’t around?”
She shrugged.
“How about this,” I said. “You go tell whoever you want about those trespassers down there, but leave me alone.”
I kind of liked having her around, but I could no longer think of a use for her, and it wasn’t a terrible idea to propagate the notion—among the pixies—that the creatures under my tree weren’t okay.
“But you also trepper.”
“Dmitri gave me permission to trespass.”
This was untrue, but if she
flew back to him and asked he’d back me up.
“You not trepping?”
“No. Just them.”
She flew in a circle to think about this.
“Okay. I go?” she asked.
“You can go.”
“Okay, bye.”
Ha flew away, and that was that. Then it was just me and the mermen.
* * *
A little while later, one of them figured out why they kept smelling my presence around the tree, and decided the world must include a third dimension. Then they looked up. I don’t know if they could actually see me, because I wasn’t doing any glowing. They had large black eyes that looked to have no pupil, and I had no clue how good those eyes were at detecting things in near-total darkness. If they spent most of their time in the deep sea, though, their eyes were probably pretty good.
Unless they used their other senses more regularly when they were underwater, in which case, never mind.
This is what I mean by knowing your enemy. I had no experience with these creatures, and didn’t know what was normal for them. Faeries presented a similar problem, although in theory I could probably figure out how to get back into their realm so as to gain a better understanding, and they still lived in a land-based world so it wouldn’t be so bad. With these guys, forget it.
One of them put his arms and his tail around the trunk. At first I thought he was planning to squeeze the tree until it collapsed—and who knows, maybe they were strong enough to do that—but then he started to climb.
The little flagella things on the bottom of his… fin, let’s call it, were somehow helping propel him up the tree. It was slow, and he looked about as surprised as anyone that it worked, but it did work.
That was my cue to go. I got to my feet as carefully as possible, secured the backpack, and felt my way down one of the extended tree limbs until I reached a spot I’d eyeballed back when Ha was still with me. I jumped.
It was the satyrs who showed me how to travel by treetop. An adult satyr has a vertical leap of something like twenty-five feet, so I could have probably found a better teacher, but some of the rules translated well. For example, only use live trees with a robust network of branches and leaves. When jumping from tree to tree, always reach for the largest limb you can find, and if you can’t find one, scoop up all the small ones. If this doesn’t work, don’t panic, because you’re bound to hit a good one on the way down.
In a real forest it’s frankly not all that scary or difficult to travel this way, it’s just that humans stopped spending time in trees so long ago we forgot how easy it was. I mean, aside from the occasional Tarzan movie, not that those were remotely accurate. Rope-sized vines that happened to be secure on the other end just aren’t common.
Generally, the jumps aren’t all that long, and sometimes they’re completely unnecessary, especially in your more robust rainforests. If the trees are mature enough and close enough, they’re woven together in such a way that the hard part is often just recognizing when you’re relying on a part of the tree in front of you instead of the one behind you.
Parts of the island jungle were like this, especially near the top of the mountain. This was where I was starting from, so for a little while I moved at a pretty decent downhill clip. It wasn’t nearly as fast as it would have been if I was on the ground and running, but it was better than nothing.
After probably an hour of downhill travel, I’d made a couple of disturbing observations. The first was that the mermen on the ground were definitely in communication with one another, and as much as it sounded like undifferentiated howling, complex ideas were being exchanged. I say this because their tactics were evolving as I moved.
They were still climbing trees, but appeared to recognize that traveling among them the way I did was a physiological impossibility. They could still get up to the low branches, though, which reduced my choices because one of the things they communicated was, where I was going and what trees to get to before I got there.
As I went downhill, in other words, I stopped seeing mermen in trees behind me and started seeing them in trees in front of me.
There were still plenty of trees from which to choose, though, so I continued around the obstacles and hoped they didn’t have a large enough army to cut me off completely.
The second observation was one I’d made thousands of times before, only generally in situations that were less perilous: civilization can sometimes ruin everything.
There were, as I’ve said, a lot of private lands hidden in the woods. For the most part, the property owners did what they could to maintain the forest cover, because they valued secrecy almost more than they valued direct access to sunlight, but that didn’t mean there was no manipulation of the natural landscape. Ground had been cleared, fences were erected, paths were put in… and trees were pruned, thinned, and eliminated.
I reached a certain point in my travels where the trees started to get not-so-close together. The jumps became more perilous, and whenever I tried to alter my course in the direction of thicker tree cover, I found the route cut off by one of the mermen.
I was being herded.
I’m intimately familiar with the concept, but this was probably the first time I’d ever been the target instead of the one coordinating the herding. The frustrating part was, even realizing what was going on I couldn’t do anything about it. I wondered if this was how the mammoths felt when we forced them off cliffs or into the devastating fists of a troll.
About the only change I could make was to slow down, and so I did. Once it was obvious traveling faster wasn’t going to get me to a point where there were no mermen and I was safe, I had no reason to go so quickly that I risked making a mistake. (Note: forty feet above the forest floor is always a bad place to make a mistake.)
The next hour, then, was a somewhat leisurely trip. At each tree I got to eat a little, have some water, rest my legs, and then take the next tree pre-selected by my pursuers. It was relaxing, in its own way.
I got pretty close to the road at one point. I knew this because I could see the red taillights shining through the leaves, and caught the sound of a revving engine. For about two seconds I thought maybe Ha reached Dmitri and I was getting rescued, but the sounds were faint and the SUV’s were clearly heading the wrong way. Dmitri had begun his assault on the lower island.
Then I remembered he’d given me a radio. I dug it out of the bag and tuned it to the right channel. As soon as I kicked up the volume, though, the night was filled with the sound of impenetrable static. I tried anyway.
“Dmitri, this is Adam, over,” I said.
Static.
“Dmitri, can you hear me? I could use a bunch of guns right about now.”
More static.
I fiddled with the dial for a few minutes longer, but there was no escaping the white noise. I caught a voice here and there—I could swear one of the voices was Esteban, but that might have been my mind playing tricks—but that was all. No clear channels.
It was the mermen. Somehow, they were impacting the electrical field on the island. I know exactly enough about electricity to successfully avoid being killed by it, and that’s all. But I also knew we all had clear radio communications before, and I knew there were dozens of mermen within a hundred feet of me, and I don’t believe in coincidences.
* * *
The end came when I reached a tree at the edge of a clearing. It was obvious almost immediately, and not because there were no trees left to jump to once I got there—although that was true. No, it was obvious because the clearing was occupied by a committee of impatient mermen.
All of them were staring up, waiting. I decided that as much as I had been studying their behavior over the past few hours, they’d been studying mine, so they understood that when my pace slowed it was because I became aware of their tactics. It was reasonable, on their part, to conclude that they didn’t need to send anyone up this particular tree to shake me down.
I’m a tiny bit more s
tubborn than that when it comes to facing my own probable demise, though, so I stayed in the tree and ate some more dried meat, and drank my second-to-last bottle of water. I figured eventually one of them would give a shout along the lines of why don’t you come down from there already?
That moment came, but not in the form of a shout. One of the mermen stepped forward, looked past my tree and gave a wordless salute to someone in a tree uphill. It was the last tree I’d been in before arriving at the clearing, actually.
I looked over my shoulder. One of the pursuing mermen had made it halfway up the trunk of the tree: a big, wide, very old specimen that looked lush and alive when I was sitting in it a little earlier.
I heard an odd hissing noise, apparently coming from the spot where the merman and the tree met. Then there was a puff of white smoke, and the tree groaned. Really, it was just the first stages of gravity pulling down the tree that made the noise, but it sounded like the plant actually cried out audibly.
The merman was either exerting a great deal of force or extruding an acid of some sort, but the outcome was the same: he brought down the tree, and in only about thirty seconds. Looks like they could bring them down if they wanted.
The signaling merman—evidently a leader, which was actually good information to have—looked back up at me.
“All right,” I said. There was no reason to think he could understand, but I said it anyway. “I’m coming down.”
My arrival in the clearing caused something that in humans would be called a buzz, as the assembled mermen—there were ten of them—murmured to one another. In them it was a bunch of clicks, like gossiping dolphins.
The leader raised a fist, which shut up everybody. He stepped forward, sniffed me, and stared. More clicking from the rabble, another call for silence, then he turned to them and spoke some words.
I didn’t hear most of what he said. There was a lot of what I’d call whistling, some clicks and clacks, and something amounting to heavy breathing. I decided what was going on was that most of his vocalizing was subsonic. I was pretty sure if there were a dog nearby, he’d be going nuts.
Buster could probably hear it, I decided. There was no reason for that to be true, because dragons and dogs are about as far apart evolutionarily as mosquitos and whales, (I’m guessing) but I liked the idea. It filled me with irrational hope that a dragon was about to burst into the clearing and come to my rescue. I’d never in my life wished for such a thing before, but it had been a weird couple of days.
Immortal and the Island of Impossible Things (The Immortal Series Book 4) Page 24