The Forest of Peldain

by Barrington J. Bayley

  Also, Vorduthe could not forget that the lake had powers of persuasion of its own. The problem he contemplated was pushed from his mind by the sweet memory of the interlude the lake had bestowed, which put him in an agony of longing and shame. Longing, because for a brief time it had been as if that fateful accident with the barbsquid had never happened nearly five years ago, as if his wife had remained well and happy. Enthralling dream! Enticing, practically irresistible.…

  Shame, because even while enjoying the experience he had known that it was not real, and that he enjoyed it alone. In reality his wife lay half a world away, still paralyzed, knowing nothing of it.

  He despised himself for such solitary indulgence.

  A figure in an Arelian kilt was toiling up the slope. As he came nearer Vorduthe saw that it was Troop Leader Kana-Kem. His young face was determined-looking.

  He spoke stubbornly. “Forgive me for following you here, my lord. But the men want to know what their orders are to be. Do we strike?”

  “Strike?” queried Vorduthe.

  “We have not been idle while you have been studying with the Peldainian priest, my lord.” Kana-Kem smiled. “We have been working on some of the local girls—they find us pleasing, and have little idea of secrecy. We have found out where the palace armory is. Our weapons are stored there, and much else besides. Now we have but to plan how to get at them.”

  “I commend you, Troop Leader,” Vorduthe said thoughtfully. “What do you suggest we do then?”

  “These people are soft, apart from a handful of warriors. We will not be taken by surprise a second time.”

  “Just the same it would be a risky enterprise, with small chance of success.”

  “If we do no more than put a sword in Octrago’s black heart it will be worth the effort, my lord.”

  “Yes, we could do that.”

  Kana-Kem seemed both puzzled and displeased by Vorduthe’s diffidence. “You spoke of destroying this kingdom, my lord. If we cannot win it for King Krassos then that is what we should do. What plan have you?”

  “I had intended to arrange for the forest to strangle the whole island,” Vorduthe told him bluntly. “But you must keep that to yourself. Do you understand?”

  The Troop Leader spent some time in absorbing this news. He nodded, frowning.

  “But now,” Vorduthe added, “I am not sure. I am not sure… I will speak to you again presently.”

  “The men grow impatient, my lord. You have not spoken to them for days, and they are feeling lost and angry. They will act on their own if you do not give them leadership.”

  Even this threat of rebellion did not stir Vorduthe. “That is enough,” he said sharply. “I will speak to you presently.”

  Kana-Kem turned and made his way back down the hill. Vorduthe stayed where he was, thinking as he watched the sun glint dully on the green lake below.

  Overhead, the gnarled branches creaked in a sudden breeze.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “I have a hard question to put to you,” Mistirea said.

  They were in the place referred to as the temple. In reality it was a ceremonial training school where the most suitable of Mistirea’s acolytes were taught exercises in psychic sensitivity. The numbers in the temple and its surrounding dwellings were being added to by the armed men from the mountain fastness, whom Mistirea had summoned to Lakeside now, that the need to defy King Kerenei was gone. To Vorduthe it was surprising that the High Priest should be permitted his own armed force, even though it was not as large as the king’s. Tradition placed a high priority on his safety, evidently.

  Shaded from the heat of the day, the room was cooled by large, thick leaves that sprouted from the internal walls and waved constantly. “I have been talking with Prince Askon,” Mistirea continued. “He made me realize how little you may wish to help us, beyond the need to save your men from execution.

  “It is true that you owe this country nothing. You have suffered much and you have been disappointed in your expectations. In the lake you are alone with the spirit, and it would be easy for you merely to pretend to play the part I have asked of you. After all, only after some time would the behavior of the trees of the forest tell us otherwise.

  “If that is your attitude, Lord Vorduthe, then I beseech you to think again. Peldain is a country of thousands of men, women and children, none of whom have done you any harm. Think of them. Think what it would mean if your own country were to be ravaged by this savage forest.”

  “One Peldainian has done us harm,” Vorduthe corrected him, in a flinty voice. “What if I were to demand the blood of Prince Askon as the price of my cooperation?”

  “You cannot be serious.”

  Vorduthe did not answer, only stared stonily.

  “The Prince jestingly mentioned the possibility,” Mistirea sighed. “Or was it in jest? Yet how could one demand the life of the king’s son? Further, King Kerenei is very ill… it will not be long before Prince Askon succeeds him. Then we shall have a strange circumstance—the safety of the realm will depend on the king’s bitterest enemy.”

  “Askon Octrago swore himself a vassal of my monarch King Krassos. Let the keeping of his oath be the price of my help.”

  “In what manner is he to keep it? It can only be a form of words—Peldain remains cut off from the rest of the world, and there is no way your king can rule here.”

  “I am aware of this.” Vorduthe’s tone softened slightly. “I have already pondered these matters. You will be relieved to hear that I intend to try my strength against the spirit, if I can. My reasons, however, are my own.”

  Mistirea appeared satisfied with this response. His judgment of people was intuitive, Vorduthe knew. He depended on feeling to tell him whether a man’s word could be taken on trust.

  And so it was that later in the day Vorduthe filled his lungs for the second time while floating in the center of the lake. Mistirea placed a hand on the small of his back, urging him down.

  Vorduthe dived.

  His descent slowed as the liquid thickened, and this time the entity was waiting for him. He entered trance state, and suddenly the darkness was filled with green-gold light.

  The voice spoke soothingly. Come. Come to your beloved wife. Come to Kirekenawe.

  Vorduthe knew that a trap was being opened under him. These deceptive dreams are a trick, he replied, speaking in his mind. You do not take me to my wife. You only present me with my own wishes.

  “You are wrong,” the voice told him calmly.

  “True, when you descend into the lake you descend into your own subconscious mind, the arena where dreams take place. But what you do not know is that this, the undermind, is collective, universal. Everyone shares it. Through it you can contact others, if you know how, and I know how. It is in the undermind that you meet me. There also you met your beloved wife Kirekenawe, the closest to your own soul—and she met you.”

  “It is not possible. She is half a world away.”

  “There is no distance in the undermind, just as there is no time. How could a morning pass in the space of one breath? Yet you remember that morning… Yes, you dream and she dreams—the same dream. And since it is a dream, why should she be paralyzed? Why should you be unhappy? I will create a world for you both where you can find what you lost.…”

  “It is still only hallucination.”

  “No, it is as real as anything you have known. Do you think that you dream apart from one another? No, you dream together, your souls meet and you know one another. If you do not believe me, ask her for news of home… come, see for yourself…”

  Vorduthe’s resolve to contend with the spirit wavered. That was all the assent the lake needed.

  There was a feeling of being drawn through something. A brief period of sleep. Then.…

  The outrigger boat scudded along on the swelling, shining sea, its triangular sail taut and straining on the slanted spar. Vorduthe leaned on the steering oar, turning the prow of the canoe-like craft while
his wife hauled on the sheet, pivoting the sail so as still to catch the wind.

  The narrow vessel shot through outcroppings of coral, breasted foamy breaking waves, then beached finally on the sandy shore of the island. Swiftly the Lady Vorduthe reefed the sail and tied the sail-line. They jumped out, splashing through the warm salty water and pulling the outrigger onto the beach together.

  The sun sparkled on their sea-bronzed bodies. Vorduthe followed his wife up the beach into the shade of the long-leaved trees whose fruit contained a cool, refreshing drink. He cut down two with his knife, chopping off the stems. They drank their fill, and lay together chewing the sweet yellow pulp.

  This little group of tiny islands, completely uninhabited and with an associated atoll, had been a favorite spot of theirs early in their marriage. Many a curved, empty beach had been the scene of their pleasure in one another, while breeze-driven waves crashed softly nearby. But now, after an interlude, Vorduthe recalled the Peldainian lake’s advice. He asked his wife how things went in the kingdom.

  For the first time a frown crossed her features. “In truth, not well,” she said sadly. “Your departure signaled a time of trouble, husband. Must you really hear of it?”

  Vorduthe’s fist clenched. “Yes!”

  “Very well.”

  She threw down the bell-shaped flower she had been playing with and sat up with her arms around her knees, staring out to sea. “With so many of the seaborne warriors away on the campaign, the Mandekweans saw an opportunity to revolt. King Krassos sent the remaining warriors to subdue them, not knowing that the Orwanians had secretly joined the rebellion. Near to the Mandekwe reefs the fleet was surprised by Orwanians using fire-canoes. Some ships were burned, some driven onto the reefs, and some managed to put their forces ashore only for them to be destroyed by a larger combined army.”

  Vorduthe too sat up. “Then it is as Korbar predicted! Except that it was not planned by Octrago…”

  “Since then the King has been busy training more warriors and gathering his forces. The rebels have taken some smaller islands and it is known they are assembling a seaborne army of their own. There will be a big sea battle soon. Then, I expect, all will be restored as before.…”

  Suddenly she jumped up and peered toward the horizon, shading her eyes. “Look! Sails!”

  Vorduthe followed her example. He could just see a line of sails which quickly passed out of sight. It was, without doubt, a war fleet.

  “We must get back to Arelia quickly,” he burst out. “I am needed!”

  Her laughter was tinkling, amused, and slightly sorrowful. She turned her eyes to him. “We can do nothing to help, husband. Have you forgotten? We are here, but not here. Elsewhere I lie on my bed, with servants around. As for you, in truth I do not know where you are. Yet somehow I feel that I do not dream all this alone. I feel that you are alive, and with me. Am I right?”

  “You are right,” he told her. “I am with you. At the same time I am in Peldain, on the other side of the forest.”

  They sat down again. Haltingly, he told her the story of what had happened since the day his army rolled its engines and wagons into the predatory forest. She listened intently, fascinated, and was silent after he had finished.

  “Now I must suffer the frustration of knowing what happens in the Hundred Islands, without being able to come to the King’s aid,” he added ruefully.

  She turned, and clutched his arm. “Let’s forget all that,” she urged. “Yours is a strange tale, but is not this a better reality than we knew before? Let us enjoy it while we can—together!”

  Suddenly Vorduthe realized how thoughtless he had been. His intense joy and delight at being with his wife again, at seeing her restored in her dream body, still could hardly match her own. It was inconceivable that he could rob her of what she had been given. The problems of King Krassos—or of Peldain—dwindled to insignificance.

  The sun was lower in the sky, which had darkened marginally to a deeper blue. He sensed that the meeting was over, and took her hand.

  Then sleep overtook him.

  But he did not wake with aching lungs back in the thickness and the warmth. He was in the green-gold haze, still with no need to breathe.

  You see, the lake said, it is as I told you.

  “What are you?” Vorduthe demanded, framing the question in his mind. “Is it true that you fell from the stars? That is hard to believe.”

  “It is true, in a manner of speaking,” the lake answered. “I will tell you all, as a gesture of good faith. Once I was a man, not so different from yourself. I came to this world from a world among the stars, in a ship that could fly through the air like a bird. There were no men on Thelessa then. It was I who brought them here.

  “Yes, I was a man, but a man with an uncommon ambition. Men are mortal, and my aim was to be immortal like a god. Since it is individuals that die, I needed a body that was not individual, and that would last indefinitely.

  “The answer lay in vegetable existence. Vegetable life has a level of consciousness which to us is like deep sleep. This I used as the foundation of my immortality. Upon this sleep I erected the structure of the subconscious mind, the dreaming state, in preparation for receiving my waking consciousness.

  “The arrangement is not dissimilar to the human pattern, but the project needed a long, long time, much longer than I had to live. I created the lake as an interim measure. It is not water: it is a biological soup of chemicals upon which I imprinted a replica of my conscious mind, and it is in tune with the great subconsciousness of the forest. This connection already gives me great powers, as you have seen. When the forest is matured I shall take full possession of my new, everlasting, ever-growing body, and the lake will become redundant.

  Had the spirit of the lake depended on words only, Vorduthe might have grasped little of what was said. He understood as much as he did with the help of visualizations of hallucinatory vividness, which showed him in glimpsed pictures how this strange long-dead man had descended on Peldain in his flying ship, with a retinue of slaves to help him. He had arranged for future generations of these slaves to be cared for in Peldain’s inner garden, in case he still needed human servants. Ironically the cult of the lake had arisen, and unknowingly had retarded culmination of the project. But early on some of the slaves had escaped, had made their way across the sea and settled in the Hundred Islands.

  “How could the mind of a man dwell in this lake for thousands of years?” Vorduthe objected. “It would be unendurable.”

  The spirit laughed gently. “Vegetable existence is not only everlasting, it is also slow. What to you is a thousand years I can experience as one short day, and in that day there has been much to attend to.”

  “Life as a forest sounds hardly to be desired.”

  “You lack imagination. Once the time scale is taken into account, there is as much potential in vegetable development as there is in animal. I shall be mobile, I shall sense and think—I shall develop vegetable brains, I shall grow human bodies in pods if I wish. Every tree, every branch and blossom, every new organ and sensation will be at my disposal. Already I experience the sexual excitement of wind-spread fertilization, and had I been able to focus my consciousness in any one place, I would have battled with you in the forest, and destroyed you.

  “You would destroy me now, if you could.”

  “You have guessed that I cannot. I have no power over your will. But there is no need for us to be enemies. I have no interest in the Hundred Islands. I only need Peldain, and not even all of that. Do not oppose me. Leave me in peace, to grow… in return, you may come here, and gain your reward …”

  The glow faded and impending suffocation told Vorduthe that his time was up; the spirit could hold him no longer. He came out of trance state, into blackness, and kicked out for the surface.

  The bargain had been struck.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The tinctures exuded by the medicine trees, the chief aid of Peldainian physicians,
no longer were able to sustain the ailing King Kerenei. An air of ceremonial sadness fell over Lakeside at the news of his impending death, mingled with the expectation of his young, vigorous son’s accession.

  But although Askon Octrago’s extraordinary exploit in bringing the foreigners to Peldain had advanced his reputation, the easy-going life of Lakeside was not too much disturbed by these events. Early one morning Vorduthe was visited by Troop Leaders Donatwe Mankas and Wirro Kana-Kem. They walked together through the tree-town. Multicolored blossoms, their perfume ever-present, fell from the arbors and drifted constantly in the air. All around were the parked tree-dwellings, the greater structures that were used as communal meeting places, somewhat of a cross between gardens and taverns. Also there were small workshops where such work as there was to be performed in Peldain was done, and storehouses for food provided by the trees.

  No payment was ever demanded for services rendered. The inhabitants were allotted to work as needed, by the authority deriving from the king.

  Vorduthe and his companions walked through a crowd of playing children. “We are reaching the point of no return, my lord,” Donatwe Mankas complained. “Some of the men are taking wives. Children are on the way. Soon they will feel settled here and will have no stomach to fight. And now Octrago is to be king! Have you given up, my lord? Are we not to strike at all?”

  With all the squadron commanders gone, the two remaining troop leaders instinctively spoke up as boldly as if they had held the rank. Indeed, either of these two would make a match for Mendayo Korbar. Kana-Kem glanced at Vorduthe but said nothing. He had never repeated what Vorduthe had told him about his plan to destroy all Peldain, had never even asked what he had eventually decided, but it was plain the warrior thought much.

  When he saw these innocent children at play, when he thought of all the blameless families on this island, Vorduthe wondered if he would in fact have the heart to let the entity in the lake proceed, squeezing the habitable area of the island smaller and smaller.