by Джеффри Лорд
«But things may be changing for the worse,» said Swebon. «This is the third time in the last year they have come twenty or thirty strong against a large village. They seem to be striking harder at us as the Sons of Hapanu also become more dangerous.»
Blade frowned. «Do you think the people from the city could be causing the Treemen to attack you? I do not know how they might do this, but-«
«Neither do we,» said Swebon. «And I do not think it is so. How could the Sons of Hapanu make the Treemen understand what they wanted? The Treemen have no language that even the wisest of men can understand.»
Blade knew that there might be ways of communicating with the Treemen that didn’t involve a spoken language. He also knew it would be hard to convince Swebon of this, and if he did, what good would it do? It would merely burden the chief with another worry for his people, without offering him any help against the dangers threatening them.
Besides, it didn’t really matter whether the Treemen and the Sons of Hapanu were one problem or two. They were both becoming a serious menace to the Forest People. They both had to be met with better weapons and perhaps different tactics. Now all Blade had to do was invent these weapons and tactics.
He had no qualms about taking the side of the Forest People. The Treemen were an evolutionary dead end, too dangerous to be ignored as animals but too close to animals to be treated as men. They took and they would probably go on taking, without giving anything in return.
The Sons of Hapanu were a somewhat different matter. They had a well-developed civilization. No doubt they saw the Forest People the same way the People saw the Treemen, as an inferior race, hardly more than animals. Perhaps in the end they would win out and rule this Dimension, even the Forest.
Not now, though-not if Blade could do anything about it. The Sons of Hapanu might have all the virtues of civilization and a high opinion of themselves. That didn’t give them the right to sweep through the Forest, killing or enslaving the People. The Forest People deserved at least a few more centuries to go their own way, and Blade would do everything he could to give them those centuries.
The only problem was that he still didn’t know exactly what he could do to bring this about.
The village slowly recovered from the Treemen’s raid. The dead were burned, their ashes cast into the river, and the proper rites performed in memory of the seven women carried off. The damaged huts were repaired, and the carpenters went to work on a whole squadron of new canoes. There were more than the village needed to replace the ones lost or set adrift by the Treemen.
«I am sending word to the Red Flowers village,» Swebon told Blade. «I would like their chief Tuk and his best men to join us in a raid against the Yal. They do not have enough canoes of their own, so we must make some new ones to carry their men.»
«Why a raid now?» asked Blade.
«We have lost women,» said Swebon. «We need more, and so we shall go to the Yal for them. It is a good way to make sure the Treemen do us no real harm.»
Blade thought it was also an even better way to make the wars among the tribes more dangerous. If every tribe who lost women to the Treemen promptly went out and raided its neighbors, the tribes would soon be fighting seriously. They would be weakening each other just at the time when they most needed to stand together against both the Treemen and the Sons of Hapanu.
For the tenth time, Blade wished he’d already come up with some new weapon or tactic to offer Swebon. Then he could not only point out how dangerous the raid on the Yal would be, he could offer an alternative. Unfortunately he still didn’t have anything to offer.
Blade wanted to laugh and curse at the same time. Lord Leighton considered him something of a military genius for inventing so many new weapons in so many different Dimensions. His Lordship didn’t know the half of it! It wasn’t genius. It was just common sense, a good memory, and a keen eye for both detail and opportunities. None of this had done him a damned bit of good in this Dimension so far!
At least going out on this raid against the Yal would be a good starting point, whatever he thought of its wisdom. He’d be seeing the Fak’si in action, and while that might not help it certainly couldn’t hurt.
«Swebon,» Blade said. «I would like to go with the Fak’si on this raid. I am not of your people, only a visitor, so I do not know if I have the right to-«
Swebon clapped Blade on the back and slapped his hair so hard Blade’s ears rang. «I was praying to the Forest Spirit that you’d ask! With two strong spears like you and Guno following me, the Red Flowers will have to send more of their own good men. Otherwise they will lose honor and some of their share of the women we take.»
«Thank you, Swebon,» said Blade. «I do not promise to fight any better against the Yal than I did against the Treemen or the Horned Ones. But I hope I shall fight no worse, either.»
«Then may the Forest Spirit have mercy on the Yal,» said Swebon, laughing.
The next day Swebon left for the Red Flowers village, while the warriors prepared their weapons and the women packed food. The new canoes were hastily finished, launched, tested, then tied up along the bank to the south of the village, hidden behind a screen of leaves. The tale around the village was that a hunting party was going out, into land where the Banum might be found. Only Guno and a few other leaders among the warriors knew the real target of the raid.
Swebon returned from the Red Flowers with a canoe filled with their warriors, another filled with dried fruit, and promises of much more of both. Guno was heard muttering, «I’m not going to hope for much more than promises from the Red Flowers until I see it.»
He had to eat those words a few days later, when the Red Flowers showed up-five canoes and seventy warriors under their gray-haired chief Tuk. Swebon gave the Red Flowers three new canoes, and in return Tuk swore to follow Swebon as his chief until they all returned from their victory over the Yal. There was a final feast, and Lokhra spent the night being so grateful to Blade that he got very little sleep. Then the raiders set off, a hundred and fifty men in sixteen canoes.
They paddled up the Fak’si River, past its junction with the Yellow River, and on upriver for two more days. By the end of the third day they’d reached a point where a one-mile portage would take them to the river flowing down into Yal territory. Unfortunately, by the end of the third day it was also raining in buckets. The banks were rapidly turning into swamp and all the raiders were as soaked as if they’d been swimming. It was impossible to try hauling even the smallest canoe sections through the slimy ooze. It was impossible to even make camp and light fires to roast the fish they’d caught.
However, the rains gave with one hand what they took away with the other. It poured down so violently and so long that all the streams in the area were swollen to several times their normal size. One that was normally only knee-deep could now float loaded canoes. So instead of a mile of struggling overland, there was only a quick dash across a few hundred yards of ground high enough to be merely boggy, not liquid. Instead of costing them time, the rain ended up saving them two full days.
The banks of the new river rose more steeply, and there were fewer Horned Ones. Along the banks the trees grew taller, but their branches didn’t make such a thick canopy as usual. The vines, creepers, bushes, and flowers of the jungle floor grew so thickly that the perfume of the flowers was sickeningly heavy and the cries of birds feeding on the fruit half deafened Blade.
The most common tree Blade saw was the same kind he’d awakened under, the kind with the ribbed trunk and the sticky sap. The sap oozed from the bark and collected in great puddles at the base. Swebon called it the kohkol tree.
«The sap has many uses, apart from decorating the skins of English warriors who fall asleep under the trees,» said the chief. Blade laughed, remembering the mess he’d been when he first met Swebon. «We pour it on the leaves when we put canoes together. We also use it for other things, which you will see in time.» Blade didn’t ask what the «other things» might
be; he suspected they were religious.
The river swarmed with fish, which had to be eaten raw, since fires might be sighted by Yal hunters. The Fak’si were skilled at cleaning their catch, and raw fish was considerably better than going hungry. After the first few meals Blade found himself almost looking forward to sampling new varieties.
There was one kind of fish all the Fak’si seemed to value, judging from the way they cheered when one broke surface. Why anyone would cheer about it was more than Blade could see. The smallest of these fish was six feet long and two feet thick, with bony spines all down the back, poisonous green and purple mottling on the sides, and a corpse-white belly. Instead of a proper mouth it had a circle of sucking discs rimmed with small teeth around a foot-wide black gullet. Blade wasn’t sure how it fed and was sure he didn’t want to find out. He mentally labeled it the «ugly fish,» and couldn’t understand why anyone cheered when one appeared. It looked unappetizing, if not actually poisonous.
About noon on the third day in Yal territory, Swebon and Tuk made hand signals for the canoes to head in for the bank. All sixteen canoes were grounded and the whole raiding party climbed out. The four priests, two from each village, stood by the water’s edge and chanted what were apparently questions and answers in a language Blade couldn’t understand. As usual the computer had altered his brain during the transition into Dimension X, so that the language of the Forest People reached him as English and his speech reached them in their own language. Yet for some reason his brain hadn’t been altered quite enough to grasp the language the priests were using. If it was a purely ritual language it didn’t matter too much in practice, but it might be an ominous development if it continued. Being tongue-tied in each new Dimension would be nothing less than a disaster!
The priests took turns asking and answering questions for about half an hour. Then one of them drove a wooden stake into the ground, a second killed a bird, a third held it up so that its blood dripped down on the stake, and a fourth sprinkled dried herbs from a bag onto the blood. This took another half hour. By that time Blade was getting impatient. Proper rites or not, did they all have to stand here on the bank like a lot of bloody statues, easy targets for any Yal who came by. A single flight of arrows could hardly miss hitting a dozen Fak’si.
Fortunately the rites came to an end before Blade’s patience did. The raiders climbed back into their canoes and headed off downstream more slowly than before. Blade saw a man with a fishing spear squatting in the bow of each canoe, ready to throw.
The river wound back and forth, and the line of canoes stretched out. Only half the raiders were in sight when the man in the bow of the canoe just ahead of Blade’s leaped to his feet. Ignoring the rocking of the canoe, he braced himself and raised his spear. The paddlers backed water until the canoe was almost stopped. Then the fisherman’s arm snapped forward, the harpoon flashed down, the line hissed out, and suddenly an uglyfish broke surface in a shower of foam.
It was a real monster, nearly ten feet long, and for a moment Blade wasn’t sure who’d caught whom. The fish charged the canoe and smashed into the bow so hard Blade heard wood crack. The impact half-stunned the fish and it was slow to turn away. As it presented its side to the fisherman, he snatched up another spear and drove it in deep. The fish leaped completely out of the water, knocked the fisherman overboard with a final blow of its tail, then fell back dead.
No one even tried to get the uglyfish into the canoe. There wouldn’t have been room. Instead two men helped the fisherman back into the canoe while others looped a rope around the uglyfish’s tail. Then the canoe started off again, towing the uglyfish tail-first behind it.
In two hours Blade saw the raiders catch at least seven uglyfish. No one said a word to him about what all this was supposed to mean. He had gruesome visions of a banquet of uglyfish, or some sacrificial rite that went on long enough to use them all. Neither idea appealed to him.
Another hour, and then Swebon suddenly signaled four canoes to follow him toward the bank. Blade saw that here the bank was lower and the kohkol trees grew so thickly that their branches kept the ground in shade. The vines and shrubbery were no longer thick enough to clutch a man like the tentacles of an octopus.
By the time Swebon’s canoes were firmly grounded on the bank, the others were out of sight. Swebon turned to Blade, «You must be quiet, and try to understand all you see this day without asking questions. All the priests and Tuk wish it so, and you must do as they wish.»
«May I ask why they wish it?»
«You are not of the People, not one who has been given spear and shield with the Forest Spirit watching. The Forest Spirit will tolerate your presence at-at what we do-this day only if you show it respect by your silence.»
«I will be silent, for it is the way of the English to honor those who watch over other peoples.» He was perfectly happy not to participate in the upcoming religious rites, if they involved eating uglyfish.
«Good.» Swebon sprang to the bank and motioned the other men to follow him. They scrambled up to the edge of the trees, spread out, then vanished into the jungle. Blade noticed that each one was carrying a large gourd, hollowed out and stoppered, and a small knife of iron set in bone, shaped somewhat like an old-fashioned straight razor. Swebon and half a dozen men armed with bows spread out along the bank to keep watch on the canoes, the river, and the Forest behind them.
Whatever took place in the trees took place in silence. All Blade knew was that in about half an hour the men started reappearing. Their knives were stuck in their belts and the gourds were not tightly stoppered and apparently full. As carefully as if they’d been handling eggs, they laid the gourds in the bottoms of the canoes and climbed in. Swebon was the last man aboard, then the canoes shot off after the others.
Before twilight they caught up, at a place where the river spread out through the Forest in a wasteland of marsh and bog. The four canoes turned into the widest channel through the marsh and followed it until the river was out of sight behind. Half a mile inside the marsh they came to the rest of the raiding party, the canoes drawn up in a circle with their bows grounded on a patch of dry land. The patch covered several acres, more than large enough to hold the four priests, four warriors to help them, and a large iron kettle hung on a tripod over a wood fire. One of the warriors was feeding the fire carefully with handfuls of moss that burned with a thin gray smoke, quickly lost among the branches overhead.
One at a time, the stoppered gourds were handed to the priests and emptied into the pot. Now Blade recognized what the gourds held. It was kohkol sap, freshly tapped from the trees. While one priest poured, another stirred the sap continuously with a wooden paddle. When he raised the paddle, long strings of the thickened sap trailed from it, like strings of glue.
By the time the last gourd was empty, the sap had thickened and turned whitish-gray. Now warriors came splashing through the waist-deep water, towing the uglyfish behind them. One fish after another was hauled up on the bank, to the feet of the man who seemed to be the chief priest. With a long saw-edged knife he made two quick slashes, one under each eye. Then he reached into the wounds and pulled out two dripping reddish glands; each about the size of a grapefruit. Finally he held the glands over the pot of kohkol sap and squeezed them until they burst and spurted reddish fluid. Blue fumes rose from the iron pot as the fluid fell into the sap. From the whiff he got, Blade wondered why the priests and their helpers didn’t drop dead on the spot. The fumes smelled as if they came from something not only long dead but horribly diseased before it died.
Blade sat as more than twenty uglyfish were butchered, then dumped back in the water. By the time the last one was gone, the pot was nearly full and the blue fumes hung like a revolting fog over the land and the canoes around it. From the faces of the men around him, Blade knew he wasn’t the only one suffering from the smell.
There was more, however. One by one the empty gourds were picked up and filled with the mixture from the pot, then hande
d back into the canoes. As the gourds were filled, the fumes slowly died away and Blade no longer had to fight to keep his stomach under control. Finally the nearly empty pot was overturned, dousing the coals of the fire with the sludge in the bottom, then loaded aboard the priests’ canoe.
«Now the Shield of Life is ready,» said Swebon. That didn’t tell Blade much. It sounded more like a medicine than a weapon, but that was about as much as he could guess. He didn’t really care, just as long as he didn’t have to swallow anything which gave off the fumes he’d just smelled.
It was nearly dark, so Blade expected they’d stay in the marsh, camping on the dry ground or even sleeping in the canoes. Instead they returned to the river, then headed downstream again almost as fast as in daylight.
Blade leaned forward and tapped Swebon on the shoulder. «I should not question the judgement of Fak’si chiefs, but this night journey makes me wonder. What about the Horned Ones?»
Swebon’s teeth were a white flash in the darkness. «Tuk had an idea. If we went down the river to the nearest Yal village in the darkness, we would not be seen before we struck. So we are going to do as Tuk said.
«We left all the grashta-«Blade assumed he meant the uglyfish «- in the marsh. Their blood flows into the water and it will draw all the Horned Ones of this river. They will be too busy fighting over the fish to attack us.»
Blade mentally crossed his fingers, then laughed. «Why didn’t you tell me this before, Swebon? Then I could have made jawbracers for each canoe, just in case.»
«Tuk only spoke as we made the Shield of Life,» said Swebon. He seemed slightly embarrassed. «He knows more of this river and of the Horned Ones than I do. There might not be peace with him if I did not follow him in this, for he is proud.»
Blade shrugged. It could have been much worse, and certainly no people and no Dimension had a monopoly on proud old generals who got brainstorms. He relaxed, and gradually he began to enjoy himself.
Now it was completely dark, but sometimes luminous patches glowed as paddles and prows broke the oily surface of the water. There was no wind, but they were too far from either bank for most insects. The water dripped from the paddles and gurgled at the prows, the paddlers murmured to themselves, and night birds called from the distant banks.