by Phillip Mann
He stole a glance behind and found himself staring straight into a tentacle-fringed orifice. The Hammer was waiting for him! He watched as its sting came down and butted him, urging him up the hill.
Wong Lungli had never been so close to such a creature. On the practice ranges during Wong Lungli’s time on Terpsichore there was always the comfortable smell of plastic. But this creature stank of venom and blood. In white terror Wong Lungli staggered on up the hill, herded by the Hammer and helped by thrusts in the back.
At the pagoda he realized why he had been driven there. He could see his city. The cherry trees were on fire. Fine pagodas blazed and their tiles exploded like fire-crackers. He saw a Hammer stalk one of his palace guards. It ran beside him and then dabbed down with its sting and nipped him in half. He saw the earth cave in under concentrated dab rays and knew that even the private Gate was destroyed. He saw the inland sea burn.
For the last of the Dragon Emperors there was only one way out. He saw the Hammer and he saw his world. With all his might he hurled himself head first against the stone pillars of the pagoda in an attempt to dash his brains out. But his body held back and he botched the job and was still conscious through a red curtain of pain when the Hammer picked him up and threw him like a doll down the hill.
The Hammer were berserk and thorough. At the same moment they appeared over An they also arrived over the other Wong cities. Everywhere the pattern of destruction was the same. They smashed the Way Gates and laid waste the land. They gave no quarter, killing prisoners and functionaries alike. They stung till their venom sacs were dry and they sank on their knees in fatigue and ecstasy.
But An came in for special treatment. On that world they destroyed all life. They flattened all the buildings and ploughed them under, turning their stings to ploughshares. They dragged into light priceless works of art, some of which had endured all the revolutions since the time mankind first left Earth. They broke the fine blue pottery without a qualm. They tore the silks and the tapestries and the timeless paintings and buried them.
They left An a dead world and set about creating their own bloody empire.
The wheel had turned but one notch. It was not broken.
54
ON ULTIMA THULE
Pawl knew none of this.
Life on Thule settled, and although Pawl did little except look after his small garden and make love to Laurel, he found himself happy beyond his hopes. He felt fully alive in a way that he had only glimpsed in those moments when he had managed to trap life in words. Not that he wrote any more, or attempted to. Just being was sufficient. Once he had feared boredom. Now, with nothing to do and a lifetime to spend, boredom was the last thing on his mind. The days seemed too short.
Pawl became the slave of his love. He knew what was happening. Laurel was a drug. Love was a drug. Each day she grew in his mind, becoming closer to his ideal, and yet somehow she was always in front of him, leading.
Then one night, one strange night, when Erix made the walls of the dome flicker with deep purple shadows, Laurel held him fiercely. She offered herself to him in every way and there was an urgency about her love-making which upset him. She wanted more, something that he could not provide. She wanted to be touched and taken in a way that was beyond him.
“Hold me, Pawl. Hold me. Stop time. For me. For you. Stop time.”
“Laurel.”
“Isn’t that what you tried to do when you wrote down words? Isn’t that your art?”
“I don’t know.”
“You told me once. Oh, hold me, I am so cold. Time is dragging me.
Pawl did not know what to do and so he held his trembling woman close to him and whispered what words he could. Words from their past. She said nothing, but squirmed against him as though she would climb into his skin.
Towards morning she lay soft and relaxed in his arms. “It is not enough, is it?” she murmured. “Oh Pawl. I am sorry. I have tried to love you. Love me.”
“I do. I do.”
“But it is not enough to hold me.”
The next night she would not sleep with him. She spent the entire night in the clearing. Pawl sat sadly to one side. She seemed miles away. When Erix passed, she snarled. When a brief spatter of rain fell, she spread her arms and hands and tried to catch the rain and drink it.
She was no longer Laurel. It was Laurel’s body, but something occupied it. A stranger peered from her eyes. When she kissed Pawl once her lips were hard and unyielding. Finally, tired and depressed, Pawl entered the dome and collapsed on to the bed. He remembered Odin’s words, “She is a seed.” But still he did not understand.
When he awoke he felt a weight by his side, and discovered that Laurel had placed Odin’s stone there.
Of Laurel there was no sign.
She seemed to have run away.
Pawl called for her. He wandered round the great tree. He sat listening. He scrambled down to the lake and beat his way through the dense bush. And then finally night came and he made his way back to his camp and climbed into bed. In the morning he woke alone.
He hoed his garden. It was for recreation only. Pawl had discovered that he no longer needed to eat. Somehow he sustained himself by breathing and drinking.
While hoeing he had the sudden clear knowledge that Laurel was beyond the black-water lake. With that knowledge came an admonition that he should not go back to her yet.
But the knowledge of where she was released a great well of joy in him. She was safe and there, wherever there might be. And he hoed until his arms ached. That evening he tried to climb the silver tree to see if he could see the dark lake but the bark was too smooth and he slipped down.
*
The next morning Pawl was shaken awake. It was a dream shaking him. When he opened his eyes the shaking stopped and he stared at the grey domed roof. But it had been Laurel, or something like her, bending over him with rough hands. She was calling him to her.
Pawl shook the sleep from his head and walked out of the dome and into the misty clearing where dawn was still breaking and a fine rain was falling. He set out across the clearing and into the bush in the general direction of the lake. Pawl moved easily in the bush now, slipping under branches and round saplings.
He emerged from the bush, close to the lake but further round than he had ever explored. He crossed some soft sand and noticed that there was a set of footprints already there: shallow depressions filled with water.
He came to a river of dark water which sluiced over a shingle bar.
About two hundred yards up the river, on the opposite bank, stood Laurel. She stood very still and seemed taller.
Pawl waded across the shingle bank and ran towards Laurel, calling her name. But he pulled up short before he reached her.
Laurel’s legs were slightly spread and she was ankle deep in water. Her legs were thicker and veins stood out which ran from her knees right up her body to her neck. Her dappled colour had begun to fade to a uniform grey. Her arms had grown longer and the fingers with the webbing were stiff and reached down to her knees. They were growing towards the soil. Already there was a fusion taking place between her arms and the main part of her body. The neck was thicker too, and supported a head which was thinner and with the features drawn out. The eyes were closed and the nose was flattened and the mouth was open, as though waiting to drink the rain. Her hair was completely gone.
Pawl approached slowly. He spoke her name, but she did not move. He reached forward and with his fingers touched her face. It was as hard as hide that has been stretched in the sun.
He bent down and touched her feet. The toes were buried in the silt. They reminded him of something. Roots. That was it. They were like roots.
Laurel was turning into one of the trees.
Each day Pawl visited Laurel and each day he noticed changes. Laurel grew sturdier and more silver as she lost her humanness.
Pawl realized as he sat and looked at her that although she had changed her form she was still Laurel. He thought he
could feel love radiate from her and that made him peaceful.
For a while he wondered if he was destined to become a tree. But then he dismissed the thought. It was not in his nature. He was a maker, a doer.
He began to clear the space round Laurel so that she could grow more easily.
55
IN THE GALAXY
And what of the fate of the spaceways?
The order of the Families was destroyed and with it went the worst and the best of humanity. The chains of Way Gates, which had endured for so long that they seemed part of nature, were either smashed by alien war parties or “died”, for the sensitive cells of the bio-crystalline brains had little resistance when confronted by the logical illogic of the jovial Diphilus or the death-will of the Hammer.
The Gerbes settled on their world and were content to be forgotten.
The Hooded Parasol spread wherever they could and farmed native populations.
The Hammer fought among themselves and the Spiderets rebuilt their workshops.
Drip by patient drip the great bowl of the galaxy filled.
Isolated, the planets and star systems which had once belonged to Great Families with splendid-sounding names, such as the Xerxes de la Tour Souvent or the Shell-Bogdanovich Conspiracy, went on their own ways.
Some communities died out. Many were destroyed by the aliens during what became known as the Great Purge. Others thrived. Such a one was Mako.
Remember Mako?
Trade in the Rand Melon died overnight.
The Way Gate that had served that small planet so well suddenly stopped functioning. Its mirrors would not turn. Its Way Controller became slurred and silly and finally would not speak at all. There was no way to send the crop of Rand Melon off the planet.
The farmers of Mako reacted quickly. They dug up the plants and used the Rand Melon oils to give them power while they composted its leaves. There were limited stocks of food grain and livestock on the planet and these were gathered and protected during what proved to be a harsh winter.
There was starvation and cannibalism in outlying areas, that I can’t hide from you. But the young and the strong and the most passionate survived.
In the spring, thin men ploughed the land and spread the seed. Thin women wove nets from the Rand Melon flax and these caught fish. And at harvest time everyone worked and everyone prayed.
The second winter was not so bad.
And during the third winter there was a surplus, just, of meat and grain.
With full stomachs, the people of Mako were able to look up to the stars again and the stars became objects of worship. Children were able to point and say, “There’s Clarissa’s tears and there are the Proctor Fangs.” There was even a constellation called the Great Pawl in which there were two bright yellow stars. But the names meant very little. The past became mythology as the future preoccupied people’s minds. And that is just the way it should be. However….
The Pocket remained the Pocket.
Deep inside Lumb, Pettet and Raleigh looked to where Erix and Thule turned round their small bright sun. There was movement there. Slowly, and as mysteriously as they had come, the trio slipped back into the bright green gas of Emerald Lake. Within ten days they were gone.
It was as if they had never been.
Book Three
MOVEMENT
The tree by the dark river is tall now, but in comparison with the other great trees it is only a sapling. Its canopy is just beginning to spread. In the dawn sunlight it is all grey and shining silver.
Climbing in its upper branches is a man. His face is ageless and without wrinkles, though he is very old. His skin has acquired a faint green luminescence and his eyes, still bright and yellow, stare into an inner distance rather like the blind, though he is not blind.
He clambers with the grace of a monkey and shinnies fearlessly up the smooth silver boughs. If he encounters moss he scrapes it away with his fingers, being careful not to mark the tree. He preens the tree and removes any dead white leaves.
Occasionally he looks down, hanging secure with one arm crooked in a fissure and one foot braced against the bark. He likes to remain many hundreds of feet high. He only ventures on the ground when he needs water or fruit. Strange things walk on the ground.
Once he met his father, stumping on thickset legs. The man with forked beard and long blond hair stopped and nodded and then marched on. He has met his mother too, several times, always as a young woman and laughing as though she hadn’t a care in the world. His brothers have ambled past, and Pettet and Raleigh, and once Peron. Pawl knows them for what they are, seeds grown from his memory and passion, and is courteous, but he does not let them take part of his life. Within minutes he can climb the tree and be lost in its upper branches.
He rarely meets the creatures that live in the other trees. Like him they shun encounters.
Pawl likes to stay high. He loves to curve his body through the matted fibres of the expanding canopy. If he looks down at all it is to confront his memories. And then he shakes himself and remembers, “No regrets. Life is too short. So much to discover.”
Pawl has so much to do. The tree takes all his love.
It is a full-time job.
It will occupy him for the rest of his life.
THE END
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Also by Phillip Mann
The Story of The Gardener
1. Master of Paxwax (1986)
2. The Fall of the Families (1987)
A Land Fit for Heroes
3. Escape to the Wild Wood (1993)
4. Stand Alone Stan (1994)
5. The Burning Forest (1995) (Originally published in two volumes – The Dragon Wakes & The Burning Forest)
Other Novels
The Eye of the Queen (1981)
Pioneers (1988)
Wulfsyarn: A Mosaic (1990)
Dedication
TO MY SON,
OWEN MANN
Phillip Mann (1942 – )
Phillip Mann was born in Yorkshire in 1942. he studied English and Drama at Manchester University and later in California. He worked for the New China News Agency in Beijing for two years, but since 1969 has lived principally in New Zealand, where he held the position of Professor of Drama at Victoria University, Wellington, until he retired in 1998. His first novel, The Eye of the Queen was published in 1982 and was followed by seven others including the ‘Story of the Gardener’ and ‘A Land Fit for Heroes’ sequences. He has had many plays and stories broadcast on Radio New Zealand, which also adapted his Gardener novels Master of Paxwax and Fall of the Families.
Copyright
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © Phillip Mann 1987
All rights reserved.
The right of Phillip Mann to be identified as the author
of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2011 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 11489 0
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in
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