Sting and the Tree Companion chief were conducting some sort of discussion in pantomime, Sting’s motions sweeping and broad, the chief’s the merest flicks of fingers, while Crown stood by, an impassive column of darkness, arms folded sombrely. As Leaf and Shadow reappeared Crown said, “Sting isn’t getting anywhere. It has to be a trance parley or we won’t make contact. Help him, Shadow.”
She nodded. To Leaf, Crown said, “How’s the arm?”
“It’ll be all right.”
“How soon?”
“A day. Two, maybe. Sore for a week.”
“We may be fighting again by sunrise.”
“You told me yourself that we can’t possibly survive a battle with these people.”
“Even so,” Crown said. “We may be fighting again by sunrise. If there’s no other choice, we’ll fight.”
“And die?”
“And die,” Crown said.
Leaf walked slowly away. Twilight had come. All vestiges of the rain had vanished, and the air was clear, crisp, growing chill, with a light wind out of the north that was gaining steadily in force. Beyond the thicket the tops of tall ropy-limbed trees were whipping about. The shards of the moon had moved into view, rough daggers of whiteness doing their slow dance about one another in the darkening sky. The poor old shattered moon, souvenir of an era long gone: it seemed a scratchy mirror for the tormented planet that owned it, for the fragmented race of races that was mankind. Leaf went to the nightmares, who stood patiently in harness, and passed among them, gently stroking their shaggy ears, caressing their blunt noses. Their eyes, liquid, intelligent, watchful, peered into his almost reproachfully. You promised us a stable, they seemed to be saying. Stallions, warmth, newly mown hay. Leaf shrugged. In this world, he told them wordlessly, it isn’t always possible to keep one’s promises. One does one’s best, and one hopes that that is enough.
Near the wagon Sting has assumed a cross-legged position on the damp ground. Shadow squats beside him; the chief, mantled in dignity, stands stiffly before them, but Shadow coaxes him with gentle gestures to come down to them. Sting’s eyes are closed and his head lolls forward. He is already in trance. His left hand grasps Shadow’s muscular furry thigh; he extends his right, palm upward, and after a moment the chief puts his own palm to it. Contact: the circuit is closed.
Leaf has no idea what messages are passing among the three of them, but yet, oddly, he does not feel excluded from the transaction. Such a sense of love and warmth radiates from Sting and Shadow and even from the Tree Companion that he is drawn in, he is enfolded by their communion. And Crown, too, is engulfed and absorbed by the group aura; his rigid martial posture eases, his grim face looks strangely peaceful. Of course it is Sting and Shadow who are most closely linked; Shadow is closer now to Sting than she has ever been to Leaf, but Leaf is untroubled by this. Jealousy and competitiveness are inconceivable now. He is Sting, Sting is Leaf, they all are Shadow and Crown, there are no boundaries separating one from another, just as there will be no boundaries in the All-Is-One that awaits every living creature, Sting and Crown and Shadow and Leaf, the Tree Companions, the Invisibles, the nightmares, the no-leg spiders.
They are getting down to cases now. Leaf is aware of strands of opposition and conflict manifesting themselves in the intricate negotiation that is taking, place. Although he is still without a clue to the content of the exchange, Leaf understands that the Tree Companion chief is stating a position of demand—calmly, bluntly, immovable—and Sting and Shadow are explaining to him that Crown is not at all likely to yield. More than that Leaf is unable to perceive, even when he is most deeply enmeshed in the larger consciousness of the trance-wrapped three. Nor does he know how much time is elapsing. The symphonic interchange—demand, response, development, climax—continues repetitively, indefinitely, reaching no resolution.
He feels, at last, a running-down, an attenuation of the experience. He begins to move outside the field of contact, or to have it move outside him. Spiderwebs of sensibility still connect him to the others even as Sting and Shadow and the chief rise and separate, but they are rapidly thinning and fraying, and in a moment they snap.
The contact ends.
The meeting was over. During the trance-time night had fallen, an extraordinarily black night against which the stars seemed unnaturally bright. The fragments of the moon had traveled far across the sky. So it had been a lengthy exchange; yet in the immediate vicinity of the wagon nothing seemed altered. Crown stood like a statue beside the wagon’s entrance; the Tree Companions still occupied the cleared ground between the wagon and the gate. Once more a tableau, then: how easy it is to slide into motionlessness, Leaf thought, in these impoverished times. Stand and wait, stand and wait; but now motion returned. The Tree Companion pivoted and strode off without a word, signaling to his people, who gathered up their dead and followed him through the gate. From within they tugged the gate shut; there was the screeching sound of the bolts being forced home. Sting, looking dazed, whispered something to Shadow, who nodded and lightly touched his arm. They walked haltingly back to the wagon.
“Well?” Crown asked finally.
“They will allow us to pass,” Sting said.
“How courteous of them.”
“But they claim the wagon and everything that is in it.”
Crown gasped. “By what right?”
“Right of prophecy,” said Shadow. “There is a seer among them, an old woman of mixed stock, part White Crystal, part Tree Companion, part Invisible. She has told them that everything that has happened lately in the world was caused by the Soul for the sake of enriching the Tree Companions.”
“Everything? They see the onslaught of the Teeth as a sign of divine favor?”
“Everything,” said Sting. “The entire upheaval. All for their benefit. All done so that migrations would begin and refugees would come to this place, carrying with them valuable possessions, which they would surrender to those whom the Soul meant should own them, meaning the Tree Companions.”
Crown laughed roughly. “If they want to be brigands, why not practice brigandage outright, with the right name on it, and not blame their greed on the Soul?”
“They don’t see themselves as brigands,” Shadow said. “There can be no denying the chief’s sincerity. He and his people genuinely believe that the Soul has decreed all this for their own special good, that the time has come—”
“Sincerity!”
“—for the Tree Companions to become people of substance and property. Therefore they’ve built this wall across the highway, and as refugees come west, the Tree Companions relieve them of their possessions with the blessing of the Soul.”
“I’d like to meet their prophet,” Crown muttered.
Leaf said, “It was my understanding that Invisibles were unable to breed with other stocks.”
Sting told him, with a shrug, “We report only what we learned as we sat there dreaming with the chief. The witch-woman is part Invisible, he said. Perhaps he was wrong, but he was doing no lying. Of that I’m certain.”
“And I,” Shadow put in.
“What happens to those who refuse to pay tribute?” Crown asked.
“The Tree Companions regard them as thwarters of the Soul’s design,” said Sting, “and fall upon them and put them to death. And then seize their goods.”
Crown moved restlessly in a shallow circle in front of the wagon, kicking up gouts of soil out of the hard-packed roadbed. After a moment he said, “They dangle on vines. They chatter like foolish monkeys. What do they want with the merchandise of civilized folk? Our furs, our statuettes, our carvings, our flutes, our robes?”
“Having such things will make them equal in their own sight to the higher stocks,” Sting said. “Not the things themselves, but the possession of them, do you see, Crown?”
“They’ll have nothing of mine!”
“What will we do, then?” Leaf asked. “Sit here and wait for their darts?”
Crown caught Sting heavily by the shoulder. “Did they give us any sort of time limit? How long do we have before they attack?”
“There was nothing like an ultimatum. The chief seems unwilling to enter into warfare with us.”
“Because he’s afraid of his betters!”
“Because he thinks violence cheapens the decree of the Soul,” Sting replied evenly. “Therefore he intends to wait for us to surrender our belongings voluntarily.”
“He’ll wait a hundred years!”
“He’ll wait a few days,” Shadow said. “If we haven’t yielded, the attack will come. But what will you do, Crown? Suppose they were willing to wait your hundred years. Are you? We can’t camp here forever.”
“Are you suggesting we give them what they ask?”
“I merely want to know what strategy you have in mind,” she said. “You admit yourself we can’t defeat them in battle. We haven’t done a very good job of aweing them into submission. You recognize that any attempt to destroy their wall will bring them upon us with their darts. You refuse to turn back and look for some other westward route. You rule out the alternative of yielding to them. Very well, Crown. What do you have in mind?”
“We’ll wait a few days,” Crown said thickly.
“The Teeth are heading this way!” Sting cried. “Shall we sit here and let them catch us?”
Crown shook his head. “Long before the Teeth get here, Sting, this place will be full of other refugees, many of them, as unwilling to give up their goods to these folk as we are. I can feel them already on the road, coming this way, two days’ march from us, perhaps less. We’ll make alliance with them. Four of us may be helpless against a swarm of poisonous apes, but fifty or a hundred strong fighters would send them scrambling up their own trees.”
“No one will come this way,” said Leaf. “No one but fools. Everyone passing through Theptis knows what’s been done to the highway here. What good is the aid of fools?”
“We came this way,” Crown snapped. “Are we such fools?”
“Perhaps we are. We were warned not to take Spider Highway, and we took it anyway.”
“Because we refused to trust the word of Invisibles.”
“Well, the Invisibles happened to be telling the truth, this time,” Leaf said. “And the news must be all over Theptis. No one in his right mind will come this way now.”
“I feel marchers already on the way, hundreds of them,” Crown said. “I can sense these things, sometimes. What about you, Sting? You feel things ahead of time, don’t you? They’re coming, aren’t they? Have no fear, Leaf. We’ll have allies here in a day or so, and then let these thieving Tree Companions beware.” Crown gestured broadly. “Leaf, set the nightmares loose to graze. And then everybody inside the wagon. We’ll seal it and take turns standing watch through the night. This is a time for vigilance and courage.”
“This is a time for digging graves,” Sting murmured sourly, as they clambered into the wagon.
Crown and Shadow stood the first round of watches while Leaf and Sting napped in the back. Leaf fell asleep at once and dreamed he was living in some immense brutal eastern city—the buildings and street plan were unfamiliar to him, but the architecture was definitely eastern in style, gray and heavy, all parapets and cornices—that was coming under attack by the Teeth.
He observed everything from a many-windowed gallery atop an enormous square-sided brick tower that seemed like a survival from some remote prehistoric epoch. First, from the north, came the sound of the war song of the invaders, a nasty unendurable buzzing drone, piercing and intense, like the humming of highspeed polishing wheels at work on metal plates. That dread music brought the inhabitants of the city spilling into the streets—all stocks, Flower Givers and Sand Shapers and White Crystals and Dancing Stars and even Tree Companions, absurdly garbed in mercantile robes as though they were so many fat citified Fingers—but no one was able to escape, for there were so many people, colliding and jostling and stumbling and falling in helpless heaps, that they blocked every avenue and alleyway.
Into this chaos now entered the vanguard of the Teeth; shuffling forward in their peculiar bent-kneed crouch, trampling those who had fallen. They looked half-beast, half-demon: squat thick-thewed flat-headed long-muzzled creatures, naked, hairy, their skins the color of sand, their eyes glinting with insatiable hungers. Leaf’s dreaming mind subtly magnified and distorted them so that they came hopping into the city like a band of giant toothy frogs, thump-thump, bare fleshy feet slapping pavement in sinister reverberations, short powerful arms swinging almost comically at each leaping stride. The kinship of mankind meant nothing to these carnivorous beings. They had been penned up too long in the cold, mountainous, barren country of the far northeast, living on such scraps and strings as the animals of the forest yielded, and they saw their fellow humans as mere meat stockpiled by the Soul against this day of vengeance. Efficiently, now, they began their round-up in the newly conquered city, seizing everyone in sight, cloistering the dazed prisoners in hastily rigged pens: these we eat tonight at our victory feast; these we save for tomorrow’s dinner; these become dried meat to carry with us on the march; these we kill for sport; these we keep as slaves. Leaf watched the Teeth erecting their huge spits. Kindling their fierce roasting-fires. Diligent search teams fanned out through the suburbs. No one would escape. Leaf stirred and groaned, reached the threshold of wakefulness, fell back into dream. Would they find him in his tower? Smoke, gray and greasy, boiled up out of a hundred parts of town. Leaping flames. Rivulets of blood ran in the streets. He was choking. A terrible dream. But was it only a dream? This was how it had actually been in Holy Town hours after he and Crown and Sting and Shadow had managed to get away, this was no doubt as it had happened in city after city along the tormented coastal strip, very likely something of this sort was going on now in—where?—Bone Harbor? Ved-uru? Alsandar? He could smell the penetrating odor of roasting meat. He could hear the heavy lalloping sound of a Teeth patrol running up the stairs of his tower. They had him. Yes, here, now, now, a dozen Teeth bursting suddenly into his hiding place, grinning broadly—Pure Stream, they had captured a Pure Stream! What a coup! Beasts. Beasts. Prodding him, testing his flesh. Not plump enough for them, eh? This one’s pretty lean. We’ll cook him anyway. Pure Stream meat, it enlarges the soul, it makes you into something more than you were. Take him downstairs! To the spit, to the spit, to the—
“Leaf?”
“I warn you—you won’t like—the flavor—”
“Leaf, wake up!”
“The fires—oh, the stink!”
“Leaf!”
It was Shadow. She shook him gently, plucked at his shoulder. He blinked and slowly sat up. His wounded arm was throbbing again; he felt feverish. Effects of the dream. A dream, only a dream. He shivered and tried to center himself, working at it, banishing the fever, banishing the shreds of dark fantasy that were still shrouding his mind.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“I was dreaming about the Teeth,” he told her. He shook his head, trying to clear it. “Am I to stand watch now?”
She nodded. “Up front. Driver’s cabin.”
“Has anything been happening?”
“Nothing. Not a thing.” She reached up and drew her fingertips lightly along the sides of his jaws. Her eyes were warm and bright, her smile was loving. “The Teeth are far away, Leaf.”
“From us, maybe. Not from others.”
“They were sent by the will of the Soul.”
“I know, I know.” How often had he preached acceptance! This is the will, and we bow to it. This is the road, and we travel it uncomplainingly. But yet, but yet—he shuddered. The dream mode persisted. He was altogether disoriented. Dream-Teeth nibbled at his flesh. The inner chambers of his spirit resonated
to the screams of those on the spits, the sounds of rending and tearing, the unbearable reek of burning cities. In ten days, half a world torn apart. So much pain, so much death, so much that had been beautiful destroyed by relentless savages who would not halt until, the Soul only knew when, they had had their full measure of revenge. The will of the Soul sends them upon us. Accept. Accept. He could not find his center. Shadow held him, straining to encompass his body with her arms. After a moment he began to feel less troubled, but he remained scattered, diffused, present only in part, some portion of his mind nailed as if by spikes into that monstrous ash-strewn wasteland that the Teeth had created out of the fair and fertile eastern provinces.
She released him. “Go,” she whispered. “It’s quiet up front. You’ll be able to find yourself again.”
He took her place in the driver’s cabin, going silently past Sting, who had replaced Crown on watch amidwagon. Half the night was gone. All was still in the roadside clearing; the great wooden gate was shut tight and nobody was about. By cold starlight Leaf saw the nightmares browsing patiently at the edge of the thicket. Gentle horses, almost human. If I must be visited by nightmares, he thought, let it be by their kind.
Shadow had been right. In the stillness he grew calm, and perspective returned. Lamentation would not restore the shattered eastland, expressions of horror and shock would not turn the Teeth into pious tillers of the soil. The Soul had decreed chaos: so be it. This is the road we must travel, and who dares ask why? Once the world had been whole and now it is fragmented, and that is the way things are because that is the way things were meant to be. He became less tense. Anguish dropped from him. He was Leaf again.
Toward dawn the visible world lost its sharp starlit edge; a soft fog settled over the wagon, and rain fell for a time, a light, pure rain, barely audible, altogether different in character from yesterday’s vicious storm. In the strange light just preceding sunrise the world took on a delicate pearly mistiness; and out of that mist an apparition materialized. Leaf saw a figure come drifting through the closed gate—through it—a ghostly, incorporeal figure. He thought it might be the Invisible who had been lurking close by the wagon since Theptis, but no, this was a woman, old and frail, an attenuated woman, smaller even than Shadow, more slender. Leaf knew who she must be: the mixed-blood woman. The prophetess, the seer, she who had stirred up these Tree Companions to block the highway. Her skin had the White Crystal waxiness of texture and the White Crystal nodes of dark, coarse hair; the form of her body was essentially that of a Tree Companion, thin and long-armed; and from her Invisible forebears, it seemed, she had inherited that perplexing intangibility, that look of existing always on the borderland between hallucination and reality, between mist and flesh. Mixed-bloods were uncommon; Leaf had rarely seen one, and never had encountered one who combined in herself so many different stocks. It was said that people of mixed blood had strange gifts. Surely this one did. How had she bypassed the wall? Not even Invisibles could travel through solid wood. Perhaps this was just a dream, then, or possibly she had some way of projecting an image of herself into his mind from a point within the Tree Companion village. He did not understand.
Needle in a Timestack Page 18