Catch a falling star, p.15
Catch a Falling Star, page 15
Across their path from horizon to horizon marched a forest of dark green trees, their trunks interlaced with creepers and underbush into one vast dismaying barrier.
At first they were prepared to enter it anyway and try to strike directly across. A few hundred paces from the edge, however, they realised that the treetops completely hid them from sight of the sun, let alone the stars by which Creohan nightly had to plot their next day’s course. Withdrawing, they made their way to the top of the highest hill in the vicinity, to see whether there was any sign of a break in that great green wall. There was none. So straight that it looked artificial, though the likelier explanation was that it followed the line of some geological discontinuity—perhaps the boundary of an area rich in a necessary trace-element—the edge of the forest cut them off from their destination.
The sun was past the zenith already. It seemed best to remain where they were until the morning. While the light endured they conducted short forays into the forest and satisfied themselves that it was indeed impassable, so tomorrow they must turn north or south, whichever they agreed upon. There was much argument over that, Hoo and Creohan maintaining that north was better, for the colder climate might inhibit the forests luxuriance, whereas the southerly warmth would encourage it, Paro-mni and Kiong-la stressing the risk of being overtaken by winter if they had to make too long a detour and opting for the snow-free south. Chalyth offered no opinion of her own, but listened carefully to both points of view and admitted that both were impressive.
At last they wearied of the fruitless discussion and lay down to sleep, close around their fire for the sake of its barely perceptible warmth. Their tents and other belongings were proofed against the risk of burning, so there could be no danger from flying sparks. And for a long while they had traversed country devoid of menace, where even beasts larger than men took fright and hid when strangers appeared.
Despite knowing all this, Creohan found himself denied sleep by an irrational unease. In order not to disturb his companions by the noise of tossing and turning, he forced himself to lie still, but that aggravated his problem. At last, hoping to calm his mind by looking at the night-time forest—the presumable source of his unaccountable alarm—and convincing himself it was quiet, he drew on his clothes and stole out of the tent.
He put a few more dry branches, gathered from the edge of the forest, on the fire, and they crackled up as he walked away from the flame-light, shielding his eyes to enhance his vision. The sky was wholly cloudless, and the terrible star burned blue-bright among its harmless fellows.
Over and over his mind revolved the problem which had so concerned them earlier: northward tomorrow, or southward? He struck a bargain with himself, realising it was superstition but lacking any alternative. In accordance with—
“Creohan!” A soft whisper startled him. “Is something wrong?”
“No worse than sleeplessness,” he replied equally softly. “Go back to bed. I’ll come in a little while—No, stay a moment. Tell me if you think it’s foolish for me to divine the proper route for tomorrow by watching for a meteor, and falling in with Kiong-la and Paro-mni if its trail points to the south.”
Chalyth chuckled. “I can think of worse solutions to release one from an impasse! What made you hit on this?”
“Your own words, a small eternity ago, about Earth being on our side because our cause is good.”
“I still hold that view,” Chalyth murmured. “Despite that obscene mass of trees blocking our route. Well, then, I’ll watch with you. We’ll stand back to back, and on whichever side a meteor first appears we’ll fix our decision.”
Smiling at her readiness to fall in with his silly notion, Creohan embraced her lightly and turned into the position she had proposed. Her head tilted back to rest on the base of his nape.
“Shall we have long to wait?” she queried. “It’s not too warm away from the fire.”
“A short while only,” he assured her. “Near space is dense with the fragments left by the destruction of the moon, as I remember telling you the night of our first meeting.”
“How far away that beach seems now!” she sighed. “And how much closer are we to—? Ah, there’s one!”
In the same instant Creohan had exclaimed, “There!”
And fell silent, wondering. Overhead, almost directly at their zenith, not one but a whole cluster of meteors had flashed into sight, five, ten, fifty, in an uncountable stream, and every last one of them pointed neither north, nor south, but due west, directly across the looming dark mystery of the forest.
XXIII
A hissing noise. Creohan awoke with a start from the shallow slumber into which he had finally managed to escape through sheer exhaustion, not because that curious and absurd meteor-omen had eased his mind.
The noise continued. A whiff of smoke blew to his nostrils, and on the instant he placed the identity of the sound: a fire being put out with water. Yet there was no rain—the drum-tight tent would have resonated to its beating.
Tent?
With a stunning shock he realised that there was no tent between him and the sky. It had whisked aside, flip, like a conjurer’s trick. Silent dark shapes had invaded their campsite, the dim starglow revealing little more than that they were hunched, gangling, hairy—grotesque parodies of men, with arms so long they needed barely to lean forward to set the backs of their knuckles on the ground. That much he garnered from the last dying flicker of the fire, into which three of the creatures were urinating to extinguish it.
He yelled at the top of his voice and tried to jump up. Instantly a tangle of netting fell over his head, dropped to his waist, was yanked so hard that he rolled off his bed and sprawled painfully on the ground. Before he could recover, the same treatment had been accorded to all his companions, and within the space of a few heartbeats they were trussed helplessly.
Dazed, the travellers stared at the—beasts? No, one had to say men, Creohan told himself—the men, then, who had taken them captive. Their humanity was attested by their skills; of all the creatures that a hundred thousand years had seen on the land surface of this planet, only men had the ability to fashion creepers into nets, wore clothing, carried weapons and took prisoners. Not that either the clothing or the weapons appeared elaborate. As he gradually brought the tumult in his mind under control, he was able to discern that what they wore was limited to corslets and leggings of plaited leaves, giving the impression of scales, and they bore only spears. But those had cruelly barbed heads, and the presentation of one close to his throat was enough to convince him of the futility of resistance.
“Creohan!” Chalyth called, her voice muffled by the chance which had wrapped a tress of her thick hair over her face when the net fell over her head. “Creohan, I can’t see! What’s happened?”
“There are—twelve or fifteen people,” Creohan mumbled, eyes almost crossing as he strove to watch the menacing spear-tip. “Paro-mni, you know some of the languages of this region, don’t you? Try talking to them!”
Paro-mni obeyed, his voice shaking with ill-mastered terror, but their captors took absolutely no notice whatever. While one guarded each of the travellers with his spear and another held the end of the encumbering nets, the three who remained unassigned—including the tallest, whom Creohan assumed to be a leader—examined the camp-site with every appearance of curiosity, turning over the tents whose guy-ropes they had slashed, lifting and snuffling at the portable beds, rummaging through their various sacks and satchels. But there was virtually no sound except for Paro-mni’s desperate utterance of fragmentary greetings in a dozen languages.
“You might as well stop,” Kiong-la said in a weary voice. “I don’t think they can hear you. Look-they don’t seem to have any ears, do they?”
Amazed, Creohan realised that she was right. At first the shaggy growth of hair on their heads had disguised the fact from him, but as he became calmer and better able to study them he picked out more details, and there certainly was a complete absence of ears on those slope-browed heads. As if to compensate, the eyes were huge, showing a full circle of white around dark centres which could well have been all pupil by the degree to which the deepest shadow failed to hamper the precision of their movements.
Paro-mni broke off. He said, “What in the world have we stumbled across now?”
“Enough cultures in the past have tampered with human heredity,” Creohan muttered. “Perhaps these are descendants of a halfway successful experiment.”
“But where can they have sprung from?” Chalyth cried.
It was Hoo that answered. “I know a bit about evolutionary adaptation. It sort of gets bred into you in my family… Out of that damnable forest is my guess. Arms like that would be kind of useful for getting around in the tops of trees.”
“Well, it looks as though we’re about to find out,” Kiong-la said with ghastly gallows-humour.
Finished with his inspection, the one whom Creohan mentally identified as the leader made a quick gesture that concluded with a jab of his forefinger towards the forest, as Hoo had predicted, and at once the travellers were swept up in their nets, their feet cunningly tangled in the meshes. Spears were thrust through to form carrying-poles, and the band of night-marauders set off down the hill at an easy lope, the bearers frequently using their free arms as a kind of third leg over the rougher bits.
“It looks as though your omen has come true, Creohan!” Chalyth called.
“What omen?” Hoo snapped.
“I was trying to resolve the disagreement about which direction to take around the forest by waiting for a meteor to point its trail north or south,” Creohan explained. “And not one but dozens of the things appeared, all pointing straight at the forest.”
“Ridiculous!” Paro-mni said in a strange high voice. “The rankest superstition!”
“Superstition or not,” Kiong-la countered, “the forest is where were bound for.”
Incontestably the forest was home to these people. The moment the black-dark trees closed in around them they seemed to relax, forgetting the caution that had made them so silent while they were on open ground. Still they did not actually speak, but they cheerfully brushed aside branches with whip-like snapping sounds, made leaves rustle and disturbed other forest-dwellers from their sleep. There were chattering beast-calls, a high shrill yammer, a basso-pro-fundo groan.
So absolutely assured were the bearers now they were back where they belonged that Creohan did not realise when they left ground-level; he only worked out afterwards that he had been carried up a kind of sloping pathway, its gradient too gentle to slow the party down, along branch after branch and from tree to tree. At the time all he knew was that he was abruptly hoisted vertically into nowhere, swung to one side, and unceremoniously dumped along with his companions on to a level platform about twelve paces square, and the stars were once more overhead. Below tree-top height the forest was as murky as an underground tunnel.
He rolled over and sat up just in time to see the last bearer make a fantastic leap across a pit of utter blackness to the crown of a distant tree, seize a high bough, and drop with its yielding to another one out of sight.
They were alone, free to sort their limbs out from the nets and take stock of their situation. He was first to release himself and went to assist Chalyth, who assured him she was unhurt bar some abrasions which the nets had inflicted on her tender skin.
Paro-mni had suffered a sprained wrist, but otherwise they were all unscathed. Cautiously, not knowing what they might be standing on, they rose to their feet.
“What is this—this platform thin g?” Kiong-la demanded. “It’s springy, and it doesn’t feel very safe.”
Creohan bent and explored it with his fingers. “It’s a mat of interlaced branches,” he reported. “It seems to hold our weight well enough, but perhaps we should stay in the middle.”
“Right,” Chalyth muttered. “Just looking towards the edge makes my skin crawl. Looking down—ugh!”
“Yes, these trees must be all of a hundred feet tall,” Creohan said. “And I guess we can rely on there not being any branches strong enough to bear us within reach—did you see the way those people jumped off here?”
“What was that?”
The cry came from Kiong-la. Something had arced out of the darkness and landed with a thud at her feet. She flinched back. Another followed, another, and five in all. Hoo gave an audible sniff.
“I think that’s food!” he exclaimed. He picked up one of the objects and examined it cautiously. “Yes, a package of some sort of greasy food, wrapped up in folded leaves!”
“That—uh …” Paro-mni was obviously terrified, but making valiant efforts to control himself. “That means they don’t want to harm us, doesn’t it?”
“Needn’t,” Hoo shrugged. “They might just be fattening us up for later eating.”
There was a chorused cry of objection, but that was by reflex; the possibility he had voiced was only too likely on the present evidence, for they found on unwrapping the packages of food that they contained small animal-limbs coated with a battery paste and flavoured with a very strong bitter herb. Hoo tasted his, pronounced it strange but good, and ate with a will, but none of the others could muster any appetite.
Shortly still another object hurtled between them, to bounce once on the springv platform of branches, this time from a different direction. The new delivery was the shell of a nut as big as a man’s head, holed at the top and re-sealed with a wooden plug gnawed into shape—they could detect the toothmarks. It contained sweet water, and they drank with more enthusiasm than they could summon for the food.
Creohan ventured to the lip of the platform, crawling on his belly, and looked down. There was a black blank chasm below, indefinably deep. He sighed and dismissed the idea of climbing down, even if their captors relaxed their present vigilance—the arrival of the food and water clearly argued that they were being watched from the still higher trees that surrounded them.
Perhaps, though, these people were exclusively nocturnal; he guessed that from their enormous eyes and their ability to manage without any light but what the stars offered. Waiting until dawn before making any decisions seemed to be essential.
The others agreed with him, and they sat down in a ring, facing outwards, at the centre of the platform. The night air was still cold, and they shivered. Bit by bit they fell silent, even though they had now satisfied themselves that the earless men were actually deaf. There seemed nothing to say which would not add to their shared feeling of misery.
Perhaps an hour passed. The most easterly of the stars paled and vanished as the approaching sun started to colour the sky. Then there was a great rustling and creaking among the nearby trees, as though a gale was stirring them, but there was little wind, and after a moment Hoo hit on the proper explanation.
“Why, the forest’s alive with them!”
Straining their eyes, the travellers made out that he was correct. Bowing the topmost branches dangerously, there were a hundred or more of the tree-people, making weird unison gestures with their free arms. As tie sky brightened it could be seen that they were screwing up their eyes so that only a slit of pupil showed between the lids. Why should they be out of the protection of the branches’ green shadow when they obviously found daylight intolerable?
A moment later, the reason became clear. Hanging on a huge frame of creeper-ropes, a monstrous man-shaped doll of branches stained with red, yellow and blue eyes was hoisted up to the level of the platform. In the head of this object glinted horrible tusks and a tongue of polished new leaves, whose symbolism was unmistakable even before a spear whistled through the air past its shoulder and drove deep into the platform the travellers stood upon.
“You were half right, Hoo,” Creohan said, trying not to let his own words affect him. “They didn’t bring us here to eat us. They brought us to sacrifice to that-that god, I suppose it must be.”
“What’s a god?” Hoo demanded. “Something like what that man of the Umftiti-?”
“Look!” Chalyth burst out. “What in the world is that?”
They dragged their eyes from the horrible idol and whirled to follow her shaking arm, outstretched towards the sky. Far off across the black-green sea of the forest, which extended to the skyline on every side, a vast, obscenely swollen thing was drifting out of darkness and towards the dawn, its belly gaudy with stripes of green and white, and things like folded claws beneath.
XXIV
Their attention riveted on the five captives and their idol, and being unable to hear the oncoming monster, or indeed any other sound, the tree-people’s first inkling of the ! sky-borne menace was belated. Another flying spear preceded it, but either the thrower was poorly skilled or he was too excited to aim straight, for this one also struck harmlessly. It was too close for comfort, though, Hoo decided, and for want of a more sensible course of action in face of the now apparently double threat they faced, he urged them to drop down and make themselves a more difficult target. All except Creohan complied.
But he, after standing frozen for a moment, did the precise reverse, leaping up and down and waving frantically-then abruptly changing his mind and bending to scrabble loose one of the leafy branches composing the platform, which he proceeded to employ as a kind of signalling flag, wagging it rapidly back and forth.
“Creohan! It’ll see you!” Chalyth shouted. “Haven’t we got enough trouble here?”
“I want them to see me!” Creohan shouted back. “Don’t you know what that is? It’s man-made! It’s an airship! It’s—Aiiiiee!”
The branch flew from his outstretched arm and he doubled over, moaning. The latest of the spears to be hurled towards the platform had found its target, and the barbs were sunk deep in his biceps. Around them globules of blood were gathering like berries miraculously ripening.
