It is a great beast, greater than anything I have ever seen. And it guards the back trail for those who sent it. We must go on. The bear's message was unequivocal.
Hiero looked at Brother Aldo, who shrugged. For the first time since they had met, the priest thought the old fellow looked tired. Again he wondered how old Aldo was.
"Let's get the men moving, Gimp," Hiero said. "Tell them a big animal's behind us, that's all."
"They know that all right, Master. They can hear that much as good as you!" He turned away and barked an order.
As they marched on, the great clumps of green and brown moss, some of it lovely, others simply grotesque, increased in number. The area to the right and left of the path became obscured, both by the mosses and huge ferns but also by a greenish haze, not a fog, Hiero thought, but more as if the light off the trail had some different properties, which ordinary eyes could not penetrate. He tried probing with his mind, at random intervals, both forward on their route and back, as well as to both sides, but gained no knowledge. He could not even tap the mind of whatever horrific beast waited behind them. Those who controlled it also shielded its thoughts. A great feat, he thought glumly. His own. hard-won powers seemed those of a child by comparison.
You are needed, suddenly came a thought from Gorm.
Who���me? Hiero was startled.
Yes. I don't know why. Those who speak to me are not clear, perhaps do not wish to be. But you, and no one else in the party, have a task to do. Or else we all are trapped.
Hiero kept marching, crossbow slung loosely over one arm, his spear over his shoulder. Only his helmet was missing, too heavy for long marches for him to be instantly battle-worthy. Needed for a task? This grew stranger and stranger. He was wanted, personally, and if he failed, why, the whole party perished! He said a few soldiery words into his mustache, then crossed himself and automatically asked God's pardon for blasphemy. Neither attitude struck him as contradictory. On they went, accompanied only by rippling bird song.
Just as the light faded, they emerged into a large, moss-floored clearing. The men suddenly shouted as they saw what stood there, but Hiero, Gimp and the one-eyed mate beat them back, cursing and shoving until some semblance of discipline was restored. Still, it was hard to blame them, as Gimp said.
In the center of the clearing were three long, wooden tables. There were not seats, but none were needed. The tables were laden with steaming earthenware platters, all carefully covered against the evening damp, and on them too, at regular intervals, great clay flagons reared up, stoppered in a suggestive manner.
After almost a week of constant danger and a diet of hardtack and tough, wild game, it was an incredibly seductive display.
"Wait a minute!" Gimp screamed, waving about the heavy staff he had been carrying. "Suppose it's been dosed, you sorry catamite bastards! D'you all want to choke on poisoned grub, you miserable, mother-delighters?"
Eventually, with even Brother Aldo and Luchare, of both of whom the men were in great awe, helping, things quieted down. When they did, and he got a chance to look more closely at the food, Hiero received another message, again from Gorm.
The food is safe. We can all eat. I tell you, Hiero, the Old One says you are needed! From the bear's mind came a picture of the strange female face! So this was the Old One of whoever held them, the leader of the unknown forest creatures whom they could not even sense!
With Hiero's assurance passed on, all fell to, the majority cautiously at first, but after Hiero had tasted each dish, with more confidence. Indeed, the food was delicious, mostly strange, cooked vegetables and tubers, but also piles of some sweet bread, all very subtly flavored. There was no meat. And the clay flagons contained an odd, herb-flavored wine which managed to grow upon the palate as one drank.
"There's no poison," he told Aldo. "I'm trained to detect it. There's nothing to harm anyone, I'm sure of that. We're being helped, that's all, but why?" He had told the old man of Gorm's message, but it meant nothing to him or to Luchare either, except that she refused to move more than a foot from his side, determined that he was not going anywhere to see anyone without her.
At length, satiated, the seamen stretched out on the soft grass, groaning. Surprisingly, no one was drunk, for the strange wine seemed only to exhilarate. As night fell, under the canopy of the trees, the men were soon asleep, save for the two walking a watch and Hiero and Luchare, who shared the first guard, The bear and Brother Aldo also slept.
It was an utterly still night. No birds called any longer, no animals moved in the undergrowth. Overhead, no life could be detected. The whole forest seemed to lie under some hushed spell. Even the great, rounded piles of moss suddenly seemed tense and expectant to Hiero, as if listening in the dark. One small fire was all that could be got to light, and it sputtered dismally as the far mists of night closed in.
Hiero first felt his legs growing weak, with considerable surprise. But there was no poison! his mind cried out, even as he slumped into the mossy ground. His fading sight showed him Luchare lying next to him and, beyond her, the two sailors, also fallen. And then into his mind came only a green haze, which swirled in clouds and wreaths across his vision. He felt that some secret lay behind it, but what it was remained unreachable.
Then the mists cleared. He opened his eyes and looked into those of Gorm's "Old One," the strange creature who had watched, guided, and finally trapped them all.
He lay in a room, long, narrow, and high-ceilinged, which moved under him somehow. He swung his legs over the edge of the bed, for such it was, and looked about him in amazement. In a backless chair before him, staring calmly at him, sat the woman, for such she was, whom he had seen first in his own mind and second in that of the bear. She was nude, her small, firm breasts erect and provocative. Other than a necklace and a slim belt, both of which looked like fine metal mesh, she wore no ornaments. Her greenish-white body was utterly hairless, he noted, and the strange covering on her head seemed a cross between oval, green feathers and tiny brown leaves. Yet it was unmistakably part of her, a natural growth, not a cap.
She was indeed very beautiful, yet even as the manhood in him rose to the sexual challenge of her shape, he was also driven off, repelled by her alienness. For she was not really human at all, and the lovely outward appearance of her body seemed a mask for something utterly different. To his still-dazed mind came an unbidden thought. Why, it's as if a tree or a flower had tried to be a rabbit or a cat!
Now he could see that the room was lit by candles, fat candles, which burned in wall sconces and cast a strange perfume as they burned. Save for the chair, a small table on which stood some wooden goblets and a jug, and the carved wooden bed on which he now sat, the room was empty. And it swayed! Even as he realized suddenly where he must be and the motion of the wooden floor shook him, a thought came into his mind and he knew that his captress was speaking to him.
We (are) in the trees, high, high above, as you (guessed?), /(can) tell (what) you think but not speak/tell/talk back (?) except by an (effort). We do not speak so/thus/in a manner. Her thought was painfully slow, and looking into the green, slanted eyes, Hiero realized that it was actually physically painful to use her mind this way. She was forcing herself to do it, despite the hurt it caused her.
How do you speak, then? Who are you? his mind asked. He was feeling clear of head and he noticed that he still had his sword-knife and dagger. His strange captors had not restrained him in any way, apparently, and he was becoming intrigued as he lost any fear.
She trilled at him. A string of golden syllables came from her lips, as lovely as the rippling of a woodland waterfall, tinkling over polished stones. "Vilah-ree" was as close as he could come in speech, and he said it softly. "Vilah-ree." Now he knew one source of the continual bird music they had heard.
At his attempt, she shook her head and sang again. Her teeth were dainty and small. Again he tried to imitate her voice and then gave it up. Vilah-ree, he thought, I can't say your name
properly, I fear, not in your language. You'll have to accept my mind speech instead or let Vilah-ree do.
Then, even as they gazed at one another, the thought of Luchare and his companions came to him. What was he doing, talking like an idiot, while his love and his friends were drugged and helpless, God knew how far away! Were they even alive?
The calm expression vanished from Vilah-ree's face as well, and her full-lipped mouth opened in apparent distress. A stream of golden, chiming notes poured forth as she tried to tell him something. Realizing that it was futile, she fell silent, and he felt her thoughts on the edge of his mind again.
No (you are) wrong! We (have) hurt none of the other/untranslatable/(earth-plodders?). Look into/at my mind!
As she became more practiced, the flow of message and pictorial communication between them became easier, just as it once had between himself and the bear, though indeed he always felt the bear to be the less alien of the two. Next she showed him the camp where he had fallen into a drugged dream, but now it was guarded by a high fence of some thorny bushes. And around it at intervals stood silent, white figures, so like Vilah-ree as to make it plain they were her people. All, he noted absently, were female, and he thought, God help them if the crew ever wakes up!! Luchare, Brother Aldo, and the bear lay apart, on a great bed of leaves, and even the bull morse slumbered in an angle of the thorn stockade, looking as if he had been newly slain, save for the rise and fall of his great sides.
We need you, my people and I, Vilah-ree thought, when he had satisfied himself that all of his party were well and unharmed. Her golden-pupiled, fathomless, green eyes were close to his as she drew her chair nearer. A faint, lovely scent���-of flowers? bark? honey?���came to him, and her strangeness seemed to ebb, leaving her both vulnerable and desirable.
What do you want? His counterwrought deliberately was harsh, as he strove to break through the glamour, the witchery, of her near presence.
She considered him a moment, then rose gracefully to her feet, pale, rounded hips swaying as she walked to the end of the room.
Come���I will show you. She drew aside a long wooden shutter on a track, and sunlight poured into the room. She beckoned with one white arm, and he rose and joined her, striving to mask his wonder as he looked out.
They were in the top of one of what must have been the tallest trees in the great forest. Below them for miles stretched a green canopy of leaves and branches, some of the latter themselves as immense as normal trees. The room in which they stood was partly hollowed out, partly built into one such, in a way Hiero did not quite fathom, but which seemed to be a graft onto the living tree itself, one which Vilah-ree made plain did not injure it. But he had not been brought just to see the beauty of the daylight on the roof of the forest. She pointed, and he looked to the east and saw her enemy.
Far away, fringing the eastern horizon, lay a great, barren expanse of empty sand and rock, its pinnacles and jagged buttes glinting in the morning sun. But closer, between the desert and the forest, part of neither and repelling both, lay something else.
A vast, ugly splotch of color, composed of mauves, dull oranges, oily browns, and sickly yellows, it seemed to have eaten into the green edge of the tree world like a hideous, running sore. Without thinking, Hiero reached into his belt pouch and brought out his far-looker. With the eyepiece adjusted, the strange area was brought up close, and involuntarily he shuddered. It was indeed an evil landscape.
Even under the sun, the giant puffballs and huge, clustering toadstools looked diseased. Other strange fungi, both hanging and dripping foul ichor, covered all the other things in sight. He could see the shrouded shapes of many vast trees, every inch covered with loathsome growth, the trees obviously dead, their tortured skeletons serving as a prop for the bloated life which covered them. All of the colors and shapes were painful to look at, none appearing natural or the work of things that grew by nature's design. Even as he watched, a bloated bag of some monster puff-ball sort exploded, and the view was momentarily darkened by the billions of tiny spores scattered for hundreds of yards.
Slowly he lowered the spyglass from his eye, then turned to his silent companion.
What can I do about this? The plant world wars against itself? This looks truly evil, but why not use fire, unless you fear it, of course? Surely this plague of fungi is not invulnerable.
Look again, came her thought. See if you can see anything moving.
He did her bidding, sweeping the distant area until at length he caught sign of a movement. Adjusting the focus, he watched carefully until he had located it again, then drew in his breath in a gasp.
Over a bare patch of ground between the forest and the blight, there flowed a thing, a monster made of living slime. It had no apparent head or limbs, but innumerable, waving organs rose, long and slender, from its soft back. Its gross body seemed composed of dark, rotted velvet, and the slender rods were tipped with something soft that glowed with a putrid orange fire. Yet it was not without purpose. Its intent, quick movements bespoke intelligence and organized will. Now, as Hiero watched, it suddenly paused, and all its long pseudopods or tendrils quivered. Then the whole mass wheeled and slid over the ground in a new direction, toward a clump of bushes at the edge of the still, living forest. From these bushes bounded a creature like a huge, short-eared rabbit, running for its life. It had delayed too long, however. One of the balls of reddish foulness on the end of a slender feeler touched it fleetingly. It gave a convulsive spring and fell dead, as if struck by lightning. The slime creature flowed on until it covered the body, no small one, as Hiero could judge. In only a few seconds it moved on again. Where the animal's body had been was nothing, not even grass, only a dampness festering on the bare earth under the rays of the sun.
Again the Metz lowered the far-looker. Is there more? his mind asked.
Much more, came the answer. That thing, and (it is) one of many, is only one weapon of the House. Now into Hiero's mind there came a picture of a strange object, something perhaps like a peculiar building made of brown, still wet, soft mud. It had no truly straight lines, yet somehow it seemed to maintain a basic four-sided structure, which yet shifted from one detail to the next, though only in small ways. A vaguely rectangular wasp's nest, made of soft muck and big enough for many men to live in. But it was alive! Or at least it apparently moved and shifted, and ripples seemed to run across its surface.
If the slime-thing he had just seen was foul, at least it seemed to answer to the basic laws of life. But this object or creature was repellent beyond belief, repellent because it was utterly unnatural and ab-human in a way like nothing Hiero had ever seen before.
Then, and only then���he remembered the last cast of the symbols on the north shore of the Inland Sea. Here was the House! He looked at its image in Vilah-ree's mind again and shuddered.
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11 - The House and the Trees
I want my woman and I want the old man with the beard and I want the bear! And I want them now! I need them!
The curious disagreement and discussion had gone on for over an hour. Hiero had learned much about his task, but he had not been able to make his own will in the matter felt. Vilah-ree could not, or perhaps would not, see that he wanted at the very least to consult with his partners. To her, he alone was all that was needed. Suppressing as egotistic a thought that her ideas about him had more behind them than a desire to see him defeat the House, he returned to his patient argument.
He had learned that the House���or whatever motivated it; Vilah-ree was not clear on this point���stayed hidden in the center of the fungus blight or infection. It had appeared, seemingly from out of the desert beyond, some time ago���again, how much was not clear���and at once had attacked the forest edge. Nothing seemed to harm it or its attendant fungi very much except fire, and it, or they, attacked and ate everything remotely organic. The spores raced up and rotted healthy, giant trees, the moving slime molds devoured all animal and
small plant life, the toadstools grew from decaying plant matter overnight, and the great puffballs englobed smaller plants and somehow ingested them. Any organized attempt to interfere was met by bolts of mental? psychic? at any rate, invisible, force emanating from the House itself. Vilah-ree and her people were not warlike in any case and they were helpless before this foul onslaught. They had no physical weapons beyond small bows and spears; and, while they could blank out their minds to Hiero, the House somehow could always detect them and hold, them paralyzed until a giant slime mold was summoned to feed! And they needed the forest. Without the trees, they would die, Vilah-ree made that plain.
What about that very big animal guarding our trail, which you put there? Why not use that? he asked.
He had noticed that Vilah-ree never smiled, but now he detected something like humor in her mind, or at least a thinly veiled amusement. He was given a picture of one of her white-skinned women swinging a strange, flat, wooden device on a long cord, swinging it in great circles around and about her head. He had not seen one for many years, not since his childhood, but he recognized the bull-roarer he had once used to frighten his first girls. Its whirring roar sounded like a hideous monster indeed!
Your friend, whom you call the bear, had a picture of a terrible creature put into his mind. If such a creature truly lived, we would be helpless before it ourselves. Thus he convinced you in turn. He laughed, only half-bitterly. They had been ensnared by a bluff and a harmless sleep drug!
One other thing had Hiero learned, or rather, deduced. From his memory of the maps they carried, it appeared that the blight of the House covered much the very same area he wished to search! Here a pre-Death city supposedly lay hidden under the edge of the desert. This made him slightly more philosophic about his capture by the tree women of Vilah-ree. It looked as if a struggle, or at least a penetration of the horror caused by the fungus attack, would have been necessary in any case.
Hiero Desteen: 01 - Hiero's Journey Page 30
