"Off the horse and away from my house, ye dammid interloper!" she cried out.
I dismounted, though I found no threat in her silly spear. I was hoping to convince her to let me rest. My legs and back ached from riding.
"Sweet lady," I said in my most unthreatening, gentle voice, "you have nothing to fear from me."
She kept the spear pointed at my chest. "Half the people in these High Hills have been robbed of late, and of a sudden all the troopers have took their bowen off north or south chasing the king's son. How kin I ken ye've no weapon and plan to steal?"
I dropped away my cloak and spread my arms wide. By now the scar on my neck would be nothing but a white line, which would disappear by noon. As I spread my arms my breasts rose under my tunic. Her eyes widened.
"I have all I need," I said, "except a bed to rest on and proper clothes. Will you help me?"
She moved the point of the spear and shuffled closer. Suddenly her hand darted out and squeezed my breast. I cried out in surprise and pain.
She laughed. "Why come ye to the house of honest folk all dissembling undressed? Come in, lady, I've a pallet for ye, if ye like."
I liked. But even though it had fooled this woman and earned me a bed, I still found myself darkly ashamed of my transformation. I was a wolf, being let into the house because they took me for a friendly dog.
The house was larger inside than it looked from outside. Then I realized it was built right into a cave. I touched the rock wall.
"Ya, lady, cave keeps it right cool all summer, stops the wind good enow in the winter."
"I imagine," I agreed, deliberately letting my voice get even softer and higher. "Why are they chasing the king's son?"
"Ach, child, the king's son's done sommat terrible bad, I guess. Word comes like the wind this morrow early, must be taking all the troopery of this country here."
I was astonished that Father would let Dinte pursue me so long, and openly enough to say it was the king's son they were chasing. "Don't they fear the king's son might come this way?"
She darted me a quick glance. I thought for a moment she guessed who I was, but then she said, "I thinked for a moment here you were having your little fun. Don't ye know not two mile of here starts the forest of Ku Kuei?"
That close. I pretended ignorance. "And what does that mean?"
She shook her head. "They tells it that no man or woman goes into that forest and comes out again alive."
"And I suppose just as few come out dead."
"They don't come out at all, lady. Have a splash of soup, smells like sheep dung, but it's true mutton, killed a ewe a week gone and this be simmering ever yet."
It was good and strong. It did, however, smell like sheep dung. After a few swallows I felt ready enough for sleep and slid from the table, went to the cot she pointed out in the comer.
I woke in darkness. A dim fire crackled in a hearth, and I saw the woman's shape moving back and forth in the room. She was humming a low tune with a melody as monotonous and beautiful as the sea.
"Has it words?" I asked. She didn't hear me, and I fell back asleep. When I woke again there wag a candle in my face, and the old woman was gazing intently at me. I opened my eyes wide, and she moved back, a little embarrassed. The cold night air made me, realize my tunic was open, my breasts bare, and I covered myself.
"Sorry, wee lady," the woman said, "But a soldier came, he did, looking for a young man of sixteen years named Lanik. I told him none such had been this way, and that only here was me and my daughter. And because your hair is so close-cropped, lady, I had to show him proof ye were a girl, didn't I? So I let your tunic to fall open."
I nodded slowly.
"I thought ye might not want to be known by the soldier, lady. And another bit of news. I had to turn your horses loose."
I sat up quickly. "My horses? Where are they?"
"Soldier found them down the road, a long way, all empty. I hid your things under my own bed."
"Why, woman? How can I travel now?" I felt betrayed, though even then I suspected the woman had saved my life.
"Have ye no feet? And I think ye'll not be wanting to go far now where horses can go."
"And, where do you think I'm going?"
She smiled. "Ach, ye've a lovely face, lady. Pretty enough to be a boy or girl, and young, and fair, like a king's child. Happy the woman to have you for a daughter, or the man to have you for a son."
I said nothing then.
"I think," she said, "that there be no place for you now but the forest of Ku Kuei."
I laughed. "So I can go in and never come out?"
"That," she said with a smile, "be what we tell outlanders and lowlanders. But we be knowing right enow that a man can go in a good few leagues and gather roots and berries and other fruit and come out safe. Though odd things do happen there, and a wise man skirts the edge."
I was wide awake now. "How did you know about me?"
"Ye've got royalty in every move ye make, every word ye say, boy. Or girl. Which be ye? I care little. I only know I have little love for the godlike men of the plain who think they rule all Muellerfolk. If ye be running from the king, ye have my blessing and my arm of help."
I had never suspected that any citizens of Mueller would feel that way about my father. Now it was helpful, though I wondered how I'd feel about her attitude if I were still heir.
"I've packed ye a bundle easy enough to heft," she said. "And fooded and watered it, hoping ye like cold mutton."
I liked it better than starving.
"Don't eat the white berries on oaky-looking bushes in the forest, they'll drop ye dead in a minute. And the fruit with wrinkly bulges, don't even touch that, and be careful not to step on a smoky-yellow fungus, or it'll plague you for years."
"I still don't even know if I'm going into the forest.
"And where else, then, if not there?"
I got up and walked to the door. Dissent was high and dim, with clouds across her face. Freedom hadn't risen yet. "How soon must I leave?"
"As soon as Freedom come," she said. "Then I lead you afoot to the edge of the forest, and there ye stay until just before sunrise. Then off and in. Head east but about a third to the south till ye touch a lake. Then they say the true road to safety is due south, into Jones. Follow no paths. Follow no man shape or woman shape ye see. And pay no heed to day and night."
She brought out woman's clothing from a trunk and held it up to me. It was shabby enough, and old, but modest and virginal.
"My own," she said, "though I misdoubt I ever did fit it on my old corpse, what's swoll up with fat these last year and ten." She laughed, and put it in my pack.
Freedom rose, and she led me out the door and along a path leading due east from her house, and not much traveled by. She chattered as we went.
"What be the need of troopery at all, ask I? They flash a bit of hard metal, dip it in another's blood, and then what? Is the world all changed? Do men now fly Offworld, are we of Treason now freed by all the bloodshed? I think we be like dogs that fight and kill over a bone, and what has the winner got? Just a bone. And no hope of any more after that. Just the one bone."
Then an arrow swicked out of the darkness and into her throat and she dropped dead in front of me.
Two soldiers stepped into the moonlight, arrows ready. I ducked just as one let fly. He missed. The second hit me in the shoulder.
But by then my pack was to the ground, and I buried my dagger in the first man's heart, then kicked the other to the ground. There were ways of fighting that they never taught the troops.
When they were both still I cut off their heads so there was no hope of their regenerating and telling what they knew. I took the better of their two bows and all the glass-tipped arrows, then went back to where the woman lay. I pulled the arrow from her throat, but saw that she wasn't healing at all. One of the oldest branches of the family, then, that was too poor to stay in the chain of genetic advancement that had resulted in masterworks
of self-preservation like the royal family, like the royal troops.
And genetic monsters like the people in the pens.
Like me.
I gave her grief, letting the blood drip from my hand onto her face. Then I put the arrow that had struck my shoulder into her hand, to give her power in the next world, though I doubted privately that there was such a thing.
The packstraps chafed my wounded shoulder, and the pain was bad, but I had been trained to endure pain, and I knew that soon enough it would heal, like the wound in my hand. I walked eastward, following the trail, and soon came into the shadow of the black trees of Ku Kuei.
The forest was as sudden as a storm, from the bright light of Freedom into utter darkness. The trees looked eternal, right from the edge, as if five hundred years ago (or five thousand, the trees are that large) some great gardener had planted an orchard just so, with the edges neat and crisp along the property line.
The forest had already been like tins, though, three thousand years ago when the ships of the Republic (the lying name for the foul dictatorship of the servile classes, said the histories) took the great rebels and their families and dumped them on the useless planet called Treason, where they would be exiled until they had ships enough to come out. Ships, they said, a laugh, with silver the strongest workable metal on the planet.
Metal we could only buy, and then by selling something that they wanted. For centuries upon centunes every Family would put something in the bright cube of their Ambassador; for centuries upon centuries the Ambassador took it-- and returned it. Until we stumbled upon a way to exploit the agony of the radical regeneratives.
But some of the Families did not take part in the rush to trade with our captors. The Schwartzes stayed secretly on their desert, where no one went; the Ku Kuei lived somewhere in the bowels of their dark forest, never leaving it and never being troubled by outsiders, who feared the mysteries of the world's most impenetrable forest. The edge of the forest had always been Mueller's eastern border; and only in that direction did my father and his father never try to conquer.
It was cold and silent. Not a birdsound. Not an insect, though there were flowers enough in the open brush. Then the sun rose and so did I, setting off into the depths of the trees, going east but one-third south.
At first there was a morning breeze, but then that died, and the leaves hung absolutely still. Birds were rare, and when I saw any they were as if asleep in high branches, motionless. No small animals moved underfoot, and I wondered if this were the secret of Ku Kuei-- that nothing but plants lived here.
I could not see the sun, and so marked my direction by noting the trees that went in a line, correcting now and then. East and one-third south, I said again and again, trying not to hear it in the woman's voice-- why did I grieve for her, whom I did not know?
I walked for hours and hours, it seemed, and still it was only morning from the vague direction of the brightest light, where I supposed the sun must be. Paths ran left and right, but I followed again the voice of the old woman in my memory, saying, "Follow no paths."
I became hungry. I chewed on mutton. I found berries and ate them, but not the white ones.
At last my legs were so weary I couldn't set one in front of the other, and yet it was still day. I didn't understand my tiredness. In my training I had often been required to walk briskly from sunrise to sunset, until I could do it with little strain. Was there, then, some element in the forest air, some drug that weakened me? Or had the healing of all my recent wounds taken more from me than I expected?
I didn't know. I set down the pack beside a tree and slept without waking, long and hard.
So long that when I awoke it was daylight again, and I got up and pushed on.
Again a day of walking, then weariness while the sun was still high. This time I forced myself to go on, farther and farther, until I became a machine. I was alert enough to avoid entangling roots, to pick my way through thick places, to scramble over rocks, to slide carefully down the slopes of hollows and ravines, then clamber up the other side, but I was so numb with the effort just to stay awake that I wan't conscious of any of this, not really; an obstacle was forgotten the moment it was out of view. I felt as if I had been walking for days, and yet the sun was still high.
At first my weariness in so short a time made me feel a deep dread, that the complex of symptoms that marked a radical regenerative included a kind of general dystrophy-- but that couldn't be it, for I had found the strength to go on and on, hadn't I? I wasn't weakening, for surely I had covered some ground, at least. But perhaps rads were plagued with the sudden onset of bouts of almost uncontrollable sleepiness. Yet I was controlling it, wasn't I? And the rads in the pens, while they moved with the languor of despair, did not seem to sleep more often than other men, or at least no one ever said they did.
Then I had a thought that comforted me a little-- that the strange thing that was happening to me might not be a product of the condition of my own body, but rather might arise from the mysterious forest of Ku Kuei. Couldn't it be that the forests exuded some chemical that caused weariness? Or perhaps only the illusion of weariness. Or perhaps a whole complex of debilitating drugs in the air, causing hallucinations, distorting my sense of time, making me long to sleep with as much desperation as a man longs for water after three days without a drink.
That would explain why Ku Kuei had become such a feared and hated place. What if a man could wander in here and find his sense of time so distorted that he thought he had wandered miles in only a few minutes? Overcome with weariness, he might sleep twenty-four hours, then rise again, walk a few more meters, and fall down thinking he had done a day's labor. In only a short time the cumulative effect of all these chemicals could become fatal, either directly, by poisoning the man, or indirectly, by causing him to sleep until he dies of dehydration.
No wonder there were so few wild animals here. Perhaps a few birds acclimated to the poisonous air, some insects whose brains were too small even to be affected. But this would explain why nothing was heard from the Family of Ku Kuei almost from the hour they entered this wood three thousand years before.
Now here I was, caught up in the same natural defenses of this forest, and just as unlikely to win my way to freedom. My sentence had been death after all, not just exile. My flesh would be consumed by the bacteria and small insects of the forest floor; my bones would bleach and, after decades, crumble. I would then become part of the planet we called Treason, contributing to it the only metal that this soil would ever hold, the metal of men's souls. Was mine a soft and yielding element? Or would I be a hard place in the forest floor? Would roots soak up from me a metal that would lend vigor to their massive trunks?
These were my thoughts as I struggled to keep myself awake. For a time I think I even dreamed as I walked on, imagining myself to be one of a thousand trees marching forth to do combat with the dangerous black soldiers of Nkumai. And such was my madness that I even saw myself waving vast branches to sweep the swordsmen of Mueller from their feet, then grinding them into powder with my irresistible roots.
I came, to myself again, and thought more soberly-- though perhaps just as madly-- of what this poisonous forest might imply. It made me realize that in three thousand years of life on this world, all we of Mueller had ever thought about was how to get away, how to earn such vast quantities of iron that we might someday build a spaceship and escape. Other Families had spent their efforts trying to convince their Ambassador that they had repented of their ancestors' rebelliousness and wished to be returned from exile-- after all, they said in a thousand different missives, we are but the eightieth great grandchildren of those who once threatened your pleasant Republic. But all such wheedling letters were returned torn to shreds. Whoever was on the other end of the Ambassador, controlling it, had not learned forgiveness in three thousand years. It made me wonder if perhaps our ancestors' crimes were not in fact far more terrible than they claimed. After all, the only histories we pos
sessed told their version of what happened, and in their accounts they were completely innocent. But aren't all monstrous criminals innocent in their own eyes? Don't all their victims somehow deserve to die, in their imagination, at least?
Why in all these years had we kept our gaze starward, hoping to escape this world, and so learned almost nothing of the secrets that it held? Before we came it had been studied only enough to learn two things: First, that it was habitable-- that, small as it was, Treason was massive enough to maintain us at about a third the gravity of the world where humans had evolved, so we would be strong, could run bounding across the prairies and among the giant trees; and the basic chemicals of life were close enough to ours that while we couldn't profitably eat the native animals, we and our animals could eat enough of the native plants to sustain ourselves, so sending us here was truly exile, and not a sentence of death. And, second, that so little metal was close enough to the surface that it wasn't even worth trying to extract it. It was a worthless world. A world that did not contain within it the material we could use to build a ladder outward to the stars.
But was it truly worthless, just because it couldn't let us build starships? This world was one of the rare ones that had given rise to life. Did we even understand why life arose here at all? Was it really enough to know that we could eat the plant life? Had we no curiosity about the differences between the native life and the chemistry of our own bodies? We had learned enough about ourselves to create monsters like me, but we hadn't learned enough about this world to truly say we lived here. Yet on the eastern border of Mueller there was a place where the very trees had learned enough about us to make a lone wanderer die of dreams beneath their shadow.
All these thoughts led to only one conclusion: The certainty of my death. And yet they fined me with a strange excitement, a longing to live long enough to learn more about this world. I had received a great insight. There was another road to freedom besides iron won from the Ambassadors. We had been given a whole world, hadn't we? Could we be free by no longer pressing upward against the prison wall of gravity, and instead turning downward and discovering what lay beneath our feet; outward, discovering the native life around us and learning wisdom from it?
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