A Cactus Garden

by Jo Bannister

  “Enough to offer us an annual gem-gathering expedition into the forest in return. If it wants him that badly, what will it do with him?”

  Amalthea shuddered delicately. “I think I prefer not to know,” she lied. “But whatever happens to him will not happen here, and whatever his ship does as a result the Hive will not be the target. We could hardly have planned a happier outcome.”

  “We send him with Michal?”

  “Indeed we do. Then I think we retire to the cellars for a day or two; or three.”

  “You think it will take that long?”

  “If I had not known what they do not know, it would have taken a great deal longer.”

  “I will give them an escort to the perimeter,” said Chaucer, uneasy still.

  When Paul was hauled from his dark silent cell into bright light, before what his dazzled eyes perceived as a crowd of twinkling people (they were actually about a dozen, and they were not twinkling) whom his starved ears considered unduly rowdy, he was afraid.

  He did not think Chaucer reckless enough to let him be killed while “Gyr’s” doomwatch device still ticked in his chest, but he did anticipate efforts to make him reveal how it could be bypassed. If he had still had access to the suicide option he could have called destruction on the Hive before it mattered. Now his only choices were to tell them and be killed, or not to tell them and be hurt. He did not want to tell them, because he did not want to give them his ship and he did not want to lose his last hope of revenge; but he was not a romantic and knew it would take more than courage and the right attitude. He knew it would be hell. He waited for somebody to say something.

  Amalthea, who with her silver mail and bloody smile went on twinkling after the others had stopped, said brightly, “Congratulations. You have been bought.”

  Paul squinted at her, aware of being somewhat below par and hoping it did not show too much. “What?”

  It showed. Michal, standing with the others, was shocked at the look of him: dull and sluggard, dazed by the light, his hands chained. He had the smell of the dungeon about him. Michal thought that the violence Paul anticipated had already begun, but apart from Chaucer’s impatient boot and Amalthea’s barbed hand he had suffered no assault. His battered appearance was due mainly to the combination of physical and spiritual weariness, some residual concussion, disorientation caused by sensory deprivation, and dirt.

  But what shocked Michal more than Paul’s haggard look or the parallel scars across his face and throat, scabbed with recent blood, was the blindingly obvious fact that he was not Amalthea’s partner but her prisoner. Michal had thought he could not feel worse about all this, but he began to.

  Amalthea was speaking. The arrangement with Mithras had quite restored her good humour. “It seems your young woman is tougher than she looks. Not only is she alive when I had every assurance that she was dead” – Balrig, who was among the guard, tried to shrink his great height to evade her significant gaze – “but she appears to have acquired some influence in the forest. She has put together a deal to purchase your freedom. Be flattered: she is paying highly.”

  The news did more than strong wine to revive Paul’s dulled senses. Michal saw the fierce bright life-spark rekindle in his eyes and watched the vigour seep back into his drained body, stiffening as it went. He stood straighter. Michal’s heart wrenched within him, because he would have liked Shah to know how she was prized but could see no way of telling her that would not add to her burden of grief.

  With a guilty start, as if his mind was being read, Michal found Paul’s eyes on him. The power and the penetration were back; the mercenary was, however briefly, back in business. “Michal, is this true?”

  “She is well,” stumbled Michal. “She was hurt; she was cured. She is in the forest.” He managed to speak not a word of a lie and to give no hint of the truth.

  Paul’s obsidian scrutiny held him just a moment longer than Michal thought necessary or found comfortable. Then his eyes shifted to Amalthea. “All right. What about my ship?”.

  The lady laughed out loud. “Do not take me for a fool, Paul. With you in the forest I may sleep uneasily, but I shall at least sleep. With you orbiting over my Hive with your eye to a gunsight I should not have a moment’s rest short of the eternal one. No, you take your life and count yourself blessed. If I find you inside my perimeter again I will have your eyes.”

  Paul held out his shackled hands. Chaucer pushed him away. “At the hedge.”

  Paul raised an eyebrow. “Don’t you trust me?”

  Chaucer did not smile. “I trust you implicitly while you have the chains and I have the key.”

  The suggestion that he still posed a threat seemed to Michal to do almost as much for Paul’s rallying spirit as the news about Shah. As the escort detail marched him through the clearing his step was jaunty and his chains did not so much jangle as jingle.

  Michal agonised with himself all across the naked land. It was a no-man’s-land between the Hive and the forest – between civilisation and barbarism, though he could not have said which was which – and he felt the desolation of belonging to neither. By the time they reached the high hedge he had come to a decision, but it was not something he could communicate in public so he plunged into the twining thicket without a word of parting.

  Paul paused before following him. He proffered his shackles again. Chaucer, thoughtfully, took the key from his belt and dropped it on the bare earth. With a grin Paul retrieved it and freed himself. He nodded past the big man’s shoulder. “Keep my shuttle oiled, I’ll be back for it.” Then he too vanished into the forest.

  It was noticeable to Michal, and no comfort, how freely the hedge admitted them.

  Where the thicket yielded to forest, the broad grey boles spaced like columns supporting an endless vault, Paul looked around him in some wonder. “I’m impressed.”

  Grim-faced, Michal appeared at his elbow. “You are dead, unless you can get to your ship before they come for you. Shah did not pay Amalthea’s price, Paul – Mithras did.” He waved a spread hand jerkily around him. “All of this. The forest. The Drones. The whole god-forsaken planet. It thinks. It wants your blood.”

  “Say that again,” Paul said, “slowly.”

  It was not all that slow, Michal’s account, or all that lucid, but by the time he had finished it and Paul’s questions were answered he understood both the nature of his hazard and its enormity. He had fought armies – he had never fought a world before.

  “We shall have trouble returning through the hedge,” said Michal, talking fast now to cover the silence, “but if we succeed we should be able to take the shuttle. There is not much of a guard, and only the overseer will stand against us – the Drones will not. Once you are away I shall go back and join Shah.”

  “What will they do, when you don’t bring me?”

  Michal shrugged, embarrassed. “Show their disapproval, I suppose. Shah will probably intervene before they get too enthusuastic.”

  “And what becomes of the pair of you afterwards, when you’ve managed to alienate both of this world’s cultures?”

  “I – we – well, I suppose –” Michal stammered gamely but he could not come up with an answer.

  Paul shook his head. “I was wrong about you, and Shah was right. But your advice is worth about as much as a filigree beer-can. No, you listen to me. If I leave, you and Shah are going to die on Mithras. It may be soon and nasty or after fifty tedious years, but one way or another – in the forest, in the Hive or hung out like washing on that bloody hedge – you’re going to die here. I’ve brought Shah a long way and it wasn’t for that; and I owe you better than to fling you between two packs of hounds. Can we get Shah away without the forest knowing?”

  Michal considered, without much hope. “I cannot see how.”

  “Then I’d better talk to this Drone of yours. Can you find him?”

  “Paul, they will kill you!”

  “Can you find them?”

  “If they
do not find us first,” muttered Michal, turning away.

  Paul was still a young man by most standards, but he had already lived longer than most young men who take up freelance soldiering as a profession. Contrary to Michal’s growing conviction, he had not achieved this distinction by indulging in reckless bravado but by virtue of a logic so sharp it was vicious. A little like a computer and a little like a gin-trap, his brain had a talent for calculating percentages equalled only by its gift for self-preservation, so that his campaign skills approached if they did not actually reach the level of genius. He was a very clever man. But although he now thought until his brain fizzed with excess throughput, every step he took into the silent grey wood brought him nearer to a confrontation he had no idea how to handle.

  They walked for some hours. After a somewhat shaky start, when he was irritated in approximately equal proportions by his own infirmity and Michal’s anxious backward looks, Paul soon found his stride and enjoyed the fresh air and the exercise, the lingering oppression of imprisonment shaking lighter with every mile.

  And then, before Michal expected it and not immediately noticed by either of them, the trees began to play their part. Branches sprang back erratically, so that instead of following Michal exactly Paul steered a parallel course where the going seemed easier. He wondered idly whether the boy was taking the denser path deliberately or from stupidity; naturally enough, the explanation that Michal was taking the easier route but it was being subtly shut against himself ten paces behind did not occur to him. Finally, Paul realised that something was amiss and Michal realised what it was in quick succession, but by then they were separated by fifty strides of thigh-high scrubby growth, armed with daggers and woven impenetrably between the sparse tracks.

  “Hang about,” called Paul, “are we going different places or what?”

  Paul was not close enough to see, but Michal went deathly pale and his jaw dropped. He heard the stealthy sound of lithe verdure, and the answering echo in his brain that said the whispering accompaniment had been with them for some little time, unnoticed under the sounds of their passage. They were not moving now and there was no breeze. “Oh no,” Michal said sickly. “It is beginning.”

  “What? What’s the matter?”

  “It is the forest. It is closing in.” Michal struggled to make sense. “It has separated us and now it is closing in. The tracks are gone. I cannot move.”

  “I bloody can,” Paul said grimly. “Stay where you are, I’ll get to you.” His own line remained clear but it led nowhere near Michal. Without so much as a knife to his hand he bent and broke off an armoured knot of the tanglewood and clubbed into the intervening maquis. A few twigs broke off, a few lay down. As a means of brush clearance it was plainly ineffective. “Look, I’ll go back and pick up your trail where this jungle began. Ah,” he added in a different voice.

  “What now?”

  “The path I’ve just come up suddenly isn’t there any more. Funny stuff, this scrub – got a mind of its own.”

  “That is what I said.”

  “Yeah.” Paul scratched his nose. He looked at the track still open before him. “Do you think it’s trying to tell me something?”

  “Paul – I think it is trying to kill you.”

  Paul grinned at him, without much mirth. “Yes, well, others have tried. Not that I’ve had much trouble with vegetables before. Look, do you think you’ll be all right if I leave you for a bit?”

  Michal turned on his heel around his small lagoon of freedom. The thorned stems reefed him in but seemed to offer no immediate threat. “I expect I shall be.” His choice of emphasis was neither arbitrary nor very tactful.

  Paul grinned. “Then I think I’ll go see what it has in mind. The sooner I talk to somebody sensible the better. I can’t argue with a whin!”

  Michal watched him go, a short dark figure, oddly resilient, wading away into the grey wooded world, and expected not to see him again. He wondered what Shah would say when she knew, knowing then her own part. He recalled her blank face and her bleak voice that was the voice of Mithras, heard his own protests and the cold reply, and when his eyes cleared again Paul was gone.

  The thorn-brake flowed like a tide under the trees, its ragged surface petrified in disordered crests like foam-caps frozen in the instant of their fission. Like a tide it bore its voyager towards its appointed place, and though Paul did not know that place the sense of inevitability was strong. Like Michal he felt menace in the air, so he trod softly and watched keenly and tried to think of something which he had and Mithras might want besides his life.

  The scrub tide broke against the lip of a little valley, steep-sided and gravel clad. The whispering thorns like beaters pressed him to the edge of the defile and, left without options, he swallowed his pride and did what was expected of him. The loose shale scuttered away under his feet as he tacked carefully down the rattling hill.

  The cut was a dried-up watercourse, the bed of a small swift stream that no longer flowed, or not in this season. Little streams like that accounted for most of Mithras’running water and, apart from the broad equatorial belt of the single ocean, there was virtually no standing water at all. The trees took up the rain almost before it hit the ground.

  The stream, running swiftly enough to cut a V-shaped trench into the shingly ground, had ploughed a straight narrow furrow from here to where the flanking trees gave way of a sudden to a close knot of greenery growing over the valley in an arch. Plunging beneath that arch the cut was dark, but beyond Paul could see light: beckoning bright sunlight, unfiltered by the forest canopy. He thought, I’m supposed to go through there. Then he thought, Sod that for a game of soldiers.

  He took a sprint at the far embankment and was halfway up before he lost momentum and slithered back. He gained the lip at the second attempt, scrambling the last few feet with his hands dug deep into the shifting scree. With the whole slope sliding away from him he rolled onto firm ground, regained his feet and was hard against the green wall before the noise from the valley had died away. For a minute, until he mastered it, his breathing was the loudest sound in the forest.

  He moved away along the margin of the thicket. It was a smaller version of the great hedge surrounding the Hive, formed in the same way. Within its compass there were no trees to block out the light and the forest responded with a growth of swift sappy green, soaking up the sun and sealing off the wound like a scab. The hedge curved away from him as he walked, while over his head it grew back to meet the encroaching trees with a profile like the surface of a doughnut. Paul supposed the wound would eventually heal over and be reintegrated with the forest. In the meantime he was interested to see what lay within the living lobster-pot that was important enough to bring him so far.

  The stream had emerged from as well entered the arena in the days when it ran, though its volume was reduced somewhere within and its bed here a mere gravelly hollow over which the thicket threw a bridge. Paul took a deep breath and ducked under the green eaves. He was well aware that, if the arena was some kind of killing-ground, entering it from an unexpected angle would give him only the most transient of advantages, but he could find no other features to exploit. He could have evaded confrontation for a while longer in the forest but saw no benefit in gaining only time. His mind carefully void of expectation, he entered the green arena.

  It was a cactus garden, bright with flower. Flame and scarlet crowns decked the great fleshy plants, horny and thorny and pale as phosphorous, towering twice the height of a tall man against the hard blue sky. The fire-coloured flowers and the electrolytic sky were an assault to the shadow-trained eye. The naked, barbed plants silently looming breathed an air of impersonal malice: aloof, alien, extravagantly beautiful, inexplicably but unmistakably violent.

  As his eyes adjusted to the glare and the half-forgotten colours, Paul moved diagonally into the garden, cat-careful, alert for any sound or movement. There was none. No-one advanced to meet him. The tension increased until like a st
retched string it snapped in anticlimax and he was reduced to calling for attention. “Shah? Surgeon? Anyone?”

  There was no reply. Paul loosed the last of his pent breath in expletives and turned his attention on the improbable plants, wandering among them, trying to make sense of their presence as an enclave in the heart of temperate forest. He saw them as a kind of granulating flesh filling in a gaping wound, inflicted at a time and in a way that no-one now on Mithras, with the possible exception of the Drones, could know. They were decades old – perhaps a few, perhaps many.

  His foot snagged in the tangled undergrowth of roots and suckers and would not come free. In mild irritation he tugged at it. Then a sudden access of alarm turned him cold and, without stopping to work out why, he bent swiftly and threw the latches on his boot and dragged his foot free. As he did so the woody snare tightened spastically, crushing the strong leather with a force that would have broken his ankle.

  Even as he strove to recover his balance he felt, with surging fear and the peculiar horror of familiar things turned vicious, the very ground beneath him come alive with snapping tendrils lithe as snakes that lashed at his legs and caught his wrists as he fought them. He kept his feet under the kraken assault for perhaps half a minute then, hung about with vines like a forgotten statue, was dragged crashing down. The agile roots swarmed eel-like over him, binding his limbs immovably to the writhing ground, but he did not yell until slow dark shadows eclipsing the bright sun distracted his frantic attention from his pinioned arms and, blinking the sweat of panic from his eyes, he saw the great looming shape of the cactus bending over him.

  Chapter Three

  Shah dreamed Paul’s dream. Alone under a tree, bundled in a blanket, her body twitched and muttered fitfully while her soul bathed in clear sun in another country. In her eyes his dream, too, was clear, shrived of the mystery that had imbued that night in the Hive, but no less horrible. The looming shapes that savaged and fed on him were trees – the thongs that held him their mobile roots, the knives that stabbed him avid cactus spines – and in the dream she was one of them. Most horrible of all was the pleasure and the sense of aptness she imbibed with his blood.