Peering through the gloom, Octrago heard a rustling sound. Then a swishing and a slithering.
He looked up and saw scores of shafts, like the one he had recently avoided, descend swiftly from the foliage. It was like seeing a second forest interpenetrate the first; or, perhaps, like the massed feeding tubes extended by a certain bottom feeding marine animal: for each shaft seemed to have selected its mark and went to it unerringly.
Sword, bow and lance were no good here. There would be only a brief, wriggling struggle as the muzzle of each hollow tube dropped over the head and shoulders of its victim. Then, a loud thwack as the serpent harrier abruptly disappeared.
Forewarned, Vorduthe dodged the shaft that sought him out and threw himself onto the legs of a warrior who was already engulfed to his shoulders. But Vorduthe’s strength was quite insufficient to extricate him; he let go only just in time as the harrier vanished up the tube like an insect being sucked up a straw.
Not all who sought to rescue their stricken comrades in the same manner were quick enough to give up. Tumbling to the moss, Vorduthe saw more than one dragged up a shaft still clinging to a pair of legs.
He rolled, sprang to his feet, and ran, to see that the dreadful columns were everywhere: his whole army seemed to have fallen foul of them.
Suddenly he heard a muffled yell from a familiar voice, and whirled to locate its source. Beass Axthall, one of his squadron commanders and a lord in his own right, had been caught by a tube! Vorduthe recognized the insignia, the unique pattern of the armored kilt. But before he could even make a move, Axthall was gone!
The progress of the procession had ceased; the expedition was in total disorder. And now a new menace appeared—but, unlike the shafts, one which had previously been described by Askon Octrago.
They dropped in almost leisurely fashion from the overhead murk: greenish lines, looking like elongated stems from some innocuous flower, whose ends sported cap-like buds or petals. Like the shafts, they appeared to have some way of sensing animal presence and they also had the power of movement, for they twisted and turned as they descended, until they fell daintily on the heads of warriors busily fleeing from the lunging tubes.
One might have thought the helmets the men wore would have afforded some protection. Not so: the cap-like cups were so pliable they pushed themselves between the strips of metal and withe to clamp directly to the skull, fitting as neatly as the cap of an acorn.
In utter horror, Vorduthe watched men lifted aloft by the dozen, the stems withdrawing as if they were fishing lines being reeled in. How the caps managed to grip a man’s skull so tightly was a mystery. But up in the cover of the branches Vorduthe could vaguely see his warriors dancing and writhing, and he could hear them crying in agony.
He knew that they would hang there like grotesque fruit, all the nutrients of their bodies gradually being drawn out.
A troop leader staggered up and almost collided with Vorduthe. His face was pallid with fear.
“Danglecups!” he gasped. “Danglecups, my lord!”
“Yes. Octrago told us of these.”
At least it was possible to fend them off. Vorduthe’s sword scythed the air, severing a green cord that seemed to have been making for the troop leader. The danglecup cap flexed itself as it lay on the moss.
And not far away there was a blur of motion followed by a sickening thud mixed with the crunch of metal. A warrior had fallen to his death from far overhead. A stalk projected from his helmet, and a danglecup clung to his scalp. The sword with which he had managed to hack himself free was still clenched in his fist.
The troop leader’s tone was pleading. “What shall we do, my lord?”
“Fire is our only weapon.” Vorduthe pointed with his sword. “You take that wagon. I’ll take the other one.”
The crew of the fire engine had either been plucked from it or else had joined the other warriors who were huddled beneath it for protection. Sliding his sword up his scabbard, Vorduthe vaulted at a run onto the operator’s perch.
No new tube-shafts were descending now. Those that had already appeared seemed sated by their activity, or perhaps they were only capable of applying their suction once. Indolently they were withdrawing. But danglecups there were in plenty, and one was dropping straight at Vorduthe with frightening speed. He swung the nozzle to his highest elevation, pointing it up into the trees. Frantically his feet worked the pedal boards up and down, pumping oil. He snatched up the matchcord and reached out with it as the stream began to issue in a fountain.
The satisfying gout of fire that answered his efforts reached far when aimed upward, assisted by its natural inclination to rise. Its fringe caught the danglecup no more than a dozen arm’s lengths from Vorduthe’s head and burned it to a crisp.
By now the troop leader had managed to get his fire spout into action. From both engines billowing clouds of fire boiled up to the tree cover. Vorduthe turned his muzzle in a wide circle, spreading conflagration among the lower branches.
But suddenly his firestream died, the spout dribbling the last few drops of oil. The wagon had been in the van of the expedition, and it had drained its tank.
Vorduthe jumped to the ground. He reached beneath the wagon and roughly dragged one of the men hiding there into the open. Then he started kicking at the others.
“Cowards! Come out and fight! I’ll kill any man who doesn’t fight!”
“Fight who, my lord?” groaned a voice. But about a dozen men crawled into the open, climbing to their feet with shamed but grim faces.
Fragments of blazing twig and leaf rained down. The hanging shafts had become columns of fire.
Beyond the vicinity, however, danglecups wrought havoc as before.
“Those sucking tubes aren’t doing anything anymore,” Vorduthe told the men. “The danglecups you can use your swords on. So go to it—get those fire engines working!”
Though they were reluctant to leave the glade of safety he had created, he led them through the chaos, eyes constantly on the alert for the deadly caps that still were falling from the semi-darkness.
Now that the terror of the tubes was over, others were recovering their wits enough to take Vorduthe’s lead. From points all around came the roar of billowing flame. The gloom of the forest turned to lurid incandescence. And slowly, as the danglecups burned and the foliage overhead became a canopy of fretted fire, the expedition began to move again.
How much fire do we need to get us through this hell? Vorduthe asked himself. How much fuel is left? And what happens when it is gone? In their panic the warriors were using it wildly, and he gave orders for the spouts to be used only when necessary. Gloom returned, and the attacks of tubes and danglecups became only occasional.
At last Askon Octrago appeared. Vorduthe noticed that the front of his armor was stained green, as though he had been lying on his belly in the moss. He seemed distressed, and at once approached Vorduthe, laying a hand on his shoulder.
“I’m glad you came through, my lord. That was a rough passage.”
“You never told us about those shafts that drag men up inside them,” Vorduthe accused him. “Why not?”
“Those are shoot-tubes,” Octrago told him. “I had hoped we wouldn’t meet any of those, that’s all.”
Vorduthe didn’t believe him. He thought the Peldainian had probably kept quiet about them for fear of deterring the expedition from setting forth.
How much else had he withheld?
“What happens to a man who is taken that way?” Vorduthe asked. “He is slowly devoured, I suppose.”
Octrago shook his head. “No, it is not like that. Shoot tubes are open at both ends: they work like blowpipes. They hurl a man high in the air, over the treetops to fall down into the vales. If the fall doesn’t kill him he faces horrors greater than anything we can meet here.”
The appearance of the forest was changing once more. The overhead foliage had thinned, though rarely could one glimpse the sky, and the wagons rolled past new
types of tree. Suddenly Octrago stopped, gripping Vorduthe’s arm.
“Look. We are in a grove of cage tigers.”
Throughout the journey so, Vorduthe had been seeing the striped black-and-white trees Octrago called cage tigers. They had all proved harmless. He was surprised, therefore, at Octrago’s sudden alarm.
True, the tigers were numerous here. Of all the plants so far encountered they were the most predatory-looking: bizarrely shaped, as though about to pounce like animals, even though they clearly consisted of timber of some kind. Their foliage was sparse, and they stood barely ten feet in height.
“Too late to think of going round,” Octrago rumbled. “Best to get through as quickly as we can. Order a speed-up.”
“We should form up in some order,” Vorduthe rumbled. “We are all over the place.”
“Later,” Octrago advised tersely. “Let’s get through the grove first.”
Vorduthe concurred. Those who could do so hurried ahead. The wagons too increased their pace as much as was possible, the men at the shafts sweating with the effort.
Octrago was stepping carefully, as though afraid his footfall would set off some trap, and was eyeing the striped boles which, now that Vorduthe thought of it, could almost have been carved by the hand of man, so smooth and strange were their misshapen forms.
“You seem afraid,” he murmured to Octrago. “Do you advise the use of fire?”
“No. We must conserve the fuel. The tigers cannot take us all. Aagh—it begins!”
His exclamation was in a tone of anxiety and resignation mixed. And now Vorduthe realized why he was so concerned.
The cage tigers were virtually impossible to avoid or to defend oneself against. The sight was incredible: the mangrab trees had been able to reach twice the length of a man, but these could pounce much farther—so far that there was no place in the grove where one could be safe. They seemed to leap, to spring, to bound like an animal, but with such suddenness that the eye was bedazzled to know what was really happening. In an instant the cage tiger regained its rooted spot—which it had not in fact left—and the reason for the first part of its name became apparent. The stripes had opened up, arranging themselves into the bars of a cage, roughly square in shape though with rounded corners.
Within the cage there crouched a man.
As if by some group instinct, a score of tigers had struck within seconds of one another. Vorduthe paused to study the scene. So far, those trapped seemed unharmed. They shook the bars or tried to pry them open. Some set to work with their swords.
“Kill them quickly, and let’s be on our way,” Octrago urged. “This is no place to linger.”
“We shall set them free,” Vorduthe insisted.
“There is nothing you can do for them. The wood of the cage tiger is harder than iron. It will not even burn. Come.”
Octrago loped to the nearest cage tiger that contained a victim. His sword thrust once, skillfully, between the bars of the cage, between struts of armor, into the breast of the caged warrior. The serpent harrier, who had looked on his approach as if expecting assistance, twisted his face in an expression of surprise and pain as the blade entered, gasping as he died.
Bleakly Vorduthe joined the Peldainian, looking into the cage at the slumped body of his follower. “What fate would have awaited him?” he said.
“Death in a fallpit is quick and easy compared with what a cage tiger holds in store. This tree makes a leisurely meal of what it catches. When some hours have passed, the cage starts to contract, until the bars hold the victim tightly without any power of movement. Then the inner surfaces seep digestive juice, very gradually, no more than a smear. First the skin is burned through in strips, then the inner tissues, then through to the inner organs. His suffering would not have ceased until he died of thirst.
“But we have one advantage now. Those caught give us a route through the grove. Pass the word around: a tiger will not strike twice, and other tigers will not come too close to another of their species. Come.”
Octrago was off, sprinting to the next victim, whom he dispatched, then looking around for another to give him safety.
Vorduthe looked after him in distaste. But soon, he found himself doing the same.
Chapter Five
“It will be dark soon,” said Octrago. “Make camp here. I don’t see any dart-thorns and it’s as good a place as any.”
Since the shock of the attack by the massed shoot tubes, the invading army had fought its way through the forest for another three hours. The men were exhausted, numbed by seeing their comrades being continually picked off, though the assaults lately had come singly rather than in droves.
Vorduthe’s mind held a catalogue of ways to die, one or another of which he seemed to have witnessed every few minutes: danglecup, fallpit, mangrab, trip-root, stranglevine, shoot tubes, cage tiger.…
Then there were the dart-thorns. There seemed to be several species of these bush-like plants, which shot out their thorns at random whenever anyone passed within range. Sometimes the thorns merely lodged in the skin and caused death by poisoning, quickly and almost painlessly. Some, however, were able to enter the body of their target, leaving only a puncture hole behind. The victim would complain of a stinging sensation as the thorn burrowed inward. Then, minutes later, he exploded, fragments of his innards and raiment flying in all directions.
For some moments afterward the spot would be enveloped in a cloud of steam. Suddenly generated super-hot steam was the means, Octrago had said, whereby the thorn effected its dreadful result.
Wearily Vorduthe nodded, and called a halt. They stood in a large clearing of the type which they had been coming across occasionally since the terrain began to mount once more. A few trees, not very large, with yellowish bark dotted it. After Octrago pronounced them harmless men with axes proceeded to cut them down. They were stripped and dragged to the perimeter as part of the barricade.
Few words were exchanged while the baggage wagons were unloaded. From them came building materials: strong flexible laths, staves, poles, and coils of wicker. With these a framework began to take shape within which the battered army could rest.
Vorduthe helped to supervise the work. The barricade itself was twice the height of a man, and marked out the perimeter. Above it was stretched a net, supported on poles and reinforced with a webwork of slats.
Though the forest seemed quiet at present, Octrago had warned that it was liable to become more active after sunset, and to produce new means of assault. When relieved of the daytime task of soaking up energy-giving light, its vegetable denizens became restless.
As soon as the preparations were complete, he ordered Lord Korbar to make an assessment of losses of men and equipment. Then he went among his men as they settled down to light fires and prepare food.
He found them somber, sometimes almost sullen, though generally there was a dogged determination to continue. Night was coming quickly under the forest’s rankness. The clearing was now like a huge tent, lit by the glowing campfires. Outside, a soughing and swishing could be heard.
Vorduthe made no attempt to cheer his men with false heartiness. They knew they had taken a drubbing. Instead, he tersely commended their courage. The Hundred Islands would long extoll their exploit, he reminded them. They were already heroes.
For this he received the wry nods one could expect from toughened seaborne warriors. Only one was temeritous enough to give him the muttered and obvious reply, “If any of us get back to tell about it, my lord.”
And it was an ordinary serpent harrier, not even a troop leader, who said to him bluntly: “Do you trust the Peldainian, my lord?”
“Why do you say that?” Vorduthe retorted sharply.
“When we came under the shoot tubes he was down on his belly like a snake, hiding under a wagon.”
“And how many weren’t under the wagons, if they could get there?” grunted another who was skewering a piece of dried fish to place over the fire. “He knew how
to save himself, that was all.”
The first man persisted. “I can’t see that this forest is any less ferocious than we have always believed. The Peldainian tells us it’s a relatively safe route. My lord, will we come through? And if we do, can we get back again?”
Despite that the warrior was voicing his own doubts, Vorduthe glared at him. “I’ll hear no more of that talk. The king trusts the Peldainian, and that is enough.”
Slowly he walked back to the commander’s camp. A blaze had been got going. A stew of sea streamer and decapod tentacle slices was cooking. The smell of the food was incongruous, he thought; cheerful and homely in the midst of the most bizarre peril.
He seated himself next to the silent Askon Octrago on one of the cane stools that had been unloaded. Shortly Lord Orthane joined them. And then Lord Korbar returned. He stood over the seated party, glowering down at Octrago.
“A third of our force gone!” he hissed in a low, accusing tone, so that any underlings near should not hear what he said. “Nearly six hundred men!”
Octrago shrugged. “Say, rather, that we have two thirds left,” he said in a tone of weary negligence. “Still more than enough to take Peldain.”
“Except that we are only halfway through—and that by your own account! One more march, you say, but we have only your word for it. The forest may be endless for all I know.”
“Once again you disparage my word,” Octrago said slowly, his tone becoming firmer. “Previously I was a stranger in your country. But this time you stand upon the soil of Peldain, where I am king. Do you hear, my lord? I am king of this land—monarch and law!”
Korbar turned to Vorduthe. “Is this man even a Peldainian? There is trouble brewing on Orwane, and talk of a secret conspiracy involving the Mandekweans. I have been open in my suspicions from the start: that we have been lured away while a revolt is sprung at home. Better that we turn back now and try to make it to the coast, before the fleet sails away.”
The Forest of Peldain Page 4
