The Wordsmiths and the Warguild (15 page)

       
Gradually, his little
glow of self-satisfaction faded; he plodded onward, getting slower and slower.
The day aged; the light faded; a little rain began to drizzle down through the
trees. Eventually, he realised it was evening, and would soon be night.

       
The smart thing to do
now would be to climb a tree, to be safe from wolves. Or find a cave, and
barricade it. Or at least cut branches to make a lean-to shelter in which he
could bivouac. Then eat, scavenging worms, snails, slugs and fungus.

       
A country boy born and
bred, he knew what he had to do. But the landscape was singularly unhelpful. He
was surrounded by unclimbable claw trees; there was now no undergrowth at all,
the ground below the trees being littered with sharp-toothed leaves; there were
no helpful rocks or hollows; to the best of his recollection, he had not seen
or heard any bird or insect since entering the claw tree forest, nor had he sighted
any fungus, edible or otherwise.

       
He was in a cold, dead,
evil place, barren of life and bare of water; the rain sifting down through the
creaking, rheumatic branches was strong enough to chill and damp him, yet
insufficient to give him any hope of assuaging his thirst; a cold wind soughed
through the leaves overhead, promising a bitter night.

       
Togura came to a
decision.

       
What he had was nothing,
but it was all he was going to get, so he had better make the most of it.
Drawing his sword, he scraped away the leaves, clearing a space where he could
lay his body down. Then it occurred to him that he could dig a shallow grave in
which he could lie down out of the wind. Better still, he could dig a foxhole
in which he could sleep with his knees drawn up to his chest to conserve
warmth.

       
Eagerly, Togura set to
work, but found the ground hard and unyielding, seamed and knotted with tangles
of tough, fibrous roots. It was hopeless.

       
He ended up spending the
night huddled on the bare ground, sleeping in snatches; whenever he fell
asleep, he soon shivered himself awake again. By the time morning came, as
unfriendly as a hangover, he was feverish. His wounded leg was almost too
painful for him to walk on. The lymph node in his groin was swollen, hard and
painful; he suspected that if he had been able to clean his wound and examine
it, whe would have discovered an angry red line running up his leg, denoting
blood poisoning.

       
He had no food: even the
last of his leeches had left him.

       
"On your feet,
Togura Poulaan," he said.

       
Rising, he sought for
support, and tried to take hold of the branch of a claw tree. A mistake - and
one that he immediately regretted.

Chapter 12

       
"Zaan," said
the sun.

  
     
The ice-white
light ran through his blood in splinters.

       
It was fading.

       
"Clouds," he
said.

       
A frog answered him. He
spoke. It answered again. His teeth hurt. Then came the rain, drenching away
the last of the sunlight. The skirling wind fladdered and scooped, outpacing
his eyesight; it came in rents and buffets, sending the shimmy-shimmy leaves
stappering and plattering from down to around. Some dead at his feet. He kicked
them from ventral to dorsal.

       
"Tog," he
said.

       
Asking for someone.

       
He couldn't remember
who.

       
His legs went
balder-shalder -tok through rain perhaps autumn or winter. His third leg was a
gnarled unyielding strake padded with moss and wort where it jammed home to his
armpit. The music of a flute cut closer than a knife; hard, high, unyielding,
it lacerated his heart. He felt his pulse-beats bleeding through his body. The
wind blew furance hot; he shivered, his teeth tok-tok chin-cha-chattering.

       
"Hello," he
said.

      
 
A frog answered.

       
"Go away,
frog."

       
And then again, hoping
against hallucination:

       
"Hello?"

       
They didn't seem to
notice him. Instead, they kept to their dance, tracing formalities between the
green of green boughs and the red of red blood. He waved in their direction
with what had once been a hand but which was now a club, a poisoned mass of
striving darkness. The ground was rhythmic underfoot. A swathe of wind took him
from behind and flattened him to an undug grave.

    
   
"Once I had a
sword," he said, or thought he said. "But I lost it. Perhaps."

       
She answered him in the
cadence of birdsong, feeding him something which was honey and yet not honey.

       
"That is
good," he said.

       
"Sleep," she
said, or thought she said.

       
Then she was feeding him
again, then hurting his hand; he tried to protest, but she fed him with even,
placid spoonfulls which slurred and slubbered on his tongue. Her hands were
diligent, the blankets very warm. Yet so uncomfortable.

       
His troubling fingers
plucked bits of moss and lichen from the blankets. Dry. Tasteless. He spat them
out. It occurred to him that perhaps he was not in a bed at all, but swallowed
by some hole in the forest, chewing on moss and dreaming strange dreams while
he eased his way toward death.

       
The rocks above looked
solid, sullen, certain.

       
A cave, then.

       
The shiftless wind came
shifting in through a cold square hole in the cave. Beyond lay a high harsh
light which might have been daylight. Things clawed at the hole, scratching,
scraping, grasping, gasping. They wanted him.

       
Frightened, he called
for help.

       
She came to him. Her
voice was half birds and half water. Or was it rainbow? Her eyes, dark. Her
hands, slender. She fed him soup; he tried to hold the spoon, but found himself
clumsy as a baby. She did not laugh.

       
The next time she came,
she was shorter, heavier, and just a little bit sour. Her eyes had changed from
dark to grey, her hair from black to fair. The blankets were still scratching
him. He complained about them. This time, she said nothing.

       
Attempting diligence, he
tried to remember her face, but it shifted with uncanny agility. As in a
nightmare, he tried to stabilise his memories, only to have them prove
incompetent each time she entered. Finally he thought:

       
- Different women tend
me.

       
And knew his thought for
truth.

       
He was healing.

       
He began to take stock
of his situation.

       
The room was small.
Square. Dark. One door. The door led through shadows to a coffin-lid dungeon of
darkness. One window. From the bed, he could see the bare branches of a tree,
grasping and clutching at the thriftless wind.

       
What was the room made
of? Stone. Vast slovenly blocks of stone. No mortar. Above him, a single grey
tombstone stretched from wall to wall. He thought of himself as a tiny huddle
of flesh and sensation hunched up inside a dull, grey, senseless prison of dour
mass, monotonous weight, inertia and habitual oppression.

       
"I'm hungry,"
he said.

       
She entered, matching
none of his memories. By the windowlight, he saw she was dressed in bulky,
padded clothes of woven bark. Tufts of moss and lichen peeked out between the
warp and weft; perhaps, beneath that padding, she was as slender as a tree in
sunlight. Or perhaps not. It occurred to him that, in any case, not all trees
were slender. Not even in sunlight.

       
She did not frown or
smile; though courteous, she was grave, restrained in her dealings with him.

       
She brought food.

       
He ate gruel, pap and
watered bread.

       
It was all he could
manage.

       
The bread was very
strange. It was heavy and loamy, tasting sometimes of honey and sometimes of
fish. Was it made from grain? Or from some kind of pasted root? Eating, he
scented swamp. The bread was not to blame. The wind coming in through the
window was bringing him the smells of marsh, bog and slough.

       
When she came again, he
ate the soup without help; he could sit up by himself. His blankets were the
same woven bark as her clothes, padded with the same mosses and lichens. He
resented their million million insect-creeping legs, claws and feelers.

       
"Wool makes better
blankets," he said.

    
   
She answered him with words
which were half music, half ripening fruit. Which was strange, for it was the
wrong season for ripening fruit. Unless he was mistaken, it was winter. So
thinking, he spun down in a dizzy spiral, fainting.

       
When he woke, it was
night.

       
The shutters had not
been fastened properly; they creaked, groaned and laboured in the knock-kneed
wind.

       
"Shutters," he
said, complaining.

       
And nothing answered
no-one.

       
His head was light yet
his limbs were death-heavy. His knee-joints were made of curdling milk. Hands
alien. His throat was dry; he was thirsty. Perspiring, he reached the shutters;
he could not remember getting out of bed. He found a cord which secured the
shutters, tying one to the other. He pulled it free. The shutters swung apart.

       
He saw bright moonlight,
broken buildings, and the titubant shadows of trees reeling in the violent,
gusting wind. Banners of turbulent cloud streamed across the moon; when the
clouds cleared, the moonlight showed him the dull, low-slung outline of a
heavyweight wall which caught the moonlight in its open crescent. Set in the
middle of that crescent, like a stump about to be reaped by a sickle, was a
vast stone beehive, many times the height of a man. It had no windows, and only
one door. Sullen fire glowed within.

       
- Where am I?

       
Leaves, thin, scampering
prey, fled before the wind. Others followed close behind, cruel scuttling
predators which kept close to the ground as they moved on the kill. Then all
the leaves were suddenly flung upward in turbulent spirals as the buffeting
wind switched and turned.

       
The change in the wind
brought Togura a whiff of something foul. It was not swamp or mud or wet water.
It was the rot and decay of the flesh. It was a putrid, evil smell of
degenerating nightmares, of soft fat becoming fungus, of bones riddled with
worms, of eyeballs subsiding into dark pools of purulent liquid.

       
Togura was almost
certain that the smell was coming from the beehive.

       
The wind changed. And
the fire which he could see within the beehive was suddenly obscured, as if
someone was walking down a passageway, blocking the view to the center. Suddenly,
terrified, Togura knew that he must not be caught here at the window, watching,
witnessing.

       
He closed the shutters
and secured the cords which held them against the wind. Returning to bed, he
found himself unable to sleep. Yet when he opened his eyes again, it was
morning. Feeding on soup and the meat of a small fresh-water turtle, he
comforted himself with the thought that the wall, the beehive and the sudden
stench must all have been part of a nightmare.

       
But when his recovering
health allowed him to totter around at liberty, he found that the window's
daylight view was the same as its night-time aspect. He had not been dreaming.
Sometimes, indeed, the shift of the wind brougth him hints of something foul,
and always he identified those hints with the beehive.

       
He did not know whether
he was a guest, a slave or a prisoner, but when he was well enough to walk
along a stone shaft as blind as darkness and make the turns which took him to
the outer world, they put him to work.

       
It was most certainly
winter by now. His old clothes had disappeared, together with his leather
boots; he wore clogs, and clothes of woven bark stuffed with mosses and
lichens, and a great big ear-comforting flap-hat consisting, as far as he could
tell, of several birds' nests held in a net of woven bark. His skin broke out
into strange red rashes, which itched. But he endured.