Clash of the Sky Galleons (24 page)

There were armour-plated hoglets, sharp-tusked and quick; and gladehawks with hooked beaks and massive talons. While Quint and Maris watched from the shadows, they swooped from above and snapped from below, as they took their place in the food-chain.

Quint turned and set off in the opposite direction as a troop of whooping silver-backed quarms swung through the trees and launched themselves at the hoglets.

Maris clasped her hands over her ears as the air filled with ferocious shrieks and frenzied snarls, and hurried after him. Over and under the fallen trees the pair of them scrambled, and back into the depths of the forest. They darted between thickets and scrabbled through tangled undergrowth; they picked their way over stepping stones in broad, shallow streams which Maris yearned to drink from, but that Quint forbade with a frown and a shake of the head. Soon they were hot and panting, with sweat beading their foreheads and trickling down their backs - and still there wasn’t an ironwood pine to be found.

Far, far above their heads, the sun was sinking lower in the sky and the light that managed to break through the forest canopy was casting ever-longer shadows …

‘It’ll be night soon,’ said Quint, stopping and wiping his face with his sleeve. ‘We’ll have to climb the first big tree we come to, whatever it is, and wait till morning.’

Maris sighed and let her head drop. ‘I’m so tired, Quint,’ she murmured. ‘And hungry, and thirsty …’ But Quint wasn’t listening. He was staring into the
gloom at the gnarled roots and trunks of the trees around them, as if assessing how difficult each one might be to climb, and how long it would take them.

Maris looked away. How sick she was of this terrible place, with its beautiful glades and hideous creatures. How she longed to be back on the
Galerider,
sitting down to a bowl of woodonion broth and a tumbler of sweet rainwater from the aft-deck water butts …

She paused. There, just within reach, was a large red woodsap, nestling in the leaves of the forest floor. It was smooth, ripe, without a blemish - and sitting there just waiting to be picked up. Maris’s mouth began to water uncontrollably. She knew just how deliciously succulent it would taste.

She looked up. Quint was a few strides away, staring up at the tumbling, curled root-stack of a tall sallowdrop tree.

She knew she shouldn’t … But what harm could it do? A large, red, juicy woodsap which had just dropped from a branch far above … If
she
didn’t pick it up, then it was sure to be snatched and devoured by some Deepwoods creature at any minute …

With a trembling hand, Maris stretched out towards the woodsap. Her clammy fingers closed around the ripe fruit…

Quint turned and shouted. ‘Maris! No!’

She tried to lift the woodsap, only to discover that it was strangely heavy. She tugged at it greedily, Quint’s desperate voice roaring in her ears.

‘No! No! No …’

Suddenly, the forest floor erupted from beneath Maris’s feet as a massive scaly creature rose up on thin spindly legs. At the same moment, Maris realized that the sweet, succulent woodsap clenched in her hand was in fact attached to a thick, knotted tentacle rooted in the creature’s broad, mud-coloured forehead. As she dangled from it, five enormous eyes opened and focused on the tempting morsel which had taken the bait. The creature opened its cavernous mouth and, with a whiplash jerk of the tentacle, tossed its victim high into the air.

Maris cried out with terror as she fell back towards the gaping maw. Then, just as she was about to be swallowed whole, a huge black ironwood pinecone shot through the air and embedded itself in the creature’s gaping gullet with a fleshy
spplaffi!

The creature’s jaws snapped shut. Maris landed with a heavy thud on its forehead and skidded off. The five eyes bulged and the tentacle with its woodsap-lure shot up straight in the air as the creature began to gurgle and choke on the heavy pinecone now lodged in its throat.

On the forest floor, gasping and winded, Maris looked up to see the hideous monster stumble forward on its long, spindly legs, a long broad fin of a tail swishing wildly behind it. Then, with a long, despairing gurgle, it slumped to the ground with a flat-sounding
splat
and lay motionless. The decoy woodsap on the end of the tentacle fell lifelessly at Maris’s feet.

She turned away from it in disgust, bile rising in her throat, only to see Quint, hands on his hips, beaming down at her delightedly.

‘Wh … wh … what
was
that?’ she gasped.

‘A landfish,’ smiled Quint, helping her to her feet. ‘An angler by the look of it - but no match for a well-aimed ironwood pinecone …’

‘Pinecone?’ said Maris in a dazed voice.

‘First thing that came to hand!’ said Quint, with a delighted laugh. ‘Look over there. There are hundreds of them beneath that…’

‘Ironwood pine!’ she screamed with joy, gazing up at the most magnificent tree she had ever seen. ‘It was right here all the time!’

She hugged Quint excitedly and the two of them did a little jumping jig for a few moments. The light had faded now to a grey dusk, which was darkening by the second. Quint and Maris stopped and craned their necks back.

The base of the ironwood pine’s trunk was ten times wider than the grandest tower in Sanctaphrax; a hundred times wider than the
Galerider’s
mighty mast; a thousand individuals it would take, each one clasping the hand of the next, to encircle it. And tall! The tree soared up into the sky, dwarfing all the others about it, before spearing the lofty canopy and standing proud above the rest.

Maris turned to Quint, her face suffused with happiness. ‘I’ll bet there isn’t a taller ironwood pine in all of the Deepwoods,’ she said.

‘You could well be right,’ said Quint, standing with his hands on his hips looking up at the tree. ‘There’s just one problem.’

‘What’s that?’ said Maris, suddenly serious.

Quint smiled at her. ‘The long, long climb ahead!’

• CHAPTER ELEVEN •
THE BEACON

They started straight away. The huge ironwood pine,
_L
in contrast to the blackwood, was surprisingly easy to climb. The bark of the tree was rough and scaly, and provided convenient foot- and hand-holds.

‘It’s as easy as climbing a staircase!’ said Maris in wonder, as they made their way up the trunk, soon leaving the darkening forest floor far behind.

‘Maybe so,’ said Quint, ‘but be careful of the resin.’

He pointed to cracks in the slab-like bark, from which a thick amber substance oozed in great globules.

Maris peered at one of the glistening drops of resin seeping from a deep fissure to her right. The great shimmering globule was almost as big as she was, but that wasn’t what made her gasp. No, what took her breath away was the sight of a rotsucker - its thin snout outstretched, its bat-like wings frozen in mid-flap, and its glowing eyes dim and unseeing - entombed within the resin.

As she followed Quint up the huge trunk towards the
first of the branches high above, Maris saw countless other Deepwoods creatures which had got trapped in the treacherous resin, from tiny woodants and termites, to plump quarms and bony weezits, all frozen in mid-step, flap or hop, and strangely beautiful in their amber prisons.