The Many-Coloured Land - 1 (43 page)

"Fitharn!" Richard hissed Claude gave him an elbow in the ribs. Madame paid no attention to the interruption.

"The black monster dodged among the trees on the slope below me, coming ever closer, with the Hunt in hot pursuit. I have never in my life known such terror. My very soul seemed to shriek with it, although I uttered no sound. With all of my will I prayed for deliverance, clinging to the large branch of my cork tree with eyes tightly shut. There was a noise of carillons and thunderbolts, a buffeting wind, blinding flashes of light that penetrated my closed lids, smells of ordure and ozone and doping perfume. Every nerve end of mine seemed assaulted and overloaded, but still I willed myself to be safe.

-And the Hunt passed by. I knew that I was fainting, but my fingernails dug deeply into the soft cork bark and kept me from falling. There was darkness and I knew nothing. When I awoke... a little man in a tall hat stood beneath my tree looking up at me with starlight shining on his round cheeks and pointed nose. He called out, 'Well done, woman, you hid the both of us!"

Claude and the others had to laugh. Madame looked from one to the other in a kind of surprise, then shook her head and -allowed herself a small smile. "Fitharn took me in charge and we went to the underground home of one of his confreres, where we were safe from further harassment. Later, when I had recovered my wits, I had long conversations with the Little People and learned the true situation here in the Pliocene world. Because I am who I am, and because of the brief flash of strong metafunction I had shown in concealing us, Fitharn brought me at length to the Firvulag Court at High Vrazel in the Vosges. I proposed that the Firvulag take humans as their allies rather than bedevil them, as had been their custom since the opening of the time-gate. I contacted the soi-disant Low-life humans of the region in turn and convinced them of the wisdom of the alliance. We engineered several encounters with the gray-torcs to the Firvulag advantage, and the entente was confirmed. King Yeochee bestowed the golden torc upon me after our spies enabled his warriors to ambush and kill Iskender-Kernonn, the Lord of Animals, that same Turk who had earlier used his perverted talents in the service of the Tanu. After that, there were minor triumphs and major failures, refinements of planning, advances and setbacks. But always in my mind I have cherished the hope that one day I would be able to help undo the evil I have done."

There was a harsh little laugh from the dimness on the other side of the cypress trunk. Martha sat apart from the others in a forked branch. "How noble of you, Madame, to take all of our guilt upon yourself. And the atonement as well."

The old woman did not reply. She raised one hand to her neck and passed two fingers behind the golden collar as though trying to loosen it. Her deep-set eyes were glittering; but as always, the tears did not fall.

From the mudflats upstream came the basso bellowing of deinotherium elephants. Closer to the tree-refuge some other creature began reiterating a plaintive hoo-oh-hooo, hoo-ah-hooo. Large bats zipped among the palms that clustered on the high ground Over the backwaters, patches of mist had already coalesced and now extended thickening feelers toward the mainstream of the Rhine.

"Let's get out of here," Felice said abruptly. "It's dark enough now. We've got to be across the river before the moon shows over those mountains."

"Right," said Claude. "You and Richard help Martha down."

He held out his own hand to Angelique Guderian. Together they climbed from the tree and made their way to the water's edge.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Black Forest of Elder Earth was a thoroughly tamed woodland. When seen from a distance its firs and pines did appear dark; but within the twenty-second-century forest itself all was green and pleasant, with manicured pathways that tempted even the laziest hikers to indulge wanderlust without the threat of inconvenience. Only in the southernmost part of the range, around the Fekiberg and its sister peaks, did the terrain rise above a thousand meters. In the twenty-second century the Schwarzwald was thickly peppered with quaint resorts, restored castles, Kurhouser, and mountain villages where out-world visitors were welcomed by costumed inhabitants and mouthwatering Kirschtorten.

The Pliocene Schwarzwald was something else altogether.

Before the erosive action of small Pleistocene glaciers wore the range down, it was higher and more sinister. Facing the rift valley of the Proto-Rhine was an escarpment that rose sheeriy for almost a kilometer and a half, broken only by occasional narrow gorges cut by torrents from the highlands. Foot-travelers approaching the Black Forest from the river had to climb up one of these clefts, following precipitate gametrails or scrabbling over great blocks of granite sheathed in rampant greenery, kept moist even during the dry season by mists rising from chains of cascades. Able-bodied Firvulag hikers were known to have ascended the escarpment in eight hours. It took Madame Guderian and her crippled party three days.

Above the rim of the eastern horizon the true Black Forest began. Nearest the river, where strong winds blew down the trough from the Alps, the spruces and firs grew contorted into fantastic shapes. Some of the trunks resembled dragon coils or writhing brown pythons, or even humanoid giants frozen for ever in agony, their upper limbs woven together into a roof twenty or thirty meters above the ground.

Farther east, this Twisted Forest calmed and straightened. The land of the southern Schwarzwald rose rapidly toward a culminating crest more than two thousand meters high, with three eminences. On the flanks of the western slope were conifers of climactic proportions, white firs and Norway spruces seventy meters tall growing in ranks so dense that when one tree died, it could hardly find room to fall, but instead leaned against supportive neighbors until it decayed and fell to bits. Only rarely was there a break in the forest canopy that allowed Richard to plot their course from the sun or the North Star. They could find no obvious trail, so the ex-spacer had to lay one out, moving from landmark to tedious landmark, never able to get a line of sight more than fifteen or twenty meters long because of the denseness of the trees.

The understorey of this evergreen expanse received very little sun. Its dreary bluish twilight supported almost no low-growing green plants, only saprophytes nourished by the detritus of the great trees. Some of the things that battened on decomposition were degenerate flowering plants, pale stalks with nodding ghostly blooms of livid white, maroon, or speckled yellow; but paramount among the eaters of the dead were the myxomycetes and the fungi. To the five humans traveling through the Pliocene Black Forest it seemed that these, and not the towering conifers, were the dominant form of life.

There were quivering sheets of orange or white or dusty translucent jelly that crept slowly over the duff of needles and decaying wood like giant amebae. There were bracket fungi, from delicate pink ones resembling baby ears to stiff jumbos that jutted from the trunks like stair treads and were capable of bearing a man's weight. There were spongy masses of mottled black and white that enveloped several square meters of forest floor as though veiling some unspeakable atrocity. There were airy filaments, pale blue and ivory and scarlet, that hung from rotting limbs like tattered lacework. The forest harbored puffball globes two and a half meters in diameter, and others as small as pearls from a broken string. One variety of fungus cloaked decaying shapes in brittle husks resembling colored popcorn. There were obscene tilings resembling cancerous organs; graceful ranks of upright fans; counterfeit slabs of raw meat; handsome polished shapes like ebony stars; oozing diseased purple phalluses; faerie parasols blown inside out; furry sausages; and mushrooms and toadstools in varieties that seemed to be without number.

At night, they were phosphorescent.

It took the foot-travelers another eight days to traverse the Fungus Forest. During this time they saw no animal larger than an insect; but they would never cease to feel that invisible watchers lurked just outside their field of vision. Madame Guderian assured her companions again and again that the region was safe despite its ominous aspect. There was no source of food for predatory animals in the fungoid realm of life-in-death, much less support for Firvulag, who were notorious trencherfoik. The thickly matted upper branches made it impossible for the Flying Hunt to see anyone moving below. Other Lowlife scouting parties that had penetrated similar forests farther north in the range had reported them empty except for trees, the triumphant fungi, and their parasites.

But still there was the feeling.

They suffered and grumbled all through the ghastly woods, wading through soft growths that concealed treacherous, ankle-trapping holes. Richard declared that the spores in the air were choking him. Martha drooped in anemic silence after pestering Madame one time too many with a report that something was prowling among the giant toadstools. Claude caught a fierce case of jock itch that crept all the way up to his armpits. Even Felice was ready to scream out loud at the endless trek; she was sure that something was growing in her ears.

When they finally broke free of the Fungus Forest, all of them, even Madame, shouted with relief. They came into a brilliantly sunny alpine meadow that stretched north and south along the slope of an undulating crest. One bald tor rose from a ridge on their left; to the right were two more barren gray domes. Ahead of them and farther east was the rounded height of the Feldberg.

"Blue sky!" cried Martha. "Green grass!" Heedless of her disability, she went bounding over the flower-dotted alp and scrambled to the top of the eastern ridge, leaving the others to follow more slowly. "There's a little lake down there, not half a klom away!" she called. "And lovely normal trees! I'm going to soak and scrub myself and lie in the sun until I'm cooked to a frazzle. And I never want to see another mushroom again for as long as I live."

"Say again, sweetie," Richard agreed. "Not even a truffle."

They descended to the beautiful little tarn, icy cold in its depths but sun-warmed in shallower little pools around its rocky perimeter, and gave themselves up to the luxury of becoming clean again. Their filthy buckskins were left to soak in a tiny brook that ran from the lake down into the eastern valley. Shrieking like children, they went splashing and diving and swimming and wallowing.

Never since he had entered the Pliocene had Richard been so happy. First he swam to the other side of the tarn and back again. (It was only about fifty meters across.) He found a shallow pothole with the water warmed to precisely the right temperature and floated with the sun glaring redly behind his shut eyelids. Dark sand, scintillating like mica, floored his little pool. He took handfuls of it and rubbed his entire body, even his scalp. Then one last dash across the lake and out onto a hot granite slab to dry.

"You should have tried out for the Polity Olympics," Martha said.

He crept up a little higher on his rock and peered over the far edge. She was below him, lying flat on her stomach in a sheltered hollow and looking at him with one eye. Bright pink flowers grew in the crevices around her.

"How you feeling now?" Richard inquired. And he thought: Hey! She looked so different clean, relaxed, smiling with one corner of her mouth tilted higher than the other. "I'm much better," she said. "Why don't you come down?"

On the opposite shore of the lake, Claude and Madame Guderian lay side by side on decamole cots among the gentians and asters and harebells, baking the miseries out of their old bones and munching bilberries from the low-growing bushes that grew everywhere on the alpine meadow. A stone's throw away. Felice's pale-skinned form was bending in rhythmic exertions. There was a regular slapping sound as she beat their soiled clothing against the rocks of the little brook.

"Oh, to be young and energetic again," said Madame, a lazy smile upon her lips, "She has such enthusiasm for this mad expedition of ours, that little one. And what strength and patience she has shown with poor Martha. It is hard for me to credit your ominous assessment of Felice's character, mon vieux."

Claude grunted. "Just a little angel of mercy... Angélique, I've been doing some calculating."

"Sans blague?"

"This isn't funny. It's been fifteen days since we left Yeo-chee's court at High Vrazel. We took eleven of those days just to travel the thirty kloms from the Rhine to the crest of the Schwarzwald. I don't think we have a hope in hell of getting to the Ries inside of the four weeks' limit, even if we do contact Sugoll. There's probably another forty or fifty kloms of land travel ahead of us before we even reach the Danube. Then near two hundred kloms down the river to the Ries."

She sighed. "Probably you are right. But Martha is strong enough to keep up with the rest of us now, so we win press on nevertheless. If we are not back before the Truce begins, we will have to wait until another time to attack Muriah."

"We can't do it during the Truce?"

"Not if we hope for the assistance of the Firvulag. This Truce, which covers periods of a month prior to and following the Grand Combat week, is deeply sacred to both exotic races. Nothing win induce them to fight each other during Truce time. It is the time when an of their warriors and Great Ones go to and from the ritual battle, which is held on the WhiteSilver Plain near the Tana capital. Of course, in olden tunes, when Firvulag sometimes triumphed in the yearly contest, the Little People might host the games on their own Field of Gold. It lies somewhere in the Paris Basin, near a large Firvulag city named Nionel. Since the Tanu expansion, the place has been virtually abandoned. It has not hosted the Combat in forty years."

"I should think it would be good tactics to go after the mine when the Tanu are out of town. Do we really need the Firvulag?"

"We do," she said starkly. 'There are only a handful of us and the ruler of Finiah never leaves the mine completely undefended. There are always silvers and grays there, and some of the silvers can fly.