The Many-Coloured Land - 1 (45 page)

Following their trollish guide, the five travelers skirted the mountain ravines, following a tiny but very distinct trail, and passed through a part of the Black Forest that had nearly as many broadleaf trees as conifers. Wherever the Feldberg brooks slowed enough to pool there were bosky dingles clogged with tall ferns and alders, creeping clematis vines, and fall-blooming primroses with poisonously bright blossoms. They came to a hollow where the waters of a hot spring bubbled to the surface. Lush and unhealthy-looking vegetation crowded the steamy swale. A flock of ravens croaked a sardonic greeting from the half-eaten carcass of a small deer that lay near the edge of a mineral-encrusted puddle. More bones, some clean, some furred with thick moss, were strewn about the undergrowth.

Farther east, the rock formations began to change. Colored limestone outcroppings intruded amongst the granite. "Cave country," Claude remarked to Madame. They were walking side by side now, the path widening as they passed below a wooded cliff. The sun was warm; nevertheless, the paleontologist felt a subterranean chill. In the few places where the rock face was visible, they saw scarlet and blue swallows with long forked tails darting in and out of pocks in the limestone. Spiny-ribbed elephant-ears grew in dense patches beneath the trees. They sheltered clumps of distinctive mushrooms, white-stemed, red caps flecked in white.

"They are here," the old woman said abruptly. "All around us! Can you not feel them? So many! And all... deformed."

For a moment, he failed to catch the significance of what she was saying. But it fit, fit with the undercurrent of anxiety that had lurked at the edge of his consciousness ever since early morning. Fit with the surliness of the Bogle, whom Claude had mistaken for an ordinary Firvulag. "Les Criards," Madame said. "They follow us. One of them leads us. The Howling Ones."

The path led uphill at an easy slope, entirely free of debris. The swallows flickered among the firs and beeches. Great bars of golden lights slanted down into the forest as if through open windows.

The old woman said, "Such a beautiful place. But there is desolation here, mon vieux, a wretchedness of spirit that at once touches my heart and disgusts me. And it grows stronger."

He lent her his arm, for she was faltering, apparently for no physical reason. Her face had gone dead white. "We could ask the Bogle to stop," Claude suggested.

Her voice was dulled. "No. It is necessary to go on ... Ah, Claude! You should thank God for not making you sensitive to the emanations of other minds! All sentient beings have secret thoughts, those that remain hidden except to the good God. But there are other thoughts as well, pitched, as it were, on different psychic levels, the nonvocal speech, the currents and storms of emotion. This latter is what I am enveloped in now. It is a most profound enmity, a malevolence that can come only from the most distorted personalities. The Howling Ones! They hate other beings but they hate themselves so much more. And their howling fills my mind .."

"Can't you shut it out? Defend yourself as you did against the Hunt?"

"If I had been properly trained," she said forlornly. "But all that I know I have taught myself. I do not know how to counter this horde. They don't offer any concrete threat that I can seize upon." Her expression was very near panic. "All they do is hate. With all their strength ... they hate."

"Do they seem to be more powerful than ordinary Firvulag?"

"I cannot be sure of that. But they are different in some unnatural way. That is why I called them deformed. With the Firvulag, and even with the Tanu, human metapsychics can feel a certain mental kinship. It is no matter that the exotic is an enemy. But never could I be akin to these Criards! I have never before been so close to so many of them. Only rarely did we encounter them in our little enclave within the Vosges, and there they were wary. But these... I" Her voice broke off, harsh and too high-pitched. Her right fingers stroked the golden torc with a feverish urgency while those of her left hand dug painfully into Claude's arm. She kept darting her eyes from side to side, scanning the crags. There was nothing unusual to be seen.

Felice, who had been at the tail end of the line behind them, now closed the distance and announced, "I don't like this place at all. For the past half hour or so I've had the damnedest feeling. Nothing at all like those nervous fantods we got in the Fungus Forest, either. This time, there bloody well is something to be afraid of! Come on, Madame, what's going on?"

"The malign Firvulag, the Howlers, are all around us. Their mental projections are so powerful that even you, in your latent state, can perceive them."

The blonde athlete's mouth tightened to a straight line and her eyes flashed. In her unaccustomed buckskin garb, she looked like a schoolgirl playing at Red Indians. She asked Madame, "Are they getting ready to attack?"

"They will do nothing," the old woman replied, "without the permission of their ruler, Sugoll."

"Only mental intimidation, damn their eyes! Well, they don't scare me!" Felice unstrapped the bow from her pack and checked the arrows expertly without losing stride. The cliff had now become a crazy jumble of blocks and pinnacles with the rising of the land. The trees thinned. They could see far out over the intermontane valleys. Even the distant Alps were barely visible to the south. The Feldberg itself reared up another thousand meters above them, chopped off in a sheer precipice on its southeastern face as though some Titan had taken an axe to it, mutilating the symmetry of the smoothly rounded crown.

Up at the head of the line, the Bogle was holding up one hand. They had arrived at an alpine park, a meadow surrounded on all sides by steep rocks. Precisely in the center of the area was a haystack-shaped knoll of velvety black stone, veined with a weblike tracery of bright yellow.

"This is it," said the Bogle. "And here I gladly leave you."

He folded his arms and, scowling, faded from sight. The scowl lasted longer than the rest of him.

"Well, that's a hell of a..." Richard began the rounded torso and skinny limbs of the Bogle. Many hand disproportionately large hands and feet. Some of the bodies seemed twisted, as with spinal deformities; others had asymmetric bulges under well-made garments, hinting of tumorous growths or even concealed extra limbs. The heads were grotesque: pointed, flattened, ridged like tree bark, crested, even horn-bearing. Some were too large or too small for the supporting body, or monstrously ill-suited, as the tiny female head with the lustrous curls and lovely features that sat incongruously on the hunched form of a young chimpanzee. Almost all of the faces were hideous, warped or swollen or stretched beyond any semblance of humanoid normality. There were faces covered with red and blue wattles, with hair, with saurian scales, with weeping scabs, with cheeselike exudate. There were eyes bulbous, beady, stalked, misplaced, superfluous. Some of the creatures had mouths so wide as to be froglike; others lacked lips altogether, so that the stumps of rotted teeth were exposed in perpetual ghastly grins. Those mouths ranged from animal muzzles grafted onto otherwise normal skulls to improbable vertical slits, coiled trunks, and parrot beaks. They opened to show fat tusks, close-set narrow fangs, drooling gums, and tongues that might be black or fringed or even double or triple.

Very gently, the misbegotten throng howled again.

On the black rock now sat a fairly tall bald-headed man. His face was beautiful and his body, clad from neck to heel in a tight-fitting purple garment, that of a superbly muscled humanoid.

The howling ceased abruptly. The man said, "I am Sugoll, the lord of these mountains. Say why you come."

"We bring," Madame said in a barely audible voice, "a letter from Yeochee, High King of the Firvulag."

The bald man smiled tolerantly and held out one hand. Claude had to support Madame Guderian as she approached the rock.

"You are afraid of us," Sugoll observed as he perused the piece of vellum. "Are we so disgusting to human eyes?"

"We fear what your minds project," Madame said. "Your bodies can only stir our compassion."

"Mine is an Illusion, of course," said Sugoll "As the greatest of all these", he swept one arm to encompass the quivering mass of creatures, "I must naturally be their superior in all things, even in physical abomination. Would you like to see me as I really am?"

Claude said, "Mighty Sugoll, this woman has been severely affected by your mental emanations. I was once a life-scientist, a paleobiologist. Show yourself to me and spare my friends."

The bald man laughed. "A paleobiologist! See if you can classify me, then." He stood upright on his rock. Richard came and took Madame back, leaving Claude standing alone.

There was a brief flash and all of the humans except the old man were momentarily blinded.

"What am I? What am I?" Sugoll cried out "You'll never guess, human! You can't tell us and we can't tell you because none of us knows!" Peal after peal of mocking laughter rang out.

The handsome figure in purple was once again seated on his rock. Claude stood with feet widely planted, his head down on his breast and his lungs pumping. A trickle of blood oozed from his bitten lower lip. Slowly, he raised his eyes to meet Sugoll's.

"I do know what you are."

"What's that you say?" The goblin ruler hitched forward. In one lithe movement he vaulted to the ground and sprang close to Claude.

"I know what you are," the paleontologist repeated. "What all of you are. You are members of a race that is abnormally sensitive to the background radiation of the planet Earth. Even the Tanu and Firvulag who live in other regions have suffered reproductive anomalies because of this radiation. But you, you have compounded the problem by living here. I daresay you've drunk from the deep springs, with their juvenile water, as well as from the shallower fountains and the brooks of melted snow. You've probably made your homes in caverns", he pointed to the yellow -streaked knoll, "full of attractive black rocks like that one."

"It is so."

"Unless I miss my guess and my old memory bank's fritzed out, that rock is nivenite, an ore containing uranium and radium. The deep springs are likely to be radioactive, too. During the years that you people have lived in this region, you've exposed your genes to many times the radiation dose experienced by your fellow Firvulag. This is why you've mutated, why you've changed into ... what you are."

Sugoll turned and stared at the velvet-black rock. Then he threw back his beautifully formed illusionary skull and howled. All of his troll and bogle subjects joined in. This time the sound was not terrifying to the humans, only unbearably poignant.

At length, the Howling Ones ceased their racial dirge. Sugoll said, "On this planet, with only primitive genotechnology, there can be no hope for us."

"There is hope for generations unborn if you move away from here, say, into more northerly regions where there are no concentrations of dangerous minerals. For those of you alive today... well, you have your powers of illusion-making."

"Yes," the exotic ruler agreed, his voice flat. "We have our illusions." But then the implications of what Claude had said began to reveal their true import to him. He cried out, "But can it be true? What you said about our children?"

The old man said, "You need advice from an experienced geneticist. Any human with that background has probably been enslaved by the Tanu. All I can tell you is a few basic generalizations. Get out of this area to put a stop to new mutations. The worst of you are probably sterile. The fertile people will likely have recessives for normality. Inbreed the most normal among you to fix the alleles. Bring normal germ plasm into the population by mending your fences with the other Firvulag, the normal ones. You'll have to use your illusion-making powers to make yourselves attractive as potential mates, and you'll have to be socially compatible to encourage the mixing. That means no more bogey-man mentality."

Sugoll gave a bark of ironic laughter. "Your presumption passes belief! Emigrate from our traditional lands! Give up our mating traditions! Make friends with our old enemies! Marry them!"

"If you want to change your genetic pattern, that's the way to start. There's a long shot, too ... if we should ever manage to liberate humanity from the Tanu. There just might happen to be a human genetic engineer among the time-travelers. I don't know exactly how the Tanu Skin works, but it may be possible to utilize it to alter your grossly mutated bodies back into a more normal form. We were able to do this in some cases, using the regeneration-tanks of the future world that I came from."

"You have given us much to ponder." Sugoll was more subdued. "Some of the intelligence is bitter indeed, but we will think on it. Eventually, we will make our decision."

Madame Guderian now stepped forward and resumed her role of leader. Her voice was firm; her color had returned. "Mighty Sugoll, there is still the matter of our mission. Our request of you."

The exotic clenched his fist, which still held Yeochee's message. The vellum crackled. "Ah, your request! This royal command was useless, you know. Yeochee has no power here, but doubtless he did not care to admit it to you. I allowed you to enter our territory on a whim, curious as to the extremity that would make you take such a risk. We had planned to amuse ourselves with you before finally permitting you to die..."

"And now?" Madame inquired.

"What do you ask of us?"

"We seek a river. A very large one, rising in this area, which flows eastward until it reaches the great half-salty lagoons of the Lac Mer hundreds of kilometers from here. We hoped to travel upon this river to the site of the Ship's Grave."

There was a surprised chorus of howls.

"We know the river," Sugoll said. "It is the Ystroll, a truly mighty flood. We have a few legends of the Ship. Early in the history of our people on this world, we broke away from the main body of the Firvulag and sought independence in these mountains, away from the Hunting and the senseless annual slaughter of the Grand Combat."

Madame had to explain carefully the human complicity in the recent rise to dominance of the Tanu, as well as her own scheme to restore the old balance of power while freeing humanity. "But to do this, we must obtain certain ancient items from the crater of the Ship's Grave. If you will furnish us with a guide to the river, we believe that we will be able to locate the crater." "And this plan, when will you put it into effect? When might the human scientists be free of the Tanu yoke and able, if Teah wills, to help us?"