The Word for World is Forest (16 page)

Davidson put his hand to his holster. The revolver was not in it.

He’d had it in his hand, in case Post or Aabi acted up. It was not in his hand. It must be up in the helicopter with his torch.

He stood crouching, immobile; then abruptly began to run. He could not see where he was going. Tree-trunks jolted him from side to side as he knocked into them, and roots tripped up his feet. He fell full length, crashing down among bushes. Getting to hands and knees he tried to hide. Bare, wet twigs dragged and scraped over his face. He squirmed farther into the bushes. His brain was entirely occupied by the complex smells of rot and growth, dead leaves, decay, new shoots, fronds, flowers, the smells of night and spring and rain. The light shone full on him. He saw the creechies.

He remembered what they did when cornered, and what Lyubov had said about it. He turned over on his back and lay with his head tipped back, his eyes shut. His heart stuttered in his chest.

Nothing happened.

It was hard to open his eyes, but finally he managed to. They just stood there: a lot of them, ten or twenty. They carried those spears they had for hunting, little toy-looking things but the iron blades were sharp, they could
cut right through your guts. He shut his eyes and just kept lying there.

And nothing happened.

His heart quieted down, and it seemed like he could think better. Something stirred down inside him, something almost like laughter. By God they couldn’t get him down! If his own men betrayed him, and human intelligence couldn’t do any more for him, then he used their own trick against them—played dead like this, and triggered this instinct reflex that kept them from killing anybody who took that position. They just stood around him, muttering at each other.
They couldn’t hurt him
. It was as if he was a god.

“Davidson.”

He had to open his eyes again. The resin-flare carried by one of the creechies still burned, but it had grown pale, and the forest was dim gray now, not pitch-black. How had that happened? Only five or ten minutes had gone by. It was still hard to see but it wasn’t night any more. He could see the leaves and branches, the forest. He could see the face looking down at him. It had no color in this toneless twilight of dawn. The scarred features looked like a man’s. The eyes were like dark holes.

“Let me get up,” Davidson said suddenly in a loud, hoarse voice. He was shaking with cold from lying on the
wet ground. He could not lie there with Selver looking down at him.

Selver was emptyhanded, but a lot of the little devils around him had not only spears but revolvers. Stolen from his stockpile at camp. He struggled to his feet. His clothes clung icy to his shoulders and the backs of his legs, and he could not stop shaking.

“Get it over with,” he said. “Hurry-up-quick!”

Selver just looked at him. At least now he had to look up, way up, to meet Davidson’s eyes.

“Do you wish me to kill you now?” he inquired. He had learned that way of talking from Lyubov, of course; even his voice, it could have been Lyubov talking. It was uncanny.

“It’s my choice, is it?”

“Well, you have lain all night in the way that means you wished us to let you live; now do you want to die?”

The pain in his head and stomach, and his hatred for this horrible little freak that talked like Lyubov and that had got him at its mercy, the pain and the hatred combined and set his belly churning, so he retched and was nearly sick. He shook with cold and nausea. He tried to hold on to courage. He suddenly stepped forward a pace and spat in Selver’s face.

There was a little pause, and then Selver, with a kind
of dancing movement, spat back. And laughed. And made no move to kill Davidson. Davidson wiped the cold spittle off his lips.

“Look, Captain Davidson,” the creechie said in that quiet little voice that made Davidson go dizzy and sick, “we’re both gods, you and I. You’re an insane one, and I’m not sure whether I’m sane or not. But we are gods. There will never be another meeting in the forest like this meeting now between us. We bring each other such gifts as gods bring. You gave me a gift, the killing of one’s kind, murder. Now, as well as I can, I give you my people’s gift, which is not killing. I think we each find each other’s gift heavy to carry. However, you must carry it alone. Your people at Eshsen tell me that if I bring you there, they have to make a judgment on you and kill you, it’s their law to do so. So, wishing to give you life, I can’t take you with the other prisoners to Eshsen; and I can’t leave you to wander in the forest, for you do too much harm. So you’ll be treated like one of us when we go mad. You’ll be taken to Rendlep where nobody lives any more, and left there.”

Davidson stared at the creechie, could not take his eyes off it. It was as if it had some hypnotic power over him. He couldn’t stand this. Nobody had any power over him. Nobody could hurt him. “I should have broken your neck right away, that day you tried to jump me,” he said, his voice still hoarse and thick.

“It might have been best,” Selver answered. “But Lyubov prevented you. As he now prevents me from killing you.—All the killing is done now. And the cutting of trees. There aren’t trees to cut on Rendlep. That’s the place you call Dump Island. Your people left no trees there, so you can’t make a boat and sail from it. Nothing much grows there any more, so we shall have to bring you food and wood to burn. There’s nothing to kill on Rendlep. No trees, no people. There were trees and people, but now there are only the dreams of them. It seems to me a fitting place for you to live, since you must live. You might learn how to dream there, but more likely you will follow your madness through to its proper end, at last.”

“Kill me now and quit your damned gloating.”

“Kill you?” Selver said, and his eyes looking up at Davidson seemed to shine, very clear and terrible, in the twilight of the forest. “I can’t kill you, Davidson. You’re a god. You must do it yourself.”

He turned and walked away, light and quick, vanishing among the gray trees within a few steps.

A noose slipped over Davidson’s head and tightened a little on his throat. Small spears approached his back and sides. They did not try to hurt him. He could run away, make a break for it, they didn’t dare kill him. The blades were polished, leaf-shaped, sharp as razors. The noose tugged gently at his neck. He followed where they led him.

Selver had not seen Lyubov for a long time. That dream had gone with him to Rieshwel. It had been with him when he spoke the last time to Davidson. Then it had gone, and perhaps it slept now in the grave of Lyubov’s death at Eshsen, for it never came to Selver in the town of Broter where he now lived.

But when the great ship returned, and he went to Eshsen, Lyubov met him there. He was silent and tenuous, very sad, so that the old carking grief awoke in Selver.

Lyubov stayed with him, a shadow in the mind, even
when he met the yumens from the ship. These were people of power; they were very different from all yumens he had known, except his friend, but they were much stronger men than Lyubov had been.

His yumen speech had gone rusty, and at first he mostly let them talk. When he was fairly certain what kind of people they were, he brought forward the heavy box he had carried from Broter. “Inside this there is Lyubov’s work,” he said, groping for the words. “He knew more about us than the others do. He learned my language and the Men’s Tongue; we wrote all that down. He understood somewhat how we live and dream. The others do not. I’ll give you the work, if you’ll take it to the place he wished.”

The tall, white-skinned one, Lepennon, looked happy, and thanked Selver, telling him that the papers would indeed be taken where Lyubov wished, and would be highly valued. That pleased Selver. But it had been painful to him to speak his friend’s name aloud, for Lyubov’s face was still bitterly sad when he turned to it in his mind. He withdrew a little from the yumens, and watched them. Dongh and Gosse and others of Eshsen were there along with the five from the ship. The new ones looked clean and polished as new iron. The old ones had let the hair grow on their faces, so that they looked a little like huge, black-furred Athsheans. They still wore
clothes, but the clothes were old and not kept clean. They were not thin, except for the Old Man, who had been ill ever since the Night of Eshsen; but they all looked a little like men who are lost or mad.

This meeting was at the edge of the forest, in that zone where by tacit agreement neither the forest people nor the yumens had built dwellings or camped for these past years. Selver and his companions settled down in the shade of a big ash-tree that stood out away from the forest eaves. Its berries were only small green knots against the twigs as yet, its leaves were long and soft, labile, summer-green. The light beneath the great tree was soft, complex with shadows.

The yumens consulted and came and went, and at last one came over to the ash-tree. It was the hard one from the ship, the Commander. He squatted down on his heels near Selver, not asking permission but not with any evident intention of rudeness. He said, “Can we talk a little?”

“Certainly.”

“You know that we’ll be taking all the Terrans away with us. We brought a second ship with us to carry them. Your world will no longer be used as a colony.”

“This was the message I heard at Broter, when you came three days ago.”

“I wanted to be sure that you understand that this is a
permanent arrangement. We’re not coming back. Your world has been placed under the League Ban. What that means in your terms is this: I can promise you that no one will come here to cut the trees or take your lands, so long as the League lasts.”

“None of you will ever come back,” Selver said, statement or question.

“Not for five generations. None. Then perhaps a few men, ten or twenty, no more than twenty, might come to talk to your people, and study your world, as some of the men here were doing.”

“The scientists, the speshes,” Selver said. He brooded. “You decide matters all at once, your people,” he said, again between statement and question.

“How do you mean?” The Commander looked wary.

“Well, you say that none of you shall cut the trees of Athshe: and all of you stop. And yet you live in many places. Now if a headwoman in Karach gave an order, it would not be obeyed by the people of the next village, and surely not by all the people in the world at once. . . .”

“No, because you haven’t one government over all. But we do—now—and I assure you its orders are obeyed. By all of us at once. But, as a matter of fact, it seems to me from the story we’ve been told by the colonists here, that when
you
gave an order, Selver, it was obeyed by
everybody on every island here at once. How did you manage that?”

“At that time I was a god,” Selver said, expressionless.

After the Commander had left him, the long white one came sauntering over and asked if he might sit down in the shade of the tree. He had tact, this one, and was extremely clever. Selver was uneasy with him. Like Lyubov, this one would be gentle; he would understand, and yet would himself be utterly beyond understanding. For the kindest of them was as far out of touch, as unreachable, as the crudest. That was why the presence of Lyubov in his mind remained painful to him, while the dreams in which he saw and touched his dead wife Thele were precious and full of peace.

“When I was here before,” Lepennon said, “I met this man, Raj Lyubov. I had very little chance to speak with him, but I remember what he said; and I’ve had time to read some of his studies of your people, since. His work, as you say. It’s largely because of that work of his that Athshe is now free of the Terran Colony. This freedom had become the direction of Lyubov’s life, I think. You, being his friend, will see that his death did not stop him from arriving at his goal, from finishing his journey.”

Selver sat still. Uneasiness turned to fear in his mind. This one spoke like a Great Dreamer.

He made no response at all.

“Will you tell me one thing, Selver. If the question doesn’t offend you. There will be no more questions after it. . . . There were the killings: at Smith Camp, then at this place, Eshsen, then finally at New Java Camp where Davidson led the rebel group. That was all. No more since then. . . . Is that true? Have there been no more killings?”

“I did not kill Davidson.”

“That does not matter,” Lepennon said, misunderstanding; Selver meant that Davidson was not dead, but Lepennon took him to mean that someone else had killed Davidson. Relieved to see that the yumen could err, Selver did not correct him.

“There has been no more killing, then?”

“None. They will tell you,” Selver said, nodding toward the Colonel and Gosse.

“Among your own people, I mean. Athsheans killing Athsheans.”

Selver was silent.

He looked up at Lepennon, at the strange face, white as the mask of the Ash Spirit, that changed as it met his gaze.

“Sometimes a god comes,” Selver said. “He brings a new way to do a thing, or a new thing to be done. A new kind of singing, or a new kind of death. He brings this across the bridge between the dream-time and the
world-time. When he has done this, it is done. You cannot take things that exist in the world and try to drive them back into the dream, to hold them inside the dream with walls and pretenses. That is insanity. What is, is. There is no use pretending, now, that we do not know how to kill one another.”