The tree he ended up in wasn’t the best he could have done, had he the light to choose, but it should do the job. A sycamore, he guessed, or a near relative. About eighty feet tall, ancient, gnarled, and full-limbed.
The night was black as a paymaster’s heart, and humid as an overfull transport crawler in the tropics. His mechanical eye was no more help than his biological — the only mode he might have used that would do any good at this point would have lit him up like a shore leave saloon to every sensor within two hundred klicks. If there were sensors anywhere within two hundred million. Trouble was, he didn’t know, and beat up as he was, he wasn’t in any kind of hurry to find out. Just because he hadn’t seen any hostiles, didn’t mean there weren’t any.
He was thirsty again, and wishing he’d had sense to fashion some sort of water container back at the glade. Hell, he chided himself. While you’re at it, why not moan about not having made yourself some boots, or a new rifle?
He was up as high into the tree as he could get, swaying back and forth uncomfortably as he tried to settle himself more or less securely into a fork in the trunk, apologizing to the tree for the commotion before he could catch himself. He shook his head silently, feeling foolish and self-conscious now, to go along with the pain and weariness. Why? He was, he finally admitted to himself, feeling foolish because he was falling into old habits that his commanders had long since convinced him were superstitious nonsense. Sylvan
What had he been thinking? Something.... Someone? His head hurt suddenly, as though he’d been on a coffee jag, and a bad taste flooded his mouth. If only he could remember....
The tree was swaying in a freshening breeze as full night closed unseen upon the forest, and he forgot what he’d been trying to remember — hastening, instead to lash himself to the trunk with the vines he’d cut along the trail below, remembering belatedly that he’d apologized to those plants as well, and had thanked them for their aid.
Sylvan would have called them “brother vine”, of course, and wouldn’t have thought it the least funny. He’d always been doing things like that — thanking the sun and the sky, talking to the ground and plants as though they could hear and understand. Even when they’d made a kill, he’d pause with his hand on the animal’s flank or shoulder and thank it for giving up its life that his family might eat. The man in the tree was trying not to remember how young Brae had done the same, with the same lack of embarrassment, and for the same reasons. Those thoughts sent him down the path of remembrance, which led, in turn, to the headaches.
He fell asleep still trying not to remember, and never noticed as the branches surrounding him moved to cradle him more tightly.
* * *
“That’s it, then,” Swallow Courting whispered. “It’s gotten itself up a saianid. Shall we wait here until morning so we can look at the bones? They might tell us something.”
“We’ll wait,” Thrush Dancing assured her sister. “Although I’m not altogether sure t’will be bones we find in the morning.”
“How can you not be?” Swallow demanded, waving an arm toward the object of discussion. “The saianid won’t stand for any hairy wanderers squatting upon its branches as though it were an inn beside the road. Surely you know that, scholarly sister?”
“I know that this thing isn’t any thing we’ve ever seen upon the world, miss speaks with sprites,” Thrush shot back.
Swallow’s eyes went wide at the barb. Speaks with sprites? Her? Then her eyes narrowed with the challenge as she gathered in a suitably biting rejoinder. But Thrush beat her to it.
“How many impossible things have you seen today, Swallow?”
Caught within a maelstrom of possible retorts, Swallow had to stop and blink her head clear. “Impossible things?”
“Aye, sister,” Thrush responded. “And would one more impossible thing surprise you so utterly?”
“But it’s a sai-a-nid,” Swallow repeated slowly, drawing out the syllables as though teaching a new word to a child. “It is intelligent and owns powerful magicks. And it hates man children.”
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“You’re assuming that this thing is a man child.”
“What else could it be?”
“I thought that was what we were trying to find out?”
* * *
The sun never really penetrated enough of the canopy to rise, or even shine, but the lessening of the gloom was noticeable nonetheless, and the soldier’s eyes opened to an emerald haze that sent his heart thumping. It was a second or so before he realized he was no longer twelve years old and no longer in the high Sierras. Still, there was a sense of peace in the air that tasted of home, and he took the time to open himself to it.
The vines had loosened during the night, but since there were far more branches cradling him than he’d originally realized, he was in no danger of falling. He even found a handful of water within a hollow of one of the larger branches. Woody and tasting of must, it outshone the best bottled spring water he’d ever squandered hard-earned pay on. He spit out a crumble of bark and realized he was smiling. At least he thought he was smiling. It had been so long since he’d tried it, that it was hard to be sure.
“Thank you father tree,” he patted the trunk fondly and not the least bit self-conscious, “for your excellent hospitality. I cannot remember a better awakening. I have to go now, but know that I will remember you fondly.
* * *
The sisters watched in wonderment as the thing climbed nimbly down the great trunk of the saianid, seemingly none the worse for the wear.
“One,” Swallow hissed.
“What?”
“I thought we were keeping track of the impossible things we see in a day?” Swallow said.
The thing reached the ground with a light spring, the blue of it’s garb catching the least of the light and throwing it wildly back. It had taken only a few steps toward the road, however, before it stopped and turned, regarding the saianid calmly. “Oh, and the next time you and God are talking? Put in a good word for me? I can use all the help I can get!”
“Two,” Thrush Dancing’s voice was low and intense.
“What did it say?”
“How should I know,” Thrush didn’t turn her head. “It sounded like gibberish to me. But green and leafy understood, didn’t he. Look at him preen! Like he’d been proclaimed king of the wood.” The saianid’s leaves were rustling furiously, as though some invisible wind were blasting, and the trunk seemed to quiver. “I so wish we could send for the tree talker,” Thrush lamented.
“Later, if you’re so interested,” Swallow reassured her. “It isn’t as though the saianid will be hard to find again, living right here by the road and all. Meanwhile, do we follow?”
* * *
The trader eyed the shredded jacket angrily. The smell was wrong. The feel was wrong. The look was wrong. Everything about this whole thing was wrong. And he was the one it had fallen upon to deal with such compounded wrongness.
“Here,” his wife’s voice intruded upon his anger.
He turned. She stood at the edge of the wound in the forest, beside a torn live oak. He stomped over to stand beside her and glare at the bloody hand print upon the trunk.
“Blood for blood?” he grimaced. “Who does that anymore? And why would they honor it if anyone did?”
The woman shrugged expansively. “You see it, do you not? The spoor is obviously that of a man child, and there is the blood. And there,” she indicated the slit within the basketwork of limbs that was still in the process of unweaving itself, “is the way they opened for it.”
He saw no such thing. Obvious the spoor might be, but man child it was not. Still, it was clear that the area she had indicated was much farther along in its unweaving than the rest of the perimeter, and that it was the way the creature had taken.
“I can’t find a place where it came in, Daddy,” the trader’s daughter called from the far side of the clearing.
He turned from the thing’s trail and pointed at the pile of rags in the clearing’s center. “It came in right there, daughter,” he gestured impatiently. “T’was its entering caused this clearing I’ll wager. That was the magic we felt from the king’s road.”
“What do we do about it?” His wife asked quietly from behind him.
He spoke without turning, his voice low, but still hard. “What can we do? The spoor resembles that of a man child in a broad fashion, but the blood says otherwise, as does the rest of this mess,” he pulled a shard of something neither metal nor wood nor stone from the bole of the live oak and fingered its texture before flinging it toward the rag pile. “And that!,” he flung a hand toward the foreshortened, basket-hilted sword-like thing, still burning with a strange green flame. “What are we to even make of that?
“No,” he shook his head again. “There’s naught we can do but follow. How else can we know for sure?”
“But what about Clairbourne?” his daughter demanded half-petulantly. “We were supposed to be in Clairbourne already!”
This time he did turn, hands going to his hips. He’d heard rumors among the pack concerning her. Had a beau in Clairbourne, they said. He’d been pooh poohing them until now. But looking at her....
“Thorne,” he barked.
“Aye,” the taller of the two bravos responded from his perusal of the strange tool with the thunderer stock.
“Rejoin the caravan, and do you tell Wallach to go on without us. We’ll be busy for awhile,” eyes never leaving his daughter’s crumpling face. “But do you have him set the grey widow to scrying for us, for we might yet need all the band to us if this thing turns out other than a mortal man.”
“Aye,” Thorne repeated, renowned for his garrulousness. He dropped the ruined rifle and set off without another word.