The Forest of Peldain

Chapter Thirteen

The day before Lord Vorduthe was to attempt his first immersion, Troop Leader Kana-Kem had approached him. The seaborne warriors were able to wander at will throughout Lakeside, on promise of good behavior. It was a minimum concession which Vorduthe had extracted in return for his cooperation.

Kana-Kem had been sitting in the shade of an arbor with several comrades, drinking a mildly intoxicating juice that was popular here—though in comparison with the distilled essence of sea-root they were used to consuming in shore taverns all around the Hundred Islands, it affected them scarcely at all. He caught up with Vorduthe as he came within sight of the green lake.

“I remind you of your pledge, my lord,” he said quietly but firmly. “When do we strike the treacherous snake down?”

“Have patience,” Vorduthe told him. “I have a deeper revenge in mind. It may be that I can destroy not only Octrago but this whole rotten kingdom as well. That will be his reward.”

He stood now on a mossy bank, Mistirea by his side. The sun shone strongly, halfway between zenith and horizon. Both men were naked. At their feet the edge of the lake rippled slightly in a strong breeze. The dull green water—which Mistirea said was not water at all—was opaque, making the lake look stagnant, though it gave off no smell.

No stream or rivulet fed the lake. Nevertheless Mistirea claimed that it never diminished: it did not evaporate. Rainwater would float on its surface, either to dry off or to be absorbed by the containing banks.

“The time has come,” Mistirea said. “Be confident. Let your mind be calm.”

Vorduthe made no answer. To his military mind the High Priest’s training had seemed strange and incongruous, though he had seen Arelian physicians employ something like it when preparing patients for surgery. By fixing the attention on a steady flame, the mind could sometimes be made oblivious of pain.

In his temple behind the palace, Mistirea had used a similar technique to concentrate Vorduthe’s mind, and then had taught him how to turn his consciousness inward. It was like diving into a deep pool, where phantasms of thought drifted. Farther and farther in he went, until thought vanished and there was only a kind of limpid darkness. That, Mistirea said, was where he might meet the soul of Peldain.

Water or not, the substance of the lake felt like water as they waded into it, refreshingly cool to their feet and legs. Then they plunged, and swam for the center.

Mistirea maintained his position with easy motions of his arms. They were floating over the lake’s deepest part.

“May the gods who guided you to us aid you now,” Mistirea said. “Dive! Dive!”

And Vorduthe dived.

Darkness closed in on him the moment his head slipped below the quiet surface. Not one ray of sunlight penetrated the lake. Down he went, arms streamlined against his sides as though he were diving off the coral atolls that gave Arelia its calm seas.

As he descended he put himself into the semi-trance state taught by Mistirea. The darkness grew darker and took on the lightless clarity he had come to know.

Momentarily his attention was distracted. The medium through which he sank became thicker with depth and impeded his motion. Soon he could thrust no deeper and came to a stop, suspended.

Once again he turned his mind inward. Unlike the upper levels, the surrounding fluid was at body temperature. He was losing the sense of his bodily outlines. An impression of beating heart and racing blood filled his consciousness, as though he had become a creature inhabiting his own internal organs. Then that, too, faded.

Mistirea had given him no inkling of what contact would be like, except that it was apt to be unexpected. The spirit of the forest had no solid body and manifested itself according to the mind of the inquirer.

Unexpected it was. Vorduthe almost forgot where he was, almost forgot the need to hold his breath. He was plunged into green light and a mass of green fronds and foliage that stretched away in all directions.

The verdant jungle was not still. It roiled and swelled. Monstrous mutational sports burst from it, quickly to subside and be replaced by others. Fear gripped Vorduthe at first; he thought he was back in the coastal forest. Then he realized that none of this actually touched him. He quieted himself.

In that quiet, he sensed the presence.

Like the jungle itself, it gave the impression of green: the dark, brooding green of the forest’s depths or of ancient ferns; the light green of southerly trees; the dazzling luminous green of the glassy gems found on volcanic slopes.

And yet nothing was really visible. The presence was at his shoulder, just outside his range of vision. Now it was here, now it was there. Or he was in a new world and that entire world was alive, in the same way that a person was alive, so that the presence was everywhere and it was nowhere.

But it was real. So real that Vorduthe found himself framing a question.

Where am I?

The answer came in sighs of wind, in the shush of waving fronds, in the rustle of foliage and the groan of slender tree limbs.

Where else but here?

Here is only illusion, Vorduthe replied.

Is it? If it is, then everything is illusion.

The voice was becoming strangely firmer. With each succeeding word it seemed to detach itself from leaf and stem, from fern and frond, to become a definite tone: a smooth, confident, green tone. Vorduthe could almost put a face to it, could feel a kind of personality behind it.

Without volition on his part, he plunged deeper into the jungle, which seemed to be of endless depth. Suddenly he was in a little glade, and here a pageant was presented to him. It reminded him of the mythic pageant played out yearly in Arelia, which told how Irkwele, the sky god, made the world. But here the pictures were mind pictures; some of them one could have drawn on sketching bark, some not.

He had already heard something of the story from Mistirea. The lake had poured itself from the sky, where it had once dwelt among the stars. It was a godlike intelligence that had created both the forest and the artifact trees. It had also placed people on the island, to live in harmony with the trees.

For many generations of Peldainians the spirit in the lake had been cooperative, receptive to the trained minds of successive high priests. But now it was growing stronger and intractable.

It was stretching, extending itself. It no longer wanted to be restrained. Peldain’s strange botany was its body, and that body wanted to grow. Peldain as a garden for intelligent animals to live in was an indulgence that no longer mattered. It was to become rank with life, and the mind-jungle surrounding Vorduthe boiled with eagerness.

Vorduthe was glad to see it. This was the revenge he had spoken of to Kana-Kem. He would encourage the spirit in the lake to choke the island.

But what was this… he had not counted on the forest being so voracious, so hungry for conquest. It had a greater lust for it than had King Krassos or any of his forebears. Vorduthe saw the forest rage unchecked and invade the sea, mutating all the time.

It would seize the whole world. In time, it would reach the Hundred Islands.

“So now there is a fresh mind to contend with,” the green voice said calmly. “Listen, you speak of illusions. You are troubled by dreams. Well, here is a dream.”

The viridescent jungle faded. Vorduthe felt his eyes close involuntarily. He was falling asleep.

When he awoke, he felt refreshed. He was lying on a low fleece-covered bed. A pleasant breeze, carrying the tang of the sea, drifted through a nearby open window.

His gaze fell on a ceiling of gaily painted timber, typically Arelian in design. Idly he let his eyes scan the rest of the room, and everything he saw he knew.

He was in his sleeping quarters in his villa, on the headland overlooking Arcaiss.

He leaped from the bed and strode to the window. Far below was the harbor, with trade ships floating at anchor. Partly obscured by the headland were the naval docks, and there he recognized some of the ships that had carried his expedition to Peldain.

The sun had not long risen, and cast dazzling streamers of gold on the flat sea.

For long moments Vorduthe stared at the vivid scene. He did not turn until he heard the sound of the door panel sliding open behind him. What he saw then sent his heart leaping.

The Lady Kirekenawe Vorduthe had stepped into the room. She wore a simple sleeping gown. Her hair fell about her shoulders, and she was smiling.

She moved with all the grace and suppleness he had once known and delighted in.

“I woke feeling different,” she said. “So I knew I would find you here.”

Vorduthe himself had slept naked, as was his habit. Her eyes were traveling with hungry anticipation over his body, which was stirring.

He reached out. She rushed to him, her body warm and pulsing.

Together, they fell upon the low bed.

The angle of the sunlight falling through the windows had dipped by the time they finished their exertions. They relaxed, luxuriating in each other’s aroma.

Suddenly she touched his lips with her fingers. “You must go now. It is time.”

“No,” he tried to say, but wife and villa rushed from him. He was in darkness, suspended in warm liquid. His lungs ached with the need for air.

No more than two minutes could have passed.

He struck out for the surface. Mistirea was floating there patiently, and he waited while Vorduthe filled his lungs and regained his strength.

Wordlessly they swam to the shore. The two men stood dripping by the lakeside, facing one another.

“You encountered the spirit,” Mistirea said. “I can see it in your eyes.”

“Yes.”

“Can you hold it in bounds?”

“I do not know.”

“You must understand how to influence the spirit,” Mistirea told him. “Its power is that of a god, but in nature it is elemental, like a young child. You must be the adult that commands that child.”

“It no longer is so,” Vorduthe said, shaking his head. “The spirit grows. It is maturing like a living creature. It has thrown off its childhood.”

Mistirea’s eyes blazed with alarm. “Then you must command it as one man commands another! As a king rules a subject! Impose your will!” His voice fell. “I know you have the strength to do this. I am not mistaken in my judgment.”

“Perhaps.”

“Do not deny it. I am not High Priest of the Lake for nothing. Tomorrow you will dive again.”

He handed Vorduthe a thick-napped cloth with which to dry himself. Vorduthe did so and clothed himself. But he refused to accompany Mistirea back to the temple.

Instead he climbed the hill above Lakeside and sat on the fringe of Cog Wood, looking down. He spent a while studying the lake, noting the way it was cupped by the sloping terrain as if it had indeed been dumped from above, supported by an embankment to the west.

If he quieted his mind, after the manner that Mistirea had taught him, he fancied he could almost sense currents of thought running through the network of pale branches over his head. He understood Cog Wood now, since his immersion in the lake’s mind-jungle. Within the twisted boughs were what amounted to nerves, and they linked up to form a continuous skein throughout the wood. It was an attempt by the lake, at some time in the past, to create a vegetable version of a brain. Perhaps, he thought, the spirit had intended to transfer itself from the lake to this brain, but the wood had proved unable to sustain consciousness. It was like an arboreal version of some sessile creature, stupid and unmoving, but mentally sensitive to what went on around it.

Apparently even Mistirea did not know the meaning of this past experiment. It, like the sculpted hill-maiden, created at a time when the forest had been much less extensive than it was now, had become lost in the mists of Peldain’s history. It never seemed to occur to Peldainians to make a record of events, so that after one generation all was usually forgotten.

Vorduthe’s state of enforced calm did not last long. When it broke, his brooding feelings came tumbling through. He still burned for revenge, sickened by Octrago’s treachery—even though he could, to a limited extent, understand the motive for the tortured prince’s actions.

He had it in his power to exact that revenge. But if he did, Arelia’s turn would come. Not immediately—not for a hundred years, perhaps. But it would come, and nothing could stop it.

On the other hand he could exert himself to tame the being in the lake. Vorduthe was used to sizing up a newly met personality, and he sensed that the lake’s was not yet stronger than his own. As Mistirea said, it was susceptible. But then, Peldain would be saved, secure within its forest barrier, and Octrago would have triumphed.

Also, Vorduthe could not forget that the lake had powers of persuasion of its own. The problem he contemplated was pushed from his mind by the sweet memory of the interlude the lake had bestowed, which put him in an agony of longing and shame. Longing, because for a brief time it had been as if that fateful accident with the barbsquid had never happened nearly five years ago, as if his wife had remained well and happy. Enthralling dream! Enticing, practically irresistible….

Shame, because even while enjoying the experience he had known that it was not real, and that he enjoyed it alone. In reality his wife lay half a world away, still paralyzed, knowing nothing of it.

He despised himself for such solitary indulgence.

A figure in an Arelian kilt was toiling up the slope. As he came nearer Vorduthe saw that it was Troop Leader Kana-Kem. His young face was determined-looking.

He spoke stubbornly. “Forgive me for following you here, my lord. But the men want to know what their orders are to be. Do we strike?”

“Strike?” queried Vorduthe.

“We have not been idle while you have been studying with the Peldainian priest, my lord.” Kana-Kem smiled. “We have been working on some of the local girls—they find us pleasing, and have little idea of secrecy. We have found out where the palace armory is. Our weapons are stored there, and much else besides. Now we have but to plan how to get at them.”

“I commend you, Troop Leader,” Vorduthe said thoughtfully. “What do you suggest we do then?”

“These people are soft, apart from a handful of warriors. We will not be taken by surprise a second time.”

“Just the same it would be a risky enterprise, with small chance of success.”

“If we do no more than put a sword in Octrago’s black heart it will be worth the effort, my lord.”

“Yes, we could do that.”

Kana-Kem seemed both puzzled and displeased by Vorduthe’s diffidence. “You spoke of destroying this kingdom, my lord. If we cannot win it for King Krassos then that is what we should do. What plan have you?”

“I had intended to arrange for the forest to strangle the whole island,” Vorduthe told him bluntly. “But you must keep that to yourself. Do you understand?”

The Troop Leader spent some time in absorbing this news. He nodded, frowning.

“But now,” Vorduthe added, “I am not sure. I am not sure… I will speak to you again presently.”

“The men grow impatient, my lord. You have not spoken to them for days, and they are feeling lost and angry. They will act on their own if you do not give them leadership.”

Even this threat of rebellion did not stir Vorduthe. “That is enough,” he said sharply. “I will speak to you presently.”

Kana-Kem turned and made his way back down the hill. Vorduthe stayed where he was, thinking as he watched the sun glint dully on the green lake below.

Overhead, the gnarled branches creaked in a sudden breeze.