The Forest of Peldain

Chapter Fifteen

The tinctures exuded by the medicine trees, the chief aid of Peldainian physicians, no longer were able to sustain the ailing King Kerenei. An air of ceremonial sadness fell over Lakeside at the news of his impending death, mingled with the expectation of his young, vigorous son’s accession.

But although Askon Octrago’s extraordinary exploit in bringing the foreigners to Peldain had advanced his reputation, the easy-going life of Lakeside was not too much disturbed by these events. Early one morning Vorduthe was visited by Troop Leaders Donatwe Mankas and Wirro Kana-Kem. They walked together through the tree-town. Multicolored blossoms, their perfume ever-present, fell from the arbors and drifted constantly in the air. All around were the parked tree-dwellings, the greater structures that were used as communal meeting places, somewhat of a cross between gardens and taverns. Also there were small workshops where such work as there was to be performed in Peldain was done, and storehouses for food provided by the trees.

No payment was ever demanded for services rendered. The inhabitants were allotted to work as needed, by the authority deriving from the king.

Vorduthe and his companions walked through a crowd of playing children. “We are reaching the point of no return, my lord,” Donatwe Mankas complained. “Some of the men are taking wives. Children are on the way. Soon they will feel settled here and will have no stomach to fight. And now Octrago is to be king! Have you given up, my lord? Are we not to strike at all?”

With all the squadron commanders gone, the two remaining troop leaders instinctively spoke up as boldly as if they had held the rank. Indeed, either of these two would make a match for Mendayo Korbar. Kana-Kem glanced at Vorduthe but said nothing. He had never repeated what Vorduthe had told him about his plan to destroy all Peldain, had never even asked what he had eventually decided, but it was plain the warrior thought much.

When he saw these innocent children at play, when he thought of all the blameless families on this island, Vorduthe wondered if he would in fact have the heart to let the entity in the lake proceed, squeezing the habitable area of the island smaller and smaller.

Yet the Eye of Peldain held him to his bargain. Every day he dived into its turbid, tepid depths, and it was as if he dived straight into a secret land below the lake; he no longer encountered the entity at all.

The seeming hours he spent with his wife Kirekenawe meant far more to him than the remaining day here in Lakeside, which paradoxically took on the aspect of a drab dream in comparison. They sailed and swam, they dived in the shallow coral reefs abounding in the Hundred Islands. Sometimes they found themselves somewhere in Arelia, even in Arcaiss—but never again did they meet in their villa: neither of them wanted to come upon the helpless form of Kirekenawe in her quarters. The favorite venue, whether selected by the lake or unconsciously by themselves, was an idyllic little island Vorduthe had never in fact seen, and which he was fairly sure did not really exist: a paradisiacal setting complete with lawn-like meadows, perfumed trees and leaping deer.

Only when pressed did Kirekenawe give him news of the rebellion that King Krassos was fighting to contain. The sea battle, apparently, had been inconclusive. Early on Vorduthe had caught a brief glimpse of damaged and partly burned ships in the harbor. He gathered, however, that there was no immediate danger, and he felt confident that Arelians, as always, would prevail.

Today’s would be the sixtieth sojourn, in the dream life, in the distant Hundred Islands.

Vorduthe stopped walking. He looked at the troop leaders one after the other. “You are forgetting that with Octrago’s accession to the throne the situation will be changed. He will be in a position to redeem his oath of allegiance. He promised to engineer a way through the forest so as to give regular communication with Arelia, and he should be given a chance to prove his word.”

“The project is impossible,” Kana-Kem said flatly. “In any case, only a fool would trust him.”

These words were close to insubordination. “Enough!” Vorduthe snapped. “I, and I alone, will decide on any action.”

Dismissing them, he strode toward the lake.

All Vorduthe’s misgivings vanished as the lake’s surface closed over his head. A poignant feeling assailed him. Then his consciousness was drawn inward, into sleeplike trance.

He “awoke” on their dream island. He was standing under a water-fruit tree, near a patch of silky tassel-fern. A young leaping-deer with a dappled fawn-colored coat nibbled the moss.

He did not see Kirekenawe at first. But suddenly there she was, gazing at him from the edge of a small grove. Her smile, as he caught sight of her, was wistful, almost pained. She wore nothing but a short kilt of blue-and-purple grass, whose strands moved sensuously as she came toward him.

“Quickly!” she said breathlessly. “Quickly!”

He let her draw him into the silver tassel fern and they sank down in its softness. It was a perfect bed for love-making, and she gripped him with a desperate ardor, more intense than she had ever shown him.

Usually she liked to prolong the pleasure but now she worked her body with impatient eagerness to satisfy them both as soon as possible. Then, her skin filmed with perspiration, she lay back gasping, gazing at him with soft, sad eyes.

When she had caught her breath she sat up. “Husband, there is little time,” she said. “This is our last meeting.”

“What are you saying?” he growled in alarm.

Sorrowfully she sighed, shaking her head. “It is not fitting that I should hide the truth from you now, at the very end. I have been less than honest with you—I did not want our newfound happiness to be marred by something we could do nothing to change.”

While he stared at her aghast she went on: “The sea battle against the rebels went worse than I told you. It broke Arelia’s naval strength. Since then the savages have taken island after island… how could I tell you this, and make you unhappy? Now the worst has happened. The savages have landed on Arelia… King Krassos is dead, Arcaiss is burning and I can smell the smoke… the Orwanians have reverted to cannibalism, husband…”

Vorduthe recalled with a shock his drugged dream in the forest. “You must have yourself moved at once to a place of safety,” he ordered.

“Too late, they are in the house. I hear the servants being murdered. In moments they will enter my room. Good-bye, husband. I die in happiness, knowing what we have enjoyed together!”

“No!”

Vorduthe clutched at his wife. But suddenly she was not there. He was alone in the tassel bed that was hollowed out by the press of their bodies.

“No!”

This time he cried his protest at the sky. And as if in answer, the world around him trembled and flurried. There was an impression of swift motion. Then he seemed to be looking down on the room where his paralyzed wife lay.

It was impossible to read any emotion in her impassive face. One servant remained with her: a young waiting girl who crouched near her mistress wearing an expression of stark terror. She shrieked as into the room there burst a band of grinning brown-skinned Orwanian primitives, their teeth filed, practically naked except for their weapons.

Laughing, three savages dragged away the kicking, screaming servant girl. The rest turned their attention to Kirekenawe, stripping off the sheet that covered her, playing with her white body. They seemed puzzled at first that she did not move. Then, reaching agreement, they carried her down to the courtyard, where fires had been lit under cooking grids… and one Orwanian took a black flint knife to slice off her nose and chew it raw….

At this fulfillment of his earlier premonitory vision Vorduthe’s spirit recoiled into the sky among the wheeling birds. The majestic nazarine blue rippled, went dark, and then he seemed to break through a barrier and knew that for him the dream was over.

Images assailed him. He had caught the entity in the lake unawares and knew that the dream had been no fiction; it really had happened—was happening. He saw too how the entity viewed Thelessa: as a dazzling oceanic jewel, a world sapphire, a paradise whose climate varied scarcely at all throughout the year, whose waters remained gentle and pacific. By comparison Vorduthe caught a sense of what other worlds in the heavens were like, tilted somehow with respect to the sun so as to produce extremes of heat and cold all in the same latitude; their seas sloshed about pendulum-like by the near presence of yet other worlds that loomed visibly in their skies.

The entity claimed the whole of Thelessa as its territory, regardless of any bargain struck with Vorduthe. Peldain was to be turned into a single riotous jungle where the vegetable products of a fevered imagination would be given full rein. If any human beings survived, it could only be as hunted animals.

I should have brought you back sooner. I have been inattentive.

The green-gold voice was as smooth and calm as ever, but behind it, keeping pace with its words, was an elemental rage that could not be contained or disguised, a tempest of ever-changing plant growth. The soul in the lake, once a man, had lost its humanity long ago. Vorduthe could dimly understand why. The descent into the subconscious involved a descent into primeval forces. The entity had surrendered itself to the raw wish of primitive life to survive and grow at the expense of anything else.

I see you have resolved to take the part of the High Priest, at last, the voice continued. You think you can control me.

In his anger and grief Vorduthe was indeed ready to fight the entity for mastery. But the voice only chuckled.

It is too late, Lord Vorduthe of Arelia. When first you dived into this lake you might have succeeded. But love made you delay, and now I have learned to avoid your will, just as I once learned to avoid Mistirea’s. So good-bye, Lord Vorduthe, noble of Arelia.

The voice faded and Vorduthe found himself out of trance state and alone in pitch darkness, warm liquid all around. His lungs had not yet reached the limit of their endurance, but he knew that the entity would never admit him into its presence again.

The lake’s stratagem had worked. While Vorduthe was distracted with delight in Kirekenawe it had been familiarizing itself with his psyche, absorbing a part of him so that his mind could not be used as a weapon against it. It was maturing fast. Probably, Vorduthe thought, no one would ever influence it again.

It was time to depart. For the last time he soared, toward daylight and fresh air.

The High Priest’s eyes became hollow as Vorduthe, standing dripping on the lake’s mossy shore, confessed his failure.

“Yes, I had thought there was something wrong,” he said in a ghostly voice. “So it was all for nothing. Peldain will die.”

“No,” Vorduthe said. “There is still something we can do. If you had not lost the habit of work in the physical world these past generations you would have thought of it yourself.”

Mistirea stared uncomprehending when Vorduthe first explained what he meant. When it came home to him that the thing was possible, he was dumbfounded.

“But the Eye of Peldain has always been with us!” he protested.

“Do you still think of it as a god? If so it is a malign god.”

“It is a god in a sense, a god that must be appeased… yet strange to say, once it was a man.” Mistirea nodded, evidently thinking he was telling Vorduthe something new. “Yes, it is so. You know the hill that is shaped like a woman, in the valley beyond the Clear Peaks? Legend has it that the hill was so sculpted on the orders of the lake long ago. Though no longer a man, it became hungry for the shape of a woman. It wished to caress such a woman with the branches of the forest….”

Mistirea came back to the point. “The lake alone can restrain the forest! What would happen if your plan were carried out?”

“But it is not true that the spirit restrains the forest, as such,” Vorduthe told him. “Rather it is the other way about. The lake is the forest’s soul, its driving force. If that force is removed the forest will remain deadly, certainly, but it will have no directing intelligence. It will be unable to evolve; men will be able to drive it back, perhaps even to burn it down. In any case we can prevent it spreading.”

Vorduthe began to dry himself. Mistirea stood still, thinking hard.

“It must be done secretly,” he said at last. “If the King should hear of it—”

“What of your own acolytes? Could they be trusted?”

“Some, yes… others, no.”

“My men will carry out the work,” Vorduthe promised. “Even if the palace should learn of it, it must still be carried through, and that means fighting. My men alone will not be enough to hold off the King’s force, but if even some of your acolyte warriors joined in there might be a chance. Can you get us our weapons? Even more important, we shall need suitable tools.”

“Very well, then, we are joined in conspiracy,” Mistirea agreed somberly. “If you are wrong, Lord Vorduthe, may the gods you worship help this traitor!”