The Forest of Peldain

Chapter Four

In a little over an hour and a half the task of transferring the expedition through the terror-hedge was completed. To begin with there had been more attacks by tree-lances, until the firewagons had once again been brought into play, clearing a safe area consisting of charred moss and smoking tree stumps.

Since leaving the shoreline they had been steadily climbing. Octrago had led them to what appeared to be a broad ridge. The overhead canopy was thinner, the air clearer. Vorduthe began to feel more confidence in his foreign guide.

He surveyed his force as the troop leaders organized the new formation, superintended by their squadron commanders. The brash shouting of the beach landing was gone, and had been replaced by a determination that was almost sullen. Orders were given in low tones, and the subdued air of the expedition, the quiet grunts and murmurs as the wagons were jockeyed into position, the clinking of weapons and armor in an oppressive near-silence was ominous.

Vorduthe understood the new mood. The seaborne warriors were accustomed to fighting men like themselves. It affected their morale to take such heavy losses without meeting an enemy they could identify as an enemy. If they had faced the ravages of wild beasts now, they would have remained of good cheer, but against plants and trees….

Octrago, too, was watching the work with a critical eye. “Don’t let them spread out too much!” he warned. “Our survival depends on our numbers—we must punch our way through the forest like a fist. Any who become separated won’t stand much chance.”

Vorduthe nodded. “Especially if they wander off the route, I suppose?” He glanced at the Peldainian. Several times he had pressed him for a map of the special route that was supposed to make passage through the forest possible. But Octrago insisted on keeping it in his head.

Perhaps the secret was simple, Vorduthe thought: keep to the high ground. But if that was all there was to it, why was Octrago so reticent?

He could think of one good reason: Octrago himself wanted to survive. And the Hundred-Islanders would take special care to protect the life of someone whose guidance they believed was indispensable….

The mass of men and wagons began to move, surging around the tree trunks like an incoming tide washing around rocks but giving them a wide berth whenever they could. Vorduthe noticed that Octrago hung back and fiddled nervously with the hilt of his sword. It occurred to him that the Peldainian wanted to be in the middle of the press so as to take advantage of the strategy he himself had outlined. The idea was that a relatively safe area could be created in the interior of the column, able to deal with threats by force of numbers, by fire—by whatever means lay at hand. To this end, the troop leaders on the periphery had orders to keep the formation compact.

Yet Octrago claimed to have come by this route with only fifty men, Vorduthe reminded himself. In that case, a party as large as this ought to be able to overcome the hazards fairly easily.

After a short distance springy moss gave way to tangled herbage standing calf-high. Vorduthe felt something tug at his ankle. He stumbled, then felt an excruciating pain as though his foot were being severed. In one swift motion he unclasped his sword and struck down through coarse grass and leaf. Something wriggled and attempted to pull him off balance.

“Don’t fall!” Octrago shouted in warning. “We are in a patch of the damned stuff! Use your sword and stay on your feet!”

Vorduthe pulled his foot free. From it there dangled a length of trip-root, woody and fibrous and harmless-looking now that it was separated from the parent plant. It creaked as he pried it with difficulty from his ankle.

That it was far from harmless could be seen from what was happening all around. A wagon lurched, the men in charge of it stuck to the ground as if they had blundered into quicksand, their faces grimacing with pain and fear. Elsewhere, too, men were stumbling and struggling, slashing at the grass with their weapons. And some fell, the trip-root quickly fastening itself on legs, arms and necks like the stranglevine to which it was closely related.

Octrago himself was caught. With deft strokes of his blade he freed himself, then loped to the stalled wagon, taking long, tiptoeing leaps. He began scything at the grass, rescuing as many as he could of the haulers.

For some it was too late. A warrior leaned against the nearside wagon wheel, one leg lifted to stare at the red-dripping stump where his foot had been.

The Peldainian did not hesitate. His sword-point went straight to the wounded warrior’s heart, sliding between the ribs of his armor. Octrago turned away without even waiting to see the body fall.

“On! Forward! You are too slow! Proceed like this—”

Bending slightly, he swished at the grass before him, scything a path. Where trip-root was revealed he chopped through it, cutting the woody musculature.

“You need your wits about you in this forest,” he said disapprovingly when he caught up with Vorduthe. “Your men should be more spirited, my lord.”

Vorduthe did not answer. They were leaving the field of trip-root; the ground was reverting to moss with only clumps of coarse grass and strange flowers with crude, blotched colors. He forced himself to turn around and look back to the bodies that lay scattered about, abandoned to be cut to pieces by the inexorable root network and slowly to add their blood, flesh and bone to this ghastly jungle.

He lingered until the last of the troops into which the force was divided had moved onto mossy ground. For the next half hour they traveled without incident. The ground continued to rise; rocky outcrops appeared. The trees, whether straight-trunked or gnarled and twisted into fantastic shapes as many were, became fewer.

But after a while their path began to slope downward, gradually at first, then more steeply. The eerie twilight cast by the overhang grew deeper. Octrago appeared to hesitate several times, casting his gaze here and there before resuming the march with dogged steps.

Vorduthe caught up with him. “Is something wrong?”

“No, we are on course.”

“Yet we are descending. Isn’t that dangerous?”

“The terrain is uneven,” Octrago responded grumpily. “We can hardly climb all the time. You must trust me, my lord.”

“So I must,” Vorduthe muttered, and fell back to where he could keep watch on his juggernaut of an army as it wended its way down the hillside. The forest was growing thicker, with less space between both the tall trees that supported the overhead canopy and the variegated species, mostly shorter, that displayed such strange shapes and foliage. Vorduthe spotted mangrab trees, lance trees, and the striped trees that Octrago had warned were cage tigers. So far none appeared to be of the active lethal kind, or if they were they were staying dormant.

The wagons were also carefully steered round the clumps of bush, bramble and other plants for which there were no ready names. Then an indistinct tangle loomed up ahead. It was as if the tree trunks rose from a foggy sea of twig and fern which barred the way in all directions.

Octrago halted, staring at the massed vegetation.

“Well?” Vorduthe asked. “Do we turn aside?”

“Not unless you want to go down into the vales, and you know all about that. It’s only a thicket. Call the wagons together. We’ll push them forward in a solid wall to trample it down, and walk behind.”

“Tell me what dangers lie in this thicket,” Vorduthe asked. “You had to come through it on your way to the coast, presumably. How did you manage it?”

“We hacked our way through,” Octrago said after a pause. “It held no special dangers on that occasion—but now, who knows? The forest is unpredictable.”

With that answer Vorduthe had to be content. Following the Peldainian’s suggestion, he had about half the wagons formed into a wedge, while his small and already-battered army clustered behind. The remaining wagons he kept in place along the flanks, as before.

The wedge crashed through the thicket with a crackle and a swish. For some time this, plus the creak of wheels, the clink of armor and tramp of feet, were the only noises to be heard. The air thickened and dimmed; overhead seemed to be an aerial jungle which cut off the light, and through which the wagons were carving a rough tunnel.

Occasionally a wagon would jerk and stop, caught in a clump of vegetation or mass of roots, and the whole procession would pause while it was cut free. Vorduthe would have begun to relax, had he not been aware of the nervousness of Octrago, which made him suspect the Peldainian of hiding the truth.

They were deep within the thicket when the forest began its attacks. He heard a cry.

“Stranglevine—beware!”

It was like huge ropy cobweb that dropped from the trees, swung and snaked through the air, suddenly appearing to seize anything it encountered, gripping and squeezing, lifting wriggling men clear off the ground by their necks, a living skein of hangman’s nooses.

But at least it was a foe that could be combatted. With swords, with long-handled cutters, the masses of vine were sliced and hacked, writhing and falling in limp strands and tangles to the ground.

Vorduthe, while slashing at the jerking cord himself, tried to count the number of men who succumbed to the manic creeper before it was dealt with. How many had he lost now?

And at this rate how many would he have left when they entered Peldain proper? He looked surreptitiously at Octrago. It was not easy to read the Peldainian’s naturally pale face. But Vorduthe fancied he looked worried.

“Tell me,” he said when the stranglevine was left behind, “do our casualties agree with your calculations so far?”

Octrago uttered what sounded like a grotesque laugh. “We have scarcely begun. The time to count our losses is at nightfall.”

He moved away as if unwilling to continue the conversation and, striding between the lines of warriors who strained at the wagon shafts, leaped lightly onto a tailboard, peering over the bulk of the vehicle to look ahead.

After some minutes he looked back, signaling to Vorduthe, then dropped to the moss and approached him.

It seemed to Vorduthe, perhaps only in his imagination, that Octrago was terrified. His bony face was unnaturally tense. And its green pallor was not only, he suspected, a reflection of the viridian twilight through which they were traveling.

“The way is barred,” Octrago informed him. “We shall have to break formation and filter through the trees.”

“Why did you not tell me this before we entered the thicket?”

“Remember, we were moving in a smaller group the last time I passed this way.”

“So you were… I wonder how a party as small as yours managed to defend itself against the stranglevine we just came through. Large numbers were decidedly an advantage there.

“Exactly,” Octrago said acidly. “You can see for yourself why so few of us made it to the coast.” He paused. “Actually, we did not come upon that particular patch of vine. I do not claim to be retracing our path yard for yard. Or, just as likely, the vine has grown since.”

By now the wedge was creaking to a halt and Vorduthe was once again obliged to issue orders through his squadron commanders. The wedge broke up. Each wagon, still pushed by its retinue of warriors, began to find its own way through the thicket.

The going was tough. Singly the wagons lacked the wedge’s power to trample down the tangle, and more and more often a way had to be cleared for them by hand, stalk and bramble hacked away with swords that now were permanently drawn. Vorduthe noted that Octrago’s sword also did not leave his hand, even though he was taking no active part in the work. His suspicion that Octrago was expecting something unpleasant increased. He clicked open the hasp of his scabbard and let his own weapon fall into his grasp.

It was becoming difficult to see what surrounded them, so dense was the thicket. A bole or tree trunk might be only feet away and give no clear indication of its presence or of its species. Vorduthe was not surprised, then, when a voice—it sounded like Lord Axthall’s—suddenly shouted out hoarsely. “Beware mangrab!”

At the same time the clumping sound of mangrab trees opening and closing came from several directions, followed by groans of utmost agony.

There was also a crunching, snapping noise. He realized one of the mangrabs had accidentally caught part of a wagon. Suddenly there was an explosion. Through the blurring vegetation, he saw a fireball burning furiously and sending a pall of smoke rising through the branches of the trees.

It was a fire engine the mangrab had seized.

Bellowing to the men to keep going, Vorduthe trudged doggedly on, keeping to the path flattened by the wagon ahead. At length the stench and crackle of the flames were left behind. And now the thicket began to grow somewhat sparser, though the trees remained as close-pressed as before and were hung with liana-like creeper. Luckily it stayed inert, swaying slightly; it was not stranglevine.

Vorduthe stepped from the path and slashed with his sword at the standing stalks. He moved a few feet to the side, placing his feet gingerly though he did not think fallpits grew in a place like this, and peered cautiously. He could partly see the outline of a neighboring wagon trundling jerkily along, until it was eclipsed by a tree trunk.

His momentary carelessness as to his own safety saved him from certain death. When he looked back it was to see a long shaft, a kind of bamboo pipe thicker than a man, that had lowered itself from the opaque verdure overhead, aslant like the tree-lances they had encountered earlier. Its lower end hovered above the spot where he had stood, hunting to and fro as if searching.

The shaft, no doubt, was hunting him. It had sensed him; it had lunged, and it would have caught him had he not at that moment chanced to step aside.

Where was Octrago? Vorduthe wished to question him as to the nature of this thing. The Peldainian was out of sight, however. Vorduthe skirted the spot, warning off the following warriors who paused to gawp.

The thicket petered out quite suddenly a short distance farther on and the wagon rolled over clean moss. Hereabouts the forest was an eerie, semi-darkened palace whose columns were ragged rows of tree trunks, decorated with gargoyle-like bark of twisted, ravaged boles. The overhead canopy shut out nearly all light.

Peering through the gloom, Octrago heard a rustling sound. Then a swishing and a slithering.

He looked up and saw scores of shafts, like the one he had recently avoided, descend swiftly from the foliage. It was like seeing a second forest interpenetrate the first; or, perhaps, like the massed feeding tubes extended by a certain bottom feeding marine animal: for each shaft seemed to have selected its mark and went to it unerringly.

Sword, bow and lance were no good here. There would be only a brief, wriggling struggle as the muzzle of each hollow tube dropped over the head and shoulders of its victim. Then, a loud thwack as the serpent harrier abruptly disappeared.

Forewarned, Vorduthe dodged the shaft that sought him out and threw himself onto the legs of a warrior who was already engulfed to his shoulders. But Vorduthe’s strength was quite insufficient to extricate him; he let go only just in time as the harrier vanished up the tube like an insect being sucked up a straw.

Not all who sought to rescue their stricken comrades in the same manner were quick enough to give up. Tumbling to the moss, Vorduthe saw more than one dragged up a shaft still clinging to a pair of legs.

He rolled, sprang to his feet, and ran, to see that the dreadful columns were everywhere: his whole army seemed to have fallen foul of them.

Suddenly he heard a muffled yell from a familiar voice, and whirled to locate its source. Beass Axthall, one of his squadron commanders and a lord in his own right, had been caught by a tube! Vorduthe recognized the insignia, the unique pattern of the armored kilt. But before he could even make a move, Axthall was gone!

The progress of the procession had ceased; the expedition was in total disorder. And now a new menace appeared—but, unlike the shafts, one which had previously been described by Askon Octrago.

They dropped in almost leisurely fashion from the overhead murk: greenish lines, looking like elongated stems from some innocuous flower, whose ends sported cap-like buds or petals. Like the shafts, they appeared to have some way of sensing animal presence and they also had the power of movement, for they twisted and turned as they descended, until they fell daintily on the heads of warriors busily fleeing from the lunging tubes.

One might have thought the helmets the men wore would have afforded some protection. Not so: the cap-like cups were so pliable they pushed themselves between the strips of metal and withe to clamp directly to the skull, fitting as neatly as the cap of an acorn.

In utter horror, Vorduthe watched men lifted aloft by the dozen, the stems withdrawing as if they were fishing lines being reeled in. How the caps managed to grip a man’s skull so tightly was a mystery. But up in the cover of the branches Vorduthe could vaguely see his warriors dancing and writhing, and he could hear them crying in agony.

He knew that they would hang there like grotesque fruit, all the nutrients of their bodies gradually being drawn out.

A troop leader staggered up and almost collided with Vorduthe. His face was pallid with fear.

“Danglecups!” he gasped. “Danglecups, my lord!”

“Yes. Octrago told us of these.”

At least it was possible to fend them off. Vorduthe’s sword scythed the air, severing a green cord that seemed to have been making for the troop leader. The danglecup cap flexed itself as it lay on the moss.

And not far away there was a blur of motion followed by a sickening thud mixed with the crunch of metal. A warrior had fallen to his death from far overhead. A stalk projected from his helmet, and a danglecup clung to his scalp. The sword with which he had managed to hack himself free was still clenched in his fist.

The troop leader’s tone was pleading. “What shall we do, my lord?”

“Fire is our only weapon.” Vorduthe pointed with his sword. “You take that wagon. I’ll take the other one.”

The crew of the fire engine had either been plucked from it or else had joined the other warriors who were huddled beneath it for protection. Sliding his sword up his scabbard, Vorduthe vaulted at a run onto the operator’s perch.

No new tube-shafts were descending now. Those that had already appeared seemed sated by their activity, or perhaps they were only capable of applying their suction once. Indolently they were withdrawing. But danglecups there were in plenty, and one was dropping straight at Vorduthe with frightening speed. He swung the nozzle to his highest elevation, pointing it up into the trees. Frantically his feet worked the pedal boards up and down, pumping oil. He snatched up the matchcord and reached out with it as the stream began to issue in a fountain.

The satisfying gout of fire that answered his efforts reached far when aimed upward, assisted by its natural inclination to rise. Its fringe caught the danglecup no more than a dozen arm’s lengths from Vorduthe’s head and burned it to a crisp.

By now the troop leader had managed to get his fire spout into action. From both engines billowing clouds of fire boiled up to the tree cover. Vorduthe turned his muzzle in a wide circle, spreading conflagration among the lower branches.

But suddenly his firestream died, the spout dribbling the last few drops of oil. The wagon had been in the van of the expedition, and it had drained its tank.

Vorduthe jumped to the ground. He reached beneath the wagon and roughly dragged one of the men hiding there into the open. Then he started kicking at the others.

“Cowards! Come out and fight! I’ll kill any man who doesn’t fight!”

“Fight who, my lord?” groaned a voice. But about a dozen men crawled into the open, climbing to their feet with shamed but grim faces.

Fragments of blazing twig and leaf rained down. The hanging shafts had become columns of fire.

Beyond the vicinity, however, danglecups wrought havoc as before.

“Those sucking tubes aren’t doing anything anymore,” Vorduthe told the men. “The danglecups you can use your swords on. So go to it—get those fire engines working!”

Though they were reluctant to leave the glade of safety he had created, he led them through the chaos, eyes constantly on the alert for the deadly caps that still were falling from the semi-darkness.

Now that the terror of the tubes was over, others were recovering their wits enough to take Vorduthe’s lead. From points all around came the roar of billowing flame. The gloom of the forest turned to lurid incandescence. And slowly, as the danglecups burned and the foliage overhead became a canopy of fretted fire, the expedition began to move again.

How much fire do we need to get us through this hell? Vorduthe asked himself. How much fuel is left? And what happens when it is gone? In their panic the warriors were using it wildly, and he gave orders for the spouts to be used only when necessary. Gloom returned, and the attacks of tubes and danglecups became only occasional.

At last Askon Octrago appeared. Vorduthe noticed that the front of his armor was stained green, as though he had been lying on his belly in the moss. He seemed distressed, and at once approached Vorduthe, laying a hand on his shoulder.

“I’m glad you came through, my lord. That was a rough passage.”

“You never told us about those shafts that drag men up inside them,” Vorduthe accused him. “Why not?”

“Those are shoot-tubes,” Octrago told him. “I had hoped we wouldn’t meet any of those, that’s all.”

Vorduthe didn’t believe him. He thought the Peldainian had probably kept quiet about them for fear of deterring the expedition from setting forth.

How much else had he withheld?

“What happens to a man who is taken that way?” Vorduthe asked. “He is slowly devoured, I suppose.”

Octrago shook his head. “No, it is not like that. Shoot tubes are open at both ends: they work like blowpipes. They hurl a man high in the air, over the treetops to fall down into the vales. If the fall doesn’t kill him he faces horrors greater than anything we can meet here.”

The appearance of the forest was changing once more. The overhead foliage had thinned, though rarely could one glimpse the sky, and the wagons rolled past new types of tree. Suddenly Octrago stopped, gripping Vorduthe’s arm.

“Look. We are in a grove of cage tigers.”

Throughout the journey so, Vorduthe had been seeing the striped black-and-white trees Octrago called cage tigers. They had all proved harmless. He was surprised, therefore, at Octrago’s sudden alarm.

True, the tigers were numerous here. Of all the plants so far encountered they were the most predatory-looking: bizarrely shaped, as though about to pounce like animals, even though they clearly consisted of timber of some kind. Their foliage was sparse, and they stood barely ten feet in height.

“Too late to think of going round,” Octrago rumbled. “Best to get through as quickly as we can. Order a speed-up.”

“We should form up in some order,” Vorduthe rumbled. “We are all over the place.”

“Later,” Octrago advised tersely. “Let’s get through the grove first.”

Vorduthe concurred. Those who could do so hurried ahead. The wagons too increased their pace as much as was possible, the men at the shafts sweating with the effort.

Octrago was stepping carefully, as though afraid his footfall would set off some trap, and was eyeing the striped boles which, now that Vorduthe thought of it, could almost have been carved by the hand of man, so smooth and strange were their misshapen forms.

“You seem afraid,” he murmured to Octrago. “Do you advise the use of fire?”

“No. We must conserve the fuel. The tigers cannot take us all. Aagh—it begins!”

His exclamation was in a tone of anxiety and resignation mixed. And now Vorduthe realized why he was so concerned.

The cage tigers were virtually impossible to avoid or to defend oneself against. The sight was incredible: the mangrab trees had been able to reach twice the length of a man, but these could pounce much farther—so far that there was no place in the grove where one could be safe. They seemed to leap, to spring, to bound like an animal, but with such suddenness that the eye was bedazzled to know what was really happening. In an instant the cage tiger regained its rooted spot—which it had not in fact left—and the reason for the first part of its name became apparent. The stripes had opened up, arranging themselves into the bars of a cage, roughly square in shape though with rounded corners.

Within the cage there crouched a man.

As if by some group instinct, a score of tigers had struck within seconds of one another. Vorduthe paused to study the scene. So far, those trapped seemed unharmed. They shook the bars or tried to pry them open. Some set to work with their swords.

“Kill them quickly, and let’s be on our way,” Octrago urged. “This is no place to linger.”

“We shall set them free,” Vorduthe insisted.

“There is nothing you can do for them. The wood of the cage tiger is harder than iron. It will not even burn. Come.”

Octrago loped to the nearest cage tiger that contained a victim. His sword thrust once, skillfully, between the bars of the cage, between struts of armor, into the breast of the caged warrior. The serpent harrier, who had looked on his approach as if expecting assistance, twisted his face in an expression of surprise and pain as the blade entered, gasping as he died.

Bleakly Vorduthe joined the Peldainian, looking into the cage at the slumped body of his follower. “What fate would have awaited him?” he said.

“Death in a fallpit is quick and easy compared with what a cage tiger holds in store. This tree makes a leisurely meal of what it catches. When some hours have passed, the cage starts to contract, until the bars hold the victim tightly without any power of movement. Then the inner surfaces seep digestive juice, very gradually, no more than a smear. First the skin is burned through in strips, then the inner tissues, then through to the inner organs. His suffering would not have ceased until he died of thirst.

“But we have one advantage now. Those caught give us a route through the grove. Pass the word around: a tiger will not strike twice, and other tigers will not come too close to another of their species. Come.”

Octrago was off, sprinting to the next victim, whom he dispatched, then looking around for another to give him safety.

Vorduthe looked after him in distaste. But soon, he found himself doing the same.