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and catch it to prevent a broken nose. Then he ran to her, for she was weeping
bitterly, hands pressed to her eyes, the tumbled, corkscrew curls hanging
around her face like some odd but beautiful foliage.
Come on, love, he thought. / was only fooling. You fell sorry for her, didn't
you?
She gulped and buried her face in his chest again, choking back the sobs
before she could even use her mind.
Yes, of course I did. Any real woman who was honest would.
THE HOUSE AND THE TREES
279
She's never had a man and she fell in love with you. When she said to me (it
was hard to understand her at first, too) that I'd have you always, but could
she have just one night, well, I forgot any jealousy. But it was still the
hardest thing I've ever done, and don't you forget it!
"Oh, Hiero," she said aloud, her voice sad, "do you know what her last thought
this morning was?" Maybe mine will be the first male. Do not forget me, you
who have him for always. "I almost cried right then."
He patted her back and made encouraging masculine noises. "Don't cry, love,"
he said. 'Tm not mad. Besides, I did have
a delightful dream."
She looked up, saw that he was grinning at her, and finally managed a smile.
"Look, I don't want to hear any more about it, all right?"
At this point the seamen appeared in marching gear and order, coming out into
the open near them, jabbering, and craning their necks as they saw the
burned-over waste for the first time. Blutho and Gimp halted them and came
over to join the two. Brother Aldo returned as well, leading Klootz, and Gorm
emerged from the shadows of a giant tree's base. All were now ready, and Hiero
took up his place in the lead again. But though the bear still went with him,
the priest now rode upon the bull morse. Klootz's eyes gleamed with pleasure
and he bugled, a hoarse, bellowing cry which echoed under the cloudy heavens
and through the humid air until the echoes died away into silence beneath the
arches of the mighty wood.
Hiero looked back, hoping for a glimpse of the wood sprite whose dream he had
shared, but he saw nothing. Once from the now silent forest, a golden burst of
song rang out, but whether it was Vilah-ree or not, he never knew.
They will follow us along the edge of their realm, came Aide's thought from
the rear of the column. They wish to know if the House is alive and think you
can tell them. So the queen told Luchare.
It's alive, he sent back. But I hope we can avoid it. I made no impression
before. Are we carrying coats?
Yes, in a clay pot. We can kindle fire in seconds and we have many arrows
ready, on my order to Gimp.
Let's hope they won't be needed.
They marched south at a steady pace along the wood edge,
2&0
HIERO'S JOURNEY
which towered like a rampart of green, with brown bark only rarely glimpsed.
Occasionally, small bursts of flame off to their right showed them where the
tree women still set fire to patches of unfired blight, working their way
south on a general level with the column. Eventually even this ceased,
however. They stayed a quarter of a mile out in the waste; and tramping over
the bare burn, which was only gently rolling, the men made very good time.
They halted for a brief meal and then went on. Toward evening, the
long-gathered clouds released a torrential bath upon their heads, and
visibility became so poor and the newly bared earth such a glutinous mud that
it was obviously silly to carry on. They made camp under the trees and had
trouble even there in getting a fire to light. Eventually one was got going,
under a lean-to, and they managed a savory stew for supper. The rain was warm,
though, and all there were seasoned travelers, to whom a little extra water
meant nothing.
It rained most of the night. When dawn came, they knew they were reaching the
end of the forest at last. The trees themselves were changing. Palms and
acacia-like shrubs began to appear in quantity. The real broad-leafed giants
dwindled and soon no longer occurred at all. The heat steadily increased. To
the south, wide, grassy plains became dimly visible, rolling through thinning
copses of trees to the distant horizon. On their left, the outlying fingers of
the eastern desert drew nearer, and with the desert came the all-too-familiar
livid colors of the fungus belt. Down there in the south of the forest, the
fire had hardly touched anything, for the House had not come so close to the
trees, indeed was a number of miles away. Perhaps the absence of the great
trees made the area less attractive to it.
However, there was plenty of wild game. Beasts resembling deer and creatures
like large-horned antelope grazed in herds here and there, only moving slowly
out of the men's way. Most were unfamiliar to Hiero. Once they came upon a
short-tailed, striped brute, half as big as Klootz, which was feeding on the
carcass of something fully three times the morse's size. They wisely skirted
this scene, and the huge carnivore, which looked like a cross between a bear
and a ten-times-magnified lynx, was content, or possibly replete, only
growling in tones of thunder. That night they built both large fires and a
high stockade, making camp early in order to construct the latter. The
THE HOUSE AND THE TREES
281
bellowings and roarings all about them made this move seem a wise one. This
was evidently not a country which either knew or feared men.
The next morning -dawned clear and hot, the humid air perfumed like a breath
of summer. Flowering grasses scented each step. On this day they turned and
marched east, and all the leaders were in front. The time had come, by all
their reckonings, to search for the Lost City. Maps were no longer of use.
As they advanced out into the semi-scrub, semi-desert area, the colors of the
House drew inexorably nearer. Soon they could distinguish individual growths,
gnarled objects like giant, oil-brown shelf fungi mostly, and squat puffball
things of dirty purplish red and yellow, whose pocked surface exuded some
shiny substance equally repellent. The things were unlike the northern
growths, but the hardened muck did not exist here, evidently not having been
needed. They had lost all traces of the great fire, in fact, for it had never
come this far to the south.
Hiero called a halt. "I'm not putting our necks into that damned, horrid
thing's trap without a very careful search," he said. He indicated the first
huge magenta puffballs. "Those things aren't half a mile away. That's quite
close enough, judging from my own experience."
Aldo looked thoughtful. "We should, by all that's holy, be almost on the very
site you're looking for, Hiero. In fact, we may be right on top of it. I can't
see anything to indicate this wasn't always a plain, but that's true of many
buried cities." He patted the priest's shoulder. "I hope you've also thought
that it may be hopelessly buried, son. We'll do our best, but who knows when
those symbols were copied onto the maps, and maybe recopied a hundred times
over?"
Luchare refused to be discouraged. A curious ally, as unexpected as he often
was, was the bear.
"We can't have come this far, under such leadership, to find nothing!" the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]