Needle in a Timestack Read online

  “Crown wouldn’t,” said Crown, who had been chewing his lip in tense silence. “But I see some different possibilities.”

  “Go on.”

  “One is to find these Tree Companions and compel them to clear this trash from the highway. Darts or no darts, one Dark Lake and one Pure Stream side by side ought to be able to terrify twenty tribes of pinhead forest folk.”

  “And if we can’t?” Leaf asked.

  “That brings us to the other possibility, which is that this wall isn’t particularly intended to protect the neighborhood against the Teeth at all, but that these Tree Companions have taken advantage of the general confusion to set up some sort of toll-raising scheme. In that case, if we can’t force them to open the road, we can find out what they want, what sort of toll they’re asking, and pay it if we can and be on our way.”

  “Is that Crown who’s talking?” Sting asked. “Talking about paying a toll to underbreeds of the forest? Incredible!”

  Crown said, “I don’t like the thought of paying toll to anybody. But it may be the simplest and quickest way to get out of here. Do you think I’m entirely a creature of pride, Sting?”

  Leaf stood up. “If you’re right that this is a toll station, there’d be some kind of gate in the wall. I’ll go out there and have a look at it.”

  “No,” said Crown, pushing him lightly back into his seat. “There’s danger here, Leaf. This part of the work falls to me.” He strode toward the midcabin and was busy there a few minutes. When he returned he was in his full armor: breastplates, helmet, face mask, greaves, everything burnished to a high gloss. In those few places where his bare skin showed through, it seemed but a part of the armor. Crown looked like a machine. His mace hung at his hip, and the short shaft of his extensor sword rested easily along the inside of his right wrist, ready to spring to full length at a squeeze. Crown glanced toward Sting and said, “I’ll need your nimble legs. Will you come?”

  “As you say.”

  “Open the midcabin hatch for us, Leaf.”

  Leaf touched a control on the board below the front window. With a soft, whining sound a hinged door near the middle of the wagon swung upward and out, and a stepladder sprouted to provide access to the ground. Crown made a ponderous exit. Sting, scorning the ladder, stepped down: it was the special gift of the White Crystal people to be able to transport themselves short distances in extraordinary ways.

  Sting and Crown began to walk warily toward the wall. Leaf, watching from the driver’s seat, slipped his arm lightly about the waist of Shadow, who stood beside him, and caressed her smooth fur. The rain had ended; a gray cloud still hung low, and the gleam of Crown’s armor was already softened by fine droplets of moisture. He and Sting were nearly to the palisade, now, Crown constantly scanning the underbrush as if expecting a horde of Tree Companions to spring forth. Sting, loping along next to him, looked like some agile little two-legged beast, the top of his head barely reaching to Crown’s hip.

  They reached the palisade. Thin, late-afternoon sunlight streamed over its top. Kneeling, Sting inspected the base of the wall, probing at the soil with his fingers, and said something to Crown, who nodded and pointed upward. Sting backed off, made a short running start, and lofted himself, rising almost as though he were taking wing. His leap carried him soaring to the wall’s jagged crest in a swift blurred flight. He appeared to hover for a long moment while choosing a place to land. At last he alighted in a precarious, uncomfortable-looking position, sprawled along the top of the wall with his body arched to avoid the timber’s sharpened tips, his hands grasping two of the stakes and his feet wedged between two others. Sting remained in this desperate contortion for a remarkably long time, studying whatever lay beyond the barricade; then he let go his hold, sprang lightly outward, and floated to the ground, a distance some three times his own height. He landed upright, without stumbling. There was a brief conference between Crown and Sting. Then they came back to the wagon.

  “It’s a toll-raising scheme, all right,” Crown muttered. “The middle timbers aren’t embedded in the earth. They end just at ground level and form a hinged gate, fastened by two heavy bolts on the far side.”

  “I saw at least a hundred Tree Companions back of the wall,” Sting said. “Armed with blowdarts. They’ll be coming around to visit us in a moment.”

  “We should arm ourselves,” Leaf said.

  Crown shrugged. “We can’t fight that many of them. Not twenty-five to one, we can’t. The best hand-to-hand man in the world is helpless against little forest folk with poisoned blowdarts. If we aren’t able to awe them into letting us go through, we’ll have to buy them off somehow. But I don’t know. That gate isn’t nearly wide enough for the wagon.”

  He was right about that. There was the dry scraping squeal of wood against wood—the bolts were being unfastened—and then the gate swung slowly open. When it had been fully pushed back it provided an opening through which any good-size cart of ordinary dimensions might pass, but not Crown’s magnificent vehicle. Five or six stakes on each side of the gate would have to be pulled down in order for the wagon to go by.

  Tree Companions came swarming toward the wagon, scores of them—small, naked folk with lean limbs and smooth blue-green skin. They looked like animated clay statuettes, casually pinched into shape: their hairless heads were narrow and elongated, with flat sloping foreheads, and their long necks looked flimsy and fragile. They had shallow chests and bony, meatless frames. All of them, men and women both, wore reed dart-blowers strapped to their hips. As they danced and frolicked about the wagon they set up a ragged, irregular chanting, tuneless and atonal, like the improvised songs of children caught up in frantic play.

  “We’ll go out to them,” Crown said. “Stay calm, make no sudden moves. Remember that these are underbreeds. So long as we think of ourselves as men and them as nothing more than monkeys, and make them realize we think that way, we’ll be able to keep them under control.”

  “They’re men,” said Shadow quietly. “Same as we. Not monkeys.”

  “Think of them as like monkeys,” Crown told her. “Otherwise we’re lost. Come, now.”

  They left the wagon, Crown first, then Leaf, Sting, Shadow. The cavorting Tree Companions paused momentarily in their sport as the four travelers emerged; they looked up, grinned, chattered, pointed, did handsprings and headstands. They did not seem awed. Did Pure Stream mean nothing to them? Had they no fear of Dark Lake? Crown, glowering, said to Sting, “Can you speak their language?”

  “A few words.”

  “Speak to them. Ask them to send their chief here to me.”

  Sting took up a position just in front of Crown, cupped his hands to his mouth, and shouted something high and piercing in a singsong language. He spoke with exaggerated, painful clarity, as one does in addressing a blind person or a foreigner. The Tree Companions snickered and exchanged little yipping cries. Then one of them came dancing forward, planted his face a handsbreadth from Sting’s, and mimicked Sting’s words, catching the intonation with comic accuracy. Sting looked frightened, and backed away half a pace, butting accidentally into Crown’s chest. The Tree Companion loosed a stream of words, and when he fell silent Sting repeated his original phrase in a more subdued tone.

  “What’s happening?” Crown asked. “Can you understand anything?”

  “A little. Very little.”

  “Will they get the chief?”

  “I’m not sure. I don’t know if he and I are talking about the same things.”

  “You said these people pay tribute to White Crystal.”

  “Paid,” Sting said. “I don’t know if there’s any allegiance any longer. I think they may be having some fun at our expense. I think what he said was insulting, but I’m not sure. I’m just not sure.”

  “Stinking monkeys!”

  “Careful, Crown,” Shadow murmured. “We can’t speak thei
r language, but they may understand ours.”

  Crown said, “Try again. Speak more slowly. Get the monkey to speak more slowly. The chief, Sting, we want to see the chief! Isn’t there any way you can make contact?”

  “I could go into trance,” Sting said. “And Shadow could help me with the meanings. But I’d need time to get myself together. I feel too quick now, too tense.” As if to illustrate his point he executed a tiny jumping movement, blur-snap-hop, that carried him laterally a few paces to the left. Blur-snap-hop and he was back in place again. The Tree Companion laughed shrilly, clapped his hands, and tried to imitate Sting’s little shuttling jump. Others of the tribe came over; there were ten or twelve of them now, clustered near the entrance to the wagon. Sting hopped again: it was like a twitch, a tic. He started to tremble. Shadow reached toward him and folded her slender arms about his chest, as though to anchor him. The Tree Companions grew more agitated; there was a hard, intense quality about their playfulness now. Trouble seemed imminent. Leaf, standing on the far side of Crown, felt a sudden knotting of the muscles at the base of his stomach. Something nagged at his attention, off to his right out in the crowd of Tree Companions; he glanced that way and saw an azure brightness, elongated and upright, a man-size strip of fog and haze, drifting and weaving among the forest folk. Was it the Invisible? Or only some trick of the dying daylight, slipping through the residual vapor of the rainstorm? He struggled for a sharp focus, but the figure eluded his gaze, slipping ticklingly beyond sight as Leaf followed it with his eyes. Abruptly he heard a howl from Crown and turned just in time to see a Tree Companion duck beneath the huge man’s elbow and go sprinting into the wagon. “Stop!” Crown roared. “Come back!” And, as if a signal had been given, seven or eight others of the lithe little tribesmen scrambled aboard.

  There was death in Crown’s eyes. He beckoned savagely to Leaf and rushed through the entrance. Leaf followed. Sting, sobbing, huddled in the entranceway, making no attempt to halt the Tree Companions who were streaming into the wagon. Leaf saw them climbing over everything, examining, inspecting, commenting. Monkeys, yes. Down in the front corridor Crown was struggling with four of them, holding one in each vast hand, trying to shake free two others who were climbing his armored legs. Leaf confronted a miniature Tree Companion woman, a gnomish bright-eyed creature whose bare lean body glistened with sour sweat, and as he reached for her she drew not a dart-blower but a long narrow blade from the tube at her hip, and slashed Leaf fiercely along the inside of his left forearm. There was a quick, frightening gush of blood, and only some moments afterward did he feel the fiery lick of the pain. A poisoned knife? Well, then, into the All-Is-One with you, Leaf. But if there had been poison, he felt no effects of it; he wrenched the knife from her grasp, jammed it into the wall, scooped her up, and pitched her lightly through the open hatch of the wagon. No more Tree Companions were coming in, now. Leaf found two more, threw them out, dragged another out of the roofbeams, tossed him after the others, went looking for more. Shadow stood in the hatchway, blocking it with her frail arms outstretched. Where was Crown? Ah. There. In the trophy room. “Grab them and carry them to the hatch!” Leaf yelled. “We’re rid of most of them!”

  “The stinking monkeys,” Crown cried. He gestured angrily. The Tree Companions had seized some treasure of Crown’s, some ancient suit of mail, and in their childish buoyancy had ripped the fragile links apart with their tug-of-war. Crown, enraged, bore down on them, clamped one hand on each tapering skull—“Don’t!” Leaf shouted, fearing darts in vengeance—and squeezed, cracking them like nuts. He tossed the corpses aside and, picking up his torn trophy, stood sadly pressing the sundered edges together in a clumsy attempt at repair.

  “You’ve done it now,” Leaf said. “They were just being inquisitive. Now we’ll have war, and we’ll be dead before nightfall.”

  “Never,” Crown grunted.

  He dropped the chainmail, scooped up the dead Tree Companions, carried them dangling through the wagon, and threw them like offal into the clearing. Then he stood defiantly in the hatchway, inviting their darts. None came. Those Tree Companions still aboard the wagon, five or six of them, appeared empty-handed, silent, and slipped hastily around the hulking Dark Laker. Leaf went forward and joined Crown. Blood was still dripping from Leaf’s wound; he dared not induce clotting nor permit the wound to close until he had been purged of whatever poison might have been on the blade. A thin, straight cut, deep and painful, ran down his arm from elbow to wrist. Shadow gave a soft little cry and seized his hand. Her breath was warm against the edges of the gash. “Are you badly injured?” she whispered.

  “I don’t think so. It’s just a question of whether the knife was poisoned.”

  “They poison only their darts,” said Sting. “But there’ll be infection to cope with. Better let Shadow look after you.”

  “Yes,” Leaf said. He glanced into the clearing. The Tree Companions, as though thrown into shock by the violence that had come from their brief invasion of the wagon, stood frozen along the road in silent groups of nine or ten, keeping their distance. The two dead ones lay crumpled where Crown had hurled them. The unmistakable figure of the Invisible, transparent but clearly outlined by a dark perimeter, could be seen to the right, near the border of the thicket: his eyes glittered fiercely, his lips were twisted in a strange smile. Crown was staring at him in slack-jawed astonishment. Everything seemed suspended, held floating motionless in the bowl of time. To Leaf the scene was an eerie tableau in which the only sense of ongoing process was supplied by the throbbing in his slashed arm. He hung moored at the center, waiting, waiting, incapable of action, trapped like others in timelessness. In that long pause he realized that another figure had appeared during the melee, and stood now calmly ten paces or so to the left of the grinning Invisible: a Tree Companion, taller than the others of his kind, clad in beads and gimcracks but undeniably a being of presence and majesty.

  “The chief has arrived,” Sting said hoarsely.

  The stasis broke. Leaf released his breath and let his rigid body slump. Shadow tugged at him, saying, “Let me clean that cut for you.” The chief of the Tree Companions stabbed the air with three outstretched fingers, pointing at the wagon, and called out five crisp, sharp, jubilant syllables; slowly and grandly he began to stalk toward the wagon. At the same moment the Invisible flickered brightly, like a sun about to die, and disappeared entirely from view. Crown, turning to Leaf, said in a thick voice, “It’s all going crazy here. I was just imagining I saw one of the Invisibles from Theptis skulking around by the underbrush.”

  “You weren’t imagining anything,” Leaf told him. “He’s been riding secretly with us since Theptis. Waiting to see what would happen to us when we came to the Tree Companions’ wall.”

  Crown looked jarred by that. “When did you find that out?” he demanded.

  Shadow said, “Let him be, Crown. Go and parley with the chief. If I don’t clean Leaf’s wound soon—”

  “Just a minute. I need to know the truth. Leaf, when did you find out about this Invisible?”

  “When I went up front to relieve Sting. He was in the driver’s cabin. Laughing at me, jeering. The way they do.”

  “And you didn’t tell me? Why?”

  “There was no chance. He bothered me for a while, and then he vanished, and I was busy driving after that, and then we came to the wall, and then the Tree Companions—”

  “What does he want from us?” Crown asked harshly, face pushed close to Leaf’s.

  Leaf was starting to feel fever rising. He swayed and leaned on Shadow. Her taut, resilient little form bore him with surprising strength. He said tiredly, “I don’t know. Does anyone ever know what one of them wants!” The Tree Companion chief, meanwhile, had come up beside them and in a lusty, self-assured way slapped his open palm several times against the side of the wagon, as though taking possession of it. Crown whirled. The chief coolly spoke, voice le
vel, inflections controlled. Crown shook his head. “What’s he saying?” he barked. “Sting? Sting?”

  “Come,” Shadow said to Leaf. “Now. Please.”

  She led him toward the passenger castle. He sprawled on the furs while she searched busily through her case of unguents and ointments; then she came to him with a long green vial in her hand and said, “There’ll be pain for you now.”

  “Wait.”

  He centered himself and disconnected, as well as he was able, the network of sensory apparatus that conveyed messages of discomfort from his arm to his brain. At once he felt his skin growing cooler, and he realized for the first time since the battle how much pain he had been in: so much that he had not had the wisdom to do anything about it. Dispassionately he watched as Shadow, all efficiency, probed his wound, parting the lips of the cut without squeamishness and swabbing its red interior. A faint tickling, unpleasant but not painful, was all he sensed. She looked up, finally, and said, “There’ll be no infection. You can allow the wound to close now.” In order to do that Leaf had to reestablish the neural connections to a certain degree, and as he unblocked the flow of impulses he felt sudden startling pain, both from the cut itself and from Shadow’s medicines; but quickly he induced clotting, and a moment afterward he was deep in the disciplines that would encourage the sundered flesh to heal. The wound began to close. Lightly Shadow blotted the fresh blood from his arm and prepared a poultice; by the time she had it in place, the gaping slash had reduced itself to a thin raw line. “You’ll live,” she said. “You were lucky they don’t poison their knives.” He kissed the tip of her nose and they returned to the hatch area.