Lord of the Trees

  “Then go to hell!” he bellowed, his throat sac swelling, and by that I knew he was almost insanely furious.

  Logic told me to shoot him then and there, because there was no telling what he might do to hurt us. We could not afford to take the least chance. But I did not follow logic, of course, since I just could not kill him without adequate provocation. I even yelled at him to get into the jungle before the explosions.

  Then I got into the plane, and the port was closed, we took off, and, as we swung back around, I pressed the button that transmitted a frequency to sets below. The two choppers and the tents blew up in a great cloud.

  When the Nine heard of this, they would be doubly enraged, if that was possible. Never had they been so threatened, so outraged, so thumb-at-nosed-at, if I may use such a phrase. (It parallels the structure of Folk speech.) I hoped that old Anana’s veins would swell up and up and she would die of a stroke.

  But I knew that it was the end of the affair that mattered and that I might be dead, or wish I were dead, in a day or two. Or even sooner.

  Within fourteen hours, we were getting off a small boat on a beach near Bournemouth, a city of Hampshire County. We walked up a steep flight of wooden steps to the top of a cliff. Four automobiles awaited us. It was four o’clock in the morning, and fog pressed heavily around us. Though the driver of my car could not see where he was going, he seemed to be trusting to instinct. He drove at what was a suicidal clip in the blindness, forty miles per hour, through the streets of Bournemouth. But a radar scope on the dashboard showed ghostly images of cars and people and street lamps and signposts, though we could not read the signs, of course.

  Our trip had been smooth and speedy all the way. At Dakar, rather, at a strip in the desert many miles outside Dakar, the metal belt was cut off me and the shell of plastic explosive and the epoxy glue was removed. We were given new clothes and forged papers before transferring to a plane which took us around Spain to a small airport off the coast of southwestern France. From there we took an amphibian which set us down next to a small motor yacht twenty miles off the coast, just outside the fog. If you have enough money and have spent some years in building up your own organization, just in case you have a falling out with the Nine, you find that you can get much done quickly and quietly. As long as I could keep feeding my men money, and I had enough gold stashed away in Africa and elsewhere to do so, I had more than just myself to rely on in this battle. And, of course, Doc Caliban had his own organization, just as he had his own supply of gold.

  It pays to be rich, as Clio often told me.

  It was still dark and foggy when we were dropped off before a small hotel outside the city of Salisbury off Highway A338. Clara sat up in bed for a long time smoking until I asked her to quit or else go into the next room. I smoked heavily when I was first introduced to civilization, but that dissipation did not last long. It left too foul a taste and reduced my wind and was a nuisance altogether. Now I could not endure to have smoke anywhere near in an enclosed bedroom.

  The maid woke me with a tap on the door at six. Clara was asleep but awoke shortly after I had shaved. She said, “I was trying to think last night why the Nine should be here. I know that they are supposed to have tracked Iwaldi here. But why here? Then I remembered some years ago when I ran into a man I’d only seen twice before, both times at the caves. I was in London then, visiting friends. William Griffin, a son of Lord Braybroke, I believe, told me of overhearing a conversation between a Speaker and his woman. We candidates are great gossips, you know, trying to find out all we can about the Nine. The Speaker had overheard Shaumbim telling Tilatoc that the world had changed so much that it would be impossible to hold funeral rites at some of the places most closely associated with the Nine. Anana’s birthplace, for instance, was now covered by a great office building in Spain.”

  Shaumbim was one of the two Mongolian members of the Nine. Tilatoc was the ancient Central American Indian.

  “XauXaz was the one who died. Do you know anything about him at all? Could he have been associated with Stonehenge?”

  “I’ve heard XauXaz speaking in an ancient tongue, some sort of proto-Germanic,” I said. “And he spoke to me in English several times when I was Speaker, but only to give orders. Just before Caliban and I were sent from the caves with orders to fight each other to the death, Anana told me a few things about Caliban and myself. We’re half-brothers, and our grandfather was XauXaz. He may also have been our great-great-grandfather. God knows how many times he was our ancestor. He used Grandrith Castle as a breeding farm in some kind of experiment. I suspect that his brothers, Ebn XauXaz and Thrithjaz, who are also dead, may have bred the Grandrith family, maybe a long time before the Grandriths came to England, when they were Norsemen. And maybe a long time before then, maybe they started when our ancestors were just forming their Germanic speech. I don’t know, I’m guessing. I also suspect that old Ing, he whom the original Old English speakers worshiped as a living god, and he from whose name England was derived, may have taken a part in the breeding of the Grandrith line. Just as I suspect that my being raised by subhumans may have been an experiment of the Nine.

  “But I’m digressing. I don’t know what XauXaz had to do with Stonehenge. He was at least eighteen thousand five hundred years old when Stonehenge was built and maybe three times as old. He had been associated with the Germanic people from the beginning. And I doubt very much that the builders of Stonehenge, the ‘Wessex’ peoples, who probably descended from the Bronze Beaker peoples, were Germanic. The proto-Germanic language wouldn’t even have existed then.

  “But maybe he was associated with the Stonehenge people, maybe he was their living god. Maybe he supervised the building of Stonehenge. And then the Wessex people declined or he left them and went to the land between the Oder and the Elbe rivers. It is possible.”

  We might never know. But the Nine were here for what must be a very good reason for them.

  Murtagh entered with a noticeable increase in the frequency of oscillations of face. His skin was pale, and his mouth was as thin as the edge of a fingernail.

  “Are you exceptionally nervous?” I said.

  “Exceptionally so,” he replied. “But I always am when on the brink of an important action. You will find that my nerve won’t desert me. I can be relied upon.”

  I told him what Clara and I had been discussing and asked him if he had any information.

  “The Nine, as you well know, are sticklers for tradition,” he said. “I suppose when you’ve lived as long as they have, you will be, too. Though the way you live I doubt you’ll reach even a hundred. No offense!” he added sharply. Apparently, though he had thrown in with me, he still resented me.

  “I rather believe that the ceremony will be the burial of XauXaz, if he is associated with this place. Not a genuine burial, because even the Nine don’t have enough influence to bury him in the center of Stonehenge and keep all questions suppressed. But the funeral could be held there, and he could be buried nearby in some private land.”

  It seemed like a sound theory. I started to comment on it when the phone rang. I was closest, so I answered. A strange voice, deep as a hog grunting at the bottom of a well, spoke.

  “J.C.? D.C. here!”

  It was the proper challenge, and I gave the proper response. “Seedy? Seejay here!”

  “Speaking for D.C.,” the deep voice said. “Van Veelar. My friends call me Pauncho. Trish said to say hello. O.K.?”

  By that he must have meant that the naming of Trish was an additional reassurance that he was sent by Caliban. Patricia Wilde was Doc’s beautiful cousin, whom I was supposed to have killed but who was very much alive, as both Doc and I discovered.

  “Meet you at the corner of Barnard and Gigant Streets,” he said. “Be smoking a big cigar. You know what G. beringei looks like?”

  That had to mean gorilla beringei, the mountain gorilla. I said, “Very well.”

  “That’s me. A dead ringer for old beringei.
You can’t mistake me. Smoking a cigar in a big black Rolls. Always travel in style. See you. Hurry. This line may be tapped. Oh, and don’t forget! Anybody with metal fillings in their teeth is out. Or with metal plates in their heads. Or anywhere in their bodies. Right? You got the message? Right!”

  There was a click. I passed the word out, and in five minutes we had paid our bill and were driving away. The fog was as thick as ever. The sun was an exceedingly pale halo just above the housetops. The radio said that the fog had been in the area for two days and showed no signs of leaving. It was a freak phenomenon, extending inland for forty miles north of the coast.

  I had been to Salisbury twenty years before, but I have a good memory for topography and direction. And we had a city map. So we found the corner of Barnard and Gigant and located the Silver Cloud in an illegal parking area. I approached the car from the sidewalk side while Clara and Murtagh came on him from the street side.

  His window was open, and the collar of his thick black coat was up and his bowler hat was tipped forward. The cigar reeked in the heavy wet air. I bent down to look at him through the window. His profile was much like that of a male of The Folk.

  Clara said something to him, and he motioned to me to come into the car. Clara and Murtagh went onto the sidewalk side and leaned in to hear through the window on the side, which he had opened. He turned on the ceiling lights. His eyebrows were the thickest I’d ever seen. His nose was a smudge; his upper lip was proportionately as long as an orangutan’s; his jaws protruded; his teeth were thick but widely spaced. The eyes under those heavy supraorbital ridges were small and gray-blue. Despite his intense ugliness, he radiated likableness.

  “Doc told me all about you,” he said. “I don’t know anything about our gang, but he said that you were the boss at your end of things, so I’m your obedient servant. I think we’d better get going, ’cause time is of the essence. You got pocket communicators so you can tell ’em back here to stick close to us. Easy to get lost in this soup.”

  I showed him the cigarette-lighter shaped transceivers which had a range of a half-mile. He was familiar with them, since Caliban had invented them. We got into the cars, I gave orders, and the four cars started up close on Pauncho’s rear bumper. He had exceptionally long arms, and the body under the coat was keg-shaped. He talked out of the side of his mouth while the cigar bobbed up and down.

  “I ain’t got time to tell you everything that happened in Germany. Suffice it that we’ve tracked Iwaldi to this area. He’s here because he knew the Nine would be holding XauXaz’s funeral. They’re on to his being here. They are also on to us being here, but all they know, so far, is that we are in the area, too. They’ve been looking for us; we’ve had some narrow escapes here. But that’s all polluted water under the bridge. Listen, watch the road signs, will you? We got to take A-three-six-o northwest out of town. I made a dry run last night, but in this fog... whoops! Watch it, you crazy fool!”

  A dark form swerved away from us, its horn blaring.

  “Listen, the radio last night interviewed some crackpot that claimed this fog was caused by witches. Said there was a coven lived near Stonehenge. I ain’t so sure he was too far off the beam. Doc says old Anana has some strange powers that reach way back into the Old Stone Age. But I’m getting off the track. Here’s the shape-up. Doc and Trish—what a dish!—and Barney, my dumb-dumb buddy, are near Stonehenge, by the long barrows at the crossing of A-three-six-o and A-three-o-three. Doc says if they’re gone when we get there, we should proceed on to Stonehenge. The ceremony’ll take place sometime today. The Nine won’t be bothered by tourists on account of the fog or the local police. They’ve pulled strings to assure that. Doc thinks the police have been told that the British secret service wants the area kept clear while they run down enemy agents there. It’s easy when you figure that some of the biggest big shots on Downing Street are servants of the Nine.”

  Pauncho added that Iwaldi was in the neighborhood, though Doc and his aides had not actually seen him. The battle would be three-way with my forces and Doc’s definitely in the minority. But our strategy was to hit and run. If we could get just one of the Nine, we would feel happy.

  Pauncho van Veelar told us to open the small chests on the floors. We did so and brought out chain mail shirts and loinguards and close-fitting helmets. All were of irradiated plastic.

  “Put them on now,” he said. “Once we get there, you won’t have much time to change. Those shirts, by the way, resist a direct impact to a considerable degree. But if a man is strong enough—I am—he can tear the links apart.”

  We started to undress in the cramped quarters. I said, “Doc’s message was rather curt. It said not to bring anyone with metal fillings in their teeth or with metal anywhere in their bodies. Now that I see this plastic armor, I’m beginning to get a vague idea of what was behind that cryptic order. Would you mind explaining so our mental fog isn’t as thick as that out there?”

  “Yeah, sure,” he grunted. “Sorry. One thing at a time, I always say. You see, one of Doc’s inventions is an inductive-field generator. It sends out a fan-shaped beam with an extreme range of half a mile. It’s atomic-powered and eats up a lot of power but an amplifier enables it to radiate almost as much as it takes in. It heats up all metals within its field. Teeth fillings, rings, various articles such as watches, guns, knives, you name it. Copper telephone wires and aluminum high-tension power lines melt, and the towers get too hot to take hold of. The gas in a car’s tank will explode from the heat of the metal.

  “But we got weapons that we can use in a field in our trunks. Clubs—baseball bats—and plastic knives okay for stabbing but lousy for cutting. And small fiberglass crossbows with gut strings and wooden bolts with plastic points. And plastic grenades with compressed gas and detonators in them. Gunpowder, TNT, cordite, all types of explosives, become very unstable so you can’t use them in plastic firearms or bombs. Even the gas in Doc’s grenades is a special type of gas.”

  “So it’s back to the primitive?” I said. “I like that.”

  It was ironic that the servants of the Nine and I had fought each other in the primeval forests of remotest Africa with helicopters, napalm bombs, automatic rifles, personnel detectors, and every up-to-date weapon available. Yet here in one of the most technologically advanced and most populated nations of the world, we were to engage in battle with clubs and knives and tiny bows. And with this heavy fog, we were liable to end up using only the clubs and knives and, indubitably, our hands and feet.

  “Except for the materials, the weapons’ll be primitive,” Pauncho said. “And the inductor prevents the use of personnel radar or other detectors in this fog, too! The Nine’ll have their own inductor going, you can bet on that, and the same kind of weapons we’ll have, all of which Doc invented. And maybe Iwaldi’ll have his inductor on, if he really shows. Of course, he won’t unless he’s crazy, but he’s crazy, no doubt of that. The Nine’ll have an army of thugs, and they’ll be using them as a big net to catch Iwaldi, not to mention us, if they win the battle, that is.

  “Oh, by the way, we’ll have to hoof it a mile or so. We can’t take the cars inside the inductor area. But Doc says that the Nine’ll have cars, enough to carry them inside the area. They got three. Steam driven and plastic. Doc made them for the old geezers for just such a setup as this. Antipoetic justice, ain’t it? We ride shank’s mare, and they ride in style in cars Doc’s genius built for them!”

  We got onto A360, and Pauncho pushed the car at eighty all the way. He talked without letup. Ordinarily, such chatter would have rasped my nerves, but he provided much information which I desired. He told me that he was the son of “Jocko” Simmons and that Barney Banks, his dumb-dumb buddy, was the son of “Porky” Rivers. These were the old men who had accompanied Doc Caliban on their last adventure at the age of eighty. I have described them and their heroic deaths in Volume IX of my memoirs. They were the last survivors of a group of five who had dedicated their lives to helping Cal
iban in his battle against evildoers. (Never mind that Caliban was also working for the Nine because they offered him immortality. Caliban was given a free hand to battle crime as long as he did not interfere with the Nine. I do not condemn him for that; I succumbed to the temptation of immortality, too.)

  Pauncho and Barney were born in 1932, shortly after their mothers divorced their fathers. Rivers and Simmons spent too much time with their leader and their wives, fed up, cut loose.

  “I remember my father, the old ape, visiting me now and then,” Pauncho said. “My mother remarried about two years after the divorce, and her husband adopted me. He was a great guy. But I was torn. I liked my father at the same time I hated him because he had, in a sense, deserted me. Now I can appreciate why he decided in favor of adventure. But I loathed chemistry even though my father was one of the world’s greatest chemists. Maybe because of that.”

  Pauncho remembered visits from his “Uncle Doc” and visits to his wonderland laboratory in the eyrie of the Empire State Building. Pauncho and Barney had grown up together, since they lived three houses apart. They were in the same outfit in the Marines during the Korean War. They were visiting Doc after the deaths of their fathers, when he invited them to join him. Both had apparently inherited a love for adventure and combat from their fathers, and when they found out that Doc’s own researches were close to the point where he would be able to reproduce the immortality elixir, they accepted his offer.

  At the rate Pauncho was going, we would have reached the junction of the two highways in ten minutes. But we had to stop to avoid running into a pile-up of three cars. He slowed down to forty after that. Then, after a glance at the milometer, he crept along until the junction suddenly moved out from the fog. He turned right and drove for a few feet and then parked the car on the side of the road. The other cars followed. Two of the drivers got out swearing about the crazy fool Yank.