"Yes, he has," said Bayub-Otal, "and after all you've risked and suffered, both you and Meris are fully entitled to whatever he'll give you. Well, that's clear, then."
With a certain air of embarrassment he continued, "And have you thought, Maia, about where you're going?"
She had indeed. She wanted and intended to go wherever Zen-Kurel went; and if she could not, she did not care what became of her.
"It's all one to me, Anda-Nokomis," she said. "Perhaps I may think of something later."
"But do you want to try to reach the Zhairgen with us?" He was just perceptibly impatient.
"That'll do as well as anything else. Will you excuse me if I go to bed now? I'm very tired." And she turned away without waiting for a reply.
When they came to set out the following morning, it was clear that Zen-Kurel must have been giving thought to the importance of maintaining at least a civil working relationship with the two girls. He greeted both of them courteously if rather distantly, and went on to say that he thought they could hope to reach the Zhairgen that evening.
"Of course it won't be like twelve miles in open country," he said. "It'll be rough going in the forest, I dare say, but we can make sure of keeping our direction by following the Daulis downstream. Even if we do have to spend a night in the forest, we shall be able to manage all right. A fire's the great thing. I was once three nights in the Blue Forest in Katria, and that was quite bearable."
They had become his soldiers, thought Maia, with se-cret, fond amusement. He felt it his responsibility to look after them, to show no favorites, to set an example and raise everyone's confidence. In some respects she felt so much older than he. Probably it was as well that for now things should remain as they were; impersonal and matter-of-fact. Anyway, he should have all the loyalty and help he would permit her to give him. She would act her part of the dutiful follower, even though she suspected that in his courage and ardor he might very well be leading them all into grave danger. Reckon I've caught love like I was ill, she thought. I couldn't stop loving him whatever happened, whatever he did. I've got to suffer it, but I'll be damned if I'm going to show it.
Bayub-Otal was his usual chilly, composed self. His great virtue, thought Maia--one more likely to appeal to men than women--was his consistency. He could always be relied upon to be much the same, whether in good fortune or bad, in danger or out of it. She could well imagine that he must have been a tower of strength to his friends in the prison at Dari-Paltesh.
Meris seemed subdued--even anxious to please. That was the pathetic thing about Meris, thought Maia.
It was as though she really couldn't help the things she did. So then someone hit her or humiliated her and she became quite a nice girl--for a while. She wondered how deeply Zirek felt about her. Despite all they had undergone, she was still very beautiful; and obviously, as Zen-Kurel had conceded, indisputably possessed of courage and endurance.
Zirek himself struck Maia as being in a mood of well-masked apprehension, when Zen-Kurel's back was turned he winked at her and mimed the action of tossing a coin, catching it in his palm and turning it over on the back of the other hand. Then, pretending to uncover and look at it, he stared up at her with an expression of comical dismay.
Their farewells were brief but sincere. Kerkol and Blarda wished them luck and Clystis gave them what food she could spare. Maia gave her an extra hundred meld, embraced her and wished her the perpetual favor of the gods. Then they set off across the pasture in the direction of the river.
They reached it about two hours later, just as the day was growing hot. The bank, though rough and lonely, was fairly open. The river was about twenty yards wide and certainly deep. Despite the time of year, there was no bottom to be seen. There was indeed a good, steady current, but nothing so swift as Zen-Kurd's account had led Maia to expect.
"No crossing that, you see, Anda-Nokomis," said Zen-Kurel in a conclusive tone.
"And no point, either,' replied Bayub-Otal, "if we can reach the Zhairgen without."
They turned downstream, picking their way through gradually thickening scrub and now seeing ahead of them tiie outskirts of the forest, dark against the growing glare of the southern sky. "It'll be cooler once we get in there," said Zen-Kurel, slashing at the flies with a broken-off branch.
The approach to the forest consisted of fairly close brush and, beside the river, wide patches of dried-up reeds and cracked mud, which at any other time of year would have been impassable. These they pressed through, putting up great clouds of gnats which tormented them, following them about in front, as Zirek put it, and settling on their necks and arms. Once Meris startled a bright-green snake, which whipped between her and Maia and was gone before either of them had time to feel afraid--of that particular one. > Emerging at length from the further side of this marshland, they found themselves at the foot of a long, gradual slope, so thickly overgrown that they could not really see how high it might be. To the right of this the river wound away among tangles of undergrowth until it was lost to sight.
"We mustn't lose touch with the river, Anda-Nokomis, if we can help it," said Zen-Kurel, "but the best thing will be to get up this ridge and then go down and pick up the bank again. We'll be able to see more of the lie of the land from the top."
They began to climb. Maia, who had started a menstrual period the previous morning and now had a headache, was beginning to feel thoroughly out of patience. Damn these fools who couldn't swim!
There--just there--was the river-- safe, smooth, cool and free from flies. She could easily have been three or four miles down it in an hour.
"Are you all right, Maia?" asked Bayub-Otal, turning back to give her his hand over a fallen tree-trunk.
She nodded curtly, smacked a gnat on her arm and pushed on uphill.
An hour later, having at last topped the ridge, they found themselves gazing down on the forest proper.
The prospect was formidable and worse. Maia, surveying it with something close to terror, could only suppose that either Clystis must have thought that Zen-Kurel possessed magic powers or else that she had been too nervous of him to speak out more strongly.
Ahead of and below them lay a vast, shallow dip, something like two or three miles across. In every direction, as far as the eye could see, it was compact with trees, unbroken and even as a roof in the still heat. So uniform, so featureless was this prospect that they might have been looking out across a smoothly undulant, green lake. No tree seemed taller than another and none, one would suppose, could have moved even in a wind, so close together were they crowded. Looking at that forest, no one could tell in what millennium he might be living. The god of that place, thought Maia, was not hostile to mankind; no, he was simply indifferent, distinguishing not at all between men, beasts and the insects darting among the leaves. Once in there, their lives would have no more value than those of ants; and they themselves would be as helpless.
On the farther side of this great bowl the horizon was closed by a line of the same trees; and one could imagine the forest continuing unchanged beyond. Away to their right, below the ridge on which they were standing, they could catch, here and there, glimpses of the river.
"Jumping Cran!" muttered Zirek, staring. "It can't be done, sir!"
"Nobody has to do it who doesn't want to," replied Zen-Kurel with (so it seemed to Maia) a somewhat forced air of confidence. "Personally, I'm going to Terekenalt and that's the way. But let's have a rest and eat now, shall we?"
"I was just thinking about the eating,' said Bayub-Otal. "I think it may take us quite a long time to reach the Zhairgen through that; certainly two days. We ought to be rather sparing, I think, of what food we've got."
"We might be able to kill something," said Zen-Kurel. "I'd like a chance to try these arrows."
Having eaten, they descended the ridge, making once more for the river, and now entered in earnest the forest depth. Within half an hour Maia was almost as frightened as though Fornis herself, innumerably multipl
ied, were lying in wait behind every tree. There was no true light; only a murky, green gloom filtering down from far above, so dim that neither they themselves nor the trees cast shadows. They could not see more than twenty or thirty yards ahead, partly for the gloom and partly for the undergrowth all around. The humidity was like damp felt clinging to skin and clothes; a thick, resistant film which they seemed to thrust apart with their bodies in pushing on. There were weird, disturbing noises--sudden cries and chatterings, and sometimes the squawking of alarmed birds in the confined stillness--but the creatures making them remained unseen.
She felt diminished, shrunken as though by an evil spell, a minute creature walking between the legs of a giant. And the giant was vigilant. He, she now knew, was the god: a god unknown to man; nameless--what were names?--infinitely remote and old. He was watching them as he watched everything in the forest, yet their fate was nothing to him. Nor would propitiation be of the least avail. He was lord of a world in which prayer had no meaning and death itself very little; a world in which the frog sat impassively as the snake approached closer to devour it.
After a time they had lost all sense of direction. There was, of course, no telling where the sun might be.
Zen-Kurel, using Maia's knife--the only one they had--tried to maintain a line by marking successive tree-trunks, but the undergrowth, in many places so impenetrable as to force them to turn this way and that, rendered the scheme futile. After a long time they came upon a tree already marked and realized that they must have returned to it. Of the river there was neither sight nor sound.
Zen-Kurel, however, remained outwardly calm. The river, he insisted, could not be far away, but when Zirek asked him how he could be sure that they were not going away from it, he could only reply that he expected before long to come on some tributary brook which they would be able to follow. As the afternoon wore on, Maia began to entertain first the possibility, then the likelihood and finally the conviction that they might very well wander until they died. When, like a specter, the idea first glimmered in her mind, she dismissed it as a morbid fancy. But with growing thirst and fatigue adding to the discomfort of her menstruation, it was all she could do--and, as we have seen, Maia did not lack courage--not to give way openly to her fear. If ever they did find the basting river, she thought, she would plunge in and be damned to the lot of them, so she would. Meanwhile, Meris was showing no alarm whatever. Meris, as well she knew, had seen unspeakable things, and survived them. She, Maia, was not going to be put to shame by Meris. Well, not yet, anyway.
At last they happened to come out into a clearing--an acre or two of relatively open ground which none of them could remember seeing from the ridge. Here there must have been, or so it seemed, some local disease of the trees, for a great many were dead; several leaning against those still living, others lying their huge length along the open ground. There was a little pool of water, too, in a rock-hollow, from which they drank. Although this was apparently fed by a spring, it flowed nowhere, the overflow merely seeping away into the surrounding, parched ground.
Now at last they could see the sun. It was low, reddening to evening, and lay on their right. Looking back, they could catch sight, far off above the trees, of the ridge which they had descended.
"Well, at least we've been going more or less in the right direction, Anda-Nokomis," said Zen-Kurel, "though I'm afraid we must have gone something like two miles for every one that's been any good to us. And, now we know where the river must be, too."
"I don't think we'd better try to reach it tonight," said Bayub-Otal. "Everyone's tired out. Wherever we are, we're going to need a fire, and there's plenty of dead wood here. I suggest we camp."
"How much further d'you reckon it is to the Zhairgen, then, sir?" asked Zirek. "We've got very little food, and the girls can't be expected to stand up to much more of this."
"We must just hope for the best, mustn't we?" replied Bayub-Otal expressionlessly. He turned away and began gathering sticks with his one hand.
"We shall get there tomorrow," said Zen-Kurel. "Why not, once we reach the river bank?"
A few hours later, as night fell with only the briefest of twilight, Maia realized that in the forest, darkness called forth another world. Here, human order was reversed. Daylight was the time appointed by the god for concealment, inaction and sleep. In daylight he was sole, a presence absorbing his creatures into himself, sheltering them from the intrusion of that upstart, the sun. At nightfall he became manifold, breathing into them his fell, rapacious spirit, so that they became as he, indifferent to fear, suffering and death, intent only upon obeying his will. They must kill and eat, for with the renewal of day it was decreed that they should return once more into the single essence of their master. Kill--be killed: eat--be eaten: which, mattered little. This was their pursuit and calling, and they were impelled to it without power of decision.
Zirek still had his pedlar's fire-making tools--quartz, iron and sulphur--and had little trouble in transferring the flame to a heap of dry grass. Soon their sticks were burning well, and Maia and Meris joined the men in dragging up fallen branches and logs. Having no axe, they set the logs to burn at one end, pushing them forward into the blaze as they were consumed. Neither Bayub-Otal nor Zen-Ku-rel said anything about turns on watch, and Maia guessed that the three men had already come to some arrangement among themselves.
When she had eaten the few mouthfuls that were her share of supper, she wrapped herself in her cloak and lay down to sleep. Yet tired out as she was, sleep would not come. She was hungry; her head ached; her belly hurt. Her flux had come on strongly and there was nothing clean or dry to put between her legs. But these discomforts were as nothing compared with her terror of the forest and the thought of the morrow. I can't go on, she thought. Even if no one'll come with me, I'll go back to the farm alone. Yet she knew very well that she could not attempt it.
The active night was full of wild, disturbing cries. From somewhere far off sounded a many-voiced clamor which must, she thought, be the howling of wolves. As she lay listening to this and trying to guess how distant it might be, there came from close by a deep, mewling cough, repeated several times. She turned faint with fear. At sup-per-parties in the upper city she had once or twice listened to Beklan hunters' stories of the great cats. An armed man, someone had told her, stood iio least chance against one of these creatures, and hunters invariably left them alone in their wild, forest territories, which, he had added, it was their nature to defend fiercely against intruders.
Looking out into the darkness she could see, here and there, eyes reflecting the firelight--some glowing red, oth-ers white or green. There seemed a continual coming and going of eyes between the trees. They were being watched. How could these watchers be anything but hostile? And they themselves--what could they do against them? Nothing; and this was the worst of her fear. Danger is far harder to bear when one can neither retaliate nor fly.
Meris was sleeping as soundly as a child. How strangely contradictory people often were, thought Maia.
Meris, the agent of so much pointless, destructive trouble, had been composed and cooperative all day; unsmiling, but also uncomplaining and performing promptly whatever was asked of her. Probably the men felt less encumbered by Meris than by herself.
Zirek was on watch, pacing slowly up and down on the opposite side of the fire as he looked out into the darkness. In one hand he was carrying his bow and an arrow, but seemed not so much tense as simply wary. On impulse she got up and walked round to him, conscious of the fouled cloth chafing between her legs. He nodded and smiled but said nothing.
"Zirek," she whispered, "how are we going to get out of this?"
He raised his eyebrows, feigning surprise.
"Why, your chap's going to get us out, isn't he?"
"My chap?" She was vexed. She did not ,want teasing.
"Well, the man you love, then. But he has been your lover, even if he isn't now."
"Oh, don't be silly, Zirek! It r
eally makes me angry to hear you go on like that. Why, he hates me! He thinks I tricked him and deceived him."
"Maybe he does: but he's still in love with you, even if he wishes he wasn't."
"How do you know that? He's never told you so, I'm sure."
"No, but I can tell. A man can tell, you know.".
"How?"
"I don't know, but you can." He paused. "Well, for a start, the way you treated each other at the farm."
"But Anda-Nokomis--he's just as angry with me for swimming the river."
"I know, but he hasn't been your lover. He's just in love with you: that's different."
"What?Zirek, whatever do you mean? I never heard such nonsense!"
"Funny, isn't it, how men can see things women can't? And sometimes the other way round. But I'd bet all I've got; which isn't much, unless we ever get to Santil. If only we can get to Santil, though, I reckon I'll be made for life. He might even give me some sort of estate, I dare say."
"Will you marry Meris, then?"
He looked at her sidelong and winked. "Pretty girl, isn't she?" Then, briskly, "But we were talking about you, Maia, not about me. Your Katrian, he's a good lad. I trust him, anyway. He's got plenty of guts and he's no fool. I'm sure he will get us through this damned place, somehow or other." He shoved the heaviest log a couple of feet further into the fire with his foot and added some sticks to make a brighter blaze. "Besides, he's still in love with you, so he's bound to."
Suddenly, about eighty yards away from the trees, something squealed in agony. It was the death-cry of some fairly large animal--monkey, orjtvda, perhaps, or creeping hak-kukar. They both waited unspeaking, but nothing followed--only the resumption of the swarming babble all about them.
"And that's why I personally believe he is going to get us out of it," said Zirek. "Or you are, or someone is. Because that's what the gods intend, you see. They've put it into our hearts. We shan't die. We've allof us got much too much motive for staying alive."