The roof of a hut lifted up and fell over to one side, like the roof of a trapdoor spider. The walls collapsed in orderly fashion outwards, falling to the ground and forming a petal-figure. In the center of the hut was a catapult, a giant bow with an arrow made from the horns of the creature that had provided the booms on the noses of the gliders. To it were attached a number of flaming bladders. The bow was released, and the burning arrow shot upwards and buried itself deep within the under part of the floater.
The catapult crew began to wind the string back. A man fell from an opening in the floater and was followed by ten more. They came down as if parachuting. Their descent was checked by a cluster of bladders attached to a harness around the shoulders and chest. An arrow caught the first abutal just before he struck the ground, and then three more of the ten behind him were transfixed.
The survivors landed untouched a few feet from the catapult. They unstrapped their harness, and the bladders rose away from them. By then, they were surrounded. They fought so fiercely, one got to the catapult, only to be run through with two spears.
The island-floater, driven by the wind, began to pass over the village. Other stones on cables had been dropped, and a few had caught in the tangle of the walls without breaking. Then ropes fell onto the fronds and the huge loops tightened around them.
Caught at the forward end, the floater swung around so that its bulk hung over this part of the surface island. By then, the gliders had made their landing, not all successfully. Because of the density of the vegetation, the crafts had to come down upon fronds. Some were flipped over; some crashed through several fronds before being caught and held. Some slipped down between the fronds and smashed into the tough thick bushes.
But from where he stood, Wolff could see at least twenty pilots, unhurt, who were now slipping through the jungle. And there had to be others.
He heard his name called. Vala had come back and was standing at the foot of the hill.
“What do you intend to do?” she said angrily. “You have to take sides, Jadawin, whether you want to or not. The abutal will kill you.”
“You may be right,” he said as he came down the hill. “I wanted to get some idea of what was going on. I didn’t want to rush blindly into this without knowing where everybody was, how the fight was going on. . . .”
“Always the cautious and crafty Jadawin,” she said. “Well, that’s all right; it shows you are no fool, which I already know. Believe me, you need me as much as I need you. You can’t go this thing alone.”
He followed her, and presently they came upon Rintrah, crouching under a frond. He gestured at them for silence. When they were beside him, Wolff looked at where Rintrah was pointing. Five abutal warriors were standing not twenty yards from them. The tail of a wrecked glider rose from behind a crushed bush to their left. They carried small round shields of bone, javelins of bone tipped with bamboo, and several had bows and arrows. The bows were made of some hornlike substance, were short and recurved, and formed of two parts that were joined in a central socket of horn. The warriors were too far away for him to overhear their conference.
“What’s the range of your beamer?” Vala said.
“It kills up to fifty feet,” he said. “Third-degree burns for the next twenty feet, and after that, second-degree burns up through a light singe to no effect.”
“Now’s your chance. Rush them. You can kill all five with one sweep before they know what’s going on.”
Wolff sighed. There would have been a time when he would not even have waited for Vala’s urgings. He would have killed them all by now and been tempted to continue the work with Vala and Rintrah. But he was no longer Jadawin; he was Robert Wolff. Vala would not understand this, or if she did, she would see his hesitation as a weakness. He did not want to kill, but he doubted that there was any way of forcing the abutal to call off their attack. Vala knew these people, and she was probably telling him the truth about them. So, like it or not, he had to take sides.