Yet as he went, nose, ears, eyes reported to his brain, and his brain produced answers to scent, hearing, sight, which were not a part of Naill Renfro at all. His headlong flight slackened as he leaned panting against a tree bole. As his panicky breathing began to slow, his head came up again and he battled shakiness, fear. The soft whisper of breeze in the leaves, the warmth—the caress of that same wind against his bare chest and arms. . . . And now that feeling of content, that this was right, the way life should be. As if he, too, reached down roots into the earth underfoot, raised swaying branch arms to the sky—a kinship with the forest world.
But he went on, though at a soberer pace, schooling his unease. He stopped once to strip long, narrow leaves from a low-hanging branch, crushed them between his palms, and then inhaled deeply of the scent from their bruised surfaces. He felt clear headed, alert, tireless, and eager.
However, that eagerness was replaced by another emotion as he came into the hacked trace of the settlers’ war against the wild. Wilting leaves, broken branches—Naill’s nostrils twitched in a spasm of distaste. He was scowling and unaware of it. The smell of death, decay, where it did not belong, and with it another stink—of an alien life form, defiling yet familiar.
He traced that smell out of the clearing, through the thinning of brush racked and torn by the logs pulled through it. Then he was on the edge of a field, a field where the butts of forest giants still stood as raw and ugly monuments to the death dealt them weeks ago. Naill snarled at the spoilation, and within him grew the disinclination to advance any farther into the open.
Pinpoints of light pricked beyond. His gaze centered there, narrowed. That was a garth—Kosburg’s? Dared he chance moving closer? Yet he must. He was a man . . . there were men. If he could see them, speak with them, then he would know that his eyes had deceived him back at the pool, that he was not—not that thing!
Though that need drove him forward, Naill did not go openly, nor did he realize that the action he took, seemingly by instinct, would have been totally foreign to Naill Renfro. His noiseless step—with a foot planted with infinite care, his crouching run from one bit of cover to the next—was that of a scout deep on a spying trip within the holdings of the enemy.
Always that stink was heavy in his nostrils, clogging up the air to sicken him, growing heavier the closer he drew to the farmstead. He was still a field away when the clamor broke out—the hounds! Their baying was a war cry. Somehow he knew—as well as if they had human speech and shouted—that he was the quarry. So he had been right in that long-ago guess: the garths kept those four-footed hunters as a threat to laborer runaways.
But Naill also remembered the custom at Kosburg’s. The animals had not been loosed in the fields at night. There was too much chance of their disappearing on some game hunt into the forest and not returning. No, they patrolled inside the wall of the garth yard.
And this was Kosburg’s right enough. Naill recognized the set of the big main house against the night sky. There was a place where an active man could climb the outer wall, look in at the top floor window of that building, avoiding a descent into the yard. Why he had this pressing need to do just that he could not have explained, but do it he must.
Though he flinched as the hounds bayed, he ran in a zigzag from shadow to shadow until his hands were on the stake wall near the house. He leaped, again not aware that his effort was far more powerful than any Naill Renfro could have made.
Killing trees to make shelters. Why did these people not know that trees could live and yet welcome indwellers? No—always this kind must kill, use dead things to pile about them until their lairs smelled—reeked of foul decay as did the pit of a hunting kalcrok!
The stench was almost more than he could bear, making his stomach protest. Yet he crouched before the incut which held an open window and looked into the lighted room beyond. He jerked and nearly lost his balance. That—that thing—two of them! They were monsters—as horrible as the smell of these dead lairs of theirs!
“Men” hammered one small part of his brain—or rather one man—the younger Kosburg—and a woman.
Monsters! The revulsion was sharp. Hairy as beasts—alien, not only in body but in mind. Looking at them now, Naill could in a way he could not understand savor their crooked thoughts, look into the narrowness of them. There was a wrongness every part of his own spirit rejected without pity.
The woman turned her head; her eyes by chance were on the window. Her mouth shaped into a distorted square. She screamed tearingly, and continued to scream with sharp, mindless cries.
Naill leaped outward, landing lightly on his feet. Just as he had been revolted, had rejected kinship with this species, so had the woman felt about him. He ran, away from the stench of the dead wood and the creatures who laired in it, heading for the forest with its clean shelter.
But his repudiation of the garth was not the end. An hour later he lay with heaving shoulders and laboring lungs, hearing still the belling of the hounds. They had brought them out, those garthdwellers, to pick up his trail across the fields. Only the fact that they had kept the dogs leashed had saved him. But, judging from the sounds, they had not ventured yet beyond the roughly cleared land. Were they waiting there for daylight?
Then would the settlers overcome their dislike of the forest and again put the hounds on his trail? Or would he be safe if he retreated farther into the deep woods? To go deeper, he would be lost to his own kind—alone . . . His own kind?
Spirit of Space—who were his kind now? Naill shivered. His revulsion for the garth was a real thing, as real as the heat of fever, the pain in his head. He could not go to those people and claim kinship—never again.
And that fact, standing stark and black in a chaotic world, had to be faced. Something terrible had happened to him—outside, inside. He was no longer Naill Renfro. Though he was not now looking at a strange reflection in a pool, he was looking inside him at what had taken over his mind as well as his body.
Ayyar . . . who was Ayyar? If he were not Naill Renfro, then he was Ayyar. And he had to know who—what—was Ayyar, to whom the forest was truly home, to whom there came strange memories in ragged tatters. He must find Ayyar.
To do that . . . where did one search for such a weird trail? Physically, in the aisles of the forest; mentally, where? Because Naill did not know, he got to his feet and started in the only direction of which he was sure—back to the pool where he had first seen the mirrored face of someone who was no longer Naill Renfro.
Now that he had admitted that much, more and more of the new person took over. He stopped, pulled at the fastenings on the heavy boots that weighed down his feet. Footgear should be so different—made of borfund hide, fitting snugly, reaching from sole of foot to just below the knee—hunters’ boots, through which one could feel any inequality of footing, not these clumsy coverings that locked the foot in prison, away from the good earth.
He pulled in irritation at his breeches. These, too—formless, coarse—were wrong. Green-gray silky stuff which caressed the body—spider thread wound and woven, packed in stass buds and the whole pressed firm to dry and age—that made proper clothing for the wood. Iftcan . . . But the Larsh were there. Naill stumbled against a tree, stood rubbing his head. Never a clear memory, just bits and patches . . . tiny fearsome scenes of men like himself, a desperate, driven handful, fighting among trees, trees in which they dwelt, going down one by one before a rabble horde of wild men . . . scattered, broken. Somehow he knew that had been the end of his kind.
His kind? What was his kind? Who was Ayyar? He blundered on, though he knew where he was going, that he would come out at the pool side.
And he did, falling down by that quiet pocket, drinking again from his cupped hands, slapping the pool’s bounty over his sweating body. The rill ribboning from the smaller mirror pool, that should drain into the river—and beyond the river. He drew a ragged breath. Beyond the river stood Iftcan, tall and beautiful, silver leaves and singing leaves—the tower trees of Iftcan!