But he was tired, so very tired. As he relaxed beside the water, that tiredness caught at him. His feet hurt; perhaps he should not have thrown away those imprisoning coverings—only he could no longer stand their touch. Water rippled about his feet as he lowered them into the pool, soothing away smart and burn. He rubbed them dry with handfuls of grass and curled up drowsily.
The sound brought Naill out of sleep so deep dreams did not reach it. He lay where he was for a moment wrenched out of ordinary time, every part of him questioning by senses far more specialized than any off-worlder’s. He rolled under a bush and brought his head around to look skyward.
No sun yet—but the lighter sky of dawn. Against it that blot—man-made. A flyer from the port—small, two-man job—and coasting low. Naill Renfro’s memory supplied that much. But why—how—?
Had Kosburg appealed for such help in his hunting? Why? Trying to answer that was folly. Soon it would be full day—and while Naill could travel in the gloom of the forest, he dared not try to face the open under the sun. Best move now: the river—with Iftcan across it. Were the wild ones still there? No, there was a dimness, a feeling that what had happened in Iftcan was long past. But that place drew Ayyar, and to its pull Naill Renfro made no discouraging answer.
He started downstream, keeping under the roof of the trees. Overhead he could follow the circling of the flyer by the waxing and waning of the engine purr. The pilot was hunting something right enough, swinging the machine in a steady pattern of rings over the forest. What he could see below, save a carpet of tree crowns, puzzled Naill. But the circling was too regular to doubt that the port pilot did have a definite purpose, which could only be a search.
The rill that was Naill’s guide joined another stream, widened, developed a visible current. Water things swam, or popped into the flood from along the verge as he passed. He found another fussan bush, stripped its pods and munched the seeds as he went.
Then his nose warned danger—not the man smell, no, this was vile in another way. His mind supplied a murky picture of a danger that ran on many legs, lurked, hid, pounced on anything venturing into the forest strip it had appropriated as hunting territory. Naill leaped to catch at a low-hanging bough. Its elasticity helped to whip him up into the mass of the tree. And so he passed over that path with its evil smell, staying above and traveling from one tree limb to the next until the last taint of that odor was lost.
The day was on him, but the full dazzle of the sun did not reach here. Then he saw it blindingly bright before him, reflected from water, a sheet of swiftly running water. He shielded his eyes with his hands and tried to make out what lay on the opposite shore. Was there an Iftcan still?
SIX
IFTCAN THE DEAD
Dark green, but only in patches. Elsewhere stands of white—stark white pillars, dead trees around which only small brush crept, a few stunted saplings grew. Yet in his mind it was alive! Silver-green, tall and beautiful, the tree towers of Iftcan! If he could only remember clearly—and more.
Naill cupped hands over his eyes, peering through finger slits to shut out the light as much as he could. The river was wide, but there were rocks jutting above its shrunken summer surface. One could cross by aid of those. Only—it was open sky there and he could hear the hum of the flyer.
Suppose—suppose a man could slip down into the flood a little to the east, let the current carry him in an angle downstream to where a point of tumbled rocks speared into the water? A mat of old storm flotsam clung and banked there to form cover. Beyond it was brush into which one could duck.
Naill tensed, listening to the sound of the overhead menace, trying to gauge just how far away it was, speculating as to how much of the riverbank its pilot could observe. He dared not look aloft into the sky; his eyes protested even this amount of sunlight and he feared blindness.
He dropped his hands and eased off his breeches. Green body against the earth might have a better chance. Now . . . ! As well as Naill could judge, the flyer was on the farthest edge of the loop it was traveling. He began his crawl down-slope to the water, keeping to all the cover there was. The flyer was headed back!
Naill froze, hugging the earth, feeling the despair of an insect overhung by a giant boot ready to stamp it flat. He found himself furiously willing blindness on the pilot, invisibility for himself.
The motor beat loudly in his ears. Was the machine hovering right over him? By a gigantic effort of will he lay quiet, made himself wait and listen.
No, not a hover—it was passing! Passing south. When it reached the far point of the swing, he could make a run that should slip him into the water. He listened—then moved.
The water was cold; it chilled his bare body as he tried to enter without betraying splashes. Then he let the current pull him along. Above the sound of the water he caught the hum of the flyer on its backsweep.
Naill’s nails grated on a rock as he clung in its shadow, trying to make himself small. Luck was with him—the machine was passing over. He loosened that frantic hold, allowed himself to drift downstream. When he caught against the rock point, he could control himself no longer but scrambled out of the water, scuttled over the rocks, and dived into brush cover at the foot of one of those bleached bones—the dead tree towers of Iftcan.
For several long moments he merely lay there, listening, fearing that he had betrayed himself in that small burst of panic. Only the hum was fading again; the flyer was going north. He had made the crossing undetected.
Now to find a hiding place in which to wait out the day, to favor his smarting eyes. Naill put out a hand, drew it down the dry bark of the dead tree against which he had taken refuge. It was huge, this tall trunk. Was this not Iftcan, whose trees had known a thousand planet years of carefully tended growth?
His hand fell away as he drew back from the dead. In its way he knew a little of the same revulsion he had known at the garth. Living things did not shelter among the dead.
Naill moved on from the verge of the river, keeping prudently under cover. Always about him were the leafless trees, long since finished, yet standing as monuments to their own ends.
They were quiet, those forest aisles of Iftcan. His passing alerted no bird or small living thing; no insect sped away. And here no breeze sang a song he could almost but not quite put words to. At least the flyer had not followed; it still circled above the river.
Naill was through the First Ring now. Here was a belt of denser green, and in it lifted the crowns of two saplings, untended, unshaped—yet the species was not dead, then! Naill pushed his way to one, regardless of scratches and the stinging whip of small branches, to stand and run his hand along its trunk. It seemed that the bark pulsed under his palm as if he stroked a pet animal that responded by arching its body to fit closer into his hand.
“Far, far, and first the seed,
Then the seedling,
From the rooting, to the growing.
Breath of body, stir of leaf,
Ift to tree, tree to Ift!”
* * *
He crooned the words hardly above a whisper. What did they mean, demanded Naill Renfro. Growing words, power words, words of recognition, replied Ayyar. The death was not wholly death! The triumph of the Larsh was not complete. And these saplings had seeded aright—somewhere one or more of the Great Crowns was yet alive!
Weaving a path between the dead, he cut deeper into the unknown. Another living sapling! And then . . .
He stared in wonder. Old, very old . . . huge. . . . This—his tangled memory sought, found—this was Iftsiga! The ancient citadel of the south. And it lived!
No ladder hung from the great forelimb stretching high above his head. There was no way to reach the hollow he could sight where that mighty limb joined the parent trunk. And he had no wings to whisk him aloft. Naill’s head turned slowly as he caught, on the breeze ruffling the tree leaves, the slight hint of another scent.
Tracing it, he found what otherwise he might have overlooked—the sapling ladder carefully hidden in the leaf mat on the ground. To off-worlder or settler it would have been nothing more than a dead tree with stumps of branches still sprouting jaggedly from its trunk. Ayyar of the Iftin knew it instantly, swung it up against the bulk of Iftsiga, and climbed it nimbly to a limb that was wide enough to accommodate four of his kind walking abreast.