But Illylle smiled and hummed gently.
Naill-Ayyar knew that song; the words to fit the tune dropped into his mind one by one. It was very old—older than Iftcan, that song—for Iftcan’s Tree Towers had been evoked and nourished from saplings by its singing. That was the Song of the First Planting.
“There shall be again a city.” She broke the song to prophesy what they all knew in their hearts would come to pass. “And it shall rise where there was desolation. And the Oath shall be spoken once again. For the Iftin are replanted and the Nation shall grow—though the seeds were not of this world. There has been a judging and a judgment. We shall see a Fourth Leaf come into full greatness. But all growth is slow, and the way of the gardener is never without battle against destruction from without.” She began to sing again—the song which was only for the Mistresses of the Planting. They listened to her almost greedily.
She walked ahead, began to descend the stairway leading to the plain and the night. Behind they followed eagerly.
Victory on Janus
I
A winter sun was sullen red over Janus. Its bleak rays lit up the Forest that was being destroyed. Flame bit, grinding machines tore life from soil-deep roots. Quivering branches clicked together a warning that reached into Iftcan-of-the-trees, the city that once had been.
And in the heart of a mighty tree, Iftsiga, the last of the Great Crowns that still leafed and had sap blood, the in-dwellers it sheltered stirred from the depths of hibernation.
Larsh! Out of memory nearly as old as Iftsiga itself came that name. Death by the beast men. Out, brothers, defend Iftcan with sword and heart! Face the Larsh—
Ayyar struggled wildly with the covering over him, forced open unwilling eyes. It was dark here in the core of the giant tree. The summer festoons of lorgas, the light-larvae, were missing. Like all else they slept, snug in the crevices of the sheltering bark. But it was no longer quiet. About him like a wall was a trembling, a throbbing. And though Ayyar could not truly remember having heard it before, he recognized the alarm of the Forest Citadel.
“Awake! Danger comes!” Every throb of that great pulse beat through him. But it was so hard to move. The lethargy that had gripped him and his kin in the fall, that had brought them to shelter and sleep, had not lifted gradually as nature intended. Ayyar was not yet ready to face the new life of spring. Painfully he crawled from his nest of mats.
“Jarvas? Rizak?” His voice was hoarse and rusty as he called to those sharing this chamber. The force of the warning grew stronger, urging him to—flight!
Flight—not battle— That from Iftsiga, the stronghold that even the ancient Enemy could not reduce? Had the great tree not been seeded in the legendary time of the Blue Leaf, been grown to shelter the race of Iftin in the day of the Green, and of the Gray of the last disaster, outlasting the wrath of the Larsh, preserved to help awaken the Iftin anew? This was Iftsiga, the Eternal—yet the warning was—
“Flee! Flee!”
Ayyar crept to the nearest wall of the tree, put his shaking hands on that living surface. Now it was warm beneath his cold flesh, as if its life arose to fever pitch.
“Jarvas?” He clawed his way up, swaying. There was movement in the other two bed places.
“The Larsh?” That question from the gloom on his right.
“Not so. Remember, the day of the Larsh is past.”
Once again his memory had to be welded—for he bore the memories of two different men, as did all those now within Iftsiga. In an earlier time, he had been Naill Renfro, an off-world labor slave. Ayyar’s lips drew into a snarl in reaction to that memory. As Naill he had found a treasure within the woodland. And because he had dug it up, the dreaded Green Sick had struck him down.
From that terrible illness he had emerged as an Ift, green-skinned, hairless, forest-attuned, provided with the tattered memory of Ayyar, Captain of the Outer Guard in the last days of Iftcan. And as Ayyar-Naill he had found others like himself—Ashla of Himmer’s garth or settlement, who became Illylle, one-time priestess of the Mirror, Jarvas-Pate, Lokatath-Derek, Rizak-Monro, Kelemark-Torry.
Over the South Sea were still others who had earlier undergone the same change. But they were such a very few, for not all off-worlders were to be drawn into the net of the buried treasures set by the first Iftin-kind at their dying; only those who had the right temperament. And none of the changelings were truly whole. In them was an uneasy balance; one past set against the other. So was he now sometimes Ayyar, sometimes Naill, though for longer periods now Naill slept and he could draw upon the knowledge of Ayyar.
“There is death abroad.” Ayyar spoke now. “The warning—”
“True. And the time of sleep not yet done.” Jarvas answered him. “But we must have the awakening draught—”
In the gloom Jarvas crawled on hands and knees to the opposite wall, his hands fumbling with what was set into the living fabric of the tree.
“Ah—Iftsiga denies us not!” His cry was one of wonder and hope.
Ayyar lurched across the chamber. Jarvas drank from the spout set in the wall, not waiting for a cup, but catching the sweep sap in his hands, sucking it avidly from his palms. Ayyar followed his example.
The chill in him vanished, warmth sped along his veins, spread through his body. He could move easily, and his mind cleared.
“What is it?” Rizak crept up to drink in turn.
“Death—death to Iftsiga!” Jarvas stood tall. “Listen!”
The murmur, the crackle of branch against branch, was a struggle of the ancient tree to communicate with the Iftins—or the half-Iftins—now within it.
Jarvas swung around. “From the east it comes!”
To the east lay the clearings of the garths, the settlements that were black death blots in the Forest. There, too, were the buildings of the port where off-world spacers set down.
“Why—what?” Rizak turned, refreshed from his sap drink. “They do not clear land in winter, and this is not yet spring.”
“We shall find the answer only by seeking it,” Jarvas replied. “Iftsiga would not wake us, except in extremity. This is grave danger—”
“The others—” Ayyar went to the ladder which led both down and up in the center of the chamber, linking all levels of the tree tower.
“Jarvas? Ayyar?” A soft call from below, even as he set foot on the ladder rungs. He looked down into a face turned up to his.
“Haste, oh, make haste!” Illylle’s voice arose. “We must haste!” She moved before him, descending to yet another level where many small chests stood stacked against the walls.
There were the others, Kelemark and Lokatath, pulling at those boxes, moving in frantic haste to drag them to the ladder which led on down, deep into the earth and root chambers of Iftsiga.
“The seeds!” Illylle lifted one of the chests. “We must save the seeds!”
With her words a sharp urgency struck Ayyar also. Every one of those chests contained seed for the regrowth of the Iftin. In them were the treasure traps to draw new changelings into their company. Should anything destroy these chests their dream of a new nation would die. Yes, above all, the seeds must be saved.
“Where?”
His night-oriented sight had grown keen since the sap-drink, and he could read the sorrow on Illylle’s face.
“Into the root chambers—”
Dreadful indeed must be the peril! To use the root chambers meant that Iftsiga had no hope of survival. How could Illylle be sure—yet she was.
“The seeds—” She turned to summon Jarvas and Rizak now on the ladder.
Jarvas nodded decisively. “The root chambers.” He did not ask, he ordered.
So they toiled, using their new-born strength, stripping Iftsiga of the meaning it had held as the Citadel during ages more than Ift or man could reckon, carrying those precious chests, each with a sleeping memory and Ift personality, to the farthest limit of the long roots and, in doing so, killing the tree that had been the refuge and shelter of their race. And ever, as they worked so feverishly, the warnings heightened; the need for speed enveloped them, so that they ran, pushed, carried as they cleared one chamber, two, three, a fourth—
Then they were done, and Jarvas and Illylle, working together, sealed the cramped ways through which they had crawled and pushed their burdens, using the substance of the tree, with earth and certain words to bind with power.
Then they came up into the entrance chamber from which they could emerge upon a limb and let down a ladder to the ground. There they gathered supplies to make packs. Jarvas took command.