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.
He traveled along it and paused for only a moment at the hollow of the doorway before stepping into the past—the far, far past.
The walls of that circular room were very thick, as they should be when the sap and life of Iftsiga were housed within them, a living shell to encase the hollowed center. The odor that had guided him to the ladder was stronger here. Yet the upper room was empty.
Light pulsed on the ceiling over his head—lorgas, the larvae that clustered in the tree cores, attracting to them by that phosphorescence of their bodies the minute flying creatures on which they fed. They made a ring about the opening that held the stair pole reaching up—and down—in the middle of the tree. And Naill's present interest was downward.
He fitted his hands and feet into the old slots in the pole and descended nimbly. The odor of occupation was still here, but it had been three or four days since those others had left.
Another room—but not an empty one. Naill swung away from the stair well to look about him. The subdued light given off by a second cluster of lorgas was satisfactory. Carven stools—several. A neatly piled collection of sleep mats. And—against the far wall . . .
He made for that, his hands reaching out eagerly to lift the inlaid cover of a chest that was a masterpiece of construction, an intricate combination of many kinds of wood. Naill went down on one knee to roll back the protecting bark cloth. Then his breath expelled in a hiss of pleasure and content as he picked one of the exposed weapons from its oily nest of floosedown.
It caught the soft light, glinting green-silver. And it might have been forged for him alone, that sword with the leaf-shaped blade and the perfect balance, so well did its gemmed hilt fit to his hand as he swung it experimentally. To Naill Renfro it was a strange, if beautiful, weapon; to Ayyar it was comfort, an answer to his desires for defense.
A sword, even completed with scabbard and shoulder belt, as this was when he explored the contents of the arms chest further, was not all he needed. Clothing, food, shelter . . . He began to examine the other furnishings of the tree room.
Clothing—packed carefully in a long basket of woven splints with dried, aromatic leaves to be shaken from the folds as he pulled it forth to measure against his own lank body. He stood up minutes later, the soft green-silver-brown fabric stretching and accommodating itself to every movement of his frame, in tight breeches, a tunic laced over the chest with a silver cord, the supple boots he had longed for earlier. Also he wore a cloak with a hood, and a gemmed buckle to fasten at the throat—all strange and yet very familiar.
Naill smoothed the fabric across his thighs. He had given up wondering why he knew what he knew . . . all the bits about this other life. He welcomed Ayyar and Ayyar's broken memories, his alien knowledge, instead of striving to thrust that odd intruder out of his mind. This was Ayyar's world—now his. Wisdom dictated that he accept that fact and build what future he could upon it.
He sat down on the pile of mats, munching a crumbling cake of stuff Ayyar had welcomed eagerly, and tried to put his thoughts in order, to reach back to the beginning of all this. Naill Renfro had found a cache of the mysterious treasure that turned up without reason here and there on the holdings of the Believers. And from that had come all the rest.
The Green Sick—he could remember that dimly—of being dragged out of Kosburg's prison room and hearing his fate pronounced: exile and death alone in the forest. But Naill Renfro had not died—not wholly; he had instead become Ayyar of the Iftin, who also could remember—a battle through a city of towering trees and the bitterness of an overwhelming and complete defeat.
And physically he was no longer Naill Renfro either. He was a green-skinned, big-eared forest dweller who apparently could frighten garthmen into panic . . . a monster.
Green Sick—change—monster. . . . The procession of events made sense of a kind. But there had been others who had fallen ill in the past—had they all been changed? His hands paused with the bread stuff. If so, then they could be out here, too. They could be the ones who had left their scent, their signs of occupation, here—right where he was! He would not be alone in his exile!
They had been here, and left their possessions laid up carefully against a future return. To wait here for them—that might well be his brightest move. At any rate he needed rest, and he wanted to do nothing to provoke any investigation from those who rode the flyer. He would wait until night . . . for the night was his!
Naill finished the bread, flicked the crumbs from his fingers and lay back on the mats, pulling the cloak over him, his unsheathed sword beside him where hand could reach and curl about its hilt in an instant. He blinked drowsily at the ring of lorgas. Some had spun threads beaded with sticky dots to better entrap their lawful prey, and those drifted lazily in the air. The quiet held him and then it seemed as if the living tree that encased this chamber exerted its own soothing spell, and he slept, this time with no dreams at all.
How long he slept Naill could not have told, but he awoke quickly, with every faculty alert. The chamber was as it had been; he could hear no sound. Sitting up, he stretched, got to his feet, and went to the pole ladder. On impulse he descended another level in Iftsiga.
Here was a third circular chamber, slighter larger. There were chests against the walls, one pulled away from the rest. Naill went over, lifted the lid. He ruffled aside more bark cloth packing, only to be startled into an exclamation.
Green-stoned necklace, box, tube of glowing colors—piece by piece he beheld an exact duplicate of the treasure he had uncovered in the clearing! Naill lifted out the color tube. It was the same as the one Kosburg had stamped into the dust, in every flit of color, change of pattern, along its surface! But why? Slowly he took out each object and studied it carefully before putting it aside for the next. The chest was still far from empty; there was a second layer of cloth—and then another treasure set!
With the same care as he had brought them out, Naill repacked the objects. He sat on the floor, his hands still resting on the lid of the chest as he thought this through. Two sets of treasure, perfect reproductions of each other—and both like the set he had seen destroyed at Kosburg's. He wished he knew if all the other treasure caches the settlers had blasted had also been as these. If so—why?
Ritual objects placed as offerings or to mark graves? Naill tried to find the answer in Ayyar-memory, but there was no response from his new alter ego. Either Ayyar had known nothing of such things, or else there was a block between his memory and Naill Renfro. But there had to be a purpose for the caches—in the forest and in storage here. This chest had been moved out of line. Why? To better abstract part of its contents recently?
Why? Naill could have screamed that aloud in his frustration.
Perhaps somewhere else in Iftsiga he could find his answers. But when he went back to the pole ladder, he discovered that the opening to the chambers below was sealed. And for all his exasperated pounding, that round of wood did not give way. Baffled, he climbed once more into the room where he had slept and then decided to go up.
The dim light of twilight came in through the limb door as he reached the entrance chamber. There was no sound from without, save the rustle of leaves. After a moment or two he climbed to the level above. Here were no lorgas on the ceiling, only gray outer light admitted through window holes. The chamber was empty save for powdery dust and the ghostly remnants of long-shed leaves. Perhaps every upper level was the same, but he decided to try one or two more.
Naill was still on the pole ladder when he heard it—a furious snapping, ending in a hooting call, low pitched, yet with an urgency in it that could not be denied. And the Ayyar part of him responded to that with a burst of speed. He scrambled through the ladder well to face fluttering, beating wings, to look into a feathered face where great eyes were ringed darkly to seem the larger. And when that set gaze met his own, Naill was startled again.
Speech? No—the hoots and clicks of the big curved bill did not add up to human speech. Yet this flying thing recognized him, welcomed his aid, traded on an alliance between them! Not an alliance such as existed between man and animal as he had known, but between one species of intelligent life form and another of equal if different mentality. It was as shocking in that first moment of realization as if the tree holding them both had broken into intelligible words.
The bird thing was hurt. It had been blasted by—by men! Naill had an oddly distorted mental picture of hunters, which must have flashed from the other's mind to his. Someone from the port, trying to relieve the tedium of a planet-side stay, had gone hunting.
A wing trailed for his inspection, showing singed feathers, the raw bite of a blaster burn. It was big, this Janusan bird—with a wing spread of close to five Terran feet, its body, puffed in fluffy white-gray feathers, standing on huge talons intended for hunting. Now its demand for aid and attention grew sharper in his head.
It allowed him to inspect the burn. The wound was not bad enough to incapacitate it entirely. Naill received another blurred mental impression of the victim fluttering from tree to tree, working its way farther into the forest and away from the off-world invaders. But he had not the slightest idea in the world of what to do for the injury.
The bird squatted down before him as he sat cross-legged. Its folded its good wing to the body, kept the other outspread. And Naill winced as that strange mind deliberately invaded his own. It was as if one had two recordings, similar in most major features, differing in smaller details, which must be fitted one upon the other for a matching of patterns. That could not be done entirely—but on the major points where the match could be made . . .
"Yes!" Naill said as if the bird could understand. "Yes!"
He swung down the pole ladder to the room that had been inhabited. The same woven wicker basket that had held the clothing had what he sought, a pouch he had overlooked. With its cord hooked over his arm, Naill reclimbed to where the bird waited.
Awkwardly he mixed powdered leaves from one small box into a paste held by another, then spread that dressing with all the care he knew onto the raw burn. When he had done, the bird hooted again and walked about in a circle as if testing its ability to do that, though it did not try its wing.
"Who—what—are you?" Naill asked suddenly. But Ayyar was answering that for him.
A quarrin, the tree dwellers who far in the past had made a pact and alliance with the Iftin, who were also tree dwellers and lovers of the forest world. Hunter on two legs, hunter on two wings, warrior armed with sword, warrior armed with talons and sundering hooked bill, they had hunted, they had fought side by side when need arose, because by some trick of nature they had been able to communicate after a fashion. It was not an alliance between thinking man and instinct-ruled animal or bird, but a partnership between two species of equal if different prowess. Hurt, the quarrin had returned to the place where it could expect aid, and it claimed that from Naill as a right.
Now, moved by something he could not understand, Naill held out his right hand. The round head, with its upstanding ear tufts of feathers—not too unlike his own pointed ears—leaned forward a little.
The big eyes, with the yellow-red fires deep in them, studied his outheld hand with odd intentness. Then the head bent more, the cruelly hooked bill opened and closed on his flesh, not to rend or tear, but in firm pressure, as a man's hand might clasp his fellow's hand in a signal of greeting and friendship—a quick grasp, over almost at once. But Naill smiled slowly. Naill-Ayyar was no longer alone in Iftcan the Dead.