Promised Land (13 page)

‘You lied to her then. You hid it from her.'

He shook his head. ‘Nobody told her any lies,' he said. ‘She didn't want to know.'

So Linda didn't want to know about the Indris. So much for the noble pursuit of pure knowledge. The idea of the Promised Land had already answered all the questions. Don't confuse me with the facts, I've already made up my mind. I shook my head sadly.

The city seemed like an exciting prospect. I'm not one of these people who flip over ruins, but I was ready enough to take a look at anything which offered an alternative to the incredible sameness of the forest. And the thought that it was a definite somewhere that we might possibly expect to find the elusive forest people was an undeniably welcome one.

My natural pessimism, however, put in its usual sterling work in preparing me for disappointment. It doesn't do to pin all your hope to one target. Whatever happens, you always have to keep going. The first principle of survival is the survival of effort.

We found the city, all right. Another couple of hours saw us right into the city square.

It didn't look like a city. The trees grew, the canopy of purple was unbroken, the ground was still covered by the same sort of mess we'd been wading in for a week. But here and there you could scrape away the gunge and find that the surface underneath was stone. Smooth stone. Sculptured stone. The tree trunks and their big roots didn't give a damn about stone—they'd pulverised it with no trouble. Ninety percent of the city was rubble and dust. No buildings remained. But here and there was the memory of a city street.

The city had been dead, I guessed, on the order of tens of thousands of years. But who am I to guess about such things? It might have been a hundred times that. But those trees were
big
and
old
. They hadn't worked their way to perfect mastery of that city in a matter of centuries. They'd invested some real time in it.

The forest people had been there, all right. But they were riot there now.

We'd missed the boat.

The sole occupant of
the buried city was a dead cropper. It was about the size of a cow. I suppose that it fulfilled the same kind of function as a cow. It lay in an open space which had been methodically cleared of all undergrowth—the site of the Anacaon encampment. The trail that the forest people had left when they had decided to move on was like a major highway. It wasn't wide—these people respected the country code and walked in a tight column, using each other's footprints—but it had sure been walked on by a lot of feet. It would take the forest a week or two to reclaim it.

‘Is the cropper still fresh?' I asked Micheal. It had seemed that way to me, but I thought I'd better check.

‘Yes,' he said, ‘but we'd better cook the meat well.'

‘It didn't die of anything horrible, did it?' I asked. ‘Does it signify anything that the forest people left it untouched?'

He shook his head slightly.

‘I don't know,' he said slowly. ‘I think it might mean....'

He hesitated, and I completed the thought for him. ‘You think they left it for us?'

‘Perhaps,' he said. ‘But we can't assume that'

‘They haven't left a message,' I said. I'm not sure what kind of message I expected. They could hardly have left a sign saying ‘Back soon—help yourself.' The Anacaona had no written language. If they had a direct sound-to-mind link, it was quite probable that their language couldn't possibly be written down.

‘Is it safe to light a fire?' I asked Micheal.

‘Yes,' he said. ‘Can you?'

I fished out a light. ‘Never travel without one,' I said.

‘It can't spread here,' he said, meaning the cleared area.

‘Your people had no fire. There are no ashes.'

‘They wouldn't light a fire,' he said. ‘They don't have the taste for cooked meat that you people have.'

‘What about you?'

‘We eat meat. Your people have taught mine a great deal.'

The fire wasn't easy to start. The trees didn't drop twigs and the fungus wasn't at all keen to burn. At first we got nothing but a lot of smoke and a foul smell, but persistence eventually paid off and I forced some of the stuff to catch. We gradually built up a convincing blaze in a hollow on a pile of crumbled stone.

I've never been an expert at carving meat, but when you live out on the rim it's one of those things you have to get used to. I set about hacking bits of dead cropper off the carcass, and used my knife to roast it in the flame. It was a slow process, and my hand was painfully close to the flames, but circumstances demanded that the meat be well done, and I kept at it. The alien bacteria were unlikely to attack me, of course—although it was far from impossible, bearing in mind the metabolic overlap between the life systems of Earth and Chao Phrya—but the last thing I wanted was for Micheal and/or Mercede to pick up some secondary infection. Natural resilience and magic music notwithstanding, I knew it would kill them.

Mercede was stretched out on the stone, and Micheal sat beside her, playing softly. I think he was trying to bring her down slowly—play her out of the automatic phase in which the music had sustained her for so long.

We ate in silence. The meat was tough and tasted awful. Owing to my culinary inexpertise it was heavily flavoured with charcoal, but it was such a relief to get something down my throat again that I gladly overlooked its shortcomings.

‘How are you feeling?' I asked Micheal, when he rose after offering my canteen to his sister.

‘Bad,' he said. I was mildly surprised—he'd been so offhand before.

‘Mercede?' I asked.

‘She's recovering slowly. I think we should leave her to sleep. I don't think there's much profit in moving on for a while. We'll be all right here for a while.'

‘Do you think they might come back?'

‘They might.' His voice was neutral. There was a real possibility, then.

‘We'll rest, then,' I said. ‘We'll wait here until you think it's safe to continue.'

‘Thank you,' he said.

‘It's your show,' I told him. ‘You're the one who knows what's what. Are you going to try and get some sleep?'

‘I don't know that I should,' he said. ‘I've relied much more on the music these last days. I'm almost afraid that if I let my body go its own way, my heart might stop.'

I didn't know whether I ought to sympathise with him or not. It would inevitably sound patronising. I didn't know whether he knew me well enough to accept my concern. I didn't have any idea at all what he might think of me. So I lowered my eyes and stayed silent.

‘I think I'll have to let the sickness take a hold,' he said. ‘If I contain it any longer it will shake me apart when I release it.'

‘What does that entail?' I asked him quietly.

‘I have to sit very still. I must fight the sickness on my own.'

‘No music?'

‘No music.'

I didn't doubt that he knew what he was talking about, but I didn't want to question him about it. Far better to let him get on with it. Sometimes you have to be content not to understand. What happens is sometimes far more important than what you think is happening.

Micheal began to settle himself, and then froze suddenly, half-kneeling, half-crouching. His eyes had fixed upon something that was behind me. I could see his face very clearly, all the lines in it emphasised by the way everything stopped, and by the fear which I felt
because
everything stopped. A chill slid slowly down my spine. I began to turn, feeling that I was doing so very slowly, already knowing what it was that was behind me.

‘Don't move,' said Micheal. His voice hissed from still lips—although the words were English the tone was the language of the Anacaona. I stopped turning my head. I still couldn't see it.

‘Stay just where you are,' added Micheal. ‘Relax, so that you can hold yourself still.'

In grotesque slow motion, he took the panpipes from his lap, and raised them to his lips.

He began to play a languorous, intensive melody which sounded like dance music slowed by a factor of three or four. The notes moaned, and lingered in the air. The tune rose and fell like the swell of a turgid sea.

I didn't dare turn my head, because he had told me to be still. But only a few minutes passed before the need to turn was quite gone. There was another emerging from the trees behind Micheal. Then another, away to the left. And another alongside that one.

Eventually, I could see four, and there were probably several more that I couldn't see without looking over my shoulder. Whether it was the blood scent of the dead cropper or the smoke from the fire that had brought them out I didn't know and I couldn't ask. It didn't matter. They were here.

At last.

We had no weapon except for my knife. Micheal's pipes were holding them under a weird kind of spell and I didn't know how strong it was or what kind of action might serve to break it. I didn't know how long he could keep playing in his present state. But I could imagine what might happen if he stopped.

The crypto-arachnids were about the size of black bears, except that their legs were longer and made them look more spread out. They were furred like black bears too. But they had moved like the spiders I knew but had never come to love, with sinuous serial scuttling movements of a multiplicity of legs. Their mouths were hairy, and equipped with a large number of appendages for cutting and pulping food before sucking it in via twin sphincters. I couldn't see any eyes. They had no eyestalks like Earthly spiders, but they might have had any number of ocelli set within their fur. There was no way of knowing. Perhaps they had real eyes, but small and deep-set like a mole's. They couldn't rely too much on sight in the purple jungle, but they were obviously sensitive to movement or Micheal would not have insisted that I be still.

The sheer helplessness of my position was appalling. Micheal simply hadn't had any time to tell me what I should or shouldn't do. I didn't even know whether there was anything I could do. I tried to remember what I'd been told about Danel's semi-ritual methods of spiderhunting. Micheal hypnotised the spiders, Danel slew them—that was all I knew. Danel had to move to axe the spiders, but how fast—or how slowly—did he have to move? What exactly were the risks and how did he counter them?

Could I simply get up and walk around the cleared area—which had now become a kind of arena—and hack the spiders to death with my knife?

What do I
do
? I cried, silently.

Take it easy, said the wind. Take it very slowly. Move in time to the music.

That, at least, sounded sensible. Move in time with the music. It was a rational basis for experiment. But the music was far too slow, its rhythm too tortuous. I couldn't possibly blend my movements with it.

Slow, then. Whatever you do, just make sure it's very, very slow. I'll help you.

I daren't think slowly. My mind was racing. What the hell could I do? Don't try and hack them to death, I admonished myself. One blow is all you dare try. Danel kills in a single blow. The spell of the music won't make them stand still for more than one bang. Hit them with something big. A big rock.

My eyes darted around to the place where we'd built the fire. Out of the corner of my eye I surveyed the heap of rubble. There were several big rocks there. I had to select one that I could lift and carry, but also one which would make no mistake in crushing the life out of a two-ton spider. It seemed like a hopeless task, but I knew that a two-ton exoskeletal would be a great deal more fragile than a big mammal or reptile. A more urgent problem might easily be: Could I extract a suitable rock without making the whole pile slip and causing an unwanted flurry of movement?

Was there anything else I could do?

You can ask, said the wind.

Micheal can't answer.

Mercede?

She'll be unconscious for hours, and she might not be able to help anyway.

If in doubt, the wind reminded me, hesitate.

I'm hesitating, I assured him. I'm hesitating. But the heat's on. I don't know that I have any time in hand at all.

I knew that I might wreck everything with a false move, but there was no way I could guard against the false moves in advance. I could only make absolutely sure in my own mind that I knew exactly what I was going to do before I did it, and what I was going to do if I found out halfway through that it wasn't going to work.

I had to do something, or we were all as good as dead anyway.

I looked at Micheal, but he was entranced by his own music. He couldn't see me. He couldn't even look frightened. There was an awful intensity in his expression as he blew steadfastly across the mouth of the pipes.

That boy is seriously ill, I reminded myself. He said not ten minutes ago that he had to let the sickness take a hold—that if he tried to hold it in much longer it would shake him apart when he released it. Can he still be holding it? Is this the right music? Can it do both jobs at once, or is he about to give under the strain?

How long, I wondered, could he keep it up? Hours? Minutes? All night?

All right, said the wind, adding his weight to the argument I'd already built up.
Move
.

I let my head complete the turn which it had begun some minutes earlier. The crypto-arachnid behind me was just fifteen feet away from me. It was perched on top of a shoulder of loose rock, disturbed by a root-ridge. It was poised, held in a bizarre stepping position with one long leg extended to lead it down the slope to where I sat.

There were three more that I hadn't been able to see.

That made eight in all.

I redirected my attention to the one which was nearest. The perfect slab of rock lay just beneath its feet, broken away from the stone apron by the invading root. But to get it I would have to get close enough to the spider's jaws to kiss it.

Very tentatively, I raised myself to my feet.

The wind didn't whisper in my ear—as always he let me get on with the job—but I was conscious of his presence, not only in my mind but in my movements. I mustered all of my concentration to keep tight control over my movements, but I was subject to a persistent niggling temptation to drop the exaggerated slowness in favour of a panic-driven run.

I didn't stand fully erect, but maintained a half-crouch, and moved crabwise toward the spider. It seemed easier to move one arm and leg out toward it, and then close up my rear arm and leg. The bulk of my movement was thus in a plane directed straight at the spider, and might not be so noticeable from the creature's point of view.

Though I was terribly careful about the snail-like quality of my motion, it seemed that hardly any time at all had passed when I found myself level with the spider's extended foreleg. I looked down at it. It was as thick as my leg. It had a huge hairy clubfoot. Beneath the coarse hair the chitinous exoskeleton had a purple sheen.

The foot moved.

I didn't.

I undoubtedly owe my life to the fact that the utter shock of that moment did not spur me to instant recoil. I remained frozen, and the spider relapsed into stillness.

I was even more careful as I crouched right down and inched forward into the shadow of the monster. I could smell its breath—sweet and heavy, not really unpleasant. I could see the myriad tiny movements of its complicated mouthparts—quite automatic and beyond its control, but nevertheless frightening and apparently threatening. I could almost sense the tension in its limbs as the muscles held it in an unnatural posture.

My hands gripped the slab. I began to pull it backward, praying that I had not misjudged its weight either way. As it slid along; the ground it made a thin grating noise, and the spider drew back its extended leg. Once again, my control held, and as soon as I paused it stopped. But there was no alternative but to keep dragging the rock clear. It was light enough for me to pick up, but it would be a considerable weightlifting feat by my standards, and I would need the space to pluck it from the ground and smack the spider with it all in one smooth motion. There was no question of lifting it free from the ground while I pulled it out from beneath the monster.