The Word for World is Forest (13 page)

The guards opened the gate, threatening the crowding yumens inside with their spears; Gosse re-entered the compound, his big shoulders hunched as if against the rain.

Selver was very tired. The headwoman of Berre and another woman came to him and walked with him, his arms over their shoulders so that if he stumbled he should not fall. The young hunter Greda, a cousin of his Tree, joked with him, and Selver answered light-headedly, laughing. The walk back to Endtor seemed to go on for days.

He was too weary to eat. He drank a little hot broth and lay down by the Men’s Fire. Endtor was no town but a mere camp by the great river, a favorite fishing place for all the cities that had once been in the forest round about, before the yumens came. There was no Lodge. Two fire-rings of black stone and a long grassy bank over the river where tents of hide and plaited rush could be set up, that was Endtor. The river Menend, the master river of Sornol, spoke ceaselessly in the world and in the dream at Endtor.

There were many old men at the fire, some whom he knew from Broter and Tuntar and his own destroyed city Eshreth, some whom he did not know; he could see in their eyes and gestures, and hear in their voices, that they were Great Dreamers; more dreamers than had ever been gathered in one place before, perhaps. Lying stretched out full length, his head raised on his hands, gazing at the fire, he said, “I have called the yumens mad. Am I mad myself?”

“You don’t know one time from the other,” said old Tubab, laying a pine-knot on the fire, “because you did not dream either sleeping or waking for far too long. The price for that takes long to pay.”

“The poisons the yumens take do much the same as does the lack of sleep and dream,” said Heben, who had been a slave both at Central and at Smith Camp. “The yumens poison themselves in order to dream. I saw the dreamer’s look in them after they took the poisons. But they couldn’t call the dreams, nor control them, nor weave nor shape nor cease to dream; they were driven, overpowered. They did not know what was within them at all. So it is with a man who hasn’t dreamed for many days. Though he be the wisest of his Lodge, still he’ll be mad, now and then, here and there, for a long time after. He’ll be driven, enslaved. He will not understand himself.”

A very old man with the accent of South Sornol laid
his hand on Selver’s shoulder, caressing him, and said, “My dear young god, you need to sing, that would do you good.”

“I can’t. Sing for me.”

The old man sang; others joined in, their voices high and reedy, almost tuneless, like the wind blowing in the water-reeds of Endtor. They sang one of the songs of the ash-tree, about the delicate parted leaves that turn yellow in autumn when the berries turn red, and one night the first frost silvers them.

While Selver was listening to the song of the Ash, Lyubov lay down beside him. Lying down he did not seem so monstrously tall and largelimbed. Behind him was the half-collapsed, fire-gutted building, black against the stars. “I am like you,” he said, not looking at Selver, in that dream-voice which tries to reveal its own untruth. Selver’s heart was heavy with sorrow for his friend. “I’ve got a headache,” Lyubov said in his own voice, rubbing the back of his neck as he always did, and at that Selver reached out to touch him, to console him. But he was shadow and firelight in the world-time, and the old men were singing the song of the Ash, about the small white flowers on the black branches in spring among the parted leaves.

The next day the yumens imprisoned in the compound sent for Selver. He came to Eshsen in the afternoon, and met with them outside the compound, under the branches of an oak tree, for all Selver’s people felt a
little uneasy under the bare open sky. Eshsen had been an oak grove; this tree was the largest of the few the colonists had left standing. It was on the long slope behind Lyubov’s bungalow, one of the six or eight houses that had come through the night of the burning undamaged. With Selver under the oak were Reswan, the headwoman of Berre, Greda of Cadast, and others who wished to be in on the parley, a dozen or so in all. Many bowmen kept guard, fearing the yumens might have hidden weapons, but they sat behind bushes or bits of wreckage left from the burning, so as not to dominate the scene with the hint of threat. With Gosse and Colonel Dongh were three of the yumens called officers and two from the logging camp, at the sight of one of whom, Benton, the ex-slaves drew in their breaths. Benton used to punish “lazy creechies” by castrating them in public.

The Colonel looked thin, his normally yellow-brown skin a muddy yellow-gray; his illness had been no sham. “Now the first thing is,” he said when they were all settled, the yumens standing, Selver’s people squatting or sitting on the damp, soft oak-leaf mold, “the first thing is that I want first to have a working definition of just precisely what these terms of yours mean and what they mean in terms of guaranteed safety of my personnel under my command here.”

There was a silence.

“You understand English, don’t you, some of you?”

“Yes. I don’t understand your question, Mr. Dongh.”

“Colonel Dongh, if you please!”

“Then you’ll call me Colonel Selver, if you please.” A singing note came into Selver’s voice; he stood up, ready for the contest, tunes running in his mind like rivers.

But the old yumen just stood there, huge and heavy, angry yet not meeting the challenge. “I did not come here to be insulted by you little humanoids,” he said. But his lips trembled as he said it. He was old, and bewildered, and humiliated. All anticipation of triumph went out of Selver. There was no triumph in the world any more, only death. He sat down again. “I didn’t intend insult, Colonel Dongh,” he said resignedly. “Will you repeat your question, please?”

“I want to hear your terms, and then you’ll hear ours, that’s all there is to it.”

Selver repeated what he had said to Gosse.

Dongh listened with apparent impatience. “All right. Now you don’t realize that we’ve had a functioning radio in the prison compound for three days now.” Selver did know this, as Reswan had at once checked on the object dropped by the helicopter, lest it be a weapon; the guards reported it was a radio, and he let the yumens keep it. Selver merely nodded. “So we’ve been in contact with the three outlying camps, the two on King Land and one on
New Java, right along, and if we had decided to make a break for it and escape from that prison compound then it would have been very simple for us to do that, with the helicopters to drop us weapons and covering our movements with their mounted weapons, one flamethrower could have got us out of the compound and in case of need they also have the bombs that can blow up an entire area. You haven’t seen those in action of course.”

“If you’d left the compound, where would you have gone?”

“The point is, without introducing into this any beside the point or erroneous factors, now we are certainly greatly outnumbered by your forces, but we have the four helicopters at the camps, which there’s no use you trying to disable as they are under fully armed guard at all times now, and also all the serious fire-power, so that the cold reality of the situation is we can pretty much call it a draw and speak in positions of mutual equality. This of course is a temporary situation. If necessary we are enabled to maintain a defensive police action to prevent all-out war. Moreover we have behind us the entire fire-power of the Terran Interstellar Fleet, which could blow your entire planet right out of the sky. But these ideas are pretty intangible to you, so let’s just put it as plainly and simply as I can, that we’re prepared to negotiate with you, for the present time, in terms of an equal frame of reference.”

Selver’s patience was short; he knew his ill-temper was a symptom of his deteriorated mental state, but he could no longer control it. “Go on, then!”

“Well, first I want it clearly understood that as soon as we got the radio we told the men at the other camps not to bring us weapons and not to try any airlift or rescue attempts, and reprisals were strictly out of order—”

“That was prudent. What next?”

Colonel Dongh began an angry retort, then stopped; he turned very pale. “Isn’t there anything to sit down on,” he said.

Selver went around the yumen group, up the slope, into the empty two-room bungalow, and took the folding desk-chair. Before he left the silent room he leaned down and laid his cheek on the scarred, raw wood of the desk, where Lyubov had always sat when he worked with Selver or alone; some of his papers were lying there now; Selver touched them lightly. He carried the chair out and set it in the rainwet dirt for Dongh. The old man sat down, biting his lips, his almond-shaped eyes narrow with pain.

“Mr. Gosse, perhaps you can speak for the Colonel,” Selver said. “He isn’t well.”

“I’ll do the talking,” Benton said, stepping forward, but Dongh shook his head and muttered, “Gosse.”

With the Colonel as auditor rather than speaker it went more easily. The yumens were accepting Selver’s
terms. With a mutual promise of peace, they would withdraw all their outposts and live in one area, the region they had forested in Middle Sornol: about 1700 square miles of rolling land, well watered. They undertook not to enter the forest; the forest people undertook not to trespass on the Cut Lands.

The four remaining airships were the cause of some argument. The yumens insisted they needed them to bring their people from the other islands to Sornol. Since the machines carried only four men and would take several hours for each trip, it appeared to Selver that the yumens could get to Eshsen rather sooner by walking, and he offered them ferry service across the straits; but it appeared that yumens never walked far. Very well, they could keep the hoppers for what they called the ‘Airlift Operation.’ After that, they were to destroy them. Refusal. Anger. They were more protective of their machines than of their bodies. Selver gave in, saying they could keep the hoppers if they flew them only over the Cut Lands and if the weapons in them were destroyed. Over this they argued, but with one another, while Selver waited, occasionally repeating the terms of his demand, for he was not giving in on this point.

“What’s the difference, Benton,” the old Colonel said at last, furious and shaky, “can’t you see that we can’t use the damned weapons? There’s three million of these
aliens all scattered out all over every damned island, all covered with trees and undergrowth, no cities, no vital network, no centralized control. You can’t disable a guerrilla type structure with bombs, it’s been proved, in fact my own part of the world where I was born proved it for about thirty years fighting off major super-powers one after the other in the twentieth century. And we’re not in a position until a ship comes to prove our superiority. Let the big stuff go, if we can hold on to the sidearms for hunting and self-defense!”

He was their Old Man, and his opinion prevailed in the end, as it might have done in a Men’s Lodge. Benton sulked. Gosse started to talk about what would happen if the truce was broken, but Selver stopped him. “These are possibilities, we aren’t yet done with certainties. Your Great Ship is to return in three years, that is three and a half years of your count. Until that time you are free here. It will not be very hard for you. Nothing more will be taken away from Centralville, except some of Lyubov’s work that I wish to keep. You still have most of your tools of tree-cutting and ground-moving; if you need more tools, the iron-mines of Peldel are in your territory. I think all this is clear. What remains to be known is this: When that ship comes, what will they seek to do with you, and with us?”

“We don’t know,” Gosse said. Dongh amplified: “If
you hadn’t destroyed the ansible communicator first thing off, we might be receiving some current information on these matters, and our reports would of course influence the decisions that may be made concerning a finalized decision on the status of this planet, which we might then expect to begin to implement before the ship returns from Prestno. But due to wanton destruction due to your ignorance of your own interests, we haven’t even got a radio left that will transmit over a few hundred miles.”

“What is the ansible?” The word had come up before in this talk; it was a new one to Selver.

“ICD,” the Colonel said, morose.

“A kind of radio,” Gosse said, arrogant. “It put us in instant touch with our home-world.”

“Without the twenty-seven-year waiting?”

Gosse stared down at Selver. “Right. Quite right. You learned a great deal from Lyubov, didn’t you?”

“Didn’t he just,” said Benton. “He was Lyubov’s little green buddyboy. He picked up everything worth knowing and a bit more besides. Like all the vital points to sabotage, and where the guards would be posted, and how to get into the weapon stockpile. They must have been in touch right up to the moment the massacre started.”

Gosse looked uneasy. “Raj is dead. All that’s irrelevant now, Benton. We’ve got to establish—”

“Are you trying to infer in some way that Captain
Lyubov was involved in some activity that could be called treachery to the Colony, Benton?” said Dongh, glaring and pressing his hands against his belly. “There were no spies or treachers on my staff, it was absolutely handpicked before we ever left Terra and I know the kind of men I have to deal with.”

“I’m not inferring anything, Colonel. I’m saying straight out that it was Lyubov stirred up the creechies, and if orders hadn’t been changed on us after that Fleet ship was here, it never would have happened.”

Gosse and Dongh both started to speak at once. “You are all very ill,” Selver observed, getting up and dusting himself off, for the damp brown oak-leaves clung to his short body-fur as to silk. “I’m sorry we’ve had to hold you in the creechie-pen, it is not a good place for the mind. Please send for your men from the camps. When all are here and the large weapons have been destroyed, and the promise has been spoken by all of us, then we shall leave you alone. The gates of the compound will be opened when I leave here today. Is there more to be said?”