Blade spent several days cutting samples of every kind of wood he thought might be useful. Meera's help saved him much wasted time and effort. She knew which woods might be completely useless because they were too soft, too brittle, or too quick to decay. She knew which parts of many trees had the best wood. She was also handy with a knife and vine cords, trimming and bundling up branches as Blade cut them.
Blade never felt the slightest need to watch her or any fear of turning his back on her. To be sure, this was partly because they were deep in the High Forest and Meera's chances of survival would not be good if he were killed. More of it was because Meera knew what he was planning and thought it was a good idea.
She said so plainly when he asked her. She went on to say, «I do not know if I trust Swebon as much as you do. It will surely tempt him, when he has weapons that could make him ruler of the Forest. But he is a strong man, so perhaps it will not tempt him enough.
«Also, I do trust you, Blade. I trust you to let me go home to my own people if Swebon tricks us. If I go home to the Yal with our secrets, Swebon will not be able to do them any harm.»
It was surprising how Meera's mind and his seemed to run along the same paths when it came to the future of the Forest People. «I was planning on taking you home myself when we finished our work here and in Four Springs village.»
«Leaving me there?» she said, apparently surprised.
«Only long enough for the Yal to learn everything we can teach them,» Blade said. «I will not ask you to leave me, unless you want to.»
Meera shook her head. «I am happy with you. You are good to a woman, and that is good for a woman.» While Blade was trying to figure that one out, she put both hands on his chest and pushed him over backward. Then she climbed on top of him, pulled aside his loinguard, and there was no more talking for quite a while.
When the woodcutting was finished, Blade started slicing the wood into strips, while Meera trimmed and shaped the strips according to his instructions. She wasn't an expert carpenter, but again her willing help saved Blade many hours of work. He quickly discovered that once you started trying to laminate anything, the Forest was full of suitable woods for the job. In fact, Blade started by making his first two bows too strong.
These two were made of four layers of wood, glued together and then wrapped with glue-soaked leaves. They were incredibly ugly, more like clubs than bows, and impossibly stiff. Blade could hardly bend the first one, and in Home Dimension he'd easily handled a monstrous longbow with a hundred and twenty-pound pull.
Blade could bend the second bow, but it snapped every bowstring he tried to use on it. Obviously the second bow was nearly as useless as the first one. Fak'si bowstrings were made of dried animal sinew and were much tougher than their bows. A bow that was going to be too strong for such bowstrings was going to be too strong for the average Fak'si warrior to handle easily.
So much for brute force. Blade started systematic experiments with various combinations of woods in two, three, four, and even five layers. He worked from dawn to dark and would have worked into the night if he'd thought it was safe. Unfortunately, having a fire blazing in the darkness could only be an invitation to the Treemen. So Blade banked the fire each evening and retired to the shelter, where Meera would bathe him and massage the day's kinks out of his muscles.
Eventually Blade's experiments got down to five, then four, then three different kinds of wood. He discarded one more because Meera said it was fantastically rare. This left him with two. He discovered that if he used a length of one kind, reinforced on each side with thin layers of the other, he had a basically good bow. Further reinforced with a wrapping of leaves, it came out with about an eighty-pound pull. That was the same as a heavy Home Dimension hunting bow or a good longbow. It was more than twice as powerful as any bow Blade had handled in this Dimension.
After finishing the bow he tried it out on several different targets, and saw it sink arrows deep into all of them. At last the Forest People would have a weapon able to hit the vital organs of a Treeman from a safe distance. The armor of the Sons of Hapanu made them a more difficult target, but Blade was also optimistic there. An arrow from an eighty-pound bow would inflict painful wounds through everything but the heaviest mail. With arrows raining down on them, some of the Sons of Hapanu would surely die and many would be wounded. That would break up their disciplined formations, then the Forest People could safely close in to finish the job with spears, clubs, and point-blank archery.
The new bows were still going to be hideously ugly, and even Meera said so. She also said, «The Forest People are going to be too happy with the new bows to worry about how they look. The Treemen are not wise enough to tell when a thing is ugly or not. The Sons of Hapanu are going to be too busy dying from the arrows to worry about how the bows look. So who is there to care?»
Blade now wanted to try out his idea for turning the Shield of Life into a powerful tranquilizer. With luck, it wouldn't matter whether the new bows pierced armor or not. Even if they only scratched a Son of Hapanu in the leg, he would soon be slowed down-and a man slowed down in the middle of a battle doesn't last very long.
This meant moving to a new camp. The kohkol sap for the Shield of Life didn't have to be fresh, but the uglyfish juice had to be. So Blade and Meera were going to have to sit down on the bank of a river and go fishing.
Blade made five more bows, one for himself, one for Meera, one spare, and two as gifts to Swebon and Guno. Then he and Meera plucked a sack of fruit as food for the journey, packed up their gear, and set off for the Fak'si River.
Chapter 13
Blade left behind in the shelter everything they weren't going to need by the river. Both he and Meera could now walk through the Forest like human beings instead of staggering along like pack mules, and they pushed south as fast as Meera could go. When they awoke on the morning of the fourth day, Meera saw water birds above the treetops. She told Blade that they would probably reach the river before nightfall.
The good news made Blade eager to move on. So they started off at once, eating the last of the fruit as they marched. By the time it was full daylight they were almost ready for their first rest stop. As always when they stopped, Blade walked back along the last hundred yards of their trail. He hoped to discover anyone or anything following them too closely. Twice he'd found the footprints of Treemen, and once he'd seen two of them leap into the trees and vanish.
This time Blade saw nothing until he'd nearly covered the hundred yards. Then he stopped abruptly, as his eyes picked out something moving fifty yards farther on into the Forest. It was a branch, but it was moving jerkily and irregularly, as no branch should-particularly when there wasn't enough wind blowing to even stir the leaves. Blade raised his club and spear, then moved toward the jerking branch a step at a time, prodding the vegetation ahead with the spear point as he went.
The moment he saw what was making the branch jerk, Blade went flat on the ground and started scanning the trees. It was a Fak'si hunter, one side of his face a mask of blood and his hands and feet bound crudely but effectively. Half-conscious, he was rolling back and forth. With each roll his shoulder caught the branch and made it jerk.
Treemen! That was Blade's first thought. Then he remembered that he'd never heard of the Treemen binding a victim. No one even knew if they could tie a knot. This man had to be the victim of human enemies. Or was he a victim? Blade examined the man more closely. Apart from the blood on his head, he showed no signs of any injury, not even a cut or a bruise.
It was just possible that an enemy raiding party could surprise a lone Fak'si warrior and take him prisoner without doing him much harm. It wasn't likely, though. Blade's thoughts moved on, steadily and grimly, from doubt to open susicion.