“Given the size they are,” he said, “and the size we are—”
He smiled slightly to the girl following him, for she too was a giant compared to the folk who’d built these huts.
“—I don’t blame them for being nervous about whether we’re friends.”
Tilphosa knelt to look into a hut’s open doorway. She must not have seen anything to interest her, because she rose with a dissatisfied expression and faced Cashel. Her mouth started to open for another needless question, then spread in a smile instead.
“Those are willows further on the way we’ve been going,” Cashel said, matching her smile with one of his own. He dipped his staff toward the east; not far away a line of trees rose above the shrubbery. “There’s likely a stream there; open water anyway. Maybe when the folks here see we’re not doing any harm, they’ll come out to see us.”
They started off again. He hadn’t yet seen a path, not even the little tracks that voles made running through a meadow.
“What if they don’t, Cashel?” Tilphosa said. “Come out and see us, I mean.”
Cashel shrugged. “Then we keep going, like we’ve been doing anyhow,” he said. “It doesn’t look to me that they’d be able to give us anything we can’t get for ourselves. They don’t cook their food, even, that I can see.”
Tilphosa smiled cautiously “I’d like a roof if it rains,” she said. “But sky’s clear, and I don’t think those huts would be much shelter. They’re just dead leaves sewn to a frame of a few sticks.”
“I’ve seen bird nests that were built better,” Cashel agreed. Squirrels made that sort of ragged pile, of course. He started to grin at the notion of a village of big squirrels…and then sobered, because he couldn’t be sure that wasn’t just what he’d seen.
He chuckled.
“Cashel?” the girl asked.
“I don’t guess it was squirrels that made the huts after all,” he said. “A squirrel couldn’t keep quiet the way the folks around here’re doing.”
Tilphosa gave him a puzzled look, but she didn’t try to follow through on the thought.
Most of the trees ahead were willows the way Cashel had said, but the one in the center of the line had darker foliage than a willow’s pale green. It was huge, its branches spreading to cover as much ground as the village they’d just left. The branches dipped close to the ground like the necks of cattle drinking; from some of them hung huge pods.
“Cashel, there’s a man,” said Tilphosa, pointing with her left hand. Then, her voice rising, she said, “Cashel, he’s caught! Cashel, it’s—”
“Right!” said Cashel, but he didn’t say it loudly because he was already moving and concentrating on what he was going to do next. His staff was crosswise at mid-chest, slightly advanced.
The strange tree had small, rounded leaves, more like an olive’s than what belonged on a tree as big as this one. The pods hanging to the ground from the tips of many limbs were bigger than those of any locust or catalpa, though.
Almost big enough to hold a man, Cashel had thought when he first saw them; but he was wrong about the “almost” because he hadn’t appreciated quite how stunted the residents of this region were.
Most of the pods were closed and brown. A still-open one off to the right side was the same dark green as the foliage. Cashel could see from the ribbed interior that it was really just a giant leaf, not a seedpod as he’d thought.
A child-sized man, naked and almost hairless, stood as the leaf slowly closed around him. His skin was the color of polished bronze; his eyes glinted like those of a rabbit Cashel had once come upon in the jaws of a black rat snake.
A heavy odor, neither pleasant nor unpleasant, hung in the air. Cashel sneezed as he stepped cautiously closer to the victim, ready to dodge if a limb slashed down at him. He heard leaves rustle or maybe something rustling in the leaves, but the tree didn’t move.
Though the little man’s eyes no longer focused, a blood vessel throbbed in his throat. The leaf continued to fold, closing from his feet upward. Its deeply serrated edges meshed like the fangs of a seawolf.
It was obviously tough. Cashel’s crude knife might cut the pod while it was still green and flexible, but not, he thought, without carving the victim as well.
He paused, letting the range of his senses expand beyond the silent man. Because of the way the branches curved down as they spread from the trunk, he had the feeling of being in a dimly lit vault. He judged the thickness of the limb which kinked where the pod attached, then raised the quarterstaff over his right shoulder.
He punched the staff forward with all his weight behind the blow. If it’d been an oak—or worse, a dogwood—even Cashel’s strength could have done no more than bruise the bark. This tree, though, had brittle wood like a pear’s; it shattered at the impact of iron-shod hickory.
The tip and half-engulfed victim fell to the ground; the stump of broken branch sprang upward. From the low shrubbery nearby came a many-throated keening like the wind blowing across chimney pots.
Cashel bent and grabbed the little fellow by the shoulder with his left hand. That hand had been leading on the staff and was now in a state of prickly near-numbness. The pod was unfolding the way a cut intestine gapes as its own muscular walls pull it apart. When Cashel threw the man away from the tree, the pod and the scrap of attached branch fell off him.
Cashel scrambled out from under the tree. Tilphosa had come toward him, but she’d carefully stayed beyond the tree’s possible reach, where she wouldn’t get in Cashel’s way. She faced sideways, keeping Cashel in the corner of one eye while the other scanned the bushes around them.
The rescued victim sucked in deep, gasping breaths as though he’d been underwater during the time the leaf wrapped him. He blinked; awareness started to return to his eyes.
“I’ll take care of him!” Tilphosa said, kneeling at the fellow’s side. She lifted his head with the hand that didn’t hold her dagger.
Cashel straightened and surveyed their surroundings for the first time since he’d seen the man being eaten. The limbs of the strange tree were drawing up like the petals of a lotus at nightfall. The odor he’d noticed when he ran close had dissipated and remained only in his memory.
He looked at the stump of the branch; it leaked dark sap. On the ground, the unfolded leaf was crinkling like leather dried near a flame. The bark of the attached bit of limb had already sloughed away.
From a line of viburnum and lilac bushes that couldn’t possibly have hidden them, people of the same stunted race as the victim rose into plain view. They were nude, both males and females, the latter often holding babies no bigger than six-week puppies. There were no weapons or tools of any sort in their raised hands as they came toward Cashel and Tilphosa.
Cashel slid his hands apart on the staff as he faced the newcomers. There were a lot of them. If they all came from the village just to the west, then they must crowd more than a handful of themselves into each hut.
“Great lord and lady!” cried an age-wrinkled male. “We Helpers greet you! Welcome to the Land!”
“Welcome to the Land!” chorused all his fellows like frogs in the springtime. Cashel remained tense for a moment, but even he relaxed when the whole mob threw itself down on the ground before him and the girl.
14
Sharina stood beside the four-arched fighting tower fixed to the quinquereme’s deck between Captain Ceius and the steersmen in the stern and the mast amidships. Ordinarily the wooden tower—painted to look like stone—would’ve been struck until The King of the Isles prepared to go into action. Tenoctris sheltered within it now, working incantations that the sailors preferred not to see.