Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [204]
And similarly, on and on, until the words bore little meaning even to himself. The maze among the roots yielded no exit. Many times, when a narrow tunnel took an upward curve, he would crawl forward hopefully – only to come against a blind end in which a corpse lay curled, with rodents conducting their own kind of debate over the entrails.
Passing through a widening chamber, he stumbled over a king. In the darkness, size had less meaning than in the light. The king felt enormous as he landed claws first, roaring. Laintal Ay rolled over, kicking, yelling, straggling to get out his dagger, and the terrible shapeless thing bit and slashed its way towards his throat. He heaved himself over, trying to flatten it, without effect. An elbow in its eye made the assailant momentarily less enthusiastic. Out came the dagger, to be kicked away as the scrimmage was renewed. His searching fingers found a root. Dragging himself closer to it, he pinned one of the king’s arms round the root and battered at the sharp-fanged head. Then the raging thing was loose again, flinging itself down on Laintal Ay with unabated fury. The two figures, made one figure in hatred, knocked down on themselves earth, filth, and scuttling things.
Limp after the ravages of bone fever and his long fast, Laintal Ay felt his will to fight weakening. Claws raked his side. Suddenly, something slammed into their joined bodies. Savage roars and clicks filled the air. So total was his confusion that he took a moment to realise there was a third assailant in the dark – one of the Nondad warriors. The warrior was concentrating most of its venom on the king. It was like being caught between two porcupines.
Rolling and kicking, Laintal Ay fought himself loose from the fray, grasped his dagger, and managed to drag himself bleeding into an obscure corner. Drawing his legs up so that his shins protected his body and face from frontal attack, he found a narrow entryway above his head. Cautiously he pushed his way up into a tunnel scarcely wider than his body. Before the fever struck he would never have squeezed himself through; now, with pythonlike contortions, he managed it, eventually dropping into a small round chamber in the earth. He felt dead leaves under his hands. He lay there, gasping, listening with fear to the sounds of combat nearby.
‘Light, by the sentinels!’ he gasped. A faint greyness like mist pervaded the nook. He had struggled to the edge of the Eighty Darknesses.
Fear drove him to follow the light. He wormed his way out of the earth, and stood trembling beside the bare concave flank of a rajabaral. The light was a cascade, pouring from the tall lake of the sky.
For a long while he remained breathing deep, wiping blood and earth from his face. He looked down at his feet. A savage ferret face stared up at him, then disappeared. He had quit the realm of the Nondads, and his visitation had left most of them dead.
His mind dwelt poignantly on his snoktruix. Sorrow filled him, and amazement and gratitude.
One of the sentinels was overhead. Near the horizon was the other, Batalix, its rays striking almost horizontally through the great silent forest; creating a sinister beauty of its ocean of leaf.
His skins were in tatters. His flesh was incised by long weals, seeping blood, where the claws of the king had raked him.
Although he looked about and called once for Gold, it was without hope. He did not expect to see his hoxney again. His hunterly instincts warned him against staying where he was; he would become prey to something unless he moved, and he felt too faint to fight another battle.
He listened to the rajabaral. Something inside it rumbled. The Nondads had set great store by the trees under whose roots they lived; Withram was said to live at the top