Hothouse - Brian Aldiss [48]
‘Oh, I’m not tired, thank you,’ Poyly said, smiling back, for Iccall had large dark eyes and a soft skin, and was as beautiful in his way as Yattmur. ‘That is a pretty bone in your hair, shaped like the veins of a leaf.’
‘They are very rare – perhaps I might get you one.’
‘Let’s move if we are going,’ Gren said sharply to Iccall, thinking he had never seen a man grin so foolishly. ‘How can a mere singer – if that is what you are – be any use against this mighty enemy, the Black Mouth?’
‘Because when the Mouth sings, I sing – and I sing better,’ said Iccall, not at all upset, and he led the way among the leaves and the broken pillars of rock, swaggering a little as he went.
As he foretold, they did not have far to go. The ground continued to rise gently and became more and more coated with the black and red igneous rock, so that nothing could grow there. Even the banyan, which had crossed a thousand miles of continent in its sinewy stride, was forced to draw back here. Its outmost trunks showed scars from the last lava flow, yet they dropped aerial roots which explored among the rock for nourishment with greedy fingers.
Iccall brushed past these roots and crouched behind a boulder, beckoning them to join him. He pointed ahead.
‘There is the Black Mouth,’ he whispered.
For Poyly and Gren it was a strange experience. The whole idea of open country was completely unknown to them; they were forest folk. Now their eyes stared ahead in wonder that a prospect could be so strange.
Broken and tumbled, the lava field stretched away from them into the distance. It tilted and shaped up towards the sky until it turned into a great ragged cone. The cone in its sad eminence dominated the scene, for all that it stood some distance away.
‘That is the Black Mouth,’ whispered Iccall again, watching the awe on Poyly’s face.
He stabbed his finger to a suspiration of smoke that rose from the lip of the cone and trickled up into the sky.
‘The Mouth breathes,’ he said.
Gren pulled his eyes away from the cone to the forest beyond it, the eternal forest reasserting itself. Then his eyes were drawn back to the cone as he felt the morel grope deep into his mind with a dizzying sensation that made him brush his hand over his forehead. His sight blurted as the morel expressed resentment of his gesture.
The morel bored down deeper into the sludge of Gren’s unconscious memory like a drunken man pawing through the faded photographs of a legacy. Confusion overwhelmed Gren; he too glimpsed these brief pictures, some of them extremely poignant, without being able to grasp their content. Swooning, he pitched over on to the lava.
Poyly and Iccall lifted him up – but already the fit was over and the morel had what it needed.
Triumphantly it flashed a picture at Gren. As he revived, the morel explained to him.
‘These herders fear shadows, Gren. We need not fear. Their mighty Mouth is only a volcano, and a small one at that. It will do no harm. Probably it is all but extinct.’ And he showed Gren and Poyly what a volcano was from the knowledge he had dredged out of their memory.
Reassured, they returned to the tribe’s subterranean home, where Hutweer, Yattmur and the others awaited them.
‘We have seen your Black Mouth and have no fear of it,’ Gren declared. ‘We shall sleep in peace with quiet dreams.’
‘When the Black Mouth calls, everyone must go to it,’ Hutweer said. ‘Though you may be mighty, you scoff because you have only seen the Mouth in its silence. When it sings, we will see how you dance, O spirits!’
Poyly asked the whereabouts of the Fishers, the tribe Yattmur had mentioned.
‘From where we stood, we could not see their home trees,’ Iccall said. ‘From the belly of the Black Mouth comes the Long Water. That also we did not see for the rise of the land. Beside the Long Water stand the trees, and there live the Fishers, a strange people who worship their trees.’
At this the morel entered into Poyly’s thoughts, prompting her to ask, ‘If the Fishers