Into the thinking kingdoms - Alan Dean Foster [103]
The herdsman kept an eye on them as he and his friends continued to make their way through the cool, enclosing woods. Both dragonets were fully occupied with the task of excavating their nesting hole, and neither paid the least attention to the party of three men and one cat tromping through the forest litter. Certainly they did not pause to kick pinecones at the figures far below.
“I do not see anything throwing these cones at us,” Ehomba declared. Even as he concluded the observation, two more cones landed close by his feet, just missing him. His eyes instantly darted upward, but there was no sign of movement in any of the branches immediately overhead.
A smiling Knucker tapped the side of his nose with a long finger. This time, nothing came out. “We must be under attack by groats.” He scanned the treetops. “Troops of them are common in these woods. They don’t like visitors.”
As a particularly heavy cone plummeted to strike him a glancing blow on the left foot, Simna loudly offered to trade his blade for a good bow and a quiver full of arrows.
“It wouldn’t do you any good,” Knucker assured him.
“Why not?” More insulted than injured by the cone, the swordsman spoke without taking his eyes from the branches overhead. “I’m a pretty good hand with a bow. What are these groats, anyway?”
“Small furry creatures that live in the treetops in forests like these.” Holding his hands out in front of him, Knucker aligned the open palms about three feet apart. “They have long tails and feet that can grip branches as strongly as hands, in the manner of monkeys, but their faces are like those of insects, hard and with strangely patterned eyes.”
Ehomba hopped clear of a falling cone nearly the size of his head that he was fortunate to spot on the way down. It hit the ground with a weighty thump that held the potential for serious injury. As the bombardment continued and the first small cones gave way to far larger woody projectiles, the situation began to deteriorate from merely bothersome to potentially serious.
“I have good eyes and I have been looking for a long time,” the herdsman replied, “and still I see nothing like what you describe.”
Knucker’s expression turned serious. “That’s because the fur of the groat is invisible. You have to look for their eyes, which is the only part of them that reflects light.”
Searching for three-foot-long furry creatures ambling through the treetops was one thing. Hunting only for isolated eyes was far more difficult. A cone that could have knocked a man unconscious struck Ahlitah squarely on his head, provoking a roar that shook the needles of the surrounding trees. It did not intimidate the unseen groats, who continued to rain cones down on the hapless intruders at an ever-increasing rate.
More cones suggested the presence of more groats. While this made the travelers’ situation more perilous, it also improved the opportunities for detecting the elusive creatures. Moments after he executed an elegant if forced little dance that enabled him to dodge half a dozen falling cones, Simna stabbed an arm skyward.
“There! By that big branch thrusting to the east from this tree next to us. There’s one!” Reflexively, he fingered the hilt of his sword. The large compound eyes of the otherwise invisible arboreal tormentor glistened in the afternoon light. No accusatory chattering came from the creature or from any of its companions. The barrage of cones was being carried out in complete silence.
Simna was not silent, however. Ill equipped to deal with an attack from above, he was reduced to screaming imprecations at their unseen adversaries. Unsurprisingly, this had no effect on the volume of cones being dropped upon him and his friends.
By this time they had broken into a run. Their progress was made difficult because they had to keep more or less to the trail as located by Knucker while avoiding not only the falling cones but also the dense mass of trees. Straining to pick out eye reflections in the branches overhead, Ehomba struck one smaller tree a