The river swarmed with fish, which had to be eaten raw, since fires might be sighted by Yal hunters. The Fak'si were skilled at cleaning their catch, and raw fish was considerably better than going hungry. After the first few meals Blade found himself almost looking forward to sampling new varieties.
There was one kind of fish all the Fak'si seemed to value, judging from the way they cheered when one broke surface. Why anyone would cheer about it was more than Blade could see. The smallest of these fish was six feet long and two feet thick, with bony spines all down the back, poisonous green and purple mottling on the sides, and a corpse-white belly. Instead of a proper mouth it had a circle of sucking discs rimmed with small teeth around a foot-wide black gullet. Blade wasn't sure how it fed and was sure he didn't want to find out. He mentally labeled it the «ugly fish,» and couldn't understand why anyone cheered when one appeared. It looked unappetizing, if not actually poisonous.
About noon on the third day in Yal territory, Swebon and Tuk made hand signals for the canoes to head in for the bank. All sixteen canoes were grounded and the whole raiding party climbed out. The four priests, two from each village, stood by the water's edge and chanted what were apparently questions and answers in a language Blade couldn't understand. As usual the computer had altered his brain during the transition into Dimension X, so that the language of the Forest People reached him as English and his speech reached them in their own language. Yet for some reason his brain hadn't been altered quite enough to grasp the language the priests were using. If it was a purely ritual language it didn't matter too much in practice, but it might be an ominous development if it continued. Being tongue-tied in each new Dimension would be nothing less than a disaster!
The priests took turns asking and answering questions for about half an hour. Then one of them drove a wooden stake into the ground, a second killed a bird, a third held it up so that its blood dripped down on the stake, and a fourth sprinkled dried herbs from a bag onto the blood. This took another half hour. By that time Blade was getting impatient. Proper rites or not, did they all have to stand here on the bank like a lot of bloody statues, easy targets for any Yal who came by. A single flight of arrows could hardly miss hitting a dozen Fak'si.
Fortunately the rites came to an end before Blade's patience did. The raiders climbed back into their canoes and headed off downstream more slowly than before. Blade saw a man with a fishing spear squatting in the bow of each canoe, ready to throw.
The river wound back and forth, and the line of canoes stretched out. Only half the raiders were in sight when the man in the bow of the canoe just ahead of Blade's leaped to his feet. Ignoring the rocking of the canoe, he braced himself and raised his spear. The paddlers backed water until the canoe was almost stopped. Then the fisherman's arm snapped forward, the harpoon flashed down, the line hissed out, and suddenly an uglyfish broke surface in a shower of foam.
It was a real monster, nearly ten feet long, and for a moment Blade wasn't sure who'd caught whom. The fish charged the canoe and smashed into the bow so hard Blade heard wood crack. The impact half-stunned the fish and it was slow to turn away. As it presented its side to the fisherman, he snatched up another spear and drove it in deep. The fish leaped completely out of the water, knocked the fisherman overboard with a final blow of its tail, then fell back dead.
No one even tried to get the uglyfish into the canoe. There wouldn't have been room. Instead two men helped the fisherman back into the canoe while others looped a rope around the uglyfish's tail. Then the canoe started off again, towing the uglyfish tail-first behind it.
In two hours Blade saw the raiders catch at least seven uglyfish. No one said a word to him about what all this was supposed to mean. He had gruesome visions of a banquet of uglyfish, or some sacrificial rite that went on long enough to use them all. Neither idea appealed to him.
Another hour, and then Swebon suddenly signaled four canoes to follow him toward the bank. Blade saw that here the bank was lower and the kohkol trees grew so thickly that their branches kept the ground in shade. The vines and shrubbery were no longer thick enough to clutch a man like the tentacles of an octopus.
By the time Swebon's canoes were firmly grounded on the bank, the others were out of sight. Swebon turned to Blade, «You must be quiet, and try to understand all you see this day without asking questions. All the priests and Tuk wish it so, and you must do as they wish.»
«May I ask why they wish it?»
«You are not of the People, not one who has been given spear and shield with the Forest Spirit watching. The Forest Spirit will tolerate your presence at-at what we do-this day only if you show it respect by your silence.»
«I will be silent, for it is the way of the English to honor those who watch over other peoples.» He was perfectly happy not to participate in the upcoming religious rites, if they involved eating uglyfish.
«Good.» Swebon sprang to the bank and motioned the other men to follow him. They scrambled up to the edge of the trees, spread out, then vanished into the jungle. Blade noticed that each one was carrying a large gourd, hollowed out and stoppered, and a small knife of iron set in bone, shaped somewhat like an old-fashioned straight razor. Swebon and half a dozen men armed with bows spread out along the bank to keep watch on the canoes, the river, and the Forest behind them.
Whatever took place in the trees took place in silence. All Blade knew was that in about half an hour the men started reappearing. Their knives were stuck in their belts and the gourds were not tightly stoppered and apparently full. As carefully as if they'd been handling eggs, they laid the gourds in the bottoms of the canoes and climbed in. Swebon was the last man aboard, then the canoes shot off after the others.
Before twilight they caught up, at a place where the river spread out through the Forest in a wasteland of marsh and bog. The four canoes turned into the widest channel through the marsh and followed it until the river was out of sight behind. Half a mile inside the marsh they came to the rest of the raiding party, the canoes drawn up in a circle with their bows grounded on a patch of dry land. The patch covered several acres, more than large enough to hold the four priests, four warriors to help them, and a large iron kettle hung on a tripod over a wood fire. One of the warriors was feeding the fire carefully with handfuls of moss that burned with a thin gray smoke, quickly lost among the branches overhead.
One at a time, the stoppered gourds were handed to the priests and emptied into the pot. Now Blade recognized what the gourds held. It was kohkol sap, freshly tapped from the trees. While one priest poured, another stirred the sap continuously with a wooden paddle. When he raised the paddle, long strings of the thickened sap trailed from it, like strings of glue.
By the time the last gourd was empty, the sap had thickened and turned whitish-gray. Now warriors came splashing through the waist-deep water, towing the uglyfish behind them. One fish after another was hauled up on the bank, to the feet of the man who seemed to be the chief priest. With a long saw-edged knife he made two quick slashes, one under each eye. Then he reached into the wounds and pulled out two dripping reddish glands; each about the size of a grapefruit. Finally he held the glands over the pot of kohkol sap and squeezed them until they burst and spurted reddish fluid. Blue fumes rose from the iron pot as the fluid fell into the sap. From the whiff he got, Blade wondered why the priests and their helpers didn't drop dead on the spot. The fumes smelled as if they came from something not only long dead but horribly diseased before it died.
Blade sat as more than twenty uglyfish were butchered, then dumped back in the water. By the time the last one was gone, the pot was nearly full and the blue fumes hung like a revolting fog over the land and the canoes around it. From the faces of the men around him, Blade knew he wasn't the only one suffering from the smell.