“Kill it!” cried the gillot leader, dashing forward with her knife raised.
But in the dim slimes of the worm’s harneys, a decision had been reached. It bit savagely through the flesh in its mouth and dropped the rest. The head jerked upward, out of harm’s way, yellow blood pouring off its whiskers. What remained of the gillot beat its fist on the ground and then lay unmoving.
Even as the worm gobbled its morsel, it began to change, its coils crashing down into the young trees round about. Though not given to fright, the seven surviving phagors fell down in terror. The worm was splitting in twain.
It dragged its bloodied head over the grass, some way distant from them. Membranes tore with protracted noise. Something like a mask peeled from the head, which became, grotesquely, two heads. While these heads lay one on top of each other, they still resembled the old one; then the new upper head lifted and the resemblance was gone.
The jaws of the new heads sprouted fleshy feelers, rapidly growing outstretched and stiff to form a circle of spikes, behind which came a mouth, the cartilage fixed wide without the ability to close. The rest of the head followed this unseemly opening, with two eyes set horizontally in it. A layer of slime, revealed by the torn membranes, dried, causing a slight colour change to take place. One head became verdigris-hued green, the other a mottled blue.
The heads rose, rearing away from each other in antagonism, emitting a low roar.
This action caused more membranes to split all along the old body, which was revealed as two bodies, one green, one blue, both very slender and winged. A convulsive struggle, similar to a death paroxysm, shook the old body. The two new javelin bodies came streaming forth from it, spreading papery wings as they rose. The heads ascended above the shattered rajabaral, papery wings thrashed. Eight cowbirds flew round about them, screeching with open beaks.
The two opposed creatures became more stable. In another moment, their long- whiskered tails had left the ground. They were airborne, and the light of Freyr glittered on scales and sutured wings. One monster, the green one, was male, with a double series of tentacle appendages dangling from its middle regions, the other, the blue, female, its scales less bright.
Now their wings had acquired a steady beat, lifting them above the treetops. The leading aperture, the mouth, gulped in air, expelling it through rear vents. The creatures circled the clearing in opposite directions, watched helplessly by the phagor band. Then they were off on their maiden flight.
The fliers headed away like flying snakes, one towards the distant north, one towards the far south, obeying mysteriously musical air-octaves of their own, and suddenly beautiful in their power. Their long thin bodies undulated through the atmosphere. They gained height, lifting themselves above the bowl of the valley. Then they were gone, each to seek mates in the remoteness of the opposed poles.
The imagos had forgotten their previous existences, imprisoned for centuries in the hibernal earth.
Grunting, the phagors turned to more immediate things. Their stares swept about the clearing. Their hobbled kaidaw remained, placidly cropping grass. The Madis had gone. Seizing their opportunity, the protognostics had beaten it into the forest.
Madis generally mated for life, and it was rare for a widow or widower to remarry; indeed, a kind of deep melancholia generally carried off the survivor of the bond-pair. The fugitives comprised three men and their mates. The senior pair by a few years was called Cathkaarnit, that being their merged name since marriage; they were distinguished as Cathkaarnit-he and Cathkaarnit-she.
All six of them were slender and of small stature. All were dark. The transhuman protognostics, of which the Madis formed one tribe, differed little in appearance from true humans. Their pursed lips, caused by the formation of the bones of the skull and the lie of their teeth, gave them a wistful look. They possessed eight fingers on each hand, with four opposed to four, giving them an amazingly strong grip; and their feet also exhibited four toes forward and four aft, behind the heel.
They ran at a steady jog trot from the clearing where the phagors were, a pace they could maintain for hours if necessary. They ran through groves and through bogs, moving in double file, the Cathkaarnits leading, then the next oldest pair, then the next. Several wild animals, chiefly deer, went crashing away from their path. Once they flushed a boar. They hastened on without pause.
Their flight led them mainly westwards; the memory of their eight weeks of captivity lent them strength. Skirting the floods, they climbed out of the great saucer of land in which they had made their escape. The heat grew less. At the same time, the inclination upwards of the land, slight but continuous, wore down their energies. The jog trot relapsed into a fast-walking pace. Their skins burned. They pressed on, heads down, breathing painfully through nose and mouth, occasionally stumbling over the rough ground.
At last the rear pair gave a gasp and fell, to lie panting, clutching their stomachs. Their four companions, looking up, saw that they had almost gained the lip of the rise, after which the land could be relied on to level out. They continued, leaning forward, to drop as soon as they climbed from the slope to the flat. Their lungs laboured.
From here they could look back through the preternaturally clear air. Below them were their two exhausted friends, sprawling at the top of an enormous bowl of land. The sides of the bowl were pitted by gulleys down which water poured. The brooks ran down into two immense coils of a river newly enough formed for half- drowned trees still to be standing in it. Dams were forming where branches and other debris had collected. This flood was lost from view where it curved behind a fold of hillside.
Water noises filled the air. They could see where the massive concave rajabarals stood. Somewhere among those rajabarals was the party of phagors from which they had escaped. Behind the rajabarals, thick young forests grew, covering slopes that formed the opposite side of the great bowl. The trees of the forest were generally of a sombre green, rank after rank, punctuated by a tree bearing brilliant gold foliage, known to the Madis as caspiarn; its bitter buds could be eaten in times of famine.
But the landscape did not end with the forests. Beyond them could be seen cliffs which had collapsed here and there to permit a hazardous downward path for animals or men. The cliffs were part of a mountain which spread its rounded contours from one side of the view to the other. Its soft underlying rocks had split, causing ravines from which vegetation sprouted. Where the vegetation was at its most dense, and the collapsed configuration of the mountain most spectacular, a tributary river glinted, foaming as it burst among its gorges towards the valley.
Beyond and above the spongey mountain, yet other mountains stood, harsher, comprising durable basalts, their flanks excoriated by recent centuries of winter. No green mantle covered them. They remained uncompromised, although here and there they were spread with the yellow and orange and white of tiny upland flowers, their colours pure even when viewed from miles away.
Above the domes of those basalt mountains, other ranges, blue, bleak, dreadful, showed. And as if to demonstrate to every living thing that the world had no end, those ranges too permitted a glimpse of objects beyond—land at great distance and great altitude, showing its teeth in a procession of peaks. These were bastions of matter, standing where the blistering colds of the tropopause commenced.
The keen eyes of the Madis took in this prospect, picking out small touches of white among the nearer trees, between the caspiarns, along the cliffs, between the higher defiles of the mountains, even as far as the flashing tributary in its gorges. Those touches of white the Madis correctly identified as cowbirds. Where the cowbirds were were phagors. For almost as many miles as they could see, the stealthy advance of Hrr-Brahl Yprt’s host could be marked by cowbirds. Not one phagor could be viewed; yet the mighty landscape probably concealed ten thousand of them.