In the mindless carnage, the suckerbird was pulverized and forgotten. Its flesh was tossed and lost in spume.
Toy stood up, full of decision.
'We must go now,' she said. 'This is the time for us to get to the shore.'
Seven agonized faces regarded her as if she were mad.
'We shall die down there," Poyly said.
'No,' Toy said fiercely. Now we shall not die. Those things fight each other, so they will be too busy to hurt us. Later may be too late.'
Toy's authority was not absolute. The group was unsure of itself. When she saw them beginning to argue, Toy fell into a rage and boxed Fay and Shree on the ears. But her chief opponents were Veggy and May.
'We shall be killed there at any time,' Veggy said. 'There is no way to safety. Haven't we just seen what happened to the suckerbird that was so strong?'
'We cannot stay here and die,' Toy said angrily.
'We can stay and wait till something happens,' May said. 'Please let's stay!'
'Nothing will happen,' Poyly said, taking her friend Toy's part. 'Only bad things. It is the way. We must look after ourselves.'
'We shall be killed,' Veggy repeated stubbornly.
In despair, Toy turned to Gren, the senior man child.
'What do you say?' she asked.
Gren had watched all the destruction with a set face. It did not relax as he turned it towards Toy.
'You lead the group, Toy. Those who can obey you must do it. That is law.'
Toy stood up.
'Poyly, Veggy, May, you others – follow me! We will go now while the things are too busy to see us. We must get back to the forest.'
Without hesitation she swung a leg over the domed top of the buttress and began sliding down its steep side. Sudden panic filled the others in case they were left behind. They followed Toy. They swarmed over the top, slipping and scrambling down after her.
At the bottom, dwarfed by the grey height of the castle, they stood momentarily in a silent group. Awe held them there.
Their world held an aspect of flat unreality. Because the great sun burnt overhead, their shadows lay like disregarded dirt below their feet. Everywhere was this same lack of shadow, lending the landscape its flat look. It was as dead as a poor painting.
The coastal battle raged like a fever. There was in this era (as in a sense there had always been) only Nature. Nature was supreme mistress of everything; and in the end it was as if she had laid a curse on her handiwork.
Overcoming her fears, Toy moved forward.
As they ran after Toy and away from that mysterious castle, their feet tingled; the stones beneath their feet were stained with brown poison. In the heat it had dried to harmlessness.
Noise of battle filled their ears. Spume drenched them – but the combatants paid them no attention, so absorbed were they in their mindless antagonism. Frequent explosions now ploughed the sea's face. Some of the Nomansland trees, beleaguered for century after century in their narrow strip of territory, had plunged their roots down into the meagre sands to find not only nourishment but a way of defence against their enemies. They had discovered charcoal, they had drawn up sulphur, they had mined potassium nitrate. In their knotty entrails they had refined and mixed them.
The gunpowder that resulted had been carried up through sappy veins to nut cases in the topmost branches. These branches now hurled their explosive weapons at the seaweeds. The torpid sea writhed under the bombardment.
Toy's plan was not a good one: it succeeded through luck rather than judgment. To one side of the land end of the peninsula, a great mass of seaweed had threshed itself far out of the water and covered a gunpowder tree. By sheer weight, it was pulling the tree down, and a fight to the death raged about it. The little humans burst past, and fled into the shelter of tall couch grass.
Only then did they realize Gren was not with them.
CHAPTER EIGHT
GREN still lay in the blinding sun, hunched behind the ramparts of the castle.
Fear had been the chief but not the only cause for his remaining behind. He had felt, as he had told Toy, that obedience was important. Yet he was by nature hard put to it to obey. Particularly so in this case, when the plan Toy offered seemed to hold such slight hope for survival. Also, he had an idea of his own, though he found it impossible to express verbally.
'Oh, how can anyone speak!' he said to himself. "There seem so few words. Once there must have been more words!'
His idea concerned the castle.
The rest of the group were less thoughtful than Gren. Directly they had landed on it, their attention had been directed elsewhere. Not so Gren's; he realized that the castle was not of rock. It had been built with intelligence. Only one species could have built it and that species would have a safe way from the castle to the coast.
So in a little while, after Gren had watched his companions run down the stony path, he rapped with his knife handle on the wall beside him.
At first the knock went unanswered.
Without warning, a section of the tower behind Gren swung open. He turned at the faint sound, to face eight termights emerging from darkness.
Once declared enemies, now termight and human faced each other almost in kinship, as though the teeming millennia of change had wrought a bond between them. Now that men were outcasts rather than the inheritors of Earth, they met the insects on equal terms.
The termights surrounded Gren and inspected him, their mandibles working. He stood still, motionless as their white bodies brushed round him. They were nearly as big as he was. He could smell their smell, acrid but not unpleasant.
When they had satisfied themselves that Gren was harmless, the termights marched to the ramparts. Whether they could see or not in glaring daylight Gren did not know, but at least they could hear the sounds of the sea struggle clearly enough.
Tentatively, Gren moved over to the opening in the tower. A strange cool odour drifted from it.
Two of the termights came rapidly across and barred his way, their jaws level with his throat.
'I want to go down,' he told them. 'I will be no trouble. Let me come inside."
One of the creatures disappeared down the hole. In a minute it returned with another termight. Gren shrank back. The new termight had a gigantic growth on its head.
The growth was a leprous brown in colour, spongy in texture, and pitted like the honeycomb the treebees made. It proliferated over the termight's cranium, growing round its neck in a ruff. Despite this fearsome burden, the termight seemed active enough. It came forward and the others made way for it. It seemed to stare at Gren, then turned away.
Scratching in the grit underfoot, it began to draw. Crudely but clearly, it sketched a tower and a line, and connected the two by a narrow strip formed with two parallel lines. The single line was evidently intended to represent the coast, the strip the peninsula.
Gren was completely surprised by this. He had never heard of such artistic abilities in insects before. He walked round gazing at the lines.
The termight stepped back and seemed to regard Gren. Obviously something was expected of him. Pulling himself together, he stooped down and falteringly added to the sketch. He drew a line from the top of the tower down the middle of it, through the middle of the strip and to the coast. Then he pointed to himself.
Whether the creatures understood this or not was hard to say. They simply turned and hurried back into the tower. Deciding there was nothing else for it, Gren followed them. This time they did not stop him; evidently his request had been understood.