The alligator stared at the humans as they emerged from the long grass and they stared back at it.
'We can kill it. It cannot move,' May said.
'We can eat it,' Shree said. 'Even my soul is hungry."
The alligator, thanks to its armour, proved difficult to kill. Right at the onset, its tail sent Driff spinning into a pile of shingle, where she cut her face badly. But by stabbing at it from all sides, and by blinding it, they at last exhausted it enough for Toy to thrust her hand bravely into the cage and cut the creature's throat.
As the reptile threshed about in its death agony, a curious thing happened. The bars of the cage lifted upwards so that their pronged ends emerged from the ground, and the whole contraption clenched together like a hand. The straight pole above it twisted into several loops; it and the cage vanished up into the green boughs of the tree.
With exclamations of awe, the group seized their alligator and ran.
Winding their way though tight-packed tree trunks, they came on a bare outcrop of rock. It looked like a safe refuge, particularly as it was fringed by a spiky local variant of the whistlethistle.
Crouching on the rock, they began their unlovely meal. Even Driff joined in, though her face still bled from where she had grazed it on the shingle.
Scarcely were their jaws in motion than they heard Gren calling for help near at hand.
'Wait here and guard the food,' Toy commanded. 'Poyly will come with me. We will go and find Gren and bring him back here.'
Her command was a good one. To travel with food was never wise; travelling alone was dangerous enough.
As she and Poyly skirted the thistles, Gren's cry came again to guide them. The two girls moved round a bank of mauve cactus, and there he lay. He sprawled face downwards under a tree similar to the one beneath which they had killed the alligator, penned in a cage similar to the alligator's.
'Oh, Gren!' cried Poyly. 'How we missed you!'
Even as they ran towards him, a trailer creeper swung at him from the limb of a nearby tree, a creeper with a wet red mouth at its extremity, bright as a flower, poisonous-looking as a dripper-lip. It swooped for Gren's head.
Poyly's feelings for Gren went deep. Without thought, she flung herself at the creeper, meeting it as it swung forward, catching it as high as possible to avoid those pulpy lips. Drawing a new knife, she severed the stem that pulsed beneath her fingers. Then she dropped back lightly to the ground. It was easy to avoid the mouth that now writhed there, ineffectually pursing and opening.
'Above you, Poyly!' Toy cried in warning, darting forward. The parasite, alerted now to danger, uncurled a full dozen of its trailing mouths. Gay and deadly, they swung about Poyly's head. But Toy was beside her. Expertly they lopped away, till milk spurted from the creeper's wounds, till the mouths lay gasping at their feet. Vegetable reaction time is not the fastest thing in the universe, perhaps because it is rarely prompted by pain.
Breathing hard, the two girls turned their attention to Gren, who still lay pinned beneath the cage.
'Can you get me out?' he asked, looking up helplessly at them.
'I am leader. Of course I can get you out,' Toy said. Using some of the knowledge she had gained from dealing with the alligator, she said, 'This cage is a part of the tree. We will make it move and let you go.'
She knelt down and began to saw at the bars of the cage with her knife.
Over the land where the banyan ruled, covering everything with its layers of green, the chief problem for lesser breeds was to propagate their kind. With plants like the whistlethistle that had developed the curious dumblers, and the burnurn that had turned its seedcases into weapons, the solution of this problem was ingenious.
No less ingenious were some of the solutions of the flora of Nomansland to their particular problem. Here the main problem was less one of propagation than of sustenance; this accounted for the radical difference between these outcasts of the beaches and their cousins inland.
Some trees like the mangroves waded into the sea and fished deadly seaweeds for mulch. Other like the killerwillows took on the habits of animals, hunting in the manner of carnivores and nourishing themselves on decomposed flesh. But the oak, as one million-year stretch of sunlight succeeded another, shaped some of its extremities into cages and caught animals alive, letting their dung feed its starving roots. Or if they eventually starved to death, in decomposing they would still feed the tree.
Nothing of this Toy knew. She knew only that Gren's cage should move, just as the one enclosing the alligator had done. Grimly, with Poyly helping, she hacked at the bars. The two girls worked at each of the twelve bars in turn. Perhaps the oak assumed the damage being done was greater in fact than it was; the bars were suddenly pulled from the ground and the whole contraption sprang up into the boughs above them.
Ignoring tabu, the girls grabbed Gren and ran with him back to the rest of the party.
When they were reunited, they devoured the alligator meat, keeping guard as they did so.
Not without a certain amount of boasting, Gren told them what he had seen inside the termight's nest. They were unbelieving.
'Termights have not enough sense to do all that you say,' Veggy said.
'You all saw the castle they made. You sat on it."
'In the forest, termights have not so much sense,' May said, backing Veggy up as usual.
'This is not the forest,' Gren said. 'New things happen here. Terrible things.'
'Only in your head they happen,' May teased. 'You tell us about these funny things so that we will forget you did wrong to disobey Toy. How could there be windows underground to look out on to the sea?'
'I tell you only what I saw," Gren said. He was angry now. 'In Nomansland, things are different. It is the way. Many ter-
mights also had a bad fungus growth on them such as I have not seen before. I have seen this fungus again since then. It looks bad.'
'Where did you see it?' Shree asked.
Gren threw a curiously-shaped piece of glass into the air and caught it, perhaps pausing to create suspense, perhaps because he was not too keen to mention his recent fright.
'When I was caught by the snaptrap tree,' he said, 'I looked up into its branches. There among the leaves I saw a fearful thing. I could not make out what it was until the leaves stirred. Then I saw one of the fungi that grew on the termights, all shining like an eye and growing on the tree.'
'Too many things bring death here,' she said. 'Now we must move back to the forest where we can live happily. Get up, all of you.'
'Let me finish this bone off,' Shree said.
'Let Gren finish his story,' Veggy said.
'Get up, all of you. Tuck your souls in your belts, and do as I order.'
Gren slipped his curious glass under his belt and jumped up first to show he was anxious to obey. As the others stood up too, a dark shadow passed overhead; two rayplanes fluttered by, locked in combat.
Over the disputed strip called Nomansland many sorts of veg-bird passed, both those that fed at sea and those that fed on land. They passed without alighting, knowing well the dangers that lurked there. Their shadows sped and dappled over the outcast plants without pause.
The rayplanes were so mortally engaged they did not know where they went. With a crash they sprawled among the upper branches near the group.
At once Nomansland sprang to life.
The famished angry trees spread up and lashed their branches. Toothed briars uncurled. Gigantic nettles shook their bearded heads. Moving cactus crawled and launched its spikes. Climbers hurled sticky bolas at the enemy. Cat-like creatures, such as Gren had seen in the termight's nest, bounded past and swarmed up the trees to get to the attack. Everything that could move did so, prodded on by hunger. On the instant, Nomansland turned itself into a war machine.