“What is it, Todor?”
“They’ve brought us to the Big Growth—we’re right in the Cabbage Patch!”
“So,” said Prestin, thinking of what this meant to him. “We came north!”
“Fat lot of good that will do you! You just don’t know what the Big Green is like!”
“Hoshoo! Hoshoo!” shooed the guards and the two men stumbled on. The impatient tug of Honshi clawed-hands opened large double doors to reveal a wide amphitheater ringed by tiers of seats. In those comfortably upholstered seats reclined men and women—ordinary looking men and women. They were clad in bright, loose clothes, all gold, crimson, emerald and electric blue, ringed and roped and scintillant with jewels. Gold ornaments flashed from piled hair, white throats raised naked, and laughing faces, flushed and painted, stared down quizzically on the two ragged bloody men staggering into the center of the small ring. A silence fell.
“Let the vine be brought,” said a commanding voice from a box a few feet above ground level. Prestin stared. A man and woman sat there, smiling contemptuously, popping chocolates into their painted mouths, flashing their beringed fingers. The man looked to be a would-be-virile sixty; the sagging folds of flesh under his eyes and chin spoiled his anyone-for-tennis effect. He looked snakelike, very nasty, very dangerous. The girl could be classified with equal ease. Dalreay said, “Melnone and his strumpet! They run the Valcini for the Contessa. Filth.”
The spectators had resumed their talking and laughing, smoking and gossiping. They waited for the vine. “What the hell’s the vine, Todor?” Prestin whispered.
“You will see soon enough. I fear it—but if we are to die, then we die bravely, facing our foes. I die like a Dargan of Dargai!”
Prestin looked up. The roof curved over them as a shell of perspex or some other tough transparent building material. Thick lines pressed against the arch, as though somewhere outside trees were casting a shadow.
Beneath his feet was concrete, not sand as he would have imagined. An arena without sand to be bloodied did not seem quite right. Aggrieved, Prestin felt that if he was going to die here and now, at least he deserved the proper obsequies.
He was over being afraid. Like the man who fell from a tall building, he had reached an understanding with his fate before he struck the ground. He might yell blue bloody murder when the time came, but that would be from pain, not fear. Not any more.
An expectant hush slowly broke over the sightseers in their comfortable seats. A small electric handcart appeared, driven by a cowed looking man wearing stained dungarees.
“Hard luck, friends,” he said in colloquial Italian. “But don’t blame me. I only work here.”
On the truck stood a large plastic bell jar, surmounting an oversize flower pot. From the pot grew a bright green shoot which stood perhaps three feet high. Dalreay stared, fascinated.
“Part of the Big Green,” he said, swallowing.
The dungaree-clad menial struggled the pot off the trolley, handling it as though it were nitroglycerine. He placed it on the concrete, wiped his forehead, blew his nose and, whirring along with his trolley, departed.
Prestin realized that he stood now in the position of the man who kept calm because he did not understand the situation about him. He also knew that Dalreay stood so limply, so spinelessly, so like a husk of a man because he was face to face with a bogey he had heard about and feared all of his life, but had never felt existed in relation to himself. Now Dalreay had to face the hard fact that his nightmares, his childish fantasies, his secret terrors, were all out in the open. He, Todor Dalreay of Dargai, had to face the Big Green, the Cabbage Patch, alone.
“It’s only a part, you say, Todor. Well—”
“You do not understand.”
Honshi guards approached behind oval bronze shields. Others leveled javelins. Two very gingerly tendered their swords, hilt first. Prestin took his and at once the Honshi who had offered it leaped back, “Hoshooing” like a punctured steam boiler.
Dalreay took his own sword but he did not whirl it about to test the balance, or try a cut or two. He just held it down by his side, and his face looked green.
Prestin, in the middle of swishing the blade through the air, looked at Dalreay, and felt the blood drain from his own face. If so tough a campaigner as Dalreay looked like that…
A hook on the end of a jib swung out over their heads, manipulated, they saw, by the doleful, dungaree-clad menial from a caged-in box, descended and latched into the ring at the top. The Honshi guards left the arena very quickly, very smartly, stationing themselves in a phalanx at the entrance tunnel, just visible through heavy plastic partitions.
Now Prestin and Dalreay stood alone in the arena. Large plastic screens rose from slots in front of the first line of seats, forming a circular barrier.
The flower pot stood in the exact center of the arena.
“Back off,” said Dalreay thickly. Then he straightened his shoulders. “No.” He put his left hand on his right wrist and held it there, ironing out the shaking. “No, friend Bob. I will attack at the very first moment. There is a chance. I will go in straight away. You must do what you can.”
“Very well.” Prestin didn’t understand, yet he agreed anyway, sensing that Dalreay didn’t want to explain what was going to happen—didn’t want to think about it.
Melnone, guffawing and fondling his woman, shouted loudly, “Lift the cover, Tony!” His chuckle sounded like an over-ripe peach being squashed. “Eyes down looking! Now for the fun!”
Excitement vibrated all around the arena. Prestin heard bets being placed, times for the hunter and the other one—he was used to being the other one in life by now. He felt dizzy and shook his head. The hook snapped shut and lifted the swaying bell jar cover into the air. Men and women shouted. Dalreay leaped forward with his sword held high.
And the plant moved.
It writhed around like a tentacle. It rubbered back and avoided Dalreay’s great blow. A huge gasp of effort and dismay burst from the hunter. The plant whipped back and lashed Dalreay’s body like a cat-of-nine-tails—for in that short instant the tip had grown and branched. As Prestin watched, horrified, the tip grew and grew again, branched and re-branched. The vine slashed back at Dalreay. He lifted the sword and severed stems flew but he was down. Sobbing with effort, he rose on a knee as the vine looped him. Prestin, shaken by repugnance, forced himself to leap forward. He hacked as though he swung an axe. He slashed through three of the constricting loops holding Dalreay and jerked at the man’s arm. Dalreay swung his sword at Prestin’s head and chopped through the vine settling about his neck, the sword missing an ear by less than an inch.
“Thanks, Bob!” gasped Dalreay. “Back off now!”
Together the two men scrambled away, half on hands and knees, and half slithering over the concrete; they kept flailing behind them with panicky strokes that littered the ground with writhing green tendrils.
“The damned thing’s mobile!” panted Prestin, drawing gushing draughts of air, sweat drenching him.
“No, Bob. Not mobile. Just quick growing and vicious. It’s a small Lombok Liana, baby brother to some of them in the Big Green.” The two men backed away to the opposite end of the arena to watch the vine squirming from its pot, undulating over the concrete, blindly seeking them.
“Small! But look at the way it’s growing! It’ll fill the arena at this rate.” Prestin breathed heavily. “But how can it—there can’t be enough cellular building material in the pot, let alone nutriments—”
“The Valcini know all about the Cabbage Patch, Bob. They can compress nutriments. If there is the slightest sign of weakening through lack of material they just put more in. They aren’t as stupid as that.”