Ghlikh fell, screaming, but then his wings began flapping again and he descended in controlled flight toward a great branch on another trunk. Here Ghuakh waited for him. Ulysses watched them for a few minutes while his wife inspected the hole in his wing and their mouths worked furiously.
Ulysses returned to the cave and gave the knife to a warrior to cut the bonds of the others. When everybody was up and armed, he told them that they must go into the inner cave. They were eager for revenge. Inside the big cave, they killed all the Wuggrud in a few seconds. They shot the adult women, who could be as dangerous as the males, and then speared the juveniles and the infants.
Ulysses then went into the niche and tapped the membrane. The response this time was swift, understandable, and near-deadly. From a thousand hitherto unseen apertures in the walls, the floor and the ceiling, sprays of high-pressure water struck them, knocked them down, and rolled them over and over. They fought to their feet and were knocked down again. They spun around and around until they had gotten to the tunnel, which by then was half-flooded. Choking, coughing, bumped by the dead bodies of the Wuggruds, they slipped and slid to the outer dome and then out the entrance. Here the sudden rise of water almost swept them off the branch.
After a while, the stream dwindled and then quit. Cautiously, Ulysses went back into the dome, which had been swept clean of all bodies and the supplies. Most of these, fortunately, had been caught outside and stocked out of the way of the flood.
The entrance to the tunnel was sealed with a solid and sticky mass much like a honeycomb.
Ulysses counted noses and tallied the supplies and ammunition. Half of them still had their bows and a quiverfull of arrows. There were ten bombs left. Eighty-four warriors, not counting himself and Awina, were alive. They were a fatigued, beaten and bedraggled bunch. Their bowstrings and feathers on the arrows were wet and thus useless at the moment. The fuses of the bombs were also soaked, and possibly the powder was wet. They had little food.
Aufaieu, who was now the ranking Wufea chief, said, "Lord, we are ready."
He paused and then added, "To follow you back to our villages."
Ulysses tried to look him in the eye, but Aufaieu would not meet his gaze.
"I am going on," Ulysses said. "I am going to the south coast and there find out if mortals who look like me exist."
Aufaieu did not point out that a god should know this. He said, "And what about Wurutana, Lord?"
"There is nothing to be done about Wurutana at this time."
What could he or anybody do? Wurutana was just a tree, and whoever sat in power, whoever controlled the bat-people and the Wuggrud and possibly the leopard-men, could not be located. Not now, anyway. The Tree was just too vast; the controlling entity could be hiding anyplace in it. But Ulysses would capture a bat-man someday and force the location of the king of Wurutana out of him.
Or he supposed he would. Now that he thought about it, just why should he search out this hidden ruler? As long as he stayed within The Tree and did not bother those on the land outside The Tree, let him do what he wished. Ulysses had only come this far because he had not known what or who Wurutana was and because the Wufea and the others seemed to think that Wurutana was a danger to them and that the stone god could do something about it.
There was nothing to be done about The Tree itself. It would continue to grow until it covered the land. The Wufea and others could either adapt to it, learn to live on it, or they could build boats and seek out other lands.
"There is nothing to be done about Wurutana at this time," he repeated. "What we will do, what I do, will be to go on and explore the land along the sea to the south. If you wish to desert me, you may. I do not want cowards to accompany me."
He did not like to use such words. These people were not cowards. He did not blame them for feeling downhearted and eager to give up. He felt that way, too, but he was not going to give up.
Awina said, "Cowardsis right! Go back to your villages, to the clans you have disgraced! The women and the children will mock you and spit on you! And you will not be buried with the brave men! You will be buried in earth reserved for cowards! The ghosts of your ancestors will spit on you from the Happy Warground!"
Aufaieu jerked as if she had hit him with a whip. He snarled soundlessly at her, and his great dark-blue eyes glared. It was bad enough to be talked to like that by a man. But a woman! Especially a woman who had gone through exactly the same perils and battles as the men.
"I am leaving at once," Ulysses said. He pointed toward the south. "I am going that way. I am not turning back. You may follow me or you may not. I will say no more."
Aufaieu looked panic-stricken. The thought of going back without the stone god to lead and comfort them was a terrifying one. They had only gotten this far because he had extricated them from the difficult positions. And then, even if they made it back without him, they would have to explain to their people why they had deserted their stone god.
Ulysses shouldered a bag containing some food and two bombs, and he said, "Come on, Awina."
He walked past the entrance to the hole and started to work his way around the trunk. When he got to the other side, where another mighty branch began, he paused. He heard noises behind him and said, "Awina! Are they coming?"
She smiled and said, "They are coming."
"Good! Let's push on, then!"
He halted about a hundred yards on, where water welled up from a cavity on top of the branch and ran into a deep groove. Fifty yards down, the groove became a wide channel, and a riverlet started its many-miled course. He waited for the others to climb around the trunk, clinging to projections of bark, and when they had all straggled to the spring, he spoke to them.
"Thank you for staying loyal. I can't promise you anything except more of what you've had. But if we do find anything rich, anything valuable, we will share equally in the profits."
Some were silent; some murmured, "You are welcome, Lord."
"Now," Ulysses said, "we'll build rafts again. But we will put railings on them to keep any legless things or great water rats from snatching us off the rafts."
While a third of the men were cutting down the bamboo-like plants for logs and poles, and lianas for binding the logs, he set another third up as guard. The remainder went hunting. By the time the rafts were ready to be launched, the hunters had returned with three goats, four monkeys, a snoligoster, and a big ostrich-like bird. They started fires, butchered the carcasses and set them up to be roasted. When the odour of the meat filled their nostrils, their hearts filled with cheer. Before long, they were laughing and joking. By then Ulysses and Awina had returned with a string of eight fish.
While Awina prepared the fish, Ulysses pondered on recent events and on what he should do next. Though he had not seen the bat-people since he had gone around the trunk, he knew that there was nothing to keep them from dogging him. All they had to do was stay out of range of their arrows. And when they found more leopard-men or the Wuggrud, whom he was convinced were descended from bears, they could bring them down on the war party.
Moreover, there must be many more of the caves with the diaphragms or membranes. There might be a network that interconnected most of The Tree with some central control. And it was possible that this control was the bat-people's chief. After all, he had nothing but his own hunch that somebody other than Ghlikh's people was the entity known as Wurutana.
If he did get to the south coast, he might find that Ghlikh had lied to him. He may have told him that story about humans living there as an additional lure to get him into The Tree.