Blade started wedging himself firmly into place. He wasn't going anywhere tonight, even if a city of solid gold lay under that distant orange glow. He knew the value of doing his exploring with a rested body, a clear head, and the light of day to help him.
He willed himself to ignore the hardness of the branches under him, the roughness of the bark against his skin, the continuous whine of insects and the occasional raucous screech of a night bird. Slowly the world faded away, and he slept.
Chapter 4
Blade awoke with a watery sunlight in his eyes and a monumental uproar in his ears. It sounded like a hive of angry bees, a tribe of monkeys, and a rioting football crowd all rolled into one continuous roaring and screeching and droning.
Blade sat up, stretched to unkink his muscles, and started to climb down the tree. Ten feet above the ground he stopped abruptly and scrambled back up to the nearest branch.
A herd of low-slung, broad-snouted, grayish-brown animals was flowing past the tree, snorting and grunting and jostling each other. The smallest one must have weighed a lean and sinewy two hundred pounds, and all of there had long dirty yellow tusks. Blade carefully climbed back to a higher branch and waited there for the herd to pass. If those beasts were as bad-tempered as they were ugly, he didn't want to face them with his bare hands.
There seemed to be no end to the herd. The beasts trotted past by the hundreds, their gruntings and the thud of their hooves rising to drown out all the other sounds of the forest.
Then suddenly half a dozen dark-striped yellow shapes seemed to explode out of the underbrush or drop down from a nearby tree. Each of the attackers selected a victim from the herd, leaped on its back, and cut halfway through the neck with a single bite. Some of the older boars turned to face the enemy, but were swept away in a snorting, squealing flood as the rest of the herd panicked. The herd vanished with a tremendous thunder of hooves and a deafening crackling and crashing of flattened bushes. They left behind them a good many of their comrades knocked down and trampled, as well as the half dozen taken by the striped beasts.
These now settled down to feed. They were the size and shape of leopards, with large erect ears and dark bluish stripes instead of spots. Blade waited until they seemed to be paying attention to nothing but their meals. Then he clambered around to the far side of the tree, climbed down as quietly as possible, and ran.
He kept running until he was sure he was out of sight, scent, or hearing of the blue-striped cats. Then he slowed down to a brisk walk, eyes darting from, side to side, searching for possible attackers or weapons. He tried to follow a course toward the northwest, where he'd seen the lights during the night.
After an hour the overcast broke up and the sun came out. Now Blade was able to take a bearing every time he came to a clearing. As far as he could see the underbrush was trampled down or eaten bare. Small trees were completely stripped of bark to a height of six or eight feet. The remains of various predators' victims lay thickly, some bare dry skeletons, others sending up ghastly smells of decay and drawing ugly blue-green clouds of insects. In places the bodies lay so thick that Blade had to stuff leaves in his nose to shut out the smell.
The rising waters seemed to have driven the animals ahead of them. Now many times the usual animal population of the forest was packed into it. They were carrying on a deadly struggle for food and living space, and would be more than usually nervous and combative.
After another hour Blade found an untrampled stand of thorny bushes and broke off a long branch. The branch wouldn't be much protection against anything larger than a house cat, but it could at least beat off insects and snakes.
The insects swarmed still more thickly around Blade ad the sun rose higher in the sky and the sweat poured down his body. He chewed on green leaves for their moisture and kept in the shade as much as possible. Last night he'd been in danger of drowning in a waste of undrinkable water. Now he was suffering from thirst in the middle of an apparently waterless forest.
As the afternoon passed the sky disappeared behind a screen of clouds. The clouds grew slowly thicker and darker, and a breeze began to ruffle the leaves. The breeze became a wind that made the branches and the smaller trees sway, gently at first. The wind blew deliciously cool on Blade's skin.
Thunder began to roll, rapidly coming closer and growing louder. The branches tossed more wildly, and a dazzling glare flashed across the forest as lightning darted down from the clouds. As the thunder rumbled away into silence Blade heard the crackling and crashing of a tree going over. Then all other sounds were drowned out as the skies opened like the sluice gates of a dam and poured down rain on the forest.
The rain stung Blade's bare skin like a hailstorm. He threw his head back until his open mouth was turned to the sky, closed his eyes, and drank and drank and drank. As he drank, he felt the rain scouring his skin free of sweat and dirt and the mashed bodies of countless insects.
He drank until he couldn't drink any more, then started on his way again. The rain settled into a steady downpour, lashed across the forest like a whip by the wind. Thunder crashed and lightning flared and crackled on all sides and directly overhead. Blade found he had to walk constantly looking upward, to avoid being brained by falling branches and whole trees.
The rain was still pouring down when Blade stepped between two trees and found nothing but saplings and low bushes ahead of him. He peered through the rain, one hand sheltering his eyes from the pelting drops. After a hundred yards of saplings the ground was level, covered with ragged grass swaying in the wind and stretching off to vanish behind the gray veil of the rain.
Blade stopped. There was no point in wandering aimlessly out onto the plain ahead to end up roaming in circles. He could be at the very foot of the hills where he'd seen the lights, but they would be invisible until the rain stopped.
Another hour, and the rain began to ease. It was like a series of curtains rising. As each curtain rose, Blade could see a few hundred yards farther out into the gray twilight that was settling across the open land.
Behind him the forest slowly began to come back to life, as Blade moved out into the open. He kept bearing to the right as he walked. That should bring him to some point along those hills, and after that ….
He'd gone barely half a mile when he stopped abruptly, to stare down at the grass in front of him. A wide trail was beaten down there, a trail a hundred yards across where the grass lay crushed flat under the prints of human feet and the hooves of animals. In many places the earth lay in parallel brown furrows, gouged up by the wheels of heavy carts or wagons. The trail came out of the rain to Blade's right and vanished in the misty twilight.
The grass was still green, without a trace of yellowing. Whoever had passed by here was only a few hours away. Blade knelt to examine the furrows. They were sunk deep into the earth, as if the wagons had been heavily laden. Along the furrows lay half-dissolved piles of purplish-brown dung and occasional bits of fresh reddish-brown meat. Blade picked up one that had a long strip of leathery gray hide still attached.
He was turning the hide over and over in his hands when he heard a human voice shout out a wordless cry. Three other voices echoed it. He whirled, to see four armed men trotting toward him on creatures that looked like slimmed down oxen.