“You weren’t imagining anything,” Leaf told him. “He’s been riding secretly with us since Theptis. Waiting to see what would happen to us when we came to the Tree Companions’ wall.”
Crown looked jarred by that. “When did you find that out?” he demanded.
Shadow said, “Let him be, Crown. Go and parley with the chief. If I don’t clean Leaf’s wound soon —”
“Just a minute. I need to know the truth. Leaf, when did you find out about this Invisible?”
“When I went up front to relieve Sting. He was in the driver’s cabin. Laughing at me, jeering. The way they do.”
“And you didn’t tell me? Why?”
“There was no chance. He bothered me for a while, and then he vanished, and I was busy driving after that, and then we came to the wall, and then the Tree Companions —”
“What does he want from us?” Crown asked harshly, face pushed close to Leaf’s.
Leaf was starting to feel fever rising. He swayed and leaned on Shadow. Her taut, resilient little form bore him with surprising strength. He said tiredly, “I don’t know. Does anyone ever know what one of them wants!” The Tree Companion chief, meanwhile, had come up beside them and in a lusty, self-assured way slapped his open palm several times against the side of the wagon, as though taking possession of it. Crown whirled. The chief coolly spoke, voice level, inflections controlled. Crown shook his head. “What’s he saying?” he barked. “Sting? Sting?”
“Come,” Shadow said to Leaf. “Now. Please.”
She led him toward the passenger castle. He sprawled on the furs while she searched busily through her case of unguents and ointments; then she came to him with a long green vial in her hand and said, “There’ll be pain for you now.”
“Wait.”
He centered himself and disconnected, as well as he was able, the network of sensory apparatus that conveyed messages of discomfort from his arm to his brain. At once he felt his skin growing cooler, and he realized for the first time since the battle how much pain he had been in: so much that he had not had the wisdom to do anything about it. Dispassionately he watched as Shadow, all efficiency, probed his wound, parting the lips of the cut without squeamishness and swabbing its red interior. A faint tickling, unpleasant but not painful, was all he sensed. She looked up, finally, and said, “There’ll be no infection. You can allow the wound to close now.” In order to do that Leaf had to reestablish the neural connections to a certain degree, and as he unblocked the flow of impulses he felt sudden startling pain, both from the cut itself and from Shadow’s medicines; but quickly he induced clotting, and a moment afterward he was deep in the disciplines that would encourage the sundered flesh to heal. The wound began to close. Lightly Shadow blotted the fresh blood from his arm and prepared a poultice; by the time she had it in place, the gaping slash had reduced itself to a thin raw line. “You’ll live,” she said. “You were lucky they don’t poison their knives.” He kissed the tip of her nose and they returned to the hatch area.
Sting and the Tree Companion chief were conducting some sort of discussion in pantomime, Sting’s motions sweeping and broad, the chief’s the merest flicks of fingers, while Crown stood by, an impassive column of darkness, arms folded sombrely. As Leaf and Shadow reappeared Crown said, “Sting isn’t getting anywhere. It has to be a trance parley or we won’t make contact. Help him, Shadow.”
She nodded. To Leaf, Crown said, “How’s the arm?”
“It’ll be all right.”
“How soon?”
“A day. Two, maybe. Sore for a week.”
“We may be fighting again by sunrise.”
“You told me yourself that we can’t possibly survive a battle with these people.”
“Even so,” Crown said. “We may be fighting again by sunrise. If there’s no other choice, we’ll fight.”
“And die?”
“And die,” Crown said.
Leaf walked slowly away. Twilight had come. All vestiges of the rain had vanished, and the air was clear, crisp, growing chill, with a light wind out of the north that was gaining steadily in force. Beyond the thicket the tops of tall ropy-limbed trees were whipping about. The shards of the moon had moved into view, rough daggers of whiteness doing their slow dance about one another in the darkening sky. The poor old shattered moon, souvenir of an era long gone: it seemed a scratchy mirror for the tormented planet that owned it, for the fragmented race of races that was mankind. Leaf went to the nightmares, who stood patiently in harness, and passed among them, gently stroking their shaggy ears, caressing their blunt noses. Their eyes, liquid, intelligent, watchful, peered into his almost reproachfully. You promised us a stable, they seemed to be saying. Stallions, warmth, newly mown hay. Leaf shrugged. In this world, he told them wordlessly, it isn’t always possible to keep one’s promises. One does one’s best, and one hopes that that is enough.
Near the wagon Sting has assumed a cross-legged position on the damp ground. Shadow squats beside him; the chief, mantled in dignity, stands stiffly before them, but Shadow coaxes him with gentle gestures to come down to them. Sting’s eyes are closed and his head lolls forward. He is already in trance. His left hand grasps Shadow’s muscular furry thigh; he extends his right, palm upward, and after a moment the chief puts his own palm to it. Contact: the circuit is closed.
Leaf has no idea what messages are passing among the three of them, but yet, oddly, he does not feel excluded from the transaction. Such a sense of love and warmth radiates from Sting and Shadow and even from the Tree Companion that he is drawn in, he is enfolded by their communion. And Crown, too, is engulfed and absorbed by the group aura; his rigid martial posture eases, his grim face looks strangely peaceful. Of course it is Sting and Shadow who are most closely linked; Shadow is closer now to Sting than she has ever been to Leaf, but Leaf is untroubled by this. Jealousy and competitiveness are inconceivable now. He is Sting, Sting is Leaf, they all are Shadow and Crown, there are no boundaries separating one from another, just as there will be no boundaries in the All-Is-One that awaits every living creature, Sting and Crown and Shadow and Leaf, the Tree Companions, the Invisibles, the nightmares, the no-leg spiders.
They are getting down to cases now. Leaf is aware of strands of opposition and conflict manifesting themselves in the intricate negotiation that is taking, place. Although he is still without a clue to the content of the exchange, Leaf understands that the Tree Companion chief is stating a position of demand —calmly, bluntly, immovable —and Sting and Shadow are explaining to him that Crown is not at all likely to yield. More than that Leaf is unable to perceive, even when he is most deeply enmeshed in the larger consciousness of the trance-wrapped three. Nor does he know how much time is elapsing. The symphonic interchange —demand, response, development, climax —continues repetitively, indefinitely, reaching no resolution.
He feels, at last, a running-down, an attenuation of the experience. He begins to move outside the field of contact, or to have it move outside him. Spiderwebs of sensibility still connect him to the others even as Sting and Shadow and the chief rise and separate, but they are rapidly thinning and fraying, and in a moment they snap.
The contact ends.
The meeting was over. During the trance-time night had fallen, an extraordinarily black night against which the stars seemed unnaturally bright. The fragments of the moon had traveled far across the sky. So it had been a lengthy exchange; yet in the immediate vicinity of the wagon nothing seemed altered. Crown stood like a statue beside the wagon’s entrance; the Tree Companions still occupied the cleared ground between the wagon and the gate. Once more a tableau, then: how easy it is to slide into motionlessness, Leaf thought, in these impoverished times. Stand and wait, stand and wait; but now motion returned. The Tree Companion pivoted and strode off without a word, signaling to his people, who gathered up their dead and followed him through the gate. From within they tugged the gate shut; there was the screeching sound of the bolts being forced home. Sting, looking dazed, whispered something to Shadow, who nodded and lightly touched his arm. They walked haltingly back to the wagon.