“The wall,” Leaf said.
“There’s plenty of brush lying around out there,” said Sting. “We could build a bonfire and burn it down.”
“Green wood,” Leaf said. “It’s impossible.”
“We have hatchets,” Shadow pointed out. “How long would it take for us to cut through timbers as thick as those?”
Sting said, “We’d need a week for the job. The Tree Companions would fill us full of darts before we’d been chopping an hour.”
“Do you have any ideas?” Shadow said to Leaf.
“Well, we could turn back toward Theptis and try to find our way to Sunset Highway by way of the sand country. There are only two roads from here to the river, this and the Sunset. We lose five days, though, if we decide to go back, and we might get snarled up in whatever chaos is going on in Theptis, or we could very well get stranded in the desert trying to reach the highway. The only other choice I see is to abandon the wagon and look for some path around the wall on foot, but I doubt very much that Crown would —”
“Crown wouldn’t,” said Crown, who had been chewing his lip in tense silence. “But I see some different possibilities.”
“Go on.”
“One is to find these Tree Companions and compel them to clear this trash from the highway. Darts or no darts, one Dark Lake and one Pure Stream side by side ought to be able to terrify twenty tribes of pinhead forest folk.”
“And if we can’t?” Leaf asked.
“That brings us to the other possibility, which is that this wall isn’t particularly intended to protect the neighborhood against the Teeth at all, but that these Tree Companions have taken advantage of the eneral confusion to set up some sort of toll-raising scheme. In that case, if we can’t force them to open the road, we can find out what hey want, what sort of toll they’re asking, and pay it if we can and be on our way.”
“Is that Crown who’s talking?” Sting asked. “Talking about paying a toll to underbreeds of the forest? Incredible!”
Crown said, “I don’t like the thought of paying toll to anybody. But it may be the simplest and quickest way to get out of here. Do you think I’m entirely a creature of pride, Sting?”
Leaf stood up. “If you’re right that this is a toll station, there’d be some kind of gate in the wall. I’ll go out there and have a look at it.”
“No,” said Crown, pushing him lightly back into his seat. “There’s danger here, Leaf. This part of the work falls to me.” He strode toward the midcabin and was busy there a few minutes. When he returned he was in his full armor: breastplates, helmet, face mask, greaves, everything burnished to a high gloss. In those few places where his bare skin showed through, it seemed but a part of the armor. Crown looked like a machine. His mace hung at his hip, and the short shaft of his extensor sword rested easily along the inside of his right wrist, ready to spring to full length at a squeeze. Crown glanced toward Sting and said, “I’ll need your nimble legs. Will you come?”
“As you say.”
“Open the midcabin hatch for us, Leaf.”
Leaf touched a control on the board below the front window. With a soft, whining sound a hinged door near the middle of the wagon swung upward and out, and a stepladder sprouted to provide access to the ground. Crown made a ponderous exit. Sting, scorning the ladder, stepped down: it was the special gift of the White Crystal people to be able to transport themselves short distances in extraordinary ways.
Sting and Crown began to walk warily toward the wall. Leaf, watching from the driver’s seat, slipped his arm lightly about the waist of Shadow, who stood beside him, and caressed her smooth fur. The rain had ended; a gray cloud still hung low, and the gleam of Crown’s armor was already softened by fine droplets of moisture. He and Sting were nearly to the palisade, now, Crown constantly scanning the underbrush as if expecting a horde of Tree Companions to spring forth. Sting, loping along next to him, looked like some agile little two-legged beast, the top of his head barely reaching to Crown’s hip.
They reached the palisade. Thin, late-afternoon sunlight streamed over its top. Kneeling, Sting inspected the base of the wall, probing at the soil with his fingers, and said something to Crown, who nodded and pointed upward. Sting backed off, made a short running start, and lofted himself, rising almost as though he were taking wing. His leap carried him soaring to the wall’s jagged crest in a swift blurred flight. He appeared to hover for a long moment while choosing a place to land. At last he alighted in a precarious, uncomfortable-looking position, sprawled along the top of the wall with his body arched to avoid the timber’s sharpened tips, his hands grasping two of the stakes and his feet wedged between two others. Sting remained in this desperate contortion for a remarkably long time, studying whatever lay beyond the barricade; then he let go his hold, sprang lightly outward, and floated to the ground, a distance some three times his own height. He landed upright, without stumbling. There was a brief conference between Crown and Sting. Then they came back to the wagon.
“It’s a toll-raising scheme, all right,” Crown muttered. “The middle timbers aren’t embedded in the earth. They end just at ground level and form a hinged gate, fastened by two heavy bolts on the far side.”
“I saw at least a hundred Tree Companions back of the wall,” Sting said. “Armed with blowdarts. They’ll be coming around to visit us in a moment.”
“We should arm ourselves,” Leaf said.
Crown shrugged. “We can’t fight that many of them. Not twenty-five to one, we can’t. The best hand-to-hand man in the world is helpless against little forest folk with poisoned blowdarts. If we aren’t able to awe them into letting us go through, we’ll have to buy them off somehow. But I don’t know. That gate isn’t nearly wide enough for the wagon.”
He was right about that. There was the dry scraping squeal of wood against wood —the bolts were being unfastened —and then the gate swung slowly open. When it had been fully pushed back it provided an opening through which any good-size cart of ordinary dimensions might pass, but not Crown’s magnificent vehicle. Five or six stakes on each side of the gate would have to be pulled down in order for the wagon to go by.
Tree Companions came swarming toward the wagon, scores of them —small, naked folk with lean limbs and smooth blue-green skin. They looked like animated clay statuettes, casually pinched into shape: their hairless heads were narrow and elongated, with flat sloping foreheads, and their long necks looked flimsy and fragile. They had shallow chests and bony, meatless frames. All of them, men and women both, wore reed dart-blowers strapped to their hips. As they danced and frolicked about the wagon they set up a ragged, irregular chanting, tuneless and atonal, like the improvised songs of children caught up in frantic play.
“We’ll go out to them,” Crown said. “Stay calm, make no sudden moves. Remember that these are underbreeds. So long as we think of ourselves as men and them as nothing more than monkeys, and make them realize we think that way, we’ll be able to keep them under control.”
“They’re men,” said Shadow quietly. “Same as we. Not monkeys.”
“Think of them as like monkeys,” Crown told her. “Otherwise we’re lost. Come, now.”
They left the wagon, Crown first, then Leaf, Sting, Shadow. The cavorting Tree Companions paused momentarily in their sport as the four travelers emerged; they looked up, grinned, chattered, pointed, did handsprings and headstands. They did not seem awed. Did Pure Stream mean nothing to them? Had they no fear of Dark Lake? Crown, glowering, said to Sting, “Can you speak their language?”
“A few words.”