"Not now. Not now. Now you explain where you've been to the Forest Lord, and you had better be convincing. You fools may have doomed us all." Eruka seemed more than taken aback by this; he seemed on the verge of tears. Apad, covered with dried blood, seemed hardly alive, and Perkar took one glance at the assorted colors of blood staining his own clothes.
"We should take off our armor, shouldn't we?" he said. "I mean…"
"It doesn't matter," Ngangata said. "Whatever you did— whatever you fools did—the Forest Lord already knows."
Atti gave Apad a push, to get him going down the slope toward the trail. "Hurry," he said.
"Don't push me!" Apad shrieked, suddenly coming alive. His new sword came out, danced in the sunlight. It seemed to Perkar that the sword was moving Apad's wrist, rather than the other way around. The tip flicked dangerously near Atti, whose hand went to his own blade.
"Apad!" Perkar bellowed. Then more softly, "Apad. Put that away. You don't want to kill anyone else."
Apad's eyes seemed mad, but as they focused on Perkar, they softened. A bit of puzzlement replaced the wildness there.
"Perkar? Tell them not to push me. I can't stand it."
"No one will push you, Apad. Put that sword away. It looks like it wants to kill something." He noticed, startled, that the sword had blood on it. He must have handed Apad the selfsame blade he had killed the woman with. He didn't remember doing that. In fact, he thought he remembered a different weapon, straight-bladed rather than curved. Apad had always held that curved swords were "just for butchering" while straight ones were for warriors. It seemed that he was right. Nevertheless, slowly, reluctantly, Apad put the blade away.
"Those are godswords you have," Ngangata declared, astonishment as plain as the chagrin. "Gods of heaven and mountain, what have you done?"
"Nothing good, I think." Perkar sighed.
The trip back down into the lower valley was nearly silent. Perkar wanted desperately to stop and rest, if only for a moment. They had plainly been underneath the mountain for a full day and a night. He had hardly slept the previous night. The pain in his shoulder seemed worse, and his legs were beginning to wobble beneath him. So numb did all of this make him that, try as he might, he could not conjure up any image of the coming confrontation, had no idea what he would tell the Forest Lord. When at last they came before him, it was all he could do to stay on his feet.
The Kapaka, seated on a stone, rose as the party approached. He was ashen, his face paler than his beard. Perkar almost thought he swayed when he saw them in their armor, with all the bloodstains. He closed his eyes for a long moment.
The Forest Lord loomed larger than before; he seemed, somehow, to have become a part of the enormous tree, his huge bearlike body merging imperceptibly into bark and wood. His eye, now a wide black orb, seemed as sightless as they had been in the underneath. Perkar was vividly reminded of the Wild God. So low was Balati's voice that he almost didn't understand it.
"So you see," Balati told the Kapaka, "you have lied to me. I smell the blood of a mortal woman on them. They have slain her and stolen from my treasure."
The Kapaka bowed his head. When he finally spoke, it was with a semblance of conviction, but Perkar sensed the despair behind the seeming. "Lord, these men are young. They act fool-ishly. We will return your things and make restitution for the woman."
Balati may have considered that and he may not have; his head turned from side to side with glacial slowness.
"I will give no more land to Human Beings," he said finally. "And you must leave now, before I lose patience. That is the best I can do for you. No more words from you. Take your steel out of my realm. Take the things you have stained; I care nothing for them."
Apad was suddenly in motion, sword whipping out, a mad, inarticulate shriek on his lips. What then happened Perkar had to sort out later. He remembered Ngangata seeming just to appear in Apad's path, the godsword cutting bright ribbons of light around him. Then Apad was lying on the ground, spitting blood from his mouth. Ngangata bent and carefully took the sword from where it had fallen. He seemed unscathed.
"I think I'll keep this for the moment," he said.
The Forest Lord, apparently unimpressed by any of this, turned and moved off into the forest. His bulk seemed to shiver, to break apart like a pile of leaves blown about by the wind. Each shard became a crow, a cloud of them, and they rose into the sky like a whirlwind of ashes.
Perkar flinched away from the Kapaka's gaze. The old man sat back down on his stone, lips pressed tight.
"He had agreed to give us three more valleys, boys. Three more." He closed his eyes again, put a hand to his temple.
"Kapaka," Ngangata said. "Kapaka, we had best go now."
Perkar could see the Alwat. They all looked agitated, kept glancing around themselves nervously.
"Now," the half man said.
Atti touched Ngangata's shoulder. "Couldn't we wait a moment? Until the king recovers his strength?"
Ngangata shook his head. "We are already too late, I think. The Huntress and the Raven will waken by morning if not sooner. If we are not far, far away by then, we will certainly die."
"But…" Eruka began, trailed off.
"He told us to leave," Perkar finished for him.
"Yes. But I know these gods, and I know the Forest Lord. He is never of one mind. The Huntress and the Raven will want blood for this, and they will want to hunt. Thus we should go, now, be the best prey we can be. If we are very clever and very fast we may reach someplace beyond their power before they catch us."
The Kapaka looked up at that, his eyes watery and tired. "Then we die. No place is beyond their reach, I think."
Ngangata shook his head. "No," he stated. "There is one."
Perkar patted Mang's neck sympathetically. The horse's flank heaved with exhaustion and his normally beautiful coat was foamy with sweat.
"The horses can't take much more of this," he complained.
"They have to," Ngangata called back to him.
The worst part of it was, despite the valiant exertion of the animals, they seemed to be making little progress. The hill country had no trails, and the ridges ran in the wrong direction. They spent all of their time climbing up and running down hills, picking their way around fierce thickets of brambles. Mang's coat was crisscrossed with bleeding scratches, and none of the other horses was faring any better. Miraculously the Alwat, on foot, somehow managed to keep pace with them, though the eldest rode up behind Ngangata. Perkar tried to offer Digger a ride as well, but she seemed afraid to approach Mang closely, and, after all, she might not have really understood his offer. Unaccustomed as he was to reading Alwat expressions, it seemed to him that they understood their plight better than he; even the normally frolicsome Digger seemed grim, pushing through thorns and clambering over rocky ground with little regard for the countless wounds on her body.
"Why must the Alwat flee?" Perkar asked. "Surely Balati knows they had no part in our folly."
"No. Are you deaf? I told you how the Forest Lord thinks. We were all with the Kapaka; he thinks of us all as the Kapaka. Whatever crime one of us commits, he sees that as the fault of all of us, even the Alwat. I told you this, and still you went ahead with your insane scheme."
"I didn't understand," Perkar said.
"Well, you will," Ngangata said. "And let's leave this off. We have no time to fight amongst ourselves."
"What if we split up, went our own ways? Mightn't they hunt only those of us who are actually guilty then?"