Gladiators Of Hapanu

Chapter 12

Blade's search for a way to give the Forest People new weapons started off well. In fact, it started off so well that as he said afterward, «I should have known something was going to go wrong.»

Swebon gathered all the equipment Blade expected to need, telling people that an exploring party was going out, searching for land for a new village. Such a party would need much more equipment than ordinary hunters or raiders. As far as Swebon could tell, this «cover story» went over quite well.

Blade couldn't use the patch of kohkol trees where the villagers normally drew their sap. It was visited at least twice a week, and there was always a priest with the tree-tappers. There would be too much danger of someone stumbling on Blade and his experiments.

So Blade and Meera would have to plunge deep into the Forest and seek out a kohkol grove two days' march from the village. Swebon was able to give Blade detailed directions for finding it, but few others in the village even knew of its existence.

«I send you into danger by sending you there,» said the chief. «The Treemen seldom come as close to the village as the first kohkol grove. At the second, you will be in the High Forest, where the Treemen have been strong since the Forest began. I would do otherwise if I could, but I think you have more need to fear the priests and Guno than the Treemen.»

Blade nodded. «Then we shall just have to make the new bows before the Treemen find us.» He didn't particularly look forward to such a race against time, but he agreed with Swebon. The Treemen might be savage fighters, but they couldn't make the village dangerous for him.

By the time Blade and Meera had all their gear loaded on their backs, Blade was carrying close to a hundred pounds and Meera about half as much. Yet they couldn't reduce the load by another ounce without leaving out something Blade was sure they'd need sooner or later. Swebon would have been glad to send a trusted warrior with them, but Blade refused.

«We don't know that anyone except the three of us can be trusted in this,» he said. «Besides, why drag anyone else into this and put them in danger?»

Swebon shook his head. «Blade, if you ever wish to be chief of the Fak'si-well, a man who thinks of danger to those who might follow him, who will face it himself instead — no one will easily stand against him.»

«I do not wish to be chief of the Fak'si,» said Blade. «Only the maker of new weapons for all the Forest People.»

They were standing just out of earshot of the farthest treehouses of the village. It was early morning, with dawn still only a hint of light beyond the treetops. Blade was leaning against a tree, while Meera sat cross-legged among the ferns. Both were carrying their full packs.

«May the Forest Spirit bring you to success,» said Swebon, patting Blade's head and then Meera's. «And may it bring you back to us.»

«May it keep you also, friend Swebon,» said Meera. Blade gripped his staff with one hand and with the other helped Meera to her feet. Then they were gone into the darkness under the trees and Swebon turned back toward the village.

It took Blade and Meera three days to cover the two day march to the second kohkol grove. With the loads they were carrying, even Blade was slowed down and only sheer determination kept Meera on her feet. Blade was also careful to avoid leaving a clear trail for anyone to follow, and that slowed them down even more.

Eventually they came to the grove, with kohkol trees rising in a solid wall a hundred feet high across their path. A stream of clear water flowed out of the grove, and there was plenty of fruit, edible roots, and small game. They could live well here, for as long as they needed or at least as long as they could before the Treemen found them.

Blade was determined they'd also live safely, even if the Treemen did stumble across them. He set to work with ax and digging tool, cutting seven-foot poles and driving them into the ground. He sharpened the ends, bound them together with vines, then tied more poles across the top. When he was finished, they had a shelter six feet high and eight feet across, large enough to hold them and their gear. It was also tough enough to keep out any Forest animal and delay even an angry Treeman long enough for Blade and Meera to wake up and grab their weapons.

They had plenty of weapons. Each of them had a bow and quiver of arrows and a spear. Meera's spear was the one Blade had taken as a trophy from the chief's house in the Yal village. Blade also had the biggest war club Swebon could find in Four Springs village, a monster three feet long with a head bound in iron. He and Meera would be a match for three or four Treemen even without any new weapons, and in small bands the Treemen usually didn't press attacks on difficult or dangerous prey. It would be another matter if twenty Treemen showed up all at once, but such huge bands were still fairly rare.

When the shelter was finished, Blade lost no time going to work on his experiments. He tapped two kohkol trees and filled four gourds with the sap. With Meera's help he built a fire, then hung their iron pot over it, filled the pot with sap, and left it to boil.

Blade had guessed right about the kohkol sap. Boiled long enough, it became a remarkably tough and strong adhesive. It would stick almost anything to almost anything else, including Blade's fingers to each other. He discovered this while trying to retrieve a spoon which had fallen into the pot. He had to cut away the kohkol glue with a knife before he could use his left hand again, and he took a few pieces of skin along with the glue. After that Blade was more careful about handling it.

Once he knew he could make any amount of glue any time he wanted it, he started looking for wood to make the bow. He wasn't entirely sure wood was all he'd need-the famous Mongol bows used sinew and horn as well. Wood was certainly the most common material in the Forest, though, and the Forest People knew at least a hundred different kinds. Among them should be at least a few which could be laminated into a powerful bow.

Blade spent several days cutting samples of every kind of wood he thought might be useful. Meera's help saved him much wasted time and effort. She knew which woods might be completely useless because they were too soft, too brittle, or too quick to decay. She knew which parts of many trees had the best wood. She was also handy with a knife and vine cords, trimming and bundling up branches as Blade cut them.

Blade never felt the slightest need to watch her or any fear of turning his back on her. To be sure, this was partly because they were deep in the High Forest and Meera's chances of survival would not be good if he were killed. More of it was because Meera knew what he was planning and thought it was a good idea.

She said so plainly when he asked her. She went on to say, «I do not know if I trust Swebon as much as you do. It will surely tempt him, when he has weapons that could make him ruler of the Forest. But he is a strong man, so perhaps it will not tempt him enough.

«Also, I do trust you, Blade. I trust you to let me go home to my own people if Swebon tricks us. If I go home to the Yal with our secrets, Swebon will not be able to do them any harm.»

It was surprising how Meera's mind and his seemed to run along the same paths when it came to the future of the Forest People. «I was planning on taking you home myself when we finished our work here and in Four Springs village.»

«Leaving me there?» she said, apparently surprised.

«Only long enough for the Yal to learn everything we can teach them,» Blade said. «I will not ask you to leave me, unless you want to.»

Meera shook her head. «I am happy with you. You are good to a woman, and that is good for a woman.» While Blade was trying to figure that one out, she put both hands on his chest and pushed him over backward. Then she climbed on top of him, pulled aside his loinguard, and there was no more talking for quite a while.

When the woodcutting was finished, Blade started slicing the wood into strips, while Meera trimmed and shaped the strips according to his instructions. She wasn't an expert carpenter, but again her willing help saved Blade many hours of work. He quickly discovered that once you started trying to laminate anything, the Forest was full of suitable woods for the job. In fact, Blade started by making his first two bows too strong.

These two were made of four layers of wood, glued together and then wrapped with glue-soaked leaves. They were incredibly ugly, more like clubs than bows, and impossibly stiff. Blade could hardly bend the first one, and in Home Dimension he'd easily handled a monstrous longbow with a hundred and twenty-pound pull.

Blade could bend the second bow, but it snapped every bowstring he tried to use on it. Obviously the second bow was nearly as useless as the first one. Fak'si bowstrings were made of dried animal sinew and were much tougher than their bows. A bow that was going to be too strong for such bowstrings was going to be too strong for the average Fak'si warrior to handle easily.

So much for brute force. Blade started systematic experiments with various combinations of woods in two, three, four, and even five layers. He worked from dawn to dark and would have worked into the night if he'd thought it was safe. Unfortunately, having a fire blazing in the darkness could only be an invitation to the Treemen. So Blade banked the fire each evening and retired to the shelter, where Meera would bathe him and massage the day's kinks out of his muscles.

Eventually Blade's experiments got down to five, then four, then three different kinds of wood. He discarded one more because Meera said it was fantastically rare. This left him with two. He discovered that if he used a length of one kind, reinforced on each side with thin layers of the other, he had a basically good bow. Further reinforced with a wrapping of leaves, it came out with about an eighty-pound pull. That was the same as a heavy Home Dimension hunting bow or a good longbow. It was more than twice as powerful as any bow Blade had handled in this Dimension.

After finishing the bow he tried it out on several different targets, and saw it sink arrows deep into all of them. At last the Forest People would have a weapon able to hit the vital organs of a Treeman from a safe distance. The armor of the Sons of Hapanu made them a more difficult target, but Blade was also optimistic there. An arrow from an eighty-pound bow would inflict painful wounds through everything but the heaviest mail. With arrows raining down on them, some of the Sons of Hapanu would surely die and many would be wounded. That would break up their disciplined formations, then the Forest People could safely close in to finish the job with spears, clubs, and point-blank archery.

The new bows were still going to be hideously ugly, and even Meera said so. She also said, «The Forest People are going to be too happy with the new bows to worry about how they look. The Treemen are not wise enough to tell when a thing is ugly or not. The Sons of Hapanu are going to be too busy dying from the arrows to worry about how the bows look. So who is there to care?»

Blade now wanted to try out his idea for turning the Shield of Life into a powerful tranquilizer. With luck, it wouldn't matter whether the new bows pierced armor or not. Even if they only scratched a Son of Hapanu in the leg, he would soon be slowed down-and a man slowed down in the middle of a battle doesn't last very long.

This meant moving to a new camp. The kohkol sap for the Shield of Life didn't have to be fresh, but the uglyfish juice had to be. So Blade and Meera were going to have to sit down on the bank of a river and go fishing.

Blade made five more bows, one for himself, one for Meera, one spare, and two as gifts to Swebon and Guno. Then he and Meera plucked a sack of fruit as food for the journey, packed up their gear, and set off for the Fak'si River.