In Forest Afloat Upon the Sea

Six

“Rockets!”

Ivan and Eppie shouted together, but Telly knew before they yelled what had happened. The canoe had fired on them. He’d seen a sudden puff of orange flame torn away from one canoe by the wind, and a long thin cloud of white smoke begin to unreel in the narrowing gap between the Prospero and the war canoes.

The single-masted Prospero was large enough for six—Horatio Cady from the council as official representative of Schenker Float, Telly as pilot and navigator, Eppie Borges to run the heliograph, with Ivan Hayes and two others to fill out the crew.

It had taken more than two hours with a thick, sluggish wind behind them to reach the midpoint between the two floats. And when they did, they found they were not alone on the seas. A fleet of ten canoes filled with hard-stroking oarsmen cut through the waves.

And as they approached, two of the canoes had broken away from the main group and headed their way.

Telly had put the long glass to his eye and studied them carefully. Only a few thousand yards of metal-gray water lay between them. Through the glass, he could see the faces of individual rowers, though their expressions told them little.

Then he scanned across the length of one of the canoes in the center of the formation. Seated at its rear, rising above the others, was a man decked out in armor.

He wore a leather-and-wood-plate helmet that reminded Telly of Duncan Blake’s Trojan headgear—only this one had a brush of a good foot long, painted bright orange, that gave the man the look of a giant. Straps and checkplates hung loose on either side of the helmet, revealing a face covered with a beard that was almost the same color as the brush.

More lacquered wood plates covered his breast and shoulders, and Telly could see a long spear grasped in one hand. The man was not rowing, but shouting commands.

A chill had run up Telly’s spine. Who were these people? He couldn’t imagine why they wished the people of Schenker Float ill.

The two canoes coming their way were full of men—twenty or more each. They were barely three thousand yards away when they fired the rocket.

Everyone on the sailboat had seen them by now, alerted by the warning shout.

Telly kept a white-knuckle grip on the tiller, not sure which direction to turn. Cady was no help, but sat amidships in a slack-jawed wonder at the approaching canoes.

He put the tiller over hard and the Prospero swung to one side, the mast tilting towards the sea.

The rocket seemed to hang in the air, growing steadily larger, but wavering not a bit from its course—which was straight towards them. Telly steadied up on a bearing that took them at right angles to the rocket’s course. He held his breath, trying to coax the wind to blow harder, the seas to part, and the small craft to hurry on its way.

At the last minute, everyone aboard the boat turned their heads at once when the rocket soared past their stern harmlessly.

Telly barely had time to breathe a sigh of relief when he heard Ivan shout. “Here comes another one!”

This one seemed to be leading them slightly, and Telly turned again to avoid it. As he came about, a third missile was fired in their direction.

He felt a moment of panic, then shoved the tiller over in the opposite direction. The bow spun around until it was facing straight at the two canoes. The nearer rocket was almost upon them to port, while the other approached to starboard.

Each of them passed close by the Prospero and continued on to the empty sea behind it.

The canoes were due south of them now and less than a mile distant. The main body had continued on to the west and were now between the sailboat and Schenker Float.

Telly looked about, trying to decide what to do next. Not far to the north, a mile or two away, was a full-size pontoon more than a thousand meters wide and covered with low vegetation. He made his decision quickly and set course for its shelter.

With the wind off the port bow and picking up, the Prospero surged ahead. Ivan and his mates trimmed the sails, and they accelerated, the boat leaning into the long swells as if it were enjoying itself.

Two more rockets came their way, but Telly had set an oblique course that must have been hard to plot for the crews of the canoes. Both of them fell short of their target, and the canoes fell quickly behind.

A few minutes later, they rounded the far side of the pontoon, putting it between them and the canoes.

“We’ve got to warn them back home,” Cady said.

“What about it, Eppie?” Telly asked.

She looked up at the sky. “You don’t have to ask me, Telly. You can see for yourself.” The clouds were still there, bearing down on them from above like a shroud. There was no light bright enough to give the heliograph any use but making noise.

“Then we’ve got to get back,” Cady said. “Turn the boat around.”

“I certainly will, sir,” Telly said. “But the wind is against us. I’m going to have to tack upwind to get to Schenker, and that’ll take us longer than the canoes. I’m afraid there’s little we can do.”

Cady sputtered, and Eppie sighed. Ivan shook his head and looked as though he felt every bit as powerless as Telly did.

By the time they had circumnavigated the pontoon and set a course on a southerly tack, their two pursuers had headed back for the main body. According to Telly’s calculations on the plot board, it would take them more than two hours to return to Schenker—if the wind held.

It did not. And long before they made their way home, plumes of thick white smoke began to rise from the float.

Since the moment Telly had returned to Schenker Float, all that was once familiar had been transformed into some grim nightmare from another world. Fire had swept the woods and rationals, the invaders had looted the storehouses, and the dead littered the ground.

A part of Telly’s brain recognized the turnings and landmarks of the path, but the recognition only served to disorient him further. How could any of this be real? How could any of it be happening? It was like some scene from Homer or Blake’s war stories transformed into real blood and fire.

He felt his heart drop into the cold sea beneath the roots of the world. There would be no recovering from some of the destruction the invaders had caused, he realized icily. Those who were dead were lost forever.

They passed through another ruined rational, where a storehouse had been torn open and its contents spilled across the yard—charcoal, sugar, dried meat, salted fish.

When they reached the edge of the village, Telly could hear the sound of men shouting commands, women screaming in horror, and dogs baying and howling, all set against the distant roar and crackle of burning wood.

Telly was drawn by the sound of the dogs.

He knew that they would be in the thick of the fight, reckless in their willingness to risk all in protection of their masters. Everything in his world had been transformed that way—from the elements of peace and oppressive harmony into the tools and setting of momentous battle.

The rationals of his village were like squares on a chessboard. The men and women and boys and girls he’d grown up with were reduced to pieces—some struggling bravely, others removed from the game. Every structure was a potential hiding place for the enemy. And every piece of wood, every bit of manufactured metal or plastic, had been transformed into a potential weapon.

He and Ivan drew closer now to the lines, becoming more cautious with every step.

Ivan looked dazed, in shock, and not just from the exertion of running across two miles of float. His arms and legs and face were striped with cuts and stained with bruises from crossing the young pontoon where they had clambered ashore from the Prospero. Telly looked down at himself and saw that he presented an equally damaged appearance.

The trees were thickest here beyond the limits of the village. The great boles of the steelwood crowded around them, and their thick canopies conspired to block out the light from above. Through the narrow gaps. Telly could see the daylight on the far side of the wood towards the workshops. He could even see figures moving here and there in the distance.

The shadows that clung to the forest floor made his nerves sing with tension. Who knew what lay here, waiting for them to make one misstep, one mistake.

The snap of a branch underfoot to his right sent waves of crackling energy up Telly’s back. He cried out—a formless, animal sound.

But the shadow that emerged from the dark was not an enemy. It was Duncan Blake.

The navigator put a finger to his lips, then motioned for Telly and Ivan to follow him. To Telly’s surprise, Blake was not alone, but was accompanied by two dozen men, all armed with long spears.

“We’ve maneuvered around behind them,” Blake said. “If we do this right, we can upset their assault and break their momentum.”

Telly nodded, but did not really understand. He only knew that Blake was the one bit of safety and security left in the madness that Schenker Float had become. He padded along with the rest of the platoon, wordlessly watching the action unfold.

They paused when they reached the edge of the wood. There, across a few dozen meters of open space, was the enemy line. There must have been a hundred or more of them—all backs and butts and armor and helmets.

They faced the workshops, pressing forward against strengthening opposition. As he watched, Telly saw a knot of men run screaming from the edge of the shops, flames clinging to their bodies. He noted absentmindedly that they were in the area of the plastic shops, where inflammable materials were in abundance.

Then a figure rushed out of the mass of invaders and began howling. It was the red-haired devil with his high-brushed helmet who Telly had seen in the canoe earlier that day. He carried a metal sword, blackened with char and blood, which he waved in great circles over his head. He paused to whack against his troops with the flat side of the iron and howl at them in words too distorted by rage and distance for Telly to understand.

“There he is,” Ivan said in a low voice. “He’s their captain.”

“I suspect you’re right,” Blake whispered. “He looks like Hektor before the walls of Troy. Well, Hektor, time to meet your Achilles.”

Blake whistled softly, then signaled to the rest of the war party. He pointed to the red-haired commander, and the men nodded in response.

Telly was ready too, but he realized that he had no weapon. He held his empty hands out to Blake. The navigator smiled and handed Telly a knife.

“Try not to think of Homer,” he said. “The Iliad is such a slaughterhouse. Remember Henry the Fifth. ‘Imitate the actions of the tiger, stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, disguise fair nature with hard-favored rage.’ ”

He made a smile that looked unnatural on his smoke-smeared face and clapped Telly on the back.

Blake whistled again, and suddenly the party erupted from the forest, whooping and screaming and howling. They ran headlong into the rear of the enemy line, aiming straight toward the red-haired leader. Telly fell behind as they rushed on, exhausted by the afternoon’s long struggle. Ivan looked back and halted, waiting for him to catch up.

By the time he drew alongside his mate, the main party had reached their target. Their spears were long enough to hold off the enemy warriors, and their speed was enough to overcome the commander.

Warclubs swung, but failed to connect with their targets. Spears flew, jabbed, drew blood, and struck again. Men shouted in pain and fear and anger.

And in the center of it all, Telly saw Duncan Blake, his aging face gripped with a fierce rage, wrestling with Big Red, the enemy commander. Red’s sword was lost now, torn from his grip by the force of the fight. His men tried to rescue him, but the rest of the Schenker war party kept them at bay.

“Come on!” Ivan called. “Get in there!” Telly put on a final burst of speed and joined the fray.

Red’s armor had blocked Blake’s best blows, and Telly realized with a momentary panic that the men were too close together for Blake’s spear to be of any use. If only he’d kept his knife instead of giving it to Telly…

Ivan launched himself at the wrestling leaders, knocking them both to the ground. Telly flew after, drawing Blake’s knife and clutching it in his hand.

The three of them tumbled across the ground—Ivan, Blake, and Red. Suddenly Red broke free. He struck at Ivan with a clenched fist, and Ivan dropped his warclub. They struggled over the club—Big Red fighting with what looked like inhuman strength.

Blake rolled away, stunned and out of breath. Telly felt cold fear run through his veins. He was only an arm’s length away from the melee now, but uncertain of what to do.

Red swung his arm back, the war-club in his hand, preparing to strike a blow against Ivan. Telly saw a gap where the man’s armor had come loose at his side, revealing pale white flesh.

The club began its forward stroke. Telly didn’t even think. He plunged the knife into Red’s side and held it tight against the man’s ribs.

Red groaned and his arm fell, the warclub dropping to the ground. He turned abruptly, twisting the knife from Telly’s grasp. But not before it tore a deeper wound in his side, the blood flowing freely.

He spun around dizzily, then collapsed on the ground.

“You think you have killed me,” he said, staring up at Telly. “But you have not. It was fatal destiny that claimed me.”

Telly looked around at Ivan and Blake and the Schenker war party. Then beyond them at the invading warriors, who now were turning their attention to the bloodshed in their rear.

A mighty roar of shouting voices rose from the workshops, as the defenders there suddenly burst forth from their makeshift fortifications. Telly could sense the sea change as the battle turned against the enemy. They fell back, shattered, disintegrating, demoralized by the loss of their commander.

The ranks of both sides swept past Telly and the bloody tableau on the ground, leaving him to collapse in nervous exhaustion, first falling to his knees, then to all fours, as Blake’s war party circled around them for defense.

The defeat of the invaders was surprisingly swift and complete.

Once they had lost their leader and begun to retreat, they were broken. The larger numbers of the men from Schenker Float, angry and efficient warriors themselves once mobilized and armed, swamped the disorganized enemy. They captured the war canoes and slaughtered those who continued to resist.

In the end, about two dozen survivors surrendered, huddling together on the shore of Landfall Bay, surrounded by ten times their number, their backs to the water and their wounds running with blood.

For the next few hours, Telly was occupied by the grisly task of caring for the wounded and dead of Schenker Float. It was hard work both physically and emotionally.

The war parties quickly switched functions to search parties. They trudged through forest and fern looking for survivors of the attack who had sought shelter far from the rationals and workshops.

The unconscious ones were easiest to deal with, once Telly learned to handle the initial shock of discovery. Litter bearers were assigned to carry them to the makeshift hospital set up in the center of Workshop Village.

The ambulatory wounded were harder to take care of. Many were in shock, oblivious to their injuries. Some babbled on about what had happened to them, or to their loved ones. Telly didn’t want to talk and couldn’t even if he wanted to. He watched as older men applied first aid, lending what little help he could when asked.

Eventually his turn came to carry a litter, and he was relieved at the chance to escape the scene of so much destruction. The relief was short-lived.

“Telly! Telly McMahon!”

Pastor Kline called to him as he entered the village center. The pastor hurried to his side and took hold of the litter in his hand.

Telly was too numb to ask Kline what he wanted and too tired to wonder. But when they reached the hospital and set down their load, the pastor put a hand on Telly’s shoulder.

“I’m sorry, my son, but I have bad news,” he said.

Telly blinked and waited. His body ached and his tongue felt like a block of wood. “Yes?” he said, twisting the word out of his mouth.

“Your mother and father are dead,” Kline said. “Along with your Aunt Cassie and her husband. The fighting went straight through your rational. The children are all right, but everyone else was hurt—or worse.”

A man behind the pastor spoke up. Telly thought he looked familiar, but he couldn’t recognize him through the smoke and grime that covered his face. “I saw the whole thing,” he said. “Your folks fought hard, but there was just too many of them. They got your dogs too.”

That was all it took to break through the heavy void that separated Telly from the suffering around him. The image of the poor helpless dogs lying dead on the ground somewhere, was too much.

He didn’t feel the sobs that wracked his chest, nor the tears that ran down his face. He didn’t feel much of anything for a long, long time.