The Forests Of Gleor

Chapter 14

The jungle awoke the next morning in a hideous uproar of bird cries, animal howls, the squalling and squealing of apes, the clak and drone of insects. The uproar jerked Blade up out of sleep like an alarm signal. Neena awoke more slowly, sat up and listened without even opening her eyes, then lay back down and drifted off to sleep again. Either her trained ears hadn't caught anything in all the uproar that might mean danger, or she was too exhausted to care.

Blade let her sleep and listened more carefully himself. After a while he could pick out fifty or sixty distinct sounds from the jungle around him. None of them sounded at all human, or like the chittering of a stolof on the hunt.

Blade decided that Neena had the best idea, and lay down again. Here they had a good hiding place, and their night's run must have given them a good many miles' head start on any possible pursuit. If they spent the day here, they could be out again after dark, rested, refreshed, and far better prepared to face anything they might meet. Blade stretched out, closed his ears to the jungle sounds, and drifted off to sleep.

He awoke with the sun well down in the sky and the light creeping through the bushes already turning red. Neena was wide awake, combing leaves and debris out of her hair.

They ate sour greenish white berries from a trailing vine and drank at a small stream nearby. Neena took bearings on the setting sun. Then they went back under the bush and waited until darkness settled down over the forest.

«The stolofs can see and sense equally well by day or by night,» she said. «The same is not true of their masters. Those of Trawn fear the forests by night. In a way, they are wise to do so. At night the forests of Gleor can be deadly to one who knows them not. I, on the other hand-«

«-have been at home in them since you were three years old?» Blade finished the sentence for her.

Neena laughed. «No, I was not allowed into the forest until I was nine. I have still spent ten years learning its ways. That is ten years more than most of the warriors of Trawn. Against ill luck there is no defense. Otherwise I think we shall come safely to my last camp, and then to the lands of Draad.»

«Why your camp? Why not go straight home?»

«Blade, perhaps you wish to show how strong you are by roaming the forests of Gleor naked and practically unarmed. I have no such desire. In that camp I left spears, bows, clothing and boots, bottles for water, even some dried meat. There is also Kubona.» Her face turned hard. «I cannot give her vengeance now, although she shall have it sooner or later. I can give her bones proper burial, and her spirit the prayers to speed its passing.»

They left their hiding place as soon as it was fully dark. Neena led the way for a few hundred yards through a nightmarish tangle of vines and underbrush, to thoroughly confuse their trail. Then she swung west, onto a well-beaten animal trail, and once on the trail settled down to a steady trot.

They kept going all night, with only one short stop for rest and water and one short detour around a small hunters' camp. Shortly before dawn they drank again from a muddy pool and ate the meat of several fallen koba nuts. Then they scrambled forty feet up a spreading tree, found a perch screened by its long trailing leaves, and went to sleep.

For three more days and three more nights this pattern repeated itself. Once they found a pool large enough for them to bathe. Blade pulled a foot-long fish out of that pool, but Neena took one look at it and threw it back.

«A ti-ter fish,» said Neena briefly. «Our hunters use the fluid from its liver and bladder to poison their arrows.»

Another time they had to spend an hour of darkness perched high in a tree. At the foot of the tree a seventy-foot snake was curling up to sleep off a meal. When the snake hadn't moved for an hour, Blade and Neena crept down the tree and slipped silently away into the darkness.

Blade got a good look at the snake as they slipped past it. Its mouth was six feet wide, large enough to swallow a stolof or two or three men at one gulp.

On the fourth morning they did not seek out a hiding place for the day. Instead Neena took another set of bearings on the sun, then led the way off to the north.

«I think we shall be reaching the camp today,» she said. «It will be easier to find it by day than by night, even for me.»

«What about our friends from Trawn?»

«There is not much danger from them any more, I think. We are beyond where the hunters usually go. Anyone who has been chasing us from the city itself is certainly at least a day's march behind us.»

Neena followed as straight a course as the jungle would let her until just before noon. Then she stopped and began casting back and forth like a hunting dog, looking for the marks she'd left to show the way back to the camp. As she did that, Blade kept his eyes roaming back and forth, scanning the jungle around them. Neena's contempt for the soldiers and hunters of Trawn made her willing to assume that they were all many miles away. Blade, stubbornly cautious, refused to share that assumption.

The day moved on toward noon. Neena led the way deeper and deeper into a particularly grim and gloomy stand of trees. Here there was nothing but centuries-old forest giants, their high canopies so thick that the forest floor underneath was perpetually dark and almost lifeless. The heat had a deadly, airless quality to it. Blade began to feel as though he was back in the ash pit under the Hearth of Tiga, slaving away in the stifling darkness.

Blade soon lost track of time. He was beginning to lose track of distance when suddenly Neena gave a sharp, wordless cry, almost a squeal. For a moment Blade wondered if she'd been bitten by a snake. She stiffened, then seemed about to dash wildly forward. He caught her arm. She let out her breath in a long sigh, then raised her other arm and pointed. Blade followed her gesture with his eyes and saw a huge hollow tree, gray and moss grown, split open on one side.

They had reached Neena's camp. Another part of their escape lay behind them. Only one more part lay ahead of them, and that should be the easiest one of all.

Blade and Neena stood side by side for another moment. Then they both broke into a run toward the hollow tree.

The weapons and gear lay well inside the dark hollow, further concealed under piles of leaves and vines.

«Kubona and I didn't want anyone from Trawn stumbling on them, of course,» she said. «We also didn't want any of our own hunters from Draad finding them. I wasn't supposed to be this far out into the forest on my own.»

Blade said nothing, and tried to keep his face straight. Apparently he wasn't entirely successful. Neena looked at him, then sighed.

«All right,» she said. «There's no need to look at me that way. I know what you're thinking, and what you'd like to say. You're right, I'll admit it, so you can keep quiet. I'll have enough to listen to from my father when we get home.»

«No doubt,» said Blade, in a carefully neutral voice.

Neena shrugged. «I suppose I deserve at least some of it. Certainly it was my fault that Kubona was killed. But I suspect my father will be so happy that I'm home safe that he won't say too much. Queen Sanaya, on the other hand-«

«Your mother?»

«My-no, let's just call her my father's chosen wife.» The chill in Neena's voice was unmistakable.

«Not much love lost between you and Sanaya, I gather?»

«Not enough for her to really regret my being carried off and enslaved in Trawn. She-«Neena hesitated, as if uncertain how much she should say, then went on quickly. «She is only three years older than I. My father married her two years ago, in the hope of getting from her more children, sons above all.»

«You are King Embor's only heir?»

«There is my sister Jana. But she is only eleven, and my father does not care much for her. My mother died bearing her.»

«Is there a law against women ruling in Draad?»

«There is no law, but it has not happened for two centuries. There are many of the warriors and clan chiefs who would be happier under the rule of a man. They say that a man will be a better leader in war against Trawn.»

Blade frowned. «They are not thinking very clearly.»

Neena spat on the forest floor and slammed her fist against the bark of the tree. «They are damned fools! Trawn will move against us much sooner than they think. If Sanaya were to conceive tonight, we would have war before her son was able to walk. Even if he has time to grow to the age of a warrior, he will only die with the rest of us if he can do nothing about the stolofs.»

She sighed. «Ah, well, Sanaya will bear that son sooner or later. She comes from a line where the women are always fertile. Then perhaps she will have less time to intrigue with her friends or worry about me.»

There was everything Neena had promised in the camp, although the dried meat had developed worms. Blade was almost hungry enough to cut off the worm-infested portions and eat the rest, but not quite. Not when they would have fresh roast meat in a few more hours.

Neena's first concern, however, was final rites for Kubona, putting her body or at least her spirit to rest. «Those swine of Desgo's just left her lying like a piece of meat when they'd finished with her,» Neena said. There was a note of killing rage in her voice, so that even Blade felt uncomfortable for a moment. «The gods alone know what may have been by there since our fight. Well, we shall do our best.»

The place of the fight and Kubona's death lay another two miles away, on the far side of the thick stand of trees. Neena led the way swiftly through the shadows, and they reached the river bank by midafternoon.

The skeletons of two of the soldiers from Desgo's band still lay bleaching in grass now grown a foot high around them. Neena and Blade searched carefully, hoping to turn up Kubona's more delicate bones somewhere. They found nothing that could have been her. Even her clothing and weapons had vanished.

«Perhaps a party from Draad found her and took her back for burial,» said Blade.

Neena shrugged. «Perhaps. The odds are long against it. The hunters of Draad come forth more often and travel farther than those of Trawn. But the forests of Gleor are large, so it is still hard for them to find what they are not seeking.

«No, I think the beasts have given Kubona a forest burial. That is all she can hope to have, and we cannot hope to change what the gods have sent her.» Neena sat on the grass, cross-legged, her chin in her hands and her eyes cast down on the ground.

After a moment she smiled and stood up. «Perhaps it has been for the best after all. Kubona was a huntress and the daughter of many hunters. Her soul belonged to the open air and the great forests. Now her body does also. Perhaps the gods knew what they were doing.» She turned toward the patch of grass where Kubona had died. «Here we are, my comrade. Here we are, alive, to wish you peace now and avenge you when the chance comes.»

Neena was speaking so intensely that Blade had the uncomfortable feeling she was speaking to a real presence-or at least to a presence that was real to her. He did not believe in ghosts, or that anything in this sunlit clearing could do him and Neena any harm. Rather, he felt that he was an unwanted intruder on a farewell that ought to have been private.

Before Blade could move, Neena rose and turned to him. Her arms were still raised, but now they reached out toward him, beckoning him to come closer. As though pulled by invisible strings, Blade did so.

He came within Neena's reach, and her arms went around him. Her body swayed forward and pressed hard against his. She had embraced him and he had embraced her before, many times. It had always been an embrace that a sister might have given a brother, or a brother a sister. This time it was different. Weeks of captivity, weeks of endurance, the tension and violence of their escape, their trek through the forests of Gleor-bit by bit, all these things had forged a bond between Blade and Neena. Now they had the time, the place, and the strength to complete that bond.

Neena's hands crept down and around, to stroke the inside of Blade's thighs. His own hands slipped to the front of her tunic and began undoing the lacing. The leather opened; his fingers crept inside and slid around the superb curves of her small neat breasts, over her suddenly firm nipples. Neena's lips quivered, drifted open, pressed warmly and wetly against Blade's.

Blade finished undoing the lacing of her tunic and pulled it from her body. Now she was bare to the waist. He bent down, his lips joining his hands in roaming up and down her body, over throat, shoulders, breasts, the smooth, flat stomach. He kissed each nipple, felt them harden still further against his searching lips, heard Neena moan softly, deep in her throat.

He would have started on the lacing of her trousers then, but her hands got there first. She pushed her trousers down her long slim legs. They wadded and tangled around her ankles and caught on her boots. She pushed and shoved and heaved at them, half cursing, half laughing in frustration and passion and impatience all mixed together. Finally she threw herself on her back, arms spread wide, hair fanning out on the grass. She could raise her legs, but she could not spread them. They were locked together at the ankles by her tangled trousers as effectively as they had been by Lord Desgo's hobbling cords. She kicked furiously, tried to sit up, then fell over backward and lay there choking and gasping with laughter until she was too weak to even raise her head.

Blade stripped off his own loincloth and stood naked in the sunlight, staring down at Neena. Her eyes widened as she took in the whole magnificent maleness of his powerful body. He knelt, jerked off her boots with two swift motions that made her gasp, then slid her trousers off and threw them aside. Now her legs could slide apart in a single fluid motion.

In another equally fluid motion Blade was balancing himself on his arms above her. Neena's lips moved in wordless demands that he enter her, that they join. He held himself above her for another moment, until her hands reached up and grabbed his hair and beard. She jerked his head downward so hard that for another moment sharp pain almost drove away his desire.

Easily Blade lowered himself, gently but firmly he entered Neena. Her eyes widened until Blade could see the whites, then flickered shut. Her mouth opened in another, very different sort of gasp, then hungrily sought his again.

She was silent for a little while after that, but her body spoke more than loud enough. Her lips devoured his, her arms went around him and her nails raked up and down his back, her legs clamped tightly around him. She gripped him tightly in every way she could manage, by everything she could reach or touch or take into herself. She seemed to be afraid that if she loosened any part of her grip for a single moment, Blade would float away and their joining would be incomplete.

Blade wasn't going anywhere. He would have gripped Neena as tightly as she was gripping him if he hadn't been afraid of what his own strength might do to her. He seldom felt a woman throwing herself into the act of love as Neena was doing. He seldom felt as completely drawn into it himself. All his awareness and every breath he took were centered on the woman he held and who held him.

He felt her beginning to twist back and forth under him as he rose and fell inside her. He felt blood joining the sweat where her nails clawed at his back. He heard her gasp, then sob out loud, then begin a low, continuous moaning. The moan grew steadily louder. As it rose, so did Blade's own passion. He was gasping now, trying desperately to hold on, hold back, carry through to the end.

Neena's moan turned into a shriek that echoed around the clearing, sending birds and animals squawking and whirring and crashing away in all directions. She arched upward against Blade as he pressed down into her, clawed, bit, sobbed, gasped, tossed her head from side to side so that her hair fell like a blanket over both of them.

Before Neena's climax could pass, Blade reached his. He did not shout, because all the breath seemed to go out of his body in a great sigh along with his hot jetting into Neena. He clamped his arms around her, and for a moment he held back none of his strength. She did not protest, she did not care, she hardly seemed to notice. In that moment he could have crushed half her bones to powder and it would have been several minutes before she noticed what had happened.

Those several minutes passed, as they lay locked and tangled together in the flattened grass, sweat trickling off them and the sun beating down on them. Eventually their breathing slowed until they could hear the world around them, and their vision cleared until they could see it. It was more minutes before either of them could move or speak. Then they sat up, brushed themselves off, and looked at each other.

Blade noticed that barely ten feet off to one side of them was where Kubona's body had lain. Twenty feet to the other side lay the skeleton of one of Desgo's soldiers. Neena saw where he was looking, and laughed.

«No, Blade, I doubt we need fear that their spirits will have anything to say about what we have done here. Kubona-well, she was no more a blushing virgin than I. If she watched us, she will go happily and in peace, seeing our happiness.»

«And the soldiers' spirits?»

«If they were still around to watch-well, they have seen us alive and happy. They will go off to torment, knowing that they died in vain, that we returned here together, to love in the very place where they died. I doubt if we could have found a better way of adding to their torments.»

Blade laughed at Neena's ferocity. Then he said, more seriously, «I think we would do well to get our clothes on and get back to camp.»

«You would rather hide in the darkness than lie in the sun?»

«I would rather spend the rest of the day where no one can see us. There may be only the spirits of Trawn's soldiers left in these woods. I would rather not find out otherwise when a spear drives through your guts.»

Neena sighed, then nodded. Together they rose and pulled on their clothes. Then hand in hand they slipped back into the forest.