Sterling Lanier - Hiero's Journey

It took little urging to get Gorm and the morse away from the appalling sounds of the struggle. They galloped away through mud and slime, splashing recklessly through several shallow lagoons and over reeking patches of some evil-smelling herbage. Finally the uproar died away in the distance and Hiero commanded a halt. They now stood on a long, raised bar of packed, dried reeds, jammed together by some floor of a past year, and listened to the night.

The insect and frog chorus reverberated, but otherwise nothing else sounded or moved beneath the white moon, save for the cry of a startled heron which they disturbed. They could see quite a way in several directions, the principal obstacles to viewing now consisting of great reeds, whose clumps had been steadily increasing as they progressed. Some of the smooth stalks were two feet around, and the feathery tops towered up far over the soft up-thrust points of Klootz’s antlers. Between the reeds grew many huge mallows and stands of giant arrowweed, the triangular leaves of the latter dipping gently like fans in the gentle breeze. Lanes of still moonlit water stretched between the patches of mud and plant life, some opening into large ponds, others winding out of sight around distant corners. It was a scene of strange beauty, and even the ever-present smells of the dissolving marsh gases and rotting vegetation did not really detract from it, Hiero thought as he gazed.

With an effort, he recalled himself to the present. They were very lucky, in the headlong flight from the amphibian colossi, not to have blundered into some other and possibly worse peril. It was definitely time to pause and consider the next step. The Abbey maps were quite useless here, and Gorm was as alien to this strange country of mingled land and water as Hiero himself. What guides had they, then? They knew in which direction they wished to travel, south, and where it lay. They knew the Unclean were seemingly somewhere still on their tracks, coming from the opposite direction, the North they had left behind. The great swamp stretched before them unbroken to the horizon. The limits of its existence, both from the maps’ outlines and the brief glimpse the priest had caught through the eyes of the Unclean flyer, were shorter ahead of them than to either side. The marshes might stretch for hundreds of miles in the lateral directions but barely for fifty in front, southward, if his vision was any judge, the man reflected. There really wasn’t much choice. South and through the narrowest part of the swamp the path had to go. There were sure to be dangers, but, true to his training, Hiero had selected the route which promised the most for the least, in terms of rewards and perils.

Through the remainder of the night they slowly moved on south, wading through many shallow pools and avoiding equally many deep ones. It was necessary to swim on two occasions, broad channels which intersected their path and could not be circled. In the first one nothing occurred, but as they left the second, and the dripping morse hauled himself out on the mud bank, Hiero, looking back, saw the black water heave ominously, as if something large were moving off the bottom. He had been carrying his thrower across the saddle, ready for any action, but above all he dreaded an assault from below, in which all of them would be more or less helpless. The bear he had made swim just in front of Klootz’s nose, so that he could at least attempt to defend him if he were attacked.

As they now stood looking at one another, the priest could not help smiling ruefully. All three of them were soaked, and mud caked the legs of the four-foots. The clinging bog smell was vile, and there was no way of getting rid of it, not until they got out of the swamps, at any rate. One advantage the caked mud gave the animals was that it at least partially protected them from the incessant, droning attack of the mosquitoes. Slapping at himself, Hiero wondered if his protective ointment would last. He was used to bug bites, as any woodsman had to be, but the legions which rose from the Palood were something else again! To make matters worse, huge brown leeches had to be picked off the two animals at almost every stop, filthy things which haunted every pool of water.

The first day was spent huddled in a thicket of the towering green reeds. Determined not to be caught out in the open muck or water by one of the flying enemy during daylight, Hiero had hacked a careful way into the reeds which he thought unlikely to be seen from above. By the time the sun was fully up, they were well hidden in the heart of the reeds, but little more, if any, comfortable than if they had been in the open. It was a cloudless morning, and the August sun grew steadily hotter as the day advanced. The mosquitoes, shunning the light, were overjoyed to find helpless targets buried deep in the shade and attacked in new armies. Minute gnats and crawling bugs, mercifully absent during the hours of darkness, joined the onslaught and helped make them all miserable. As if that were not enough, the leeches, too, emerged from the water and, suckers waving, inched onto the three at every chance.

The man cut what he could spare from his own mosquito net and managed to rig crude muzzle screens for the two tortured beasts so that they could at least breathe in comfort without inhaling clouds of flying, stinging pests. Beyond plastering themselves with as much mud as possible, there was little else they could do. At least, Hiero thought, there was no water shortage. Where the pools were not churned up or too shallow, he had found the water to be perfectly clean and needing only to be strained once to remove insects and other vermin before being added to his canteens.

Food was another matter. There was some grouse, quite a lot of pemeekan, and even more of the biscuit left in the saddlebags, but he was aware that it really ought to be saved as much as possible. The morse would simply have to be allowed to feed before they started the night’s journey; there was certainly enough succulent vegetation growing in or near the water. But what could the poor bear do but eat the dwindling rations along with himself? Aha! Aha!

He fumbled quickly in the near saddlebag, momentarily forgetting the insects and the cloying heat. Sure enough, the fishing equipment was still in its case. Let’s see now, he thought, can I reach the water from here with a throw?

Carefully tying a shiny, weighted lure to the gut line, he threw it out into the channel which ran, brown and turbid, a few yards from the mouth of the tunnel he had carved for them in the roadbed.

On the third cast, a violent tug signified some luck; and soon a fat, striped fish, a perch of some unknown sort, he thought, weighing about three pounds, was flapping its tail on the packed mud bank. Before his luck ran out, he had caught two more of them. He gave one to Gorm, who fell upon it and seemed to find it excellent. The other two he cleaned and scaled, packing one away for later and eating one now himself. He had eaten raw fish many times before, and examination showed these not to be infested with worms, as was sometimes the case. Certainly lighting a fire would be the absolute height of folly, knowing that the heavens were no longer free of inimical eyes. He ate one of the dry biscuits with the fish and a small lump of pemeekan, since the fish contained no fat or oil. Then he curled up for a nap, doing his best to ignore the vermin, winged and legged, and to endure as stoically as his two allies.

At nightfall, having seen nothing of the winged watcher during the day, he told Klootz to go and eat; and soon the steady maceration of water plants added to the insect and frog drone. Some sorts of small birds appeared in quantity in the evening sky for the first time, and he could hear their many shrill calls as they hawked for insects over the marshland. He sourly felt that about eight million more of them would be needed to diminish the mosquito population in some degree. He shared two biscuits and the other fish with the small bear, who also had found and dug himself two whitish roots or tubers from the mud. Tasting one of them gingerly, Hiero felt the sting of some powerful acid and knew that he would be unable to supplement his own diet with this particular plant.