Barrington Bayley - The Forest of Peldain

Vorduthe too sat up. “Then it is as Korbar predicted! Except that it was not planned by Octrago…”

“Since then the King has been busy training more warriors and gathering his forces. The rebels have taken some smaller islands and it is known they are assembling a seaborne army of their own. There will be a big sea battle soon. Then, I expect, all will be restored as before….”

Suddenly she jumped up and peered toward the horizon, shading her eyes. “Look! Sails!”

Vorduthe followed her example. He could just see a line of sails which quickly passed out of sight. It was, without doubt, a war fleet.

“We must get back to Arelia quickly,” he burst out. “I am needed!”

Her laughter was tinkling, amused, and slightly sorrowful. She turned her eyes to him. “We can do nothing to help, husband. Have you forgotten? We are here, but not here. Elsewhere I lie on my bed, with servants around. As for you, in truth I do not know where you are. Yet somehow I feel that I do not dream all this alone. I feel that you are alive, and with me. Am I right?”

“You are right,” he told her. “I am with you. At the same time I am in Peldain, on the other side of the forest.”

They sat down again. Haltingly, he told her the story of what had happened since the day his army rolled its engines and wagons into the predatory forest. She listened intently, fascinated, and was silent after he had finished.

“Now I must suffer the frustration of knowing what happens in the Hundred Islands, without being able to come to the King’s aid,” he added ruefully.

She turned, and clutched his arm. “Let’s forget all that,” she urged. “Yours is a strange tale, but is not this a better reality than we knew before? Let us enjoy it while we can—together!”

Suddenly Vorduthe realized how thoughtless he had been. His intense joy and delight at being with his wife again, at seeing her restored in her dream body, still could hardly match her own. It was inconceivable that he could rob her of what she had been given. The problems of King Krassos—or of Peldain—dwindled to insignificance.

The sun was lower in the sky, which had darkened marginally to a deeper blue. He sensed that the meeting was over, and took her hand.

Then sleep overtook him.

But he did not wake with aching lungs back in the thickness and the warmth. He was in the green-gold haze, still with no need to breathe.

You see , the lake said, it is as I told you.

“What are you?” Vorduthe demanded, framing the question in his mind. “Is it true that you fell from the stars? That is hard to believe.”

“It is true, in a manner of speaking,” the lake answered. “I will tell you all, as a gesture of good faith. Once I was a man, not so different from yourself. I came to this world from a world among the stars, in a ship that could fly through the air like a bird. There were no men on Thelessa then. It was I who brought them here.

“Yes, I was a man, but a man with an uncommon ambition. Men are mortal, and my aim was to be immortal like a god. Since it is individuals that die, I needed a body that was not individual, and that would last indefinitely.

“The answer lay in vegetable existence. Vegetable life has a level of consciousness which to us is like deep sleep. This I used as the foundation of my immortality. Upon this sleep I erected the structure of the subconscious mind, the dreaming state, in preparation for receiving my waking consciousness.

“The arrangement is not dissimilar to the human pattern, but the project needed a long, long time, much longer than I had to live. I created the lake as an interim measure. It is not water: it is a biological soup of chemicals upon which I imprinted a replica of my conscious mind, and it is in tune with the great subconsciousness of the forest. This connection already gives me great powers, as you have seen. When the forest is matured I shall take full possession of my new, everlasting, ever-growing body, and the lake will become redundant.

Had the spirit of the lake depended on words only, Vorduthe might have grasped little of what was said. He understood as much as he did with the help of visualizations of hallucinatory vividness, which showed him in glimpsed pictures how this strange long-dead man had descended on Peldain in his flying ship, with a retinue of slaves to help him. He had arranged for future generations of these slaves to be cared for in Peldain’s inner garden, in case he still needed human servants. Ironically the cult of the lake had arisen, and unknowingly had retarded culmination of the project. But early on some of the slaves had escaped, had made their way across the sea and settled in the Hundred Islands.

“How could the mind of a man dwell in this lake for thousands of years?” Vorduthe objected. “It would be unendurable.”

The spirit laughed gently. “Vegetable existence is not only everlasting, it is also slow. What to you is a thousand years I can experience as one short day, and in that day there has been much to attend to.”

“Life as a forest sounds hardly to be desired.”

“You lack imagination. Once the time scale is taken into account, there is as much potential in vegetable development as there is in animal. I shall be mobile, I shall sense and think—I shall develop vegetable brains, I shall grow human bodies in pods if I wish. Every tree, every branch and blossom, every new organ and sensation will be at my disposal. Already I experience the sexual excitement of wind-spread fertilization, and had I been able to focus my consciousness in any one place, I would have battled with you in the forest, and destroyed you.

“You would destroy me now, if you could.”

“You have guessed that I cannot. I have no power over your will. But there is no need for us to be enemies. I have no interest in the Hundred Islands. I only need Peldain, and not even all of that. Do not oppose me. Leave me in peace, to grow… in return, you may come here, and gain your reward…”

The glow faded and impending suffocation told Vorduthe that his time was up; the spirit could hold him no longer. He came out of trance state, into blackness, and kicked out for the surface.

The bargain had been struck.

The tinctures exuded by the medicine trees, the chief aid of Peldainian physicians, no longer were able to sustain the ailing King Kerenei. An air of ceremonial sadness fell over Lakeside at the news of his impending death, mingled with the expectation of his young, vigorous son’s accession.

But although Askon Octrago’s extraordinary exploit in bringing the foreigners to Peldain had advanced his reputation, the easy-going life of Lakeside was not too much disturbed by these events. Early one morning Vorduthe was visited by Troop Leaders Donatwe Mankas and Wirro Kana-Kem. They walked together through the tree-town. Multicolored blossoms, their perfume ever-present, fell from the arbors and drifted constantly in the air. All around were the parked tree-dwellings, the greater structures that were used as communal meeting places, somewhat of a cross between gardens and taverns. Also there were small workshops where such work as there was to be performed in Peldain was done, and storehouses for food provided by the trees.

No payment was ever demanded for services rendered. The inhabitants were allotted to work as needed, by the authority deriving from the king.

Vorduthe and his companions walked through a crowd of playing children. “We are reaching the point of no return, my lord,” Donatwe Mankas complained. “Some of the men are taking wives. Children are on the way. Soon they will feel settled here and will have no stomach to fight. And now Octrago is to be king! Have you given up, my lord? Are we not to strike at all?”