It was a long and horrible night, traveling that way. Just when Orim was certain the ordeal would never end, the lurching motion abruptly stopped. There were further shouted exchanges from above. Weatherlight shivered. Klaars slipped from his bunk with a crash against the bulkhead. Mercifully, he struck his head and fell unconscious.
The ship shivered again and heeled upward. The list was gone. Weatherlight floated, buoyed on water.
There was a faint cheer from above, and then a clamor of feet across the deck. A hatch was thrown back with a crash. Silvery-green light spilled downward. The chief of the raiders strode to the hatch and called up into it.
Orim backed up, trying to shield Klaars with her body.
Two more raiders came into the sickbay and stood with their chief. One was a thin young man with straight, brown, shoulder-length hair. Coins were braided among the strands, though not nearly as many as in the chief's hair. Medallions and pouches hung about his neck. The other was a stocky warrior with black shoulder armor. They stood beside the chieftain and stared at Orim.
"You have the ship. Leave us alone," she said nervously.
They pushed past her. She tried to stop the plated warrior, but he brushed her aside impatiently, as though she were a child. He drew a long, thin knife. Orim stifled a scream. The warrior slashed away some bedding that had tangled Drianan's body. Then, with surprising gentleness, he lifted the dead sailor. His companion hoisted Klaars. Orim sprang forward to support Klaars's arm, and the procession moved cautiously above deck.
Orim looked around in amazement. The open plain was gone. Around the ship rose huge trees, each trunk as wide around as a small village. They rose to a lofty canopy, far above which the yellow-orange sky of morning could be glimpsed. Weatherlight itself was floating on the edge of a vast lagoon whose dimensions were impossible to determine, and whose waters stretched off into distant oblivion. Everything was dark and cool. Festooned vines and moss draped from the lower branches of the trees, trailing across the deck of the ship.
All around her, Orim sensed a vast, living presence-a being beside whom she and all the humans with her were insignificant. After the long, horrific night, this magnificent presence was a balm. She stretched cramped limbs. Likewise, her spirit seemed to stretch outward, reaching up and up until it emerged from the topmost leaves to find itself pressed against the warm body of the sky. She wanted to cry out at the pain and beauty around her. With an almost audible sigh, her spirit slowly sank back into the soft bed of the trees, drifting lower and lower until the warm waters of the earth received and caressed it. She shivered with a sudden chill and blinked her eyes. The vision faded, and she found herself once again standing on the deck of the ship. The enormous trees all around were limned in silver fire.
"A prisoner in paradise," she muttered.
She was not the only one. Klaars had been moved to the other side of the deck, where he lay unconscious on a woven pallet of reeds. The medallion-wearing young man tended him, working over his arm. A vine rope was meanwhile wrapped around Drianan's body. Three men lifted him and gently lowered the corpse over the side of the craft. Below waited a canoe filled with fern boughs. Women in adjacent canoes received the body and arrayed his arms and legs, laying flowering ivy atop his chest and wreathing his head in blossoms. They cared for him as though he were one of their own fallen.
Other figures swarmed over the rails to stand dripping on Weatherlight's polished planks. With their chieftain, they approached Orim.
She took a deep breath and murmured, "Now what?"
The leader gazed levelly at her. His eyes glinted with the same light as the coins braided into his hair. He was handsome, yes, but proud and commanding. He gestured Orim toward the side rail. There, she saw a slender canoe, evidently there to take her to shore.
A line was swiftly passed over the side, and she clambered down. Even as she descended, other raiders who had swum from shore to meet the ship were scrambling up the sides of Weatherlight. She seated herself in the middle of the canoe. Warriors climbed down fore and aft. The chieftain of the raiders meanwhile dove from the rail and struck out for shore. The warriors paddled out behind him.
As they pulled away from the swimmers and canoes, they entered very still waters. Despite the dim light, Orim could easily see the slender ripples that bled away from either side of the canoe. Around her hung a vast silence, broken only by the soft calls of the raiders and the rhythmic swish of the paddles. Here and there on the lagoon crouched huts, linked by bamboo causeways.
There was a sudden fluttering from above. A dark winged form passed close overhead. Orim ducked and gasped. The tribesmen chuckled. They halted their paddling for a moment, and one held up his hand, making an odd chirruping noise with his tongue. There was another flapping of wings, and something settled on his arm. It hung there upside down, apparently a very large bat, but its eyes were enormous and gleaming. Its ears perked sharply in her direction, and it cocked its head to one side, as if deciding what this new creature was doing in its domain.
The paddler reached into a hidden pocket of his cape and plucked forth some morsel, which he offered to the bat. The creature, without taking its eyes from Orim, snapped it up in a mouth gleaming with sharp, white teeth. The man who held it crooned to it in a soft voice. It chittered briefly, then flitted off into the darkness.
A few more strokes of the paddle, and the canoe ran aground. The warrior at the prow climbed out and motioned for Orim to do the same. She alighted on a level bank formed not of soil but of mossy wood. The vast trees were so thickly clustered in this portion of the forest that their root bulbs merged. Trunks rose all around like pillars in a temple- except that each trunk was itself as wide as a whole temple. Bark gleamed silvery beneath robes of lichen.
The warriors took Orim's arms and escorted her in among the trees. The hush deepened, though here and there she glimpsed more tribesfolk. Soon, the forest was full of them. They waited furtively among the crowded boles. With their white robes and their coin-coifed hair, they were dwarfed by the gigantic boles. Folk peered at her out of mossy hollows. The men stared suspiciously, the women quizzically, and the children with curious grins.
Countless feet had worn footpaths along the root bulbs. Though the green ceiling overhead was lofty, it cast all below in a purple murk. Even at midday, the yellow sky would give little light this deep. In most places, only the silver glow of the ever-present trees lit the darkness.
Ahead was an exception-a bright clearing. One of the millennial trees had fallen, perhaps centuries ago, and torn a vast hole in the oppressive canopy. The downed tree now was no more than a huge, mossy hill that ran through the forest. Young trees grew in straight lines from the decaying bulk. The villagers had burrowed into the side of it, excavating cave homes for themselves. Windows and doors were dug into that log. They leaked silvery-green light out into the clearing. Other villagers dwelt in eroded root bulbs or lived in hovels so encased in lichen as to seem only knobs on the forest floor.
"We are like mere insects in this place," Orim thought aloud.
At the center of the clearing was a welcome sight. A great bonfire flamed. Its warm, red light was almost blinding after the forest's ghostly illumination. Klaars sat on a pallet near the fire, his auburn hair seeming a manifestation of its flame. He had reawakened, and he cradled his broken arm as though it pained him greatly. A metal-plated guard stood on either side of him.