XV
As they neared the heights, the sun—low above gleaming crowns—struck through an opening in those leaves which surrounded her and turned Luang’s body to molten gold. Flandry stopped.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Just admiring, my sweet.” He drew a lungful of dawn air and savored the sad trilling of a ketjil. There may not be another chance.
“Enough,” grumbled Kemul. “On your way, Terran.”
“Be still!” The girl stamped her foot.
Kemul dropped a hand to his blaster and glared out of red eyes. “You have had plenty of time with her, Terran,” he said. “Any more stalling now, and Kemul will know for a fact you are afraid.”
“Oh, I am,” said Flandry, lightly but quite honestly. His pulse hammered; he saw the great branch, the leaves that flickered around it, the score of men who stood close by, with an unnatural sharpness. “Scared spitless.”
Luang snarled at the mugger: “You do not have to go up there and face blaster fire!”
Seeing the ugly face, as if she had struck it and broken something within, Flandry knew a moment’s pain for Kemul. He said in haste: “That’s my own orders, darling. I thought you knew. Since you insisted on waiting this close to the scene of action, I told him to stand by and protect you in case things got nasty. I won’t hear otherwise, either.”
She bridled. “Look here, I have always taken care of myself and—”
He stopped her words with a kiss. After a moment’s rigidity, she melted against him.
Letting her go, he swung on his heel, grabbed a rung, and went up the bole as fast as he could. Her eyes pursued him until the leaves curtained her off. Then he climbed alone, among murmurous mysterious grottos.
Not quite alone, he told his fears. Tembesi, Siak, young Djuanda, and their comrades came behind. They were lifetime hunters, today on a tiger hunt. But their number and their archaic chemical rifles were of small account against blaster flames.
Well, a man could only die once.
Unfortunately.
The taste of Luang lingered on his mouth. Flandry mounted a final ladder to the platform, which swayed in morning wind. Before him was the cabin. It looked like one arbor of purple flowers. He stepped to the doorway, twitched the drape aside, and entered.
Because the truncheons whacking from either side were not unexpected, he dodged them. His movement threw him to the floor. He rolled over, sat up, and looked into the nozzles of energy guns.
“Be still,” hissed Warouw, “or I will boil your eyes with a low beam.”
A disgruntled club wielder peered out a vine-screened window. “Nobody else,” he said.
“You!” Another Guard kicked Flandry in the ribs. “Was there not a woman with you?”
“No—no—” The Terran picked himself up, very carefully, keeping hands folded atop his head. His gray eyes darted around the hut. Siak had given him a report on the situation, after leaving Warouw here to wait, but Flandry required precise detail.
Two surly Guards posted at the door, sticks still in hand and blasters holstered. Two more, one in each corner, out of jump range, their own guns drawn and converging on him. Warouw close to the center of the room, and to Flandry: a small, deft, compact man with a smile flickering on his lips, wearing only the green kilt and medallion, a blaster in his clutch. The brand of Biocontrol smoldered on his brow like yellow fire.
It was now necessary to hold all their attention for a few seconds. Tembesi’s men could climb over the supporting branches rather than up the ladder, and so attain this platform unobserved from the front of the cabin. But it had a rear window too.
“No,” said Flandry, “there isn’t anyone with me. Not just now. I left her at—Never mind. How in the name of all devils and tax collectors did you locate me so fast? Who tipped you?”
“I think I shall ask the questions,” said Warouw. His free hand reached into a pocket and drew forth the flat case of a short-range radiocom. “The girl does not matter, though. If she arrives in the next several minutes, before the car does, we can pick her up too. Otherwise she can wait. Which will not be for long, Captain. A carful of well-armed men is out in the jungle. When they arrive, I will leave them in charge of the local airstrip—and dispensary, in case your noble young morons retain any ideas about raiding it. Then she can give herself up, or wait for a search party to flush her out of hiding, or run into the jungle and die. That last would be a cruel waste of so much beauty, but I do not care immensely.”
He was about to thumb the radiocom switch and put the instrument to his lips. Flandry said with great clearness and expression—rather proud of rendering it so well in Pulaoic—“Pillicock sat on Pillicock-hill: Halloo, halloo, loo loo!”
“What?” Warouw exclaimed.
“Take heed o’ the foul fiend,” cried Flandry: “obey thy parents; keep thy word justly; swear not; commit not with man’s sworn spouse; set not thy sweet heart on proud array. Tom’s acold.”
He twirled once around, laughing, and saw that he had all their eyes. A Guard made signs against evil. Another whispered, “He is going amok, tuan!”
The Terran flapped his arms. “This is the foul fiend Flibbertigibbet,” he crowed: “he begins at curfew, and walks till the first cock; he gives the web and the pin, squints the eye, and makes the hare-lip; mildews the white wheat, and hurts the poor creature of earth.” He burst into song:
“Swithold footed thrice the old;
He met the nightmare and her nine-fold—”
“Be still!” Warouw stuck the radiocom back in his pocket, advanced, and thrust expert fingers at Flandry’s solar plexus.
Flandry didn’t remain in the path of that blow. He tumbled on his back, just in front of the chief. His feet came up, hard, into the groin. As Warouw lurched forward on top of him, driven by the kick as much as the pain, Flandry got the man’s gun wrist between two arms and broke the blaster loose. No chance to use it—the effort sent it across the floor, out of reach.
He clutched Warouw against him, shouted, and wondered icily if the Guards would incinerate their own boss to get him.
The four sprang toward the grappling pair.
A rifle cracked at the rear window. A Guard fell backward, brains splashed from his skull. Tembesi fired again. One of the other Guards managed to shoot. Flame engulfed Tembesi. The whole rear wall went up in smoke and thunder. But even as the ecologist died, the room was exposed to outside view. Guns barked from a dozen surrounding boughs.
Flandry saw the last Guard crash to the boards. Fire sheeted up in the flimsy roof. He relaxed his hold on Warouw, preparatory to hustling the man out of the burning hut.
Warouw yanked his left arm free. His fist struck the angle of Flandry’s jaw.
For a moment, the Terran sagged among whirling ringing darknesses. Warouw scrambled clear of him, snatched up his blaster, and bounded to the doorway.
As he emerged, a voice from the leaves cried, “Halt where you are!” Warouw showed his teeth and fired full power into that foliage. The Tree man screamed and fell dead off his branch.
Warouw yanked the radiocom from his pocket. A gun spoke. The instrument shattered in his hand. He looked at his bleeding palm, wiped it, fired a thunderbolt in return, and sped for the ladder. Bullets smote the planks near his feet. The hunters hoped for a disabling shot. But they dared not risk killing him. The whole object had been to lure him here and take him alive.
As he reeled from the cabin, Flandry saw Warouw go over the platform edge. The Terran hefted the blaster he himself had picked up, drew a long breath, and forced clarity back into his head. Someone has to get him, he thought in an odd unemotional fashion, and as I’m the only one on my side who knows much about the care and feeding of spitguns, I seem elected.
He swarmed down the ladder. “Back!” he called, as supple bodies slipped along the branches on either side of him. “Follow me at a distance. Kill him if he kills me, but hold your fire otherwise.”
He set his weapon to full-power needle beam, gaining extreme range at the cost of narrowing his radius of destruction to a centimeter or so. If Warouw wasn’t quite as handy with pencil shots, there might be a chance to cripple him without suffering much harm from his own diffuse fire. Or there might not.
Down the holy Tree!
Flandry burst into view of the bough where Luang waited. Warouw confronted her and Kemul. Their hands were in the air; he had taken them by surprise. Warouw backed toward the next set of rungs. “Just keep your places and do not follow me,” he panted.
Flandry broke through the leaf cover overhead. Warouw saw him, whipped around and raised gun.
“Get him, Kemul!”shouted Luang.
The giant shoved her behind him and pounced. Warouw glimpsed the motion, turned back, saw the mugger’s gun not quite out of its holster, and fired. Red flame enveloped Kemul. He roared, once, and fell burning from the limb.
Having thus been given an extra few seconds, Flandry leaped off the bole rungs onto the bough. Warouw’s muzzle whirled back to meet him. Flandry’s blazed first. Warouw shrieked, lost his gun, and gaped at the hole drilled through his hand.
Flandry whistled. The riflemen of Ranau came and seized Nias Warouw.