The Forest of Peldain

Laughing, three savages dragged away the kicking, screaming servant girl. The rest turned their attention to Kirekenawe, stripping off the sheet that covered her, playing with her white body. They seemed puzzled at first that she did not move. Then, reaching agreement, they carried her down to the courtyard, where fires had been lit under cooking grids… and one Orwanian took a black flint knife to slice off her nose and chew it raw.…

At this fulfillment of his earlier premonitory vision Vorduthe’s spirit recoiled into the sky among the wheeling birds. The majestic nazarine blue rippled, went dark, and then he seemed to break through a barrier and knew that for him the dream was over.

Images assailed him. He had caught the entity in the lake unawares and knew that the dream had been no fiction; it really had happened—was happening. He saw too how the entity viewed Thelessa: as a dazzling oceanic jewel, a world sapphire, a paradise whose climate varied scarcely at all throughout the year, whose waters remained gentle and pacific. By comparison Vorduthe caught a sense of what other worlds in the heavens were like, tilted somehow with respect to the sun so as to produce extremes of heat and cold all in the same latitude; their seas sloshed about pendulum-like by the near presence of yet other worlds that loomed visibly in their skies.

The entity claimed the whole of Thelessa as its territory, regardless of any bargain struck with Vorduthe. Peldain was to be turned into a single riotous jungle where the vegetable products of a fevered imagination would be given full rein. If any human beings survived, it could only be as hunted animals.

I should have brought you back sooner. I have been inattentive.

The green-gold voice was as smooth and calm as ever, but behind it, keeping pace with its words, was an elemental rage that could not be contained or disguised, a tempest of ever-changing plant growth. The soul in the lake, once a man, had lost its humanity long ago. Vorduthe could dimly understand why. The descent into the subconscious involved a descent into primeval forces. The entity had surrendered itself to the raw wish of primitive life to survive and grow at the expense of anything else.

I see you have resolved to take the part of the High Priest, at last, the voice continued. You think you can control me.

In his anger and grief Vorduthe was indeed ready to fight the entity for mastery. But the voice only chuckled.

It is too late, Lord Vorduthe of Arelia. When first you dived into this lake you might have succeeded. But love made you delay, and now I have learned to avoid your will, just as I once learned to avoid Mistirea’s. So good-bye, Lord Vorduthe, noble of Arelia.

The voice faded and Vorduthe found himself out of trance state and alone in pitch darkness, warm liquid all around. His lungs had not yet reached the limit of their endurance, but he knew that the entity would never admit him into its presence again.

The lake’s stratagem had worked. While Vorduthe was distracted with delight in Kirekenawe it had been familiarizing itself with his psyche, absorbing a part of him so that his mind could not be used as a weapon against it. It was maturing fast. Probably, Vorduthe thought, no one would ever influence it again.

It was time to depart. For the last time he soared, toward daylight and fresh air.

The High Priest’s eyes became hollow as Vorduthe, standing dripping on the lake’s mossy shore, confessed his failure.

“Yes, I had thought there was something wrong,” he said in a ghostly voice. “So it was all for nothing. Peldain will die.”

“No,” Vorduthe said. “There is still something we can do. If you had not lost the habit of work in the physical world these past generations you would have thought of it yourself.”

Mistirea stared uncomprehending when Vorduthe first explained what he meant. When it came home to him that the thing was possible, he was dumbfounded.

“But the Eye of Peldain has always been with us!” he protested.

“Do you still think of it as a god? If so it is a malign god.”

“It is a god in a sense, a god that must be appeased… yet strange to say, once it was a man.” Mistirea nodded, evidently thinking he was telling Vorduthe something new. “Yes, it is so. You know the hill that is shaped like a woman, in the valley beyond the Clear Peaks? Legend has it that the hill was so sculpted on the orders of the lake long ago. Though no longer a man, it became hungry for the shape of a woman. It wished to caress such a woman with the branches of the forest.…”