Having passed through the grove while Richard stood in strident concord and learned from his fungal tutor of the moment, the entire party waited on Richard. He was now the leader of their hearts, he knew, sensing it in his chest as We This One bestowed a final piece of advice, “Do not entrust the thoughts exchanged between you and We This One, to your kind, for your kind are not You That One, but a coil that chokes itself, a tangle ever resentful for being undone, as well for being begun. Keep our concourse between Richard The Outer One, and The Ultimate One.
“Agreed,” spoke Richard, still untrusting of telepathy and not yet sure of its extent, range, reception… there had been too many things to know of the Phoenix Kind:
That their females, to lay eggs must dine on these mushrooms in order to give birth to females, and that males were mute of mind, but not dumb. That those great pairs, never permitted to number more than twelve, were composed of a single motherly will that hated the human race as people hate cockroaches, bed bugs, lice and fleas. Unable to erase mankind Phoenix Kind sought to control their multiplication and the spread of the pathogens they carried, this being technology. This might have been guessed. But that those high order saurian minds had been driven here by the comet impact that destroyed most of their world and had also brought these sentient spores to this grove was beyond all reasonable theography.
‘This I might impart, but not the dream treading discipline gifted in parlay by We This One.’
No reply came from We This One, whose face now returned to its native, fungal form.
They awaited patiently, strung out behind the coppery, feral scout, who alone looked about and ahead, the rest looking at him as if expecting him to become a mushroom.
They then looked behind him with wider eyes as he passed through the large cedars that opened upon the steeper path winding up through the jagged-toothed jaws of the mountains, the river it has attempted to cling to having departed down to the right in a rushing of steep waters.
Richard turned and saw there, not the great mushroom or its hundreds of attendant fungi, but an onyx throne, upon which sat a creature that might have been an octopus, if it had thorny bark for skin and vines for tentacles, an organic creature, great-brained and narrow-mouthed, of great antiquity, frozen in some petrified state on that shiny black throne. The grove of trees, the ring as it were, remained, as did the blocks of volcanic rock spaced between. But the interior of the grove itself was now a tangle of thorny vines that quivered and shown with life, the vines themselves terminating in succulent purple flowers, very like the morning glories that had flourished among the tree trunks earlier. These were now replaced by these reeking, seeking buds, like so many thousands of little toothless mouths questing for nectar, drinking a few butterflies, whose surviving fellows yet flirted with flowery death.
Richard shivered and somehow knew that his communication had exhausted We This One, and that his psychic teacher slumbered for a nap that was likely to exceed Richard’s entire life.
Richard turned to face his men, the last waiting him being his faithful Sergeant and Levsky, “The intelligence did say that we must return to the lake by another, unspecified way.”
The Sergeant informed, “An hour until nightfall, Sir. You were sometime among the fungi.”
Richard looked for the sun and could not find it among the towering trees, knowing it to be low in the north somewhere. The Sergeant assured him, “Levsky has assured us that the night shall be brief in this latitude.”
‘I no longer care to define night or day, other than in shades of gray.’
“Yes,” he agreed, feeling how his feet had fallen asleep. Looking ahead at the gap in the trees afforded by the steeper and more narrow way up the gorge, he asked, “How far has it been scouted?”
“The Savage has been up to the top there. He no longer speaks English, has devolved on this very spot. He has intimated by gesture that you will understand him. At the top of the pass, a half hour’s way up rough going, he has indicated is a tunnel, formed by human hand, cut from solid rock.”
“I know. This is the entrance to the Caverns of the Cairn Keepers. We are to take no side passage, but stay to the elevated main grade. The ways were carved, but by no human hand, but by hands that yet reside among the byways which we are advised not to explore.”
‘I sound so empty and far away.’
He felt his left hand clench in anger at his failure to comfort his men, who looked at him in such terror, as if his words and the scene behind him had rendered him larger than life.
‘Oh, you taunting ghost hand!’ he looked down at what he expected to be empty space beside his sword hilt, and saw, his, left, hand, clenched… in, well, in anticipation of something to do!
He drew his sword in the rising guard, leveled it out to their gasping starts and pointed to the top of the pass, “Up the way men, behind our good scout, at the double, on allied alien assurances that the way to the top is clear, though the far side of the pass is thought to be by no means endeared to our arrival—and arrive we will!”
‘There, that had a little steel in it!’
Levsky looked at him level and with a question in his eyes.
“Yes, Commander, please, see if it feels real,” as he retired the riser of the double-edged blade to shoulder.
The Russian squeezed his wrist, poked his bicep, and examined the shoulder, were the sleeve so neatly ended. There they could see the more jagged wound trace, as if in shadow.
“I have the normal sensation of being griped and poked that I recall of boarding school bullies.”
Levsky agreed, took a close look at Richard’s right hand, shook it once, “Congratulations on your newfound friend, Captain. You are, I think, a Lucky man, some angel of God smiling upon you, and I should think that angel is Justice, that daughter of The Almighty that Hesiod fancied devolved her Father’s will on mankind. The Czarina was correct in measuring you an uncommon man.”
“Thank you, Commander. And I am sorry for the loss of your men. Shall we?”
The thin face, too dapper to be trusted fully and too confident to be doubted, grinned too boyishly to be affected, drew his own single-edged curved Cossack sword in his left hand, put it spine to shoulder and assured, “I I have the rear, Captain.”
Richard started out at the double, with no fear of his ankles failing him, for they seemed as good as old in their creaking cases of leather. As well, the Russian feet behind him had some work to do to keep up.
The way ahead, up the steep incline, reminded him that the Saxons had awaited his ancestors on an eminence, less lonely and no less daunting. He felt the voice that he had always fancied belonged to Wolfhound Barrett, the best of the line, well up from some depth within, a depth that pulsed into his veins and pumped as thought into his brains, ‘Feels like a Bit of 1066, My Somali-born Lad, if with a bit less kit.’
The thought felt like voice wrung from the sands of an hour glass to tinkle into a pool of clear water, and that pool felt like it was his mind.
‘Yes Wolfhound, You and Me This One!’
There it rang, in the deeps of his being, a laugh that slid like steel from leather, a laugh that he hoped world ring forever.
