"They're a chance," she whispered. "Morgan's _sure_."
With daylight they saw four flyers patrolling instead of the usual one.
At their backs colossal blackish-gray, deeply rugose tree trunks eighty
feet in diameter rose up and up without a branch for many hundreds of
feet. Then branches jutted out enormously and the colorful cascade of
forest-top epiphytes came down the side and hung over their heads a
thousand feet above.
Pia opened the food basket and they ate, seated on a bank. She wore her
brown dress, her finest, he had learned, and she had new red shoes. She
was quiet, as if tranced.
Cole remembered the picnic on the forest top, the secret island of
beauty and innocence, and his heart stirred. He saw that the food
basket was the same one. He did not tell her his thoughts.
They talked of trivial things or were silent for long periods. He held
her hand. Once she roused herself to say, "Tomorrow, about this time,
Uncle Garth will come looking for us." Shortly after, she gasped and
caught his arm, pointing.
He peered, finally made a gestalt of broken outlines through the
shrubbery. It was a stomper, swinging its head nervously.
"It smells us," she whispered. "Oh Flinter, forgive me darling. Take
off your clothes, _quickly_!"
She undressed rapidly and hid her clothes. Cole undressed too, fear
prickling his skin, remembering what Bidgrass had told him. The stomper
moved nearer in a crackle of brush and stopped again.
Man and girl knelt trembling under a fan of red-orange fungus. The girl
broke off a piece and motioned the man to do the same.
"When it comes, pretend to eat," she breathed, almost inaudibly. "Don't
look up and don't say a word. Morwenna be with us now."
The stomper's shadow fell across them. The man's skin prickled and
sweat sprang out. He looked at the girl and she was pale but not tense,
munching on her piece of fungus. She clicked her teeth faintly and he
knew it was a signal. He ate.
The stomper lifted the man by his right shoulder. It was like two
fingers in a mitten holding him three times his own height off the
ground. He saw the beak and the eye and his sight dimmed in anguish.
Then the right wing reached down and nipped the left shoulder of the
rosy girl-body placidly crouching there. It swung her up to face the
man momentarily under the great beak and the tri-corn eye, and their
own eyes met.
Very faintly she smiled and her eyes tried desperately to say, "I'm
sorry" and "Goodbye, Flinter." His eyes cried in agony "No! No! I will
not have it so!"
Then the two-fingered mitten became a nine-fingered mitten lapping him
in darkness that bounced and swayed and he knew that the stomper was
running into Lundy Forest. The wing was smooth and warm but not soft,
and it smelled of cinnamon and sandalwood. The odor overpowered him and
the man lapsed into stupor.
* * * * *
The man woke into a fantastic dream. Luminous surfaces stretched up to
be lost in gloom, with columns of darkness between. The spongy ground
on which he lay shone with faint blue light. Luminous, slanting walls
criss-crossed in front of him. Close at hand, behind and to the right,
enormous bracket fungi ascended into darkness in ten-foot steps that
supported a profusion of higher order fungi in many bizarre shapes.
He stood up and he was alone.
He climbed over a slanting root-buttress and saw her lying there. He
called her name and she rose lightly and came to him. Radiant face,
dimpled arms, round breasts, cradling hips: _his woman_. They embraced
without shame and she cried thanks to Morwenna.