Denner_s Wreck

Still, he was no child to be frightened by something simply because it was strange. He forced himself to march on into the grove.

It occurred to him that, here among the trees, he was walking between the stems of plants as an insect walked between blades of grass, similarly sheltered, and that he was in no more danger from the trees than an ant was from grass. However, the analogy did not really comfort him, but instead made him feel insignificant.

As he moved on in the still air beneath the rustling leaves, he quickly noticed something else about the grove; it was cool. The sun was almost straight overhead, yet he was not at all uncomfortable. Out in the open he knew that he would have been sweating heavily. Summer was dying, but not yet dead, and the autumn cooling would not arrive for another few tensleeps.

With that, with the realization that he was not sweating and hot, his opinion of the grove began to change. He began to see the beauty, as well as the strangeness, in the scattered light, the soaring trunks and reaching branches, the open ground. Looking up, he began to distinguish between the different varieties of tree.

His pace had shifted from a tentative creep when he first passed under the shade of the trees to a confident stride when he conquered his fear. Now it shifted again, from a stride to an amble, as he began to take in the details of his surroundings, not as potential dangers but as potential delights.

Best of all was when he rounded a huge old oak and found himself on the bank of a stream. The water gurgled around tree roots and polished stones, and the sunlight shattered into dancing glitter on its surface. He almost thought he heard a distant music, as of children singing or someone playing lightly on a fidlin.

The streams he was familiar with, out in the grasslands, were little more than meandering ditches. They did not sing and sparkle.

It was no wonder, he told himself, that people thought a place as weird and wonderful as this must be linked to the Powers. He saw no sign of any Lady Sunlight, but only the sunlight on the leaves and water.

He looked out across the stream and saw an open meadow, a few hectares of wildflowers and short grass surrounded by trees. That, he told himself, was surely The Meadows, but he saw no Lady Sunlight, and certainly no great palace. For an instant he thought he saw something tall and glittering in the center of the meadow, but when he could not find it again he dismissed it as a trick of the light, something caused by emerging from the dimness of the trees to the meadow's brightness.

Weird and wonderful, he told himself as he sat down to rest by the stream, but nothing of the Powers about it.

He did not see the glittering column flicker again. He did not know enough to realize that, even when planted with trees, the plain would not naturally have babbling brooks full of water-rounded stones. As the life of the grove went on around him, he could not distinguish the artificial insects and flowers from the natural ones. He was unaware of the hidden machines that sca

He sat quietly by the stream until the wake's second sunset and dozed off there, convinced that he sat among wonders of nature, and only of nature.

The sun was well up the sky, and firstlight well advanced, when he awoke again. He was in the habit of waking at dawn, but he was not accustomed to the cool shade of the grove.

He rose and stretched, then knelt and splashed a little water on his face. The stream was clear and clean and cool. He bent down and drank.

His stomach growled, ruining the mood. Something chittered overhead, and he looked up in time to see leaves closing behind some small scampering creature. A dislodged vine slithered across a branch.

He had not brought any weapons, and besides, he had no idea how to hunt among trees. He reached in his pocket for the last of the corn chips, and stuffed all but the smallest fragments into his mouth.

When he had taken the edge off his hunger by chewing the corn chips to liquid, he sat down at the base of a great tree and looked around, admiring the scenery. In the rising light it took on a different aspect than it had had when he first arrived. The meadow across the stream was somehow more colorful, he thought; the air itself seemed to glisten, and the impression of distant singing in the sound of the brook was stronger than ever.

This, he thought, would be a wonderful place to bring a woman. There was a serenity to the place that he judged would appeal to most of the girls or women he knew. He was sure Kittisha would like it. The mossy bank of the stream would be a very pleasant place to lie together.

He let himself imagine that for a moment as he gazed across at the meadow.

Then he saw that the air really was glittering. He stared, realizing that it was no illusion, or at least none he had ever encountered before.

He asked himself if it could be some peculiar sort of diurnal firefly, and was on the verge of convincing himself that that was exactly what he saw when a woman stepped out of the glittering air onto the meadow grass, accompanied by strange music that was definitely neither singing nor the sound of water.

She was tall and slender, her long, flowing hair the golden yellow of sunlight on wildflowers. She wore a filmy pale something that seemed to shift both color and shape every time she moved, and which hung drifting in the air despite a complete lack of any breeze to account for such motion. Small fluttering things, like tiny glowing butterflies, flashed a thousand colors in a halo about her, and furry things moved through the grass at her feet.

Bredon stared, and felt something stir within him.

The woman paid no attention to him. She gave no sign that she had noticed his presence at all. She stood in the meadow and took a deep breath, filling her lungs with the morning air. The flutterers swirled away for a moment, then returned, and the sourceless music rose into a brief crescendo.

Bredon watched hungrily. This woman was, beyond any doubt, Lady Sunlight of the Meadows.

She was also the most beautiful thing Bredon had ever seen.

He was, he realized, looking at another Power. This was what he had come here for, to see another Power and see if he could recover some of what he had lost in his meeting with Geste. Looking at Lady Sunlight as she stretched lazily, he knew exactly what he wanted, what would more than make up for the lost mare and his lost self-esteem.

He wanted Lady Sunlight. He wanted her with a raw and simple lust stronger than any he had felt in years.

His breeches had grown uncomfortably tight as his body reacted to the sight of that sleek and inhumanly beautiful female form; he shifted his legs, trying to accommodate himself, then got awkwardly to his feet.

“Hello!” he called.

Startled, the woman dropped her arms from above her head to cover her breasts, and whirled to face him. The flutterers abruptly vanished, the music stopped, and the animals at her feet disappeared into the grass. She whispered something; he could see her lips moving, but even without the music Bredon heard nothing over the rustle of leaves and the splashing of the brook.

There was no one else in sight save she and himself. Bredon wondered who she was talking to-the invisible musicians, perhaps?

Then there was someone else in sight, or at least something else. It was shaped more or less like a man, but was obviously not a man, not even a man in a costume. It was eight feet tall, covered in gleaming silver metal, its face a dark nothingness. It stepped across the brook in a single stride and stood towering over him.

“Sir,” it said in a polite and completely human masculine voice, “you are trespassing on private property. I must ask you to leave at once."