Free Quest Beyond Time by Tony Morphett Page A

he yelled. He looked back at the river and for a moment he considered taking his chances with the sharks. But that did not seem such a good idea either.
    So he turned and followed Katrin into the forest.

CHAPTER 13
PEOPLE WHO EAT PEOPLE
    Gone was the open bushland, gone the river with the sky above it, gone were the plains. They were in the forest now and whoever lived there made no attempt to clear the undergrowth. The trees grew thick, and the bushes crowded. It was dense, dark, and dripping wet.
    Mike and Katrin moved through it, thrusting their way through the entangling bushes, impeded by the length of the rolled hang-glider. Occasionally, on either hand, Mike glimpsed the squared shapes of ruined buildings. This place had once been a town or city. Now it was rain-forest. In his mind’s eye, Mike saw what had happened. The pavements had cracked, the winds and birds had brought seeds, trees had grown in deserted streets. The roofs of buildings had fallen in, leaving the ruined walls standing for a time. Leaf-litter had piled up, rain and fire had done their work, old trees had fallen and given their trunks and leaves as food for more vegetation.
    Then people had come. At first, they would have been the weak, the dispossessed, driven from the easier life of the valleys by stronger tribes. But then they would have come to know the forest, learned to survive within it, been driven to cannibalism either for ritual or simply to get enough meat. And now, centuries later, the Forest People were no longer weak, no longer dispossessed. They were lords in this place, and Mike and Katrin were the fugitives.
    They had been travelling for perhaps two hours when they crossed a path. To Mike, it was a gift from whatever gods ruled this terrible place. To Katrin it was a source of danger.
    As they reached the edge of the path, she stopped, gesturing to Mike to do the same. Then she dropped to one knee, and took her bow in her left hand and slid an arrow from her quiver with her right.
    She looked up the path one way and down it the other.
    ‘Let’s use it. Get out of here.’ Mike had been feeling the forest closing in on him like darkness itself. He wanted to be in the light and air once again, away from the smell of rotting vegetation, and those other smells which hung in this place like an invisible mist, smells which he could not identify and therefore feared. He wanted to be out of there. Badly. The path was the way.
    But Katrin shook her head. ‘That path’ll kill you.’
    ‘What?’ He could not believe it.
    ‘A path is what you get ambushed on.’ The way she said it, he could almost hear the quotation marks. It sounded like something she had been told since she could understand language. It was like the way she avoided being silhouetted on a ridge. It was fieldcraft so engrained by her clan’s way of life as to be almost at the level of an instinct.
    Mike looked up and around. The place made his flesh creep. But he knew that his best chance of getting out of it alive was to trust Katrin’s instincts. ‘Okay.’
    ‘I’m crossing. Count three and follow. Fast.’
    She took off like a sprinter from the blocks. She disappeared on the other side of the track. Mike counted three, and sped across the track. When he broke through the bushy wall on the other side he found Katrin had been covering his move, her bow half drawn, ready for anything. He grinned at the set expression on her face.
    ‘What’s funny?’
    ‘Us. It’s like playing cowboys and indians when I was a kid. Sort of embarrassing.’
    ‘Em-barrass-ing?’
    ‘Like making you ashamed.’
    ‘You’d be more em-barrass-ed if you’d gone up that track and ended as somebody’s dinner.’
    ‘Guess I would.’ Now he was even more embarrassed at taking lightly her efforts to keep them alive.
    They moved again.
    It happened perhaps an hour later, perhaps not so long. Time had become distorted in the forest.
    Katrin had been moving along, looking from side to