“I really am terribly sorry about this,” said the Senior Dryad, Noma.
Dwarves are not immune to, or even offended by, seduction. Indeed, the Great Work is both Great and Work; what’s not to like about it?
They just normally have a great deal on their minds.
Many species exchange some sort of physical affection as a mark of emotional proximity. Some shake hands to feel the strength and firth of your grip, and perhaps to make sure you aren’t holding a knife in your good hand. (We are ambidextrous; we do not know.) Some hug you tightly, like gnomes. Some attempt to wave, hug, kiss on the cheek, AND avoid spilling their flagon of Ale on you; damn Hobbits.)
Dryads have one primary form of attack or defense, and whilst they do not actually use it as a form of greeting more than, perhaps, thirty per cent of the time, it is nevertheless of extraordinary longevity, and Sam, who sought to maximize his time doing ‘good’ work, could not bring himself to offer the mediocre, which was where he judged his level of craftsmanship in that area, having little experience and little particularly spare time.
“Are you familiar with the sensual values of freshly-picked nettles?” said a green be-merkin’d elm-lass. “No, but should you send me a treatise, I’ll read it!” Sam called over his shoulder.
Many warm arms grasped Sam in what would have been a fond embrace; but Sam, who was familiar with a two-column-tie, simply avoided the knot of limbs.
This was considered a formal greeting among the Dryads.
It should be noted that Dryads are omnivores. One of the many pleasant notes of their tree-ring-scribed history is that over many thousands of years, they developed a sense, often pheromonal, of whose pleasures they might enjoy. For many thousands of years, Dryads enjoyed an extraordinary freedom of erotolalia because those whose pheromones indicated incompatibility were eaten.
…or so it is said.
But that was long ago, and Sam was a Dwarf. It is difficult to intimidate a Dwarf with intimacy or social graces, much as it is difficult to intimidate an orange cat with a Platonic discourse in ancient Greek on the utility of silence even, and this we do stress, even when someone else is the one eating the fish.** So perhaps the Dryads no longer greeted most visitors they liked this way. There was a certain freedom among Sam; all were friendly, none more were interesting than the little statuette he just might carve if he got out of here in time.
Sam was more than worried that in order to gain the cooperation of these folks, he might need to be polite to the Senior Dryad, and that was not a level of ‘politeness’ which was of interest to him.
He need not have worried. She was a tree, it would have been impractical.
Sam looked at the Tree. She, being unbound by the constraints of non-magical reality, spoke from a huge laughing knothole mouth, and opened eyes of some how visibly-permanent bark.
“No,” she said.
“Greetings, o Ancient Rowan—”
“I’m under a third of an aeon, and I look young for my age, but thanks for the compliment that I’m looking old. Typical Dwarven diplomacy, I take it?”
The Dryads around her snickered. One or two walked up to him and whispered in his ear that he was wasting his time and might better engage it.
Actually, one of them was very, very lovely, short, and sort-of reminded him of a girl he’d once loved more than his hammer at the time.
“Are you one of those of Dionysian ecstasy followed by acts of heroism, or Dionysian frenzy followed by cannibalism?”
She smiled, in the traditional act of those with sharp-filed teeth amongst the flappable and shakable normal. “Definitely ecstasy. I surely wouldn’t lie. You’re young for a Dwarf, fairly tender?”
He opened his mouth, she winked, snapped a quick bite in his direction, and walked off, smiling. The other Dryads managed, in a manner which would impress a Bardic vocal coach, managed a snigger which nevertheless had the noise and force of a full-throated gladiatorial arena roar.
He walked closer to the tree. He had no idea what kind of Tree she was. She was quite large. He walked around, aware of many eyes drilling into his back. That’s fine; eyes don’t hurt without prims and a great source of light. Let them look. He circled the huge Lady until he found a knothole he could reach.
“Question for you, Lady?”
The Knothole responded, quiet without the resonance of the ‘mouth’, in a calm but low voice.
“Yes?”
“How do you feel about being climbed?”
Sam was not an optimist. He was not the best with that grapple. He liked to pretend, but he’d seen what really, really talented climbers could do. He paused for just a moment to wonder if the bark of a ruler/Goddess/Big Tree of Dryads was sacred, and if so, if accidentally scratching it was a blessing for fertility or merely lese majeste,
But it would be nice to speak to the Regent of these people in privacy, and the closest privacy was thirty feet up. His grapple was long enough.
Probably.
If he concentrated.
If he’d practiced more.
The Mother of (most of) The Forest lowered what no Troll weightlifter would ever be lucky enough to call ‘a limb’, and brought Sam to her. In a position not at all unlike that of Sam and the Golem, he stood beside what seemed, now that he was here, to be here ‘head’.
“No,” she said.
“’No, unlike the Dryads, you will not seek to speak unless we engage in intimate activities and we are about to have a frightening argument about splinters’, or ‘No, though defieth the Dark Lord and and spit upon her works and those who serve her,” asked Sam, categorizing carefully..
An enormous thunderburst of flicked and falling leaves submerged Sam who, had the branch not curved to hold him, would likely have fallen in a swarm of greenery.
“No,” said the Mother Tree. “We serve no Lord, Dark, Light, or Otherwise.”
Sam sighed. “You realize that the reasonable thing for the Dark Lord to do now is burn this forest as an example to others?”
“She’d destroy this much lumber to remind people they don’t like her?”
“She’d consider reminding people of why they don’t like her but they do fear her, yes.”
This thing happened, and it was interesting. Though one really oughtn’t have eyes, they both looked at each other. Though one oughtn’t have shoulders, and he others’ shoulders were made of flesh which in no way resembled wood—and finally, most finally, though one breathed oxygen and one gave it out, there was no mistake: the Dwarf and the Great Tree gave the same long, slow, miserable, resigned, deep, chest-born sigh, as their ‘shoulders’ both rose and fell in a manner which was both intensely dramatic, and which—same being suddenly cradled in a crook by the motion—kept Sam where he was.
“The White Wizards have told them this is an enchanted forest and it shall stand as long as all the Kingdoms of Man stand.”
“The Kingdoms of Man are currently busy kneeling if any of them are smart.”
“Are any of them smart?”
“They lost the war! They’re at the Council of Lessers, writing the Great Treaty of Eternal Peace and Submission!”
“They…called it that.”
Noma smiled.
It was, at least, something which involved teeth.
Sam had long ago learnt a certain trick. If there is a thought you truly wish to avoid, you cannot avoid it by thinking about it. That is tautological. One of the statuettes Sam made, not very much later, was very well-made. In time, he began to think of it a great deal, and to envision it often in his mind.
He would think about this whenever his mind began to suggest, perhaps, that it might, it could, possibly, be at the edges of thinking of what that great Tree had done to emit what was, in the end, a rather large and very ordinary acorn.
The laugh, though, was just a laugh.
“All right, Sam of the Dwarves, Sam of the Dark Lord.
“You have our Ambassador.
“When she is tall enough to speak to you, if the trees ever speak to you, then she shall be our Ambassador, and we shall listen to what she says.”
Sam picked up the acorn. She looked like a completely ordinary acorn. Below them, the Dryads were neither laughing nor smiling.
“All right,” he said.
It was the first receipt Sam received in tree sap.
He purchased some cloth from a nymphette-weaver, politely declined her two-for-one offer, and wrapped the acorn inside of it with care.
He put her in his pack and went to make a statuette before he slept.
_______
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