Cezer was not one to be easily encouraged. 'But of course! We are in the process of being rescued by a giant chicken with an unquenchable taste for pine knots.'
'Be quiet,' Mamakitty chided him, 'and listen. Or have you failed to note that Taj continues with his singing?'
It was true, Oskar realized. Ignoring his companions' increasingly vigorous debate, the songster maintained his steady trilling. Trying to find something in it besides the purely euphonic, Oskar failed completely. But then, except for an occasional howl at the moon more notable for its enthusiasm than any resemblance to actual harmony, he was no connoisseur of music.
The clacking vibration continued to increase in volume, leaving those imprisoned within the body of the fallen tree as apprehensive as they were bemused. What impending event could it portend? Of what significance was Taj's uninterrupted song? Between incessant warble and unceasing vibration, Oskar felt he might go mad. He would have given anything simply to have been able to clap his hands over the sides of his head, but his limbs remained imprisoned at his sides.
Something struck him in the eye with such force that he cried out. Instantly, a flurry of concerned voices reverberated in his ears.
'Oskar—! What is it, what's wrong? What hurt you?'
He swallowed. At least he could do that much. 'Light—I see light!'
'Impossible!' growled Cezer. 'There's no light inside this damned tree.'
'And something else,' the dog-man added.
'What?' an anxious Mamakitty demanded to know.
Oskar hesitated only briefly. 'I don't know—but
The small figure that was staring back at him querulously cocked its head to one side. Then, apparently satisfied, it resumed its work. So did its several dozen colleagues. The source of both the vibration and the peculiar loud clicking noise was now clear. It was the sound a woodpecker made while searching for the insects that scuttled about beneath a tree's bark.
Only in this instance, it was a sound generated not by one but by hundreds of woodpeckers, all working in unison with a unanimity of purpose otherwise unknown to their kind, summoned hither at the behest of a certain song propounded and somehow successfully put forth by a former master winged warbler named Taj.
'I don't know how I did it.'
The songster was sitting on the rim of the great cavity the woodpeckers and flickers and all their multifarious, industrious relatives had made in the flank of the fallen kauri. Oskar relaxed nearby, engaged in the ongoing task of removing a seemingly infinite supply of splinters and sawdust from his skin, hair, and clothing. Mamakitty was helping Cocoa to do the same. Below them, thousands of sharp-beaked birds had exposed the bodies of and were working hard to free Cezer and Samm, who alone among the travelers were still imprisoned within the tree.
'You must have some idea.' Oskar extracted a sliver of durable kauri from beneath his right arm.
Hands clasped between his knees, the songster watched his feathery brethren at work and smiled ingenuously. 'I really don't. As you know, the Master was always fond of my singing. He used to try to teach me his favorite songs, but I preferred my own. My kind is very good at piling variation on top of variation. Stuck inside the tree, I found myself wondering what could get us out. A human would have thought about a drill, or a saw. A dog, maybe, about digging, and a snake about wriggling out a crack or a hole.' He looked away shyly.
'Me, I thought about pecking. But canaries aren't very well equipped for that sort of work, and humans even less so. So I wondered who would be good at it, and what kind of song might bring them to help us.' He gestured at the hollow in which woodpeckers swarmed like ants, battering at the kauri heartwood with their beaks. 'And here they are.'
Oskar's brows creased. 'But how could they hear you singing through all that wood, and so many, from so far away?'
Once again the songster could only shrug. 'To know that, you would have to ask Master Evyndd. But each of us has been given a little magic that is part and parcel of ourselves. What more natural than that my singing should be similarly so fortified?'
'I wish Evyndd had been more explicit, instead of leaving us to find these things out for ourselves.'
Taj flicked wood dust from his boots. 'Perhaps he felt it would have frightened us to learn of such abilities before we had spent time getting used to our human forms. Perhaps he feared that, inexperienced and clumsy as we are, we might have done more damage knowing about them than not. Again, you would have to ask him.'
'I wish I could.' Rising to his feet, Oskar brushed at his pants and peered down into the cavity. Cezer was almost free, while Samm's bulkier frame would require a bit more effort on the part of the diligent birds. 'I wish he was here now, to guide us and help us, instead of leaving us to stumble onward by ourselves, suffering and learning as we go.'
Taj's tone was unusually contemplative for the normally high-strung singer. 'I imagine that the suffering is a component of the learning.'
Oskar grunted. 'That sounds like something a sorcerer would say. Don't let Cezer hear you say that. Our excitable swordsman is of a different opinion.'
'And at the moment, of mouth.' Looking down, rhythmically tapping the side of the wood depression with the heels of his boots, Taj could not repress a grin. 'It's full of wood dust.'
Together they watched and waited as the army of woodpeckers finished freeing the remaining two members of the party. Then, their work done, the ivory-bills and flickers, three-toeds and chestnuts, short-tails and long-tails, rose individually and in groups to disappear back into the depths of the forest. As for those inimical woods, they remained still and silent. Perhaps, Oskar mused, the ill-natured nature of this place was still stunned by the travelers' escape from the entombing gravitas of the sacrificing kauri. If so, then now would be an especially auspicious time to resume their journey, before the denizens of the Kingdom of Green could regain their wits and conjure yet another devilment to place in the visitors' way.
Cezer proved uncharacteristically subdued as he climbed out of the gaping hole in the side of the fallen colossus. No doubt, Oskar decided, his friend's term of interment had given him ample, if unwanted, time for reflection. In any event, his tone was conciliatory rather than contrary, and his sentences short on (though not entirely devoid of) the expected flurry of expletives. As for Samm, he was his usual stolid self. Used as he was to remaining motionless for extended periods of time, he had been less affected than any of his companions by the potentially traumatizing incident. Brushing chunks of woodpecker-pecked wood from his shoulders, he walked a short distance from the fallen giant to recover his axe, which lay where he had thrown it during his attempt to escape the falling bole.
Freed from their inscrutable wooden prison and gathered together again, they spent the rest of the day searching for their missing forest friends. Of hopeful willow and stoic oak, eager sycamore and unrepentant maple, there was no sign save the millions of splinters that formed a broken and shattered bed beneath the immense bulk of the fallen kauri. By unspoken agreement, no one knelt to examine individual fragments too closely, lest they discover bits and pieces of their former guides. It was not the first time Oskar had wept over the loss of a memorable tree.
Without anyone to lead them, they were forced to continue eastward on their own, using their shared innate sense of direction while trying to keep to the course set by the absent quartet. Oskar's conjecture that the hostile woodland had been left dazed by their woodpecker-aided escape could not be proven, but for whatever reason, they were not attacked as they trekked steadily to the east. No concussion-causing nuts came their way, no flying thorns, no looping vines. Swiftly upthrusting saplings did not arise to form an obstructing palisade in front of them, and roots failed to erupt from the bare earth to clutch at their feet. If the forest had not been left stunned by their unexpected breakout, neither did it act to further hinder their progress. Or perhaps it simply feared the threatening presence of the great cutting axe that rode on Samm's broad shoulder.
Then there came a day when the trees finally began to thin out in front of them. The pale green light ahead darkened slightly, turning a marvelous shade of aquamarine. In the distance they could see clearly the sun setting behind a bright blue sea, above which blue clouds hung in a cerulean sky. After marching for days between oppressive walls of green that might at any moment choose to crumple inward or otherwise assail them, the travelers were mightily grateful to emerge from their soaring company.
Of course, the sea presented an entirely new and, in its own way, potentially far more awkward barrier to their advancement. Oskar didn't care. Anything was better than being trapped among the troublesome trees and
