In the Green Star's Glow

16. The Mind-Search

At length, having failed to discover the whereabouts of Delgan of the Isles, Zorak of Tharkoon, or Niamh the Fair, and having failed as well to find out what had happened to myself, Prince Andar called off the search.

Although he did so with the greatest reluctance, it was obvious to all that further expeditions into the edges of the forest country would be equally as fruitless as those which had already been so tirelessly prosecuted.

The searchers embarked for their return voyage to the royal isle of Komar, leaving behind only Zarqa the Kalood.

The Winged lean politely declined Prince Andar’s invitation to return to Komar and rejoin his comrades, the newly married Prince Janchan and Princess Arjala, who were anxiously awaiting news of their lost friends.

I shall remain here in the forest for a time, Zarqa said in the telepathic mode of communication his kind employed in lieu of vocal speech. It may yet be possible to ascertain the whereabouts of my dear friends. At least, it is my most earnest desire to attempt it.

“Well, I can certainly understand your determination, Zarqa, and your desire to find your friends,” said Andar the Komarian thoughtfully. “But why do you think that you might succeed, where so many of my men have already failed?”

To this query the Winged Man made a polite but largely evasive reply. Always cautious of hurting the feelings of humans, whom he could not help but regard as less fortunate than he, Zarqa restrained himself from giving voice to his real thoughts.

He felt that he, being an immortal, and for that reason less conscious of the passing of time, was capable of far greater patience than were the Komarians. No matter how deeply and sincerely they desired to find and rescue from the perils of the wilderness the strangers who had come to their assistance in reconquering the kingdom of Komar from the Blue Barbarians, they were still mortal, and therefore time-bound. A day, a week, was an appreciable division of time to their way of thinking, because it was a measurable fraction of their lives.

Not so, to Zarqa the Kalood. To search the worldwide forest of gigantic trees for a year or even ten, meant nothing to a being whose lifespan was to be measured in many millions of years. Zarqa was more than willing to devote so long a time to the search. Not only did the Kalood suffer less than did humans from deprivation, due to his enormously tough and resilient physical makeup, but he seldom required nutriment and never needed to sleep.

And I, Karn, was the first true friend he had found in all the world since the death of the last of his kind a million years ago. I had been the first human to extend to Zarqa the warm handclasp of friendship and, in so doing, to bridge the abyss which lay between his kind and my own.

Zarqa was unable to forget that. He was ready to devote the remainder of his life, however long his immortality might last, to the search for me and my friends, or for our remains.

Moreover, it was undeniably true that Zarqa possessed one unique faculty which made his ability to search the forest of mile-high trees far more swiftly and easily than could Andar’s men, for all their numbers. And that was his wings.

Therefore, bidding Prince Andar and the others farewell for a time, Zarqa watched as they embarked for the voyage back to Komar. Then he turned, spread his great batlike golden wings, and glided from the branch into the green-gold twilight world of the giant trees.

The immediate edge of the world-forest had already been thoroughly combed by the Komarian force. They had started at the approximate point at which the sky craft, bearing Delgan and Zorak and Niamh, had been observed to enter the vast wall of treetrunks, and had searched with minute care along the edge and then deeper into the almost impenetrable woods.

Zarqa, therefore, wasted no energy in retracing their steps but sailed deeper yet into the forest, and then began to scrutinize the great trees, bough by bough, branch by branch, for any sign of human habitation.

With his enormous patience and his lack of any need for rest or sleep or food, the gaunt Kalood was able to search tirelessly, even into the hours of darkness; for his visual organs, designed along somewhat different lines than those of the human eye, required far less light in order to see.

Before leaving the royal isle of Komar, Zarqa had imbibed of the golden mead which was all the nutriment his physical system required. He could now go for many weeks, even for months, before he would begin to suffer from any lack of sustenance. When the extinct Kaloodhan race, with their miraculous super-science, had redesigned their bodies more than two thousand millennia before, they had wisely eliminated many of the built-in limiting factors which impaired the efficiency of their anatomy. They had done the job well …

After some days of tireless and unceasing search, Zarqa came to realize that his present mode of investigation was likely to prove ultimately unprofitable.

It became obvious to the Winged Flan that since they had first entered into the vast and towering forest, his friends had traveled or wandered or had been transported far away from their point of entry. He had, of course, no knowledge of the various mishaps and adventures which had befallen his former comrades, but they were simply nowhere to be found.

They were, quite obviously, still traveling. He reasoned that every hour and every day which he continued to waste by searching in his present slow, meticulous fashion, they were doubtless still voyaging far afield.

Before long, Zarqa thought of a more efficient mode of searching, a method by which he might cover enormous territory much faster, yet search just as carefully and minutely as before.

The solution to his problem was to search by mind alone.

When Nature denied the Winged Men the power of articulate speech, she repaired that omission by bequeathing to them the ability to communicate on a purely telepathic level. To the Kaloodha, then, it naturally follows, the mental radiations of a mind are as distinctly individual as personal speech is to us. Whereas we recognize differences in tone and pitch and timbre as characteristics of the individual, and recognize our friends’ voices even when unable to see them, so it is with the telepathically sensitive Kaloodha such as Zarqa.

I do not know precisely how the Winged Men identify individual mental radiations—whether it is by differences in the wavelength of thought waves or from the uniquely different configurations of each mental wavefront—but, however the manner in which they accomplish the feat, it is demonstrably possible for a Kalood to pick out the radiations of a single mind with which it is familiar, among many thousands.

So Zarqa began the mind-search.

Once before he had searched in this manner. That was when he and his companions had become separated by night during their flight from the Flying City of Calidar. Then he had searched for the mind of Ralidux the Black Immortal, but he could as easily have striven to locate Niamh the Fair or even the Goddess Arjala, for with their minds he had become by that time familiar.

Since Zarqa had no way of guessing which of his lost comrades he would encounter first, the Winged Man held firmly in mind the “flavor” and “style” and “color” of the mind radiations of Niamh and Delgan and Karn simultaneously. Only the mind of Zorak was not sufficiently known to him to afford Zarqa the chance to hold his mental characteristics firmly in memory during the search. These curious terms, by the way, are the closest that the Kalood can come in translating into human terminology the distinctly differing characteristics of individual human minds to which he is sensitive.

Now, mental radiations are not limited to line-of-sight. Neither are they blocked or dispersed or deflected by solid barriers, such as the boles or branches of the great trees of the forest (indeed, according to Zarqa, most solids are completely transparent to thought waves). Therefore, using the mind alone to search, the Winged Man was able to cover immense tracts of territory in very little time.

For another full day he flew without resting, ranging the forest in an ever-expanding spiral, his mental sensors alert and keen. The dim pulsations of brute mentalities he detected, and the keener, more articulated radiations of the minds of a variety of human brains. But nowhere did he catch the slightest trace or whisper of the three minds he sought.

Until night had fallen, that is.

Then, quite suddenly, there came to his alert concentration the distant echo of a familiar mind.

As soon as he was able to discern with some nicety the distance and direction of that mental source, he homed in on it. Flying on swift and tireless vans, the wise Kalood approached the position of the mind which was a familiar one.

It was in a peculiar set of surroundings, and more than a little danger compassed it around. But Zarqa arrowed through the dark night to come to the aid of one of the minds for which he had so untiringly searched… and found himself amid a frozen tableau of astonishing terror.

17. A Chance Discovery

During my first few days as a captive of the band of wild girls, I had sufficient opportunity to observe and even to experience their dislike of all males.

The girls kept me busy at the most menial and degrading of tasks, and seized upon every excuse to heap abuse and mistreatment upon me. I was forced to go continually naked, and my appearance afforded my savage captresses endless amusement. They also enjoyed seeing me toil for them, and I was beaten with a switch for every conceivable infraction of the rules governing my behavior.

At nights I slept on a crude pallet in a rough lean-to that adjoined the cabin in which the chieftainess of my tormentors dwelt. I refer, of course, to Varda.

My sleeping quarters were crudely built and of flimsy construction. On frequent occasions, it occurred to me that when and if the opportunity to make a break for freedom ever came, I should have little if any difficulty in getting out. Unfortunately, however, the savage band was ever on the alert to the possibility of my escape, and took every precaution to prevent it.

When, during the day, I was sent out to gather fruits or nuts or berries, a group of the littler savages accompanied me, and I performed these labors with a choke halter about my throat. To this was affixed a tether which the girls either held and cruelly jerked upon, or which was tied securely to a twig or some other relatively solid protuberance.

Very frequently, my wrists or ankles were tied together with bonds which, while they did not completely render me immobile, served at least to hamper and to restrict my freedom of movement. When I was permitted to sleep, my wrist or leg was bound securely to an iron ring sunk into the branch upon which the house of Varda was built.

My bonds, by the way, were neither ropes nor lengths of woven material, but strips of tough, well-seasoned rawhide. While I still retained a physical strength and a vitality which was considerably superior to that of a normal boy of my age and weight and height—a lingering aftereffect of the magical Elixir of Light of which I had imbibed long ago at the command of Sarchimus the Wise—it requires more than sheer brute force to sever so tenacious a form of bondage as rawhide. Nothing less than a sharp knife-blade would do the trick. I watched continuously for the chance to steal a knife or some similar sharp-edged tool, but the opportunity never once presented itself.

It began to look as if my plans for escape were hopeless pipe dreams …

While the girls beat me and used me with the utmost humiliation and scorn, mistreating me in every manner which their agile and vindictive wits could devise, they neither starved me nor managed to break my spirit.

I remained aloof and unperturbed, absorbing their cruelest punishments with a somber and uncomplaining mien. For this example of stoicism, I ask no particular credit, neither do I regard my behavior under these adverse conditions to be particularly praiseworthy or exemplary. I lived in the constant hope and expectation of freedom, which might come at any moment and in the most unexpected manner.

To be frank, I expected to be rescued, for I knew that my absence from Komar would not long go unnoticed, and that when both the skysled and myself were discovered to be missing, my friends would swiftly put two and two together, and arrive at the appropriate sum. Nor would they waste time in coming after me.

That they might have unexpected difficulties in finding me, I did not at that time envision. I had, you will understand, by this time so thoroughly become lost and disoriented, that I had not the slightest idea of quite how far I had strayed from the point at which I had first entered the forest, nor of quite how deeply my wanderings had taken me into the depths of the wilderness of gigantic trees. That forest, of course, stretched in an unbroken mass from horizon to horizon and from pole to pole, covering, insofar as any of us then knew, the entire surface of the World of the Green Star. The only portion of the planet’s surface which was definitely known to be free and unencumbered by the world-forest, was, of course, that section occupied by the Komarian Sea.

So, as you will understand, I had plenty of room to be lost in!

Remaining in my blissful state of ignorance, and expecting at any moment the arrival of my friends to extricate me from my present plight and predicament, I worried little over the future and endured, with that stoicism and fortitude I have already described, the cruel treatment I suffered at the hands of these spiteful and malicious children.

Nor did I hate my savage captors.

But these expectations, of course, did not prohibit me from keeping a close and careful watch out for a chance to escape on my own. Confident are those who help themselves.

In all, I must admit that my personal feelings toward my savage little captors were of a somewhat ambivalent nature. I could not quite find it within me to despise them, for all the abuse and discomfiture I endured at their hands.

At a young and tender age they had been wantonly savaged by the slavers who had carried them off forcibly into the wilderness, and by that act had seemingly doomed them to lives of hopeless despair. That they had managed to escape from the hands of the marauders had in no way alleviated the precarious and perilous situation into which they had been thrust.

Nor could they be blamed for their fear and loathing and mistrust of my sex, for it was at the hands of men like myself that they had suffered untold horrors and humiliations, from which indignities only the chance attack of the swarm of zzumalaks, or giant killer-bees, had delivered them.

Helpless to find their way home again, the girls had simply ventured out into the wilderness; at length finding the safe, secure nook in which they had built their camp and made it their home. Many of the tools and weapons which had formerly been the possessions of the slavers they had carried off with them, for to the survivor belongs the possessions of the slain.

The only other thing they had borne away from their dire experience at the mercy of the slave-marauders was their vicious and virulent hatred, loathing, and mistrust of all things male and masculine.

Which was only natural and human, and, certainly, quite understandable.

But which was, from my point of view, regrettable; for that hatred unfortunately included myself.

My chances for escape were very soon to take on healthy and renewed vigor. Here is how it came about.

One day my giggling captors led me farther down the great branch on which their encampment was constructed than until now I had been permitted to travel.

The reason for this lay in the discovery of an unexpected colony of the giant tree-snails, or huoma, whose tender and delicious meat made a succulent and desirable treat to our appetites. In general we lived on more Spartan and even vegetarian fare.

Under the watchful eye of the girls I pried the huge snails one by one from their positions, and bundled them into nets. Later, back at the camp, we would unshell the creatures and boil them in their own juices.

Quite a considerable number of the huge, thick-witted, slow-moving, gentle, and quite harmless monster snails had for some reason gathered on the branch, so the work occupied us for the remainder of that day.

The last few snails had sluggishly sought to avoid capture by crawling, in their lumbering form of perambulation, around to the underside of the branch.

In order to gather these last, reluctant survivors of the snail colony, I had to venture the risky business of climbing around beneath the branch. The situation was precarious and not without a certain element of danger, for I was suspended by ropes held in the hands of my careless and capricious mistresses, who threatened to let me fall if I did not quickly accomplish my tasks.

The job was difficult, and tiring, but for a very good reason I was delighted that it had fallen to my lot.

This peculiar contradiction lay in the fact of what I discovered from my upside-down position at the end of the rope.

The skysled was tethered to a down-jutting twig.

Evidently the girls had, with time, become curious as to the nature of the odd contrivance in which I had been curled up asleep when they found me and made me their captive.

A second expedition had retraced the path taken by the first, and, when the utter weightlessness of the vehicle was discovered (which made it easy to bear the prize home to the girls’ camp), they had retrieved the peculiar treasure and it now reposed, safely tethered, at no very great distance from the tree-houses.

If I could somehow manage to contrive my escape—the means of flight to freedom was close at hand.

The tantalizing presence of the skysled drove new life into my hopes for escape.

That night, as you can easily imagine, I tossed and turned, schemes tumbling through my feverish brain, and got very little sleep.

18. Varda

The nearness of the skysled put escape virtually within my grasp. But it did nothing to make escape a reality. For still was I bound and watched and tethered every moment of the day and night.

So, for the time being, I held my peace and waited things out, ever alert for the slightest slip or inattention on the part of the wild girls when I might seize opportunity by the forelock.

And still my friends did not come.

The ever-present rivalry between Varda and Iona filled the air with the tension of an unresolved conflict. Iona was continually challenging the authority of Varda, the wisdom of her decisions, and the justice of her rules. Moreover, she was constantly complaining, quarreling, criticizing. Varda kept her temper, for the most part, although I for one cannot understand how she managed to accomplish this.

But she was fully aware of the fact that Iona hated and envied her, and desired more than anything else to supplant her in the chieftaincy of the Amazon band. She knew all too well that the jealous older girl was whispering and scheming behind her back, but there was little she could do about it.

Instead, she took her frustrations and tensions out on me.

I was the butt of her fury and the object of her derision. Nothing I did pleased her sufficiently, and in no way could I satisfy her demands of perfection. I was punished, sometimes by scorn and mockery and public humiliation, but very often by punishment of a more corporeal nature.

Through it all I held my tongue, maintained my dignity as best I could, and watched and waited for the chance to make a break for freedom. Would it never come? Would I never be free of these malicious girls, free to seek my own lost beloved amid the trackless forest? Even now she might be dead, or dying, or suffering unendurable torments or privations, or in deadly danger.

It was the unknown fate of Niamh the Fair that was my saddest torment; and my love for her proved a steadfast anchor to which I clung, no matter how furious the gales which swept about me and sought to drag me down into the depths of despair. Silently, within my secret heart, I vowed a thousand times to win my way to her side—somehow, somehow!—though all the world stood ranked against me.

Very gradually there came a change in the manner with which Varda regarded me. It was neither a change for the better, or a change which I liked.

Sometimes, as I knelt scrubbing the floor, or bent over the kitchen utensils to cleanse them, or gathered firewood for the hearth, I was conscious of her eyes lingering upon my naked manhood in a curious manner. It roused within me a tingling apprehension which I can neither quite describe nor account for.

It happened the first time one morning while I was cutting wood for the cookfire.

The girl outlaws had carried off an axelike tool from the camp of the slave-marauders, and with this I was busily engaged in splitting the great slabs of bark from the branch upon which the camp was built, cutting these slabs into slender lathes, and bundling then with twine for the hearth.

The morning was hot and humid, the air windless. Leaves, which were bent awry in such a manner as toy screen the huts and cabins from aerial view, hung motionless in the steamy air.

I had been at work for about an hour and my naked hide glistened with perspiration, which ran in long wet rivulets down my belly and thighs, cutting paths through the bark-dust. The daylight gleamed in highlights along the raised ridges of the muscles of my legs, and the great thews which swelled along my back and shoulders. Each time I drew erect and lifted the heavy ax above my head, my powerfully developed pectoral muscles stood forth in sharp relief, and the corded muscles of my taut midsection grew rock-ribbed and hard.

I became aware of Varda’s gaze upon my nakedness.

The expression on her face was unreadable. Her eyes were bright and hot, yet somehow dreamy as well. Her gaze lingered on the musculature of my chest and arms, which by now were deeply bronzed from many weeks of exposure to the rays of the Green Star, during the time I had been marooned with Shann on the desert island amid the Sea of Komar.

The thirteen-year-old girl stood, her body turned a little from me, one slim hand at her throat, her head twisted to observe my body. I saw that her shallow adolescent breasts rose and fell with the rapidity of her breathing, and that high color rose to mantle her cheeks.

Catching my inquiring gaze, her eyes widened and fell, veiled behind heavy lashes, and she turned away.

But not before I saw the burning color of her cheeks.

A day or two later, while setting the long table for the evening meal, she had cause to reprimand me for a fancied clumsiness. She slapped and scratched me as I stood unresisting, my arms folded upon my chest, my head lowered. Suddenly, her blows softened almost to so many caresses. She drew the fingers of one hand, slowly, down the bulge of my biceps while her other hand went out, tentatively, to touch my bent back.

I heard her catch her breath.

The moment was electric with excitement. I said nothing, did nothing. Her hand removed itself, and the next thing I knew, she had left the cabin, and did not return for hours, not even to join in the evening meal.

She did not return, in fact, until after the fall of darkness. As I lay unsleeping in my cubicle, tethered to the metal ring, I heard her come slamming in, then the creak off her cot as she flung her restless body upon it. Then, a bit later, I beard the muffled sound of her weeping.

She cried herself to sleep that night. But I… I did not sleep at all, but lay staring up into the darkness, thinking my own thoughts.

Many times during the days and nights thereafter I felt the sensitive pressure of her gaze upon my body as I toiled at my tasks. It seemed to me that Varda sought every pretense she could think of to be in my proximity, and that she found many a reason to touch me or to stand very close to me.

I pretended to notice nothing, hoping I was mistaken about the cause of her curious malady, and its nature. For it was not really either rare or curious, the fever which, as I suspected, had Varda in its grip.

It was a sickness as old as the very world.

The affection which Varda evidently felt for me had an adverse effect on our relationship. Instead of being kinder and more gentle in her treatment, she flew more frequently into wild and furious rages, during which she scratched and pummeled me unmercifully. She fell into black moods of brooding, or into sulky passions during which nothing could rouse her or lighten her mood.

When she had cause to punish me, she did so with the utmost cruelty and vigor. It was almost as if, in punishing me, she was somehow inflicting punishment upon herself.

Although I am no psychologist, and, no more than any other man, pretend to have anything but the slightest and most cursory understanding of women, I believe I came to an understanding of her dilemma. It was the conflict between her private emotions and her public position.

The savage girls had been misused and outraged by their brutal captors. Slaying the marauders who had enslaved them had not sufficed to revenge them fully upon the male sex. So they maintained a virulent hatred of the other half of the human species, and, as I was the only male around, took this out on me.

So—while all that was womanly in the heart of the teen-aged girl was beginning to respond to my own maleness—this was in conflict with Varda’s own ingrained loathing of the masculine gender. She loathed and hated herself, on some deep, hidden layer of her being, for looking upon me with the dawning of desire.

Being only human, she punished me for the mere fact that I was a male, and that she found my maleness arousing.

The situation was potentially an explosive one.

I literally held my breath and stayed out of her way as best I could. It goes without saying that, neither by look, word, act, nor gesture, did I encourage her interest in me or display any awareness or response to her own youthful and violent passion.

This, however, seemed only to heap fuel on the flames that raged within the girl.

It was a horrible situation to be in. I could see the danger of it, but I knew myself to be completely helpless to avert the catastrophe I could so clearly foresee.

There is nothing more ghastly than the position of the prophet who, although forewarned, can do nothing to avoid the impending doom he senses.

19. The Eavesdropper

The increasing interest paid to me by Varda became more and more obvious, until it reached the point at which I was surprised that none of the other girls in the savage little band noticed it.

The peculiar expression that appeared in her eyes whenever the teen-aged girl looked into my face disturbed me profoundly. It was eloquent, if unspoken—a dare, almost a challenge. But a challenge to which I did not dare give any response. In fact, I ignored her as much as was possible, under the circumstances, and pretended to be oblivious of the way in which she virtually flaunted her half-naked young body before me at every opportunity.

The situation was drawing toward a climax, I knew; and yet I was helpless to do anything to avoid the explosion I foresaw so clearly.

Again and again, over the next day or two, I wished most vehemently that my friends would come to rescue me from this explosive tinderbox of emotions.

But they did not come …

One evening matters came to a head, and the manner of it was as follows;

The girls had, after considerable tinkering, managed to figure out how to open the storage compartment which was located in the tail of the skysled. I am only deducing this from available evidence, but there was indeed a lag of some days between the time I discovered the wild girls had salvaged my abandoned aerial vehicle, and the time they found the supplies and gear I had stored in the storage compartment.

It would have been a simple matter, had they but directed me to open the tail storage compartment for them, of course, but they gave me no such orders. I presume it was but another example of their fierce bias against my sex; to have instructed me to open the compartment for them would have been to admit openly that they did not know how the lock worked. This admission, I suppose, would have damaged their imagined superiority over all males. So they had to work it out for themselves.

When they did so, the girls had a holiday with my stores and provisions.

Before leaving the royal isle of Komar I had, you will remember, stocked my vehicle with meats, jellies, fruit, and pastry, and the peculiar purple cheeselike concoction which the Komarians regard as a rare delicacy.

These were not exactly the most ideal provisions imaginable for a journey, but were all that I had ready access to in my hurry to be off following the trail of Niamh, Zorak, and Delgan. I had, quite simply, plundered the foodstuffs from the leftovers that remained after the wedding-feast of Prince Janchan and the Goddess Arjala.

Since the savage girls subsisted largely on the fruits and nuts and berries of the forest, leavened out with occasional huoma meat, this festive fare from the banquet tables of Komar was a welcome treat to them. That evening they made a feast in the largest of the huts.

If you recall my description of the events leading up to my hasty departure from the island of the Komarians, you will also remember that, in lieu of any other drinkables, I stocked the skysled with several bottles of the effervescent golden wine of Komar.

This delicacy, in particular, delighted the palate of the little savages… and led to the crisis I had so long foreseen, while remaining powerless to circumvent.

The girls got drunk!

The only fluids they had imbibed in recent months had been rainwater and dew, collected from the curled upper surfaces of the enormous leaves that sheltered their encampment from any chance observation. The water was pure and clear and drinkable enough, to be sure, but somewhat lacking in flavor.

The golden wine of Komar, however, was quite another matter.

As they drank deep of the potent beverage, their faces grew flushed, their eyes began to sparkle, their behavior became raucous, and a mood of hilarity dominated the festive board.

In particular, it was their thirteen-year-old leader, Varda, who drank most deeply of the intoxicant. Her color deepened under the influence of the delicious wine, her eyes became humid, her movements languid yet tense, feverish, and sensual.

One by one the little girls wearied of singing and frolicking and squabbling. The wine had gone directly to their heads, which was not surprising, since in all likelihood it was the first strong drink they had enjoyed in the three quarters of a year or more since they had managed to escape from the slaver’s camp.

It occurred to me that I might very possibly turn this event to my own advantage. That is, if the savage girls got drunk enough they might sleep so soundly that I could break free without being discovered. Then all I had to do was find my way back to the skysled and fly away to freedom.

It was certainly worth a try.

However, the wine had a somewhat different effect on my girl captors than the one I had hoped for.

One by one, the littler girls became woozy, then sleepy and went off to their sleeping-furs. Eventually I was left alone with Varda.

The wine she had imbibed heightened the color in her cheeks and put a vivacious sparkle in her eyes. It also heated her blood.

“Come here, slave,” she snarled, tugging at my leash. She brought me over to where she sat, or rather sprawled, and forced me to my knees before her. Then she looked me over carefully, thoughtfully, a feverish glitter in her eyes that I did not like.

“For a man-cub, you’re not at all bad-looking,” the girl said hoarsely. She licked her lips, glancing about almost guiltily, as if to make certain we were unobserved.

I said nothing.

Then she bent forward suddenly, seized a handful of my yellow hair, tugged my head back, and kissed me. When I resolutely failed to respond to her kiss, she wrapped her arms about my neck and kissed me again, this time more deeply.

She broke off the kiss, gasping, to peer around, again as if half fearful we were being observed.

I did not like the languid glow in her eye, nor the way she moistened her lips with the small pointed tip of her soft pink tongue.

I opened my mouth, about to protest, but before I could say a word the girl abandoned all pretense and flung herself upon me, covering my face and throat with hot, panting kisses. Her warm, lithe, body pressed against me in a frenzy, and her feverish, trembling caresses were curiously intermingled with sobbing endearments.

She behaved as if possessed. As I failed to respond, and strove to maintain a clear head, remaining adamant to her entreaties, her trembling caresses turned into slaps and blows. Sobbing wildly, tearful eyes gleaming through her disordered tresses, she scratched me like a wildcat and pummeled me unmercifully.

Finally, she collapsed against me, weeping as if her childish heart were broken.

I had striven with all the fortitude within me to avoid responding to her warm and wild caresses, turning my thoughts to Niamh my beloved, and ignoring her entreaties as I ignored her curses. Throughout this humiliating ordeal, then, I had managed, however barely, to remain aloof and unaroused, although I must confess my hot young blood raged within me. The girl was savagely exciting in her disheveled, animal passion. But my heart belonged to another, and I resisted her seductive enticements with might and main.

And then it was that I saw the face at the window.

For the purposes of ventilation, square openings had been cut in the bark-slab walls of Varda’s cabin, and sections of dead yellow leaves hung over these, propped open by lengths of twig to permit the circulation of air.

The white face that peered in at us from the square of blackness had evidently observed us for some time. It was pale, wide-eyed, distraught. Scorn and cold fury and the awful gleam of vengeance was visible in the green eyes, and the mouth was curled in a fierce, gloating smile of vindictive triumph.

Only for a moment did the face hang there before it vanished. But in that moment the shock of finding ourselves observed made me stiffen my body, and when I did so, Varda, whose arms were clasped about my neck, raised her head and looked at the window.

She gasped in horror—for the face at the window had been the face of Iona.

20. The Moment of Truth

Varda gasped and sprang to her feet, staring wild-eyed at the window. But the white, scornful face of Iona was no longer there. The girl ran over to the door, ripped it open, and stared out into the night. There was no sign of the eavesdropper to be seen, apparently.

Varda returned listlessly to the cabin and sagged wearily against the table. Her face was drained, empty;

“I think she saw us,” she whispered faintly.

“I know she did,” I said.

The girl’s temper flared. She turned on me, spitting viciously. “If only you had never come among us, with your vile maleness—!” she hissed, her eyes murderous.

“I did not come of my own free will,” I said reasonably. “You forced me at spearpoint.” The truth of this seemed to exhaust her spiteful temper. She nodded dully, saying nothing. Then she began to whimper; she was, after all, little more than a child.

It suddenly occurred to me how I might turn this disastrous misfortune to my own advantage.

“What will Iona do now?” I asked urgently. The girl shrugged.

“She will tell the rest of the girls that I broke our rule against men,” she said listlessly. “Against—you know—having to do with men. They will…”

“Give the chieftainship to Iona?” I asked sharply. “Depose you? Outlaw you—force you out into the forest alone?”

She nodded slowly. “Perhaps even… kill me. I don’t know!” Then she whirled on me again, her eyes narrowing and filled with venom. In this temper she was very dangerous, I knew.

“And it’s all your fault,” she snapped.

“Then let me make reparations,” I urged her. “Let me save you from this danger. Cut me free—the knife, there, at your belt! Let us escape together. My skysled—the flying vehicle in which I came here—is tethered not very far up the branch. Only I know how to operate it. It can fly us away from here swifter even than if we rode a great zaiph. Together we can be safe, and I will protect you against the dangers of the wild.”

These words came out of me in a breathless rush, and she blinked thoughtfully, absorbing this new idea. Her hand strayed to her belt, that bit of rawhide which held the skins about her slender body, and the tips of her fingers toyed absently with the handle of her knife.

She hesitated, glancing back at the doorway which stood open and was filled with empty darkness. The girl bit her lips uncertaintly, trying to think what to do. As if I were another telepath like Zarqa, I could read the thoughts which seethed through her troubled mind;

Perhaps it would be better if I slid this knife between his ribs, rather than flee into the unknown alone with only a brutal male to dominate and abuse me … There, when Iona comes with the girls, I could lie and say he forced himself upon me and that I was only struggling to free myself from his embrace … No one would ever be able to prove the truth … I could say that Iona lied. Everyone knows how jealous she is of me, and how she twists the truth to make me look had …

Then she turned, as if reaching a decision, and looked me straight in the eyes.

“If I run away with you, will you become my lover?” she asked. The knife-blade was naked and ready in her hand.

The moment of truth had come at last.

“No,” I said. The light that flashed up in her eyes was not pleasant to see.

Flushed with triumph, Iona scampered agilely down the rungs of the ladder which led to the lower buts where the littler girls of the band slept in dormitory style. The voluptuous teen-ager was aglow with delighted gloating. At last, she thought, that bossy little hussy has played directly into my hands!

Iona threw back her head in a grimace of triumph that made her lovely face momentarily ugly. Her wild peal of laughter rang loud in the humid stillness of the night.

All around her, the world-forest was drenched in utter gloom. The moonless nights of Lao are abysses of unbroken blackness, and the inhabitants of the forest world are unaccustomed to venture abroad during the hours of darkness, except on furtive missions of stealth and secrecy.

Iona was, for this reason, alone in the night. The wild band of Amazon girls were not used even to the posting of sentinels during the night hours, there being no particular reason to do so.

The night was as black as the bitterness in Iona’s heart, and as bottomless as the depth of rancor within that heart. Long, long had she seethed inwardly with jealousy and envy of the pert tomboy who had assumed command of the savage little band. Longer still had Iona dreamed hungrily of somehow seizing the position of dominance which, in her mind, the younger girl had far too long enjoyed.

At last the fulfillment of her dreams was within her grasp.

The girl again permitted that grimace of triumph to play gloatingly across her features, in an expression that was half smile, half snarl. She felt glorious, superb!

“How could I not have guessed that the man-cub would tempt her to betray herself,” the girl panted with a wild, shaky laugh. “She likes men after all. How she must have enjoyed the way the slavers handled her! She lied all the while, saying we did not need males, and that she loathed them, and would kill more if she could! And then—to kiss and caress a skinny, half-grown forest boy! Ahh! The liar!”

It was not easy to make one’s way down the ladder rungs in the dark, for the pitch was precarious, and some of the twig sections nailed to the branch were wobbly and insecure. More than once, Iona slipped and almost fell.

Finally, she reached the big cabin where several of the little girls she had particularly tried to enlist in her following slept. She paused on the porch for a moment to calm her thudding heart and to catch her breath. Then she unlatched the catch and threw the door open and strode inside to rouse the sleeping children.

It did not take Iona long to awake the sleepy, befuddled, half-intoxicated girls from their slumbers, nor to breathlessly spew forth the story of that intimate scene which she had spied upon through the open window, nor to sting the little savages to anger with her malicious interpretation of what she had seen.

The hatred and loathing of everything male had been with the forest girls so long that it seemed natural and normal to their way of thinking; a universal law that preached the male of the species was vile and cruel and nasty, and the female pure and noble. By this time, the younger girls quite believed in this perverted gospel, and, in all fairness, the abuse and mistreatment they had endured at the hands of the brutal band of slave-marauders who had torn them from their homes, and used them as they pleased, did much to ratify their bias against all men.

Now, to learn that Varda, their leader, their lawmaker, the older girl they all idolized and admired, had betrayed this most vital and sacred doctrine by fondling and cuddling with the captive boy-slave seemed to them an outrage too vile to be endured.

They came boiling out of their cabin in a fury, like a swarm of zzumalak whose nesting place has been violated.

Shrieking, the girls swarmed up the ladder rungs to the branch above, rousing some of the older girls who slept alone or in pairs in the smaller huts. Before long the entire band of little savages was clamoring at the door to the house of their leader.

Iona shouldered her way through the yelling mob, her face glowing with the emotion which gripped her heart, her eyes flashing with triumph.

Signaling for silence with an imperious gesture, she flung the door wide.

The savage girls peered in, to confront a surprising sight… a sight they had not expected to see… and a sight at which the heart of Iona froze in terrible consternation.