Under the Green Star

Chapter 11 A NIGHT IN A TREE

My life on Earth had been such that I had never been called upon to develop resourcefulness. A man of great wealth, surrounded by loyal servants, confined to my bed or a wheelchair, I had never been flung into circumstances where my very survival rested on my abilities to exist unaided in the wilderness.

But now I had nothing else to count on. At my side, worn and pale from the horrible experiences through which she had suffered, lay a beautiful young girl thrust by hapless fate under my protection.

Our predicament was an utterly hopeless one. Hungry, bone-weary from our battle against the albino xoph, trembling with fatigue from our exhausting climb up the monster spiderweb, marooned in a giant tree a mile above the world, we somehow had to find food and warmth and shelter from the night, and protection against the hideous predators who soon would be a prowl. And we had nothing but our bare hands!

Or did we? I still wore the leathern harness of a Laonese warrior, and the princess retained some tattered rags of her once-gorgeous gown, and perhaps something could be fashioned from the scraps. Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention; and few heroes of romance have suffered from the extremity of a need as great as ours.

The harness in which I was clad was a skimpy thing at best. An affair of belts and straps crisscrossed my naked chest; about my hips I wore a thick, heavy belt or girdle; my feet were shod in high, swash-top boots. Save for these, I was devoid of ornament or accouterment.

As for Niamh, she was left with mere tatters wherewith to clothe her modesty, and the brevity of her raiment was such as to leave naked her long, exquisitely slender legs and arms of mellow ivory; and, in truth, what little clothing she retained was full of rents through which gleamed glimpses of creamy flesh. A jeweled brooch, however, yet clung by its pin to the breast of her garment, and a large diamond, or some similar gemstone of smoky, lucent fire, adorned her hand.

As for my own harness, the heavy girdle clasped about my waist was fastened by a heavy buckle larger than a man’s open hand. The tang of this buckle was a slender blade of coppery metal slightly more than four inches long. It might well serve as a decent dagger blade, if I had the means to sharpen it or to hone its edges.

Had we not been aloft in the branch of the sky-tall tree, I have no doubt but what I could have found a bit of flinty rock with a little searching, and could have honed my makeshift blade to a keen edge with some labor. One does not, however, look for stones in the upper branches of a tree.

I could not ignore this problem with any serenity of mind, for without a weapon of some sort we would be helpless to avoid the attack of the numberless predators with which the World of the Green Star swarmed. Our success in battling free of the monster spider was pure luck and largely accidental; I could not rely on fortune or Providence alone to extricate us safely from a second such encounter.

While Niamh rested, I rose to my feet and began prowling about the branch, looking for I know not what, but unable to rest easy without exploring our vicinity to discover what chance coupled with ingenuity might do to improve our situation. Food and drink were a problem, but the necessity of finding or making some manner of weapon occupied my thoughts to the exclusion of all else. Without a means of defending myself from attack, we would pass every moment in peril until help arrived from the Jewel City courtiers stranded somewhere aloft.

I explored first the crotch of the tree, the junction from which our branch sprang from the central trunk. The branch itself extruded from the trunk at a slight angle, and the place where it merged with the trunk formed a bowl-shaped hollow like a shallow pit. This slight depression contained a litter of dried leaves—each the size of outspread bedsheets. Here and there, pools of fresh rainwater had been caught in crevices in the rough bark. Thirst, therefore, would not be a problem of major concern, although lack of food might be.

After searching the crotch of the tree, I went further out on the branch to see what I might find. The branch extended for about a quarter of a mile, and, although it dwindled in width and angled upward at an ever-increasing incline, I found no especial difficulty in traversing its length, as the roughness of the bark made my progress easy enough—rather like walking across a field corrugated by the plow marks of a tractor.

Suddenly I stopped short. I had discovered we were not alone on our airy perch, and I tensed in grim anticipation of another unequal combat with a forest monster. The hulking shape before me was shrouded in the gloom of leaf-shadow: all I could make out was a gradual creeping movement and the rondure of a curved back, or so I at first assumed it to be. At length, however, and to my immense relief, I discovered the creature to be some sort of tree snail and probably of a harmless nature and a sluggish disposition. The snail, however, was the size of a full-grown dog, and its shell was a swelling hemisphere of pearly yellowish stuff, half as big as a bathtub.

The smallness of the inoffensive creature puzzled me a bit. If moths and dragonflies on this World of the Green Star grew to the size of horses and were large enough to ride upon, and if spiders attained a virtually elephantine bulk, you would think snails would grow on a comparable scale. This particular member of the species might, of course, be young; it might also belong to a dwarf genus.

Niamh, by now fully rested from her ordeal and either grown venturesome or reluctant to let me out of her sight, followed me to the terminus of the branch.

“It is only a houoma,” she said. “It cannot harm us. In fact, they are good to eat.”

I had not thought of the fact that not only is snail flesh edible and nutritive but, as the French know, delicious. Now that the princess mentioned the fact, I recalled that I had many times dined on escargot and found it a tempting delicacy. It was not difficult to slay the sluggish houoma and drag it back down to the crotch of the branch, and between us Niamh and I managed to break the shell away.

She pointed out that the shell, which had cloven neatly into two rounded halves, could serve as a bowl and that we could simmer the flesh of the snail in its own juices had we but the means of making a fire. Of course, like its near relatives the clam and the oyster, the meat of the snail is edible even when raw, but I would prefer to eat it cooked.

That presented another problem, but luckily not an insoluble one. It was not an easy task to make a fire with what we had to hand, but with patience I managed at length to strike sparks from the steel pin of Niamh’s brooch and we found the soft inner lining of the tree bark as flammable as punk, while the dry tissue of the leaves flared up easily.

While Niamh cooked the succulent flesh of the houoma over a slow fire, filling the air with delicious odors, I busied myself with the remainder of the snail shell. The substance of the shell, while brittle, was remarkably tough. And while unshelling the houoma, I had found myself thinking about that hard horny shell, wondering if its cleanly broken edge would be durable enough so that I could hone and sharpen the tang of my belt buckle against it.

Copper is one of the softer metals, and by dint of patient and tedious effort I did indeed put an edge on my makeshift dagger blade. Or on half of it, anyway, leaving the blunter end to serve as my handgrip. This part of the dagger I bound with thin supple leather from my harness.

So, tired but safe enough for the present, we ate dinner. The houoma, by the way, tasted remarkably like clam meat and made a satisfying and very filling meal, there was so much of it. We could have done with a bit of tomato sauce, though, or a twist of lemon, but I suppose Crusoes cannot be choosy.

After dinner we were ready for sleep. I built the fire up with enough bark fragments and scrapings to keep it burning steadily during the night. The bark did not flame up as wood would have done, but smoldered, turning to long-lasting coals. The warm orange-red glow of the coals would serve to keep night-prowling predators away, or so I hoped, and would shed enough heat to keep us comfortable should the night turn cool.

We curled up for the night on either side of our fire, using the less brittle of the huge yellow leaves to wrap around us like blankets. I was feeling a natural pride in my newfound skills of woodsmanship, although Niamh took my resourcefulness for granted and did not seem to think it worthy of praise. Of course, in her eyes I was Chong, a mighty hero out of the distant past, supremely able to cope with any manly feat. Only I knew that I was not the reincarnation of her hero but an impostor in a borrowed body. I did not dare disabuse her of her illusions. Before we fell asleep, we discussed our predicament, the hazards we would face in the days to come, and what few hopes we had. Niamh believed there was very little chance of our being rescued by those of her courtiers we had left behind on some branch far above us.

“They would not know where to look,” she said quietly. “The world is large and full of terrors; and we are small and frail. They could not be expected to know we survived our fall, for none who fall from such a height ever survive.”

“But surely they will search for us, nonetheless!” I argued. “I wonder they did not come flying down to find us hours ago—the descent to the web wherein we were entangled would only have taken them minutes, mounted on their dhua.”

She shook her head, silvery gloss of hair gleaming in the warm light of the coals.

“That they did not do so convinces me of what I had feared,” she murmured, “and that is that they are marooned as helplessly as we. For the dhua are the natural prey of the fearsome ythid, and dread no beast with deeper terror. At the appearance of the tree dragon, the dhua would all have panicked, breaking tether and fleeing to the winds in their fright. I fear we can hope for no rescue from my people of Phaolon …”

She sighed. The dim golden glow of the coals was warm on her lovely, heart-shaped face. Her silken lashes fluttered down, veiling the glory of her depthless amber eyes. And she slept. I stared long at the beautiful young girl with whom I had fallen so hopelessly in love and, when at length I drifted into sleep myself, my dreams were filled with visions of a slender maiden with limbs of mellow ivory and an elfin face enhaloed with a silken cloud of hair like floating, silvery gossamer.

My life on Earth had been secluded, protected, luxurious and lovely. But I did not miss the safety and comforts of my Terrene existence. I would rather be where I was now, for all the discomforts and dangers, than return to Earth. I would rather dwell in a sky-high tree under the strange light of the Green Star, battling with naked hands against fearsome monsters, than go home to a dull, tedious life of boredom and ultimate futility.

For here I was a man, a splendid savage, not a hopeless cripple. Never before had I truly lived, tasting life with an appetite spiced with danger, feeling pride in my own prowess, knowing that each day I would face new and more horrendous perils, but knowing, at least, that I lived each moment to the hilt, with verve and gusto, with excitement and suspense, with romance and mystery and adventure, by the side of the most beautiful woman of two worlds!

Chapter 12 THE SCARLET ARROW

When I awoke, the sky above me was a stupendous and fantastic vista of colossal trees soaring to unthinkable heights, and the heavens themselves obscured by an infinite canopy of leaves that stretched from horizon to horizon. The light of the Green Star fell through rents in this enormous canopy in vagrant shafts of glowing jade, and the arboreal leafage itself was struck to an incandescence of burning gold.

The air was fresh and heady with a wine-like tang. My exertions of yesterday had left me aching with weariness and worn with fatigue. But a full belly and a night of deep slumber in the open air restored my vigor, and I rose with an exuberant vitality such as I have never known.

Niamh, too, rose refreshed and looking glorious. Gone was the jewelbox princess in her mandarin robes; in her place stood a lithe, long-legged girl with tousled hair, flushed cheeks, sparkling eyes, and joyous, merry laughter. A wild girl of the worldtall woods, true, in an abbreviated scrap of ragged raiment, but a fitting companion to the half-naked savage I had become, who faced the perils of the unknown forest armed only with a crude dagger!

We bathed in puddles of cold rainwater, breakfasted off the remnants of last night’s dinner, and felt fit and ready to face whatever perils the new day might bring.

The more remote extremities of our branch extended in several directions in leafy twigs as huge as the foremast of a schooner. Some of these twigs brushed a much larger branch above us, and we resolved to attempt the ascent, having exhausted the resources our present milieu afforded us. There was no way of telling what we might find on the branch above us, and we could, of course, always return to our present place, should we wish to.

I think it was the pure, childlike excitement of our situation that urged us to explore as much of our strange new world as we could. This life of hand-to-hand struggle for survival against a savage world was as fresh and new and intoxicating to Niamh as it was to me, for all that she was native to the World of the Green Star. I once read of an emperor of China whose life was so artificial and circumscribed, so bound about by ritual and ceremony, that it was said he never once in his long life saw a bush or tree or field that was as nature had made it and not as it had been trimmed and shaped and grown by generations of gardeners. Niamh’s life, she confided to me in her artless way, had been no less artificial and sheltered. The life of the court was all she had ever known; sleek courtiers, rigid conventions, ornamented surroundings, artificial and sophisticated pleasures, were all that she had ever known. Although we prowled a hostile wilderness teeming with ferocious monsters, every moment pregnant with unexpected terrors, she felt a sense of liberation and freedom that was like a superb and golden wine to one who had for too long subsisted on bland, insipid milk.

It was, I think, this sense of freedom which kept her from worrying about the perils of our precarious position. To be hopelessly lost in this world of giant trees, the prey of unthinkable monsters, all chance of succor or rescue slim, should have plunged so delicately reared a maiden into an abyss of terror. But Niamh reacted to our predicament as if it were a spree, and the novelty of spending a night in the wild, of slaying our own dinner, of exploring a new world of mystery and beauty and savage peril she found exhilarating. As we clambered out onto the extremities of our branch, her eyes were sparkling with mischief, her cheeks flushed with excitement. With her ragged garments, long bare legs, smudged nose and tousled hair, she was absurdly like an adventurous boy—very different from the stiff, brocaded queen surrounded by a covey of suave courtiers!

The upper branch, which we attained with some difficulty, was very much larger than the one whereon we had spent the night. It was as wide as a four-lane highway and it extended from the colossal trunk at a right angle, running parallel with the ground far below. It twisted and turned, curving and meandering away until lost from view in cloud-huge clumps of leaves.

We strolled out upon it for about a quarter of a mile. Again I felt a sense of awe at the enormity of the trees of this fantastic world—trees so immense they would have dwarfed into insignificance even the towering redwoods of my native Earth. And not for the first time did I wonder at the strange disproportion of men and trees on this World of the Green Star. I felt like a midge crawling on the branch of a mighty oak, and I pondered the mystery of the size of these arboreal colossuses. Could it be that these trees were actually of normal size, and that it was the dwellers upon the Green Star planet who were elf-small? It could be: when first I came hither, voyaging in my astral form, I had naturally assumed beings so manlike in their appearance must be manlike in their height. But the more I saw of the gigantic trees and the monstrously huge insects that dwelt upon them, the more I wondered. My astral form had been a mere spark of life—a point of consciousness, without reference of size. Had I perhaps lost all sense of proportion, mistakenly believing the Laonese to be of an height comparable to the inhabitants of my own world? Were they perhaps not a miniscule people, dwelling in trees which, to my physical self, would have seemed but average in their tallness?

To this question I had no answer then; nor can I answer it now. It was but one of the thousand mysteries I encountered on the World of the Green Star, not one of which I am able to explain.

We came suddenly upon a surprising marvel of beauty. It was an immense flower, waxen pale, its voluminous petals as creamy in hue as those of the camellia—but a thousand times larger than any flower that ever bloomed on my own world.

Niamh uttered a cry of delight and hovered entranced over the fantastic blossom. She confessed that her people seldom ventured far from the Jewel City, and that such flowers were unknown. She stroked the satiny petals, drinking in the heady perfume in an ecstasy of wonder.

The blossom sprouted from a tangle of rootlets like an air plant, and seemed to be parasitic. A thousand hairy green tendrils were insinuated between interstices of bark, anchoring the immense flower to the tree. The petals were half-open, like a trumpet lily or a morning glory, and from the deep center, where creamy white deepened to a ruddy hue, filaments of feathery scarlet floated limply. I stood, leaning on a branchlet, entranced at the mysterious beauty of the scene—the lovely, exquisite, elf-like girl hovering over the colossal flower: it was like an illustration from a fairy tale, and it would have demanded the genius of an Arthur Rackham or a Hannes Bok to capture the delicate nuances of the scene.

Suddenly Niamh shrieked in horror, and a scene of dreamlike loveliness turned upon the instant into a tableau of terror. For the feathery scarlet filaments suddenly lashed out at the entranced girl like striking vipers. They coiled snakily about her wrists, holding both arms pinned in a grip of surprising tensile strength. I sprang forward, grasping her about her slim waist, and sought to pull her free of the cannibal blossom, but to no avail. The tentacles that slithered from the core of the monstrous blossom had a steely resilience that was astonishing.

As I fought and tore at the writhing tendrils, more and yet more coiled about the helpless girl. At the terminus of each scarlet length a clubbed anther hung. This organ was furred with minute spines and now that Niamh was tightly enmeshed in the coils, the anthers sought out her bare flesh. One pressed flatly against the rondure of her shoulder, another flattened against the small of her back—a third settled on her thigh.

She hung limply in the tenacious embrace of the giant flower as if in a swoon. As I grimly fought against the slithering tendrils, I felt a sudden dizziness cloud my brain. It was the heady perfume which hovered about us like a cloud of overpowering sweetness! My vision blurred; my heart thumped erratically. I fought on, senses dimming.

I had called the immense flower a parasite, not dreaming how close to the horrible fact my guess had gone. In truth, the colossal thing was a cannibal—a vampire—for now I saw, with a thrill of unbelieving horror and revulsion, that the furry anthers pressed like great sponges against the naked flesh of the dazed and swooning girl gleamed wetly of a sudden and in the next instant I realized that the creamy pallor of the huge petals was flushing pinkly. The vampire blossom was drinking her blood!

I went mad with berserk rage, ripping at the hideous flower in a spasm of killing fury. Now I had cause to thank whatever shadowy and mysterious gods had guided me to this planet that I had honed that bit of copper into a crude dagger the night before. For the strength of my hands was as nothing against the rubbery constriction of the scarlet tendrils—but that sharp edge of copper cut like a saw blade into the flower flesh. In a few seconds I had managed to sever one of the anthers from its trunk, and I plucked the obscene thing from the small of Niamh’s naked back, hurling it from me, turning my attention to the anther that pressed her shoulder, sucking her blood through a hundred hollow spines. All the while she hung limp and unprotesting in the net of scarlet tendrils: the narcotic fragrance of the vampire blossom had bemused her and she had drunk too deeply of the cloying, drug-like perfume.

I slashed through another filament and pulled the anther from her flesh. It pulled clear with a loathsome sucking sound, and where it had been pressed tightly against her skin it left a minute pattern of pinpricks, beaded with blood. I flung the wet thing from me, roaring.

But now tendrils lashed about my limbs as well, and I felt a sudden stinging sensation on my leg and, looking down saw a great spongy anther pressed against my thigh just above the knee. It stung me like nettles, but the bitter kiss of the vampire blossom soon faded to a numbness. I ignored the thing fastened to my flesh, as I hacked away at the third of the anthers that yet clung to Niamh. But as I fought desperately, my head was swimming groggily and I knew the narcotic perfume of the horrible flower was overcoming me.

The monster blossom, I now knew, was no innocent and lovely flower but a grisly abnormality—a hideous plant-animal hybrid, whose blood-lusting nature was cunningly masked with nature’s mimicry. Doubtless the loathsome thing was designed to resemble an ordinary flower, thus to lure the immense insect creatures of the World of the Green Star, the great dhua, the giant zaiph. Drawn by the sweet sorcery of its perfumed breath, the unsuspecting creatures would flutter near, either to be drugged into somnolence by the narcotic odor or to be caught by the hairy tendrils as they sought to rape away the sweetness hidden in the flower’s honeyed heart.

But now the hybrid monstrosity had caught an unexpected treat in its silken trap. Human blood must have been a rare delight, for the now-crimson petals trembled with eager lust and the snaky tendrils lashed about the two of us in frenzied hunger. I sawed and slashed through the rubbery filaments with the dregs of my strength as the last flicker of consciousness waned. As my mind faded toward the twilight of drugged slumber, my last thought was that at least Niamh was unconscious, lulled by the narcotic fragrance, numbed by the anesthetic venom of the anthers, and endured no pain as the loathly vampire drained her blood. From that dim sleep she would never wake; her slumber would but deepen until she drifted over the dark portals of life and death, into a sleep from which there was no awakening …

Then as my hands faltered, as my grip loosened, as my eyelids drooped, something caught and held my waning attention.

A strange thing suddenly flicked into being, transfixing the stamen of the enormous blossom. I blinked at it, vaguely, without comprehension.

It was a scarlet arrow.

Chapter 13 OUTLAWS OF THE TREE

My vision obscured by a darkening haze, I blinked uncomprehendingly at the scarlet arrow which had so inexplicably appeared transfixing the core of the vampire blossom as if conjured into being by an act of magic.

A blink of the eye, and another arrow—and another!—flicked into being, pinning the heart of the flower through and through!

And the flower screamed! A high, unearthly squeal of rage and pain and terror, so shrill as to be almost inaudible. The blossom petals shivered—the root tendrils convulsed—the filaments that bound Niamh and myself tightened in a spasm, then relaxed. I tore free, and, although I staggered on unsteady legs, still half-drugged from the narcotic perfume I had inhaled, I lurched to where Niamh’s limp body dangled in the flower’s obscene embrace, and tore her from the relaxing grip of the tendrils.

Men melted into being all around us, merging into sunlight from the gold-green gloom. They were taller, leaner, hardier-looking than the softer men who dwelt in jeweled Phaolon. They wore trim tunics and tight leggings of dark earth colors, umber, forest green, fawn, and russet. They wore peak-brimmed caps from which long feathers trailed, short cloaks of mottled suede, calf-high boots of supple leather. They were tanned and fit and hard-faced, with strong bare arms and bold, alert eyes. They looked, in fact, like Robin Hood’s merry men, stepped from a painting by Howard Pyle. This resemblance was enhanced by the longbows and quivers of scarlet arrows they wore, although most of them were armed with glass cutlasses and light javelins as well.

Like magical apparitions they melted out of the gloom. Without a word they helped me carry the half-conscious Niamh to a place of safety while their comrades hacked the flower to death with their curious crystal swords. The vampire blossom shrilled, lashed, and bled from a thousand wounds, its petals shredded; it lapsed into oozing ruin.

The exertion of pulling Niamh free had drained the last dregs of strength from my body. I slumped, staggered, and all but fell. One of the tall foresters gently took the girl’s limp body from me; another steadied me as I sank to my knees. A third uncorked a belt canteen—made, I dimly realized, from a hollowed nut of size sufficient to hold nearly a pint of fluid—and held it to my lips. I drank strong red wine, bitter and resinous, but bracing.

Still too dazed to speak, I blinked as another figure emerged from the leaf-gloom—a tall, long-legged girl, bronzed and fit, with brown-gold eyes and gossamer mane of silver, dressed in an abbreviated tunic, leggings, and feathered cap. A girl among these woodland outlaws—and a girl of astonishing beauty?

I must have gaped at her with goggling eyes, for she laughed, a clear, silver peal of mocking music. She had a wide-mouthed, boyish face, tanned, glowing with health. I saw full lips, voluptuously crimson, flashing eyes under arched, sardonic brows, and a full-breasted, wasp-waisted figure that moved with seductive grace and Amazonian vigor.

Then my weary, drugged mind could cling to consciousness no more, and darkness rose to drown me.

When I awoke, the succulent odor of roasting meat was thick in my nostrils and the din of strange twanging music, mingled with the casual laughter of men, was in my ears. I lay in warm softness, drinking in the mouthwatering smell of hot food, dreamily thinking of nothing, until someone said, quite close to me, “He has awakened. Call Siona!”

I opened my eyes and looked around me. All was gloom and shadow, struck through with wavering orange firelight, and for a moment I thought it must be night. But—no—that could hardly be, for our struggle with the vampire blossom had been in early morning and I could hardly have slept for so many hours as to awake after sunfall.

Looking about, I saw we were enclosed on all sides by a rough dark surface. A cave? Surely that could not be! Then I saw the roughness was that of wood, and I realized we were within the trunk of a hollow tree, or a hollowed-out portion of a tree. A cheery fire blazed amidst the tree cave, painting monstrous black shadows over the uneven walls. Perhaps twenty men and boys sat or sprawled around the blaze, some drinking from cups that looked like halves of hollowed, enormous acorns; others strummed on musical instruments that resembled mandolins or Medieval viols. Turning on a wooden spit over the crackling fire, meat was roasting, fat dripping into the flames.

By my side, eyes enormous in her pale, heart-shaped face, Niamh sat with her back against the wooden wall, staring into the flames. She looked pale and exhausted, and was doubtless weak from loss of blood, but she was alive and did not seem to have taken harm from her horrible experience.

“Who are these people who have rescued us, Niamh?” I asked in a low voice.

“Outlaws and bandits of the forest,” she said. “Exiles, fled from justice … oh, I fear we have but fallen into a greater danger, having come into their hands!”

“Why do you say that?” I asked. “They are friendly, or they would not have saved us from that terrible flower …”

She shuddered at the memory of the experience.

“They know no law but their own, and every man’s hand is against them, even as their hand is turned against every man. I fear they saved our lives for some reason of their own! Ransom, perhaps, or … even worse.”

“Slavery?” I hazarded.

She shook her head reluctantly. “They live in lawless freedom, bandit warriors equal each to the other, under an elective chieftain—in the case of this band, that strange woman, Siona—‘the Huntress,’ they call her. Oh!”

Her eyes widened. I looked up into the grinning face of the strange outlaw girl whose face had been the last thing I had seen before I fell unconscious. Lithely she stood, legs spread in boyish stance, head on one side, regarding us with bright-eyed curiosity, the slim, tanned fingers of one strong, capable little hand toying with the pommel of a dagger.

“Aye, mistress, ‘the Huntress,’ my men call me,” the woman said in a clear bell-like voice in which overtones of sleek, cat-like mockery were audible. “And what shall I call you, whom I plucked from the bosom of the blood-drinking flower?—‘the Quarry’?”

Her mocking gaze fell on me, and her expression sharpened with reluctant admiration, measuring my inches, lingering on my flat belly, deep chest, broad shoulders.

“And what of you, my lusty lad? You have the girth of a gladiator, the arms of a wrestler. Ah! I have it ‘the Champion,’ eh?” She laughed throatily, revealing small, even teeth, startlingly white against the bronze tan of her features.

“We are harmless travelers, nothing more,” said Niamh in a toneless, controlled voice.

“Perhaps,” Siona purred. “And yet ‘tis curious, you’ll admit—unarmed, lone travelers seldom venture into the middle terraces, preferring the upper tier and the great cities. Your champion has the look of a woodsman about him, but not you, my dainty lady! I’ll warrant those soft legs are more used to velvet skirts and silken couches than to scrambling about the giant boughs. And where are you bound, unarmed and unmounted, you travelers?”

“To the city of Phaolon,” murmured Niamh. I kept my mouth shut, sensing that she had more insight into this situation and its hazards than had I.

“Phaolon, is it? In truth, you choose an awkward route, and will find the road difficult, without a dhua! And I wonder what purpose you have, ragged travelers, in seeking the Jewel City alone and afoot? The wild is a savage realm, and the great trees conceal a thousand horrors which lie in wait for the unwary. To venture forth into such peril argues an overwhelming cause …”

“We are from the city of Kamadhong,” Niamh said with a glibness that won my admiration. “We did not flee into the wild from free choice, but to avoid persecution. We make for the Jewel City of Phaolon for ‘tis said the queen of that realm offers a haven to all who come to her in need.”

The Huntress frowned, pouting her ripe red mouth.

“A haven, is it? Well, mayhap; but the outlaws of the wild have never found a gracious host in her who holds the gold throne of Phaolon. In truth, her chevaliers hunt us as they will, as if we were but savage beasts, not men!”

At this candid appraisal, Niamh bit her lip, flushing, and bent her head. But the wild outlaw girl did not seem to notice.

“But, now—your story interests me, girl! ‘Persecution,’ you said it was you fled from. Tell me of that—what manner of persecution do they practice in Kamadhong against dainty ladies and their stalwart champions?”

Again, Niamh glibly concocted a reasonable story to account for our fictitious flight from a city of which I had never heard.

“We are the children of rival houses,” she said firmly, “and we—we would wed against the wishes of our houses. I am of an ancient family of the thurkuz, and my lover is a mighty warrior of the khaweng-ya, whose love is deemed beneath one of my rank.”

Now it was my turn to flush and fidget, but again the Amazon girl did not appear to notice the involuntary reaction.

The story which the princess had invented on the spur of the moment to account for our being found alone and unarmed, wandering amidst the branches of the colossal trees, was, actually, a good one which made perfect sense. I have mentioned before something of the system of hereditary castes into which the civilization of the Laonese is divided. To Siona, it would be quite logical that a daughter of the thurkuz, the landed and titled aristocracy, should be forbidden to wed a soldier of the lowly warrior class, the khaweng-ya.

In truth, she did not even question it. She eyed me with a bold and almost flirtatious appraisal, and said: “I can understand your reluctance to yield to the wishes of your family in such a matter, girl. If I had a lover with such shoulders, I, too, would cling to him!”

She shrugged, dismissing the matter.

“Well, you are welcome here, for this band does truly offer a haven to the homeless and the outcast! Take your place at the cook-fire; eat and drink your fill. With sunfall we depart for a place of greater safety, and you may come with us, if such be your wish, for our path tends in the direction of the city that is your goal and we have zaiph to spare, having lost three of our number to the hazards of the chase during this hunting expedition. Rest well—we depart ere long!”

And with those words, and a casual flip of her hand, the outlaw girl turned on her heel and strode off. Niamh sagged with relief and smiled weakly at me. It was dangerous for us to speak, not knowing what ears might be listening, so I postponed to another time the questions that seethed within me. I assumed it was a mere instinct of caution that had bidden Niamh to conceal her identity and my own from Siona, and to invent a spurious account of our being here in place of the true story.

We joined the ring about the fire and feasted heartily on a venison-like meat, coarse black bread, and segments of fresh fruit, washed down with fierce red wine. The foresters welcomed us among them, studiously avoiding questions; their rude and careless hospitality was welcome, and I gathered that it was not unheard-of for strangers to join their band for a meal. Many of them were branded outlaws, but they did not seem a depraved or vicious lot, although they were a hard-faced crew, their tongues full of strange oaths, and very ready to brawl.

Considering the casual, offhand welcome they gave us, and their lack of curiosity toward us, I wondered that Niamh kept her head bent, her face in shadow as much as possible, and spoke little. But I could hardly ask her reasons.

Chapter 14 OUTLAWS’ LAIR

When we at last left our temporary haven in the hollow branch, the heavens were ablaze with the green-gold sunset that made the forest world so strange. Shafts of unearthly molten jade sunlight fell through the monstrous branches; gloom gathered, concealing with its velvet shadow the sunny, open vistas that had stretched to all sides with day.

We were placed in the care of a sturdy rogue called Yurgon, who seemed to function as one of Siona’s underchiefs or squad lieutenants. From the brisk efficiency wherewith the departure was undertaken, I saw much in the outlaw band to admire. Among the Laonese I had known at Niamh’s palace, there were few like these hardy woodsmen. Only my faithful Panthon and a few of the guards in my entourage could match these strong, lean, silent, manly huntsmen, for, by and large, the male Laonese of my acquaintance had been slender, frail, foppish, and of a delicately effeminate beauty.

But the outlaws of Siona’s band were men through and through, and knew the meaning of discipline. In a trice the zaiph were saddled and ready, the outlaws mounted, the saddlebags containing the kills made on the hunt securely lashed to the baggage-zaiph, and all was ready.

Siona lifted her curved hunting horn and sounded a clear, imperious call. Squad by squad, in perfect order, the outlaws rose from the enormous bough. Wings drumming, the zaiph formed a double line with Siona’s mount to the fore, and hurtled up a long slanting ray of fading sunlight into the upper terraces of the giant forest. Darkness fell swiftly.

I wondered at the wisdom of traveling by night, which seemed to my thought far more dangerous than traveling by day. For one thing, the more dangerous predators were aprowl during the reign of darkness, and, as well, in the gloom that shrouded the world of giant trees after sunfall, traveling should be much more difficult, for it was easier to miss your landmarks and go astray. Summoning my courage, I asked Yurgon of this, since he rode to my right hand.

He shrugged. “There is little danger, Champion. The beasts avoid zaiph for they find them scrawny and their meager flesh unappetizing. And we are in little danger of straying from our route—see yonder gleam of light?”

He pointed to a smudge of greenish luminescence so faint I would not have noticed it had he not pointed it out to me. It was a dull glimmer of phosphorescence, scarcely visible amidst the gloom. I nodded, and asked him what it was.

“The slime exhuded by the phuol,” he said, naming a repugnant form of giant insect life which resembled the scorpion. “By day the slime is not visible; by night it sheds a pallid glow, wherewith our scouts have blazed a trail through the giant trees.”

“Very well,” I said. “But I still fail to see why you outlaws prefer to travel by night rather than by day, since you are in little danger from predators in any case.”

He gave a harsh laugh and for a moment his frank face was cruel. “The most dangerous of all predators is man himself,” he said. “And it is from our fellow men that our greatest perils come. For we of the woods, who prefer the freedom of the trees to the safety of cities, are deemed the enemy of every city man. In truth, the hand of every man is against us—the knights of Phaolon, in particular, hunt us like beasts and slay us when they can. But when the darkness reigns, the city dwellers fear to fly abroad, lest they lose themselves in the black of night.”

I was glad it was so dark that Yurgon could not see the expression on my face at his words. Now I knew why the princess had concealed her identity behind a mask of subterfuge, and why she had hidden her face as best she might!

We flew on for an hour or more. It would be meaningless to say that I became completely lost, because I had been thoroughly lost when the outlaws first rescued us from the vampire blossom. But I noticed that flight became slower and more difficult, that the web of interlacing branchlets tightened around us, and that screens of leaves blocked our path with ever-increasing frequency, until drawn aside by cunningly-concealed ropes.

We reached at last the secret city of the outlaws—if “city” is not too grandiose a word whereby to describe a huddle of huts in the crotch of a mighty bough, hung about almost entirely with immense clumps of golden leafage which most effectively screened from view the lair of the bandit clan. The site had obviously been selected for its solitude and remoteness, and as much as for its lack of visibility, which last feature, I later learned, had been considerably enhanced by art. For wherever nature had carelessly left open a vista through the screening leaves, the outlaws had with cunning artifice arranged to block the opening. Branchlets had been twisted awry, tied into position with stout thongs, and, with time, had grown into their new position.

We came to rest in the open space at the center of the outlaw village and dismounted. All was unbroken gloom; no slightest chink was left unblocked, to betray the hideout of the robber band by a vagrant gleam of light. Windows were heavily curtained with thick-woven fiber, or shuttered stoutly. Siona led us into the central structure of the encampment; the edifice was many times larger than the other huts, which were mostly low, hummock-like excrescences whose bark-and-branch fabric caused them to blend unobtrusively with the substance of the vast, gnarled and knotted branch itself.

But this central structure was at least three stories in height, and was built against the trunk of the tree, following and melting into its curves; thatched roofs artificially gilded the uniform gold of the living leaves. Even by daylight, the structure would have been difficult to identify as the work of human hands. The artisans of Siona’s troop were masters of the difficult and exacting science of camouflage—but such would only have been natural, I suppose. Survival depends largely on remaining unseen, or on becoming difficult to perceive; and the outlaw band had made of survival a true art.

The barred door was opened by alert guards at Siona’s knock; we entered, brushing past permanent light-blocking screens of woven rattan-like reeds or fibers (made, I later learned, from the skeletal structure of leaves), and came into a large, warm hall whose raftered ceiling was lost in flickering shadows.

A broad-lipped fire-well was set in the center of this room, its depth and rondure hewn into the very wood of the branch. This circular pit had been lined with mortared stones, or fragments of stones, in order to render it fireproof, and a glowing bed of coals hissed and simmered therein. Long wooden benches, and low rough-hewn tables, were set in a huge semicircle about this central fire-pit, and there were about two dozen people in the hall as the hunting party entered. Some of these were men, but most of them were women, and there were a few children to be seen.

The outlaw women were a hardy lot, bright-eyed, red-lipped, vivacious, clad in vests and skirts of rude homespun, with many vivid petticoats of gaudy hues. Brilliantly-colored kerchiefs were wound about their heads, and gold bangles glittered at throat and earlobe. They resembled nothing so much as gypsy women, and were a bold-eyed, blatantly flirtatious lot.

As for the men, they were mostly older men, some of them being of quite advanced age, although hale and hearty for all their years. Those among them who were younger seemed largely crippled or injured; I saw one lithe young bandit lacking a leg, and another who wore a scarlet kerchief wound about his brows, obviously to conceal his blindness. These were, I doubt not, the casualties of the outlaw life; and that life, I could well understand, was one filled to the brim with extraordinary perils beyond the casual experience of city dwelling men. The outlaws of the world of giant trees were hunted by the soldiery of every city, and were forced, therefore, to battle for their survival not only against the natural hazards of life in the forest—which crawled with monsters and ferocious predators beyond name or number—but against their fellow men, as well.

The returning huntsmen were greeted with loud cordiality. The fire was stirred and fed until orange flames leaped high, casting vast, writhing shadows across the walls. Women greeted their men with shrieks and laughter and warm embraces; bright-eyed, mischievous-looking ragged children ran squealing underfoot. Skins of wine were fetched from storerooms and were emptied into capacious goblets of glossy wood.

Niamh and I were neither ignored nor made the object of unwelcome curiosity; our presence was taken for granted. Doubtless, many such forays into the outer world resulted in the discovery of wandering exiles, a steady source of new recruits for the outlaw band. Cups of wine were passed to us and a place was made for us at the circular benches which encircled the roaring fire. I took a hearty swallow of the dark, foaming beverage—expecting a suave, mellow vintage such as that to which I had by now become accustomed from my days at the court of Phaolon the Jewel City. Instead, the raw, fiery liquor seared the lining of my throat and brought tears to my eyes; the outlaws had, it seemed, long since discovered the secret of fermentation, and what I had casually mistaken for wine was actually a fierce and very potent brandy!

The weary huntsmen threw themselves down on the benches, hugging and kissing their women, while children ran shrieking to fetch more skins of brandy. A sudden mood of carnival whipped the women into a frenzied gaiety: crude musical instruments were produced from voluminous skirts—music filled the firelit hall with its jangling rhythms—the younger women sprang into a wild dance like a fandango, scarlet petticoats swirling high, revealing tan sinewy thighs and long bare legs.

Raucous toasts were called out. Hoarse, bawdy jests were roared over the crashing music. White teeth flashed in swarthy, laughing faces. The fume of brandy, the heady beat of the wild music, the whirling sinuous forms whipping past in the furious dance, the broiling heat of the crackling bonfire—all these combined to make me suddenly very, very weary.

Yurgon had been keeping an eye on us, as soon became obvious. As I stifled back the third yawn he appeared before us as suddenly as an apparition, gesturing toward a cubicle across the hall which had been designated as ours.

“The night is well advanced,” he grinned, “and dawn is near. Come!” He led us through the dancers to our cubicle; and the first difficulty engendered by our false story presented itself: the cubicle had only one bed!

Niamh blushed and her eyes avoided mine. Yurgon’s keen eye noted this. Tucking his thumbs in his girdle, he threw his head back and boomed with laughter.

“Such modesty in lovers must be rare!” he chuckled. “Come, we have no priests here—‘tis time the blush of modest maidenhood were changed to lovers’ eager glow!” With a wink he turned on his heel and left us to our own devices.

I set my jaw resolutely. There was nothing else to do but to see it through. It would never do to cast our story into suspicion by a reluctance to share the same bed. I muttered as much to Niamh, and she clambered into the dark, stuffy little closet-like cubicle and sank into the remotest possible corner of the mattress, while I climbed in, jamming myself as close to the doorway as possible.

Very little privacy was possible to us under such cramped conditions, but at least there was a rough-woven hanging we could pull across the entranceway to our narrow little closet. And so we settled down to get what sleep we could, gingerly avoiding the slightest touch. We did not, of course, disrobe but slept in our clothing. I lay there in the stuffy darkness, listening to the uproar, the shouting, the music of the dance, achingly aware in every fiber of the nearness of Niamh’s body and the rhythm of her breathing. I did not sleep very well that night.

Chapter 15 I MAKE AN ENEMY

The rustle of curtains drawn suddenly aside awakened me. I was aware of a warm pressure against my shoulder and side, and, turning my head slightly, I saw Niamh nestling against me. During the night she had rolled over in her sleep until now she lay cuddled in the curve of my arm, her cheek pillowed against my breast, one arm flung carelessly about my neck, her slender leg thrown over mine. I felt acutely embarrassed; yet, at the same time, my heart thudded breathlessly against my ribs and I savored the delicious excitement of her nearness and the warm pressure of her body against my own. She slept on, oblivious to the compromising position of intimacy into which her unconscious movements during slumber had placed us.

A throaty chuckle roused me from my dreamful contemplation of her tousled, drowsy loveliness. It was a nasty, suggestive snigger, and I looked about to discover its origin. And found it, to my instant displeasure.

Someone had drawn aside the curtains that screened our sleeping cubicle, and he stood at the entrance peering in. I recognized him at a glance. It was one of the huntsmen from the night before, a member of the party which had rescued Niamh and myself from the murderous embrace of the vampire blossom. I could not at once recall his name, although I soon learned that he was called Sligon. He was a little man with a twisted back, long, dangling, anthropoid arms and something wrong with one leg so that he limped with a peculiar sidling gait like a crab.

He had a swarthy, ugly face with hot, leering eyes and his face habitually wore a sort of oily, knowing smirk. Among the tall, lean, manly foresters of Siona’s band, the hunched, sidling little man stood out very noticeably, which is why I remembered his face although we had never yet exchanged a word.

Now he stood in the entrance of our cubicle, peering in with a gloating smirk on his repellent visage. Doubtless he had been sent to arouse us for the morning meal; however, I did not like the secretive, furtive manner in which he performed his duty. And anger awoke within me at the way he stood leering in on our privacy, running his eyes over Niamh’s sleeping loveliness and her long bare legs, his gaze lingering on the glimpses of creamy flesh which showed through the rents and tears in her abbreviated garments. So I kicked him in the face!

The action was a purely instinctive one, performed without forethought, a mere lashing out at something which annoyed me. I had not really meant to kick him at all, just to shove him away, and had my hands been free at the moment, I would doubtless have used them. But they were not, and hence it was my foot that went crashing into his ugly, smirking visage and sent him sprawling.

A roar of amusement rang out as the hunched, sidling little thief crashed, squalling, into the tables. He was on his feet in an instant, eyes agleam with malice, a wicked hooked knife clutched in one hand. He snarled, spitting curses, face vicious, for all the world like a cat dunked suddenly in cold water.

I sprang from the bed as he lunged at me, the knife blade flashing in his hand. On Earth my knowledge of the tricks of rough-and-tumble fighting had necessarily been limited to what I had read in books or watched on television; but the body of Lord Chong knew all about gutter brawls, and instinctive habit patterns snapped into action.

I knocked his knife-hand aside, blocking his lunge with the blunt edge of my forearm, and sank my balled fist into his abdomen. The breath whistled from between his yellow snagged teeth. His face paled to a sickly hue and he sank to his knees and crouched there, gagging and sucking for breath. The fight had suddenly gone out of him from that one blow of mine, and as I bent to pick up the wicked little knife that he had let fall from numb, nerveless fingers paralyzed by my blocking blow, I reflected yet again on the obvious benefits of possessing the body of a fighting man, a body with superbly trained, hair-trigger reflexes!

In the next instant, burly Yurgon stepped between us, plucking Sligon from the ground by the scruff of his neck and shoving him away, turning stern eyes on me—stern, that is, if you discounted the appreciative grin that tugged at the corners of his mouth.

“No fighting, you two!” he snapped. “Siona’s rule—any further trouble between the two of you and I’ll have you both flogged. Is that understood?”

I nodded. “Perfectly! But it should also be understood that if yonder fellow or anyone else comes slinking around to peer through the curtains at the prin—at my mate and myself—he will get another boot in the teeth, flogging or no flogging. I hope that is understood!”

Yurgon chuckled. “Aye, Champion! Sligon, you sneak, stay away from our guests from now on, or I’ll give you the boot myself, understand?”

The little weasel of a man nodded silently, eyes vicious, saying nothing. I tossed him his knife and turned on my heel to where Niamh crouched in the doorway of the sleeping cubicle, flushed and bewildered, not understanding the reason for this altercation.

I assumed the incident was closed, and put it out of my mind. But as the little thief turned to slink away, he shot one glance at me from scowling eyes. It was a shaft of pure scarlet hatred, that glance, and I would have done well not to have discounted it. However, I paid it and him no particular heed, and therein, as shall ere long be seen, lay my downfall and Niamh’s doom. On such slight accidents do the hinges of destiny turn.

Siona, who slept with the unwed women in another part of the keep, had missed the altercation and no one bothered to inform her of it. When she appeared for the morning meal she noticed the sorry condition of our garments, which by now had been reduced to mere rags hardly sufficient to conceal our modesty, and curtly bade one of the foresters to find us more fitting raiment.

After breakfast, the huntsman commanded to this duty conducted us to the storerooms and saw us outfitted properly.

The fellow in question, by the way, was a fresh-faced, eager young lad named Kaorn, who seemed to be about sixteen or seventeen as far as I could judge—which was not very far, as the age of the Laonese people and their average life span remains something of a mystery to me to this very hour. I have not yet had occasion to touch upon the mystery of time on the World of the Green Star thus far in the course of this narrative, but if my reader will permit a slight digression at this point, while Niamh and I are getting dressed, I will mention that there was something peculiar and extraordinary about time on this planet.

The passage of time went largely unmarked among the Laonese, and even in their conversation they hardly ever referred to it. Among my own people, it is very common to employ such words as day and night, hour and minute—all of which, of course, refer to minor time divisions commonly, indeed universally, understood. “I’ll be there in ten minutes,” we are accustomed to saying; or “I spoke to him only an hour ago,” or “I called him last week.”

Virtually every action and activity undertaken by us in our everyday lives is performed against, or rather within, a framework of reference to time.

This is, most mysteriously, not at all the case with the slender, ivory-skinned inhabitants of the World of the Green Star. Such familiar time references are almost wholly absent from their speech as from their way of thinking, although this fact is not at once noticeable and took me quite some time to become aware of. When I did begin to notice it I believe I put it down to two facts. The first of these facts is that the Laonese people are of a pre-industrial civilization which has not yet reached the level of technology appropriate to the invention of clocks. Without possessing clocks, or some kind of device to measure the passage of time, it is understandable that references to hours and minutes would be highly arbitrary and unlikely—a fact generally overlooked by the authors of popular historical novels.

The second fact is, simply, that the Laonese rarely observe their sun. Both their sun and the various stars and constellations are generally hidden behind the dome of pearly mists that veil the heavens from their view as effectively as if they were inhabitants of the planet Venus. On Earth, of course, the sun is continuously visible throughout the daylight hours, and its passage from dawn to dusk easily observed. But the Green Star that is the sun of this world can scarcely be seen through the clouds that cover the skies, and although it is even then dimly visible as a center of brightness, the heavy leafage and immense branches wherein the folk of this world commonly dwell further obscure their notice of it.

But above and beyond the fact that the Laonese seldom refer to time by its subtler divisions—their language lacking even the words for hour or minute—they make no reference to the seasons of the year, and seldom refer even to the passage of the years. Unfortunately, my stay on the World of the Green Star was far too brief for me to have observed the passage of the seasons, but it may well have been that this planet is not so severely inclined upon its axis for the differences in temperature between the seasons to be particularly noticeable. I am left with the feeling that the Laonese dwell in a world of perpetual summer, verging, it may be, on the beginnings of autumn.

At any rate, during the time I lived among them, the Laonese seldom referred to years in any sense and for any purpose. I believe that I have already mentioned how difficult it was to estimate the age of some of the individuals whom I encountered during my stay on this strange and alien planet. Khin-nom, the old sage of Niamh’s court who taught me the language spoken by the Laonese, was an example of this. He was clearly a man of more than mature years, lean and gaunt and bewhiskered, his keen eyes and measured tones indicative of long experience and deep thought. But I would be at a loss to guess his age, for the flesh of his face was firm and healthy and unlined, his step vigorous and not in the least halting, and his body preserved the elasticity and suppleness of youth.

I wonder if it is due to the fact that their sun is not easily visible and that the giant trees about them show little change with the passage of the seasons, that the Laonese have no clearly formed conception of time, never think about it, and thus, not being aware of the passing of years, remain somehow oblivious to the effects of age? Is it possible that if a person is oblivious to the passing of years he retains the health and vigor of his youth even into well-advanced old age? Is it possible that for a mind totally ignorant of time to enjoy something closely resembling perpetual youth?

I do not know; I cannot say. This is a question for the philosophers to ponder over, and I am a man of action, not a philosopher.

Before long young Kaorn had us outfitted in the garb of the forest outlaws. I was given a supple, thigh-length tunic of some soft leathery stuff with a nap on it like suede, together with short boots, a heavy leathern girdle, short cloak, and leggings. Niamh reappeared looking for all the world like Maid Marian in a Robin Hood movie, with an abbreviated and tight-fitting jupon of forest green, soft high-laced buskins, and a feathered cap which perched winsomely atop her silken mane. She looked completely adorable, although I was too tongue-tied to say so. Kaorn, less inhibited than I, grinned in appreciation, eyes shining with boyish adoration. Niamh dimpled at the expression on the boy’s face as she pirouetted before us in her new raiment.

We rejoined the others, and, looking about, I spotted Sligon at a far corner of the hall, huddled spitefully on the end of a bench, pointedly ignoring us. My flash of temper had long since subsided and I would willingly have healed the breach between the little thief and myself, but beyond shooting me one vicious glare, he ignored me therewith, turning his back on me, and it would have been awkward for me to have made any friendly overture.

Obviously, he nursed a grudge against me. With a slight sinking feeling, I realized that I had made an enemy.

An enemy who would neither forget—nor forgive.