Under the Green Star

Chapter 20 BEYOND THE BLACK GATE

Suddenly, Siona spoke. Her words were said in a low, level voice, breathless and panting, but, curiously flat and emotionless.

“You can never escape,” she said.

I shrugged. “A man can but try.”

“No, never. For my men will follow you to the world’s end! To bring you back to me.”

It was an odd choice of words.

“For your vengeance, I suppose. Or so you can sell us to the envoys of Ardha, our enemies.”

She said nothing, but stood breathing quickly in the darkness.

Suddenly I staggered, as if a sudden fit of dizziness had come upon me. That feeling of weakness had grown steadily, until by now my head was whirling and my knees felt like rubber. I could not understand what was happening to me. The numbness which had so swiftly spread over my body, replacing the sting of Sligon’s knife blow, made me feel cold and curiously feeble.

Siona stared at me through the gloom.

“You are hurt!” she breathed.

I shook my head, trying to clear it.

“It is nothing,” I said sluggishly.

“No—you are wounded; Sligon got you!”

“A scratch—nothing more,” I mumbled. Then, and louder, “Niamh. Hurry with the zaiph.”

“Almost ready—another moment,” the princess murmured from beyond us.

And then they were upon us, striking like silent wolves out of the darkness. I whirled, sword ready, catching one blade in mid-air and wrenching it from the hand of the forester who wielded it. Another blade flickered—and another—and another. For one long moment I held three swordsmen at bay; but it was for a moment only.

Behind me, I heard Niamh cry out, and the sound of a blow being struck, and a man’s hoarse bellow of pain. Then one of the foresters staggered out of the zaiph pens and fell sprawling with the mark of Niamh’s blade across his face.

“Chong!” she cried. “Ready—come swiftly! They are all around us!”

But men encircled me and many swords flashed for my breast. With a terrific effort I beat them back, but the effort used much of the small store of strength that was left to me.

“Niamh! Mount and fly! I will follow.”

“But—”

“Fly, my beloved!”

There came to my ears the drumming of great wings. A dark shape rose above us, blacker than the blackness. A heart-shaped face peered down at me through the murk a girl’s face white against the darkness. She was aloft! Thanks to whatever gods hold watch and ward over the World of the Green Star, she was aloft! And they could never catch her in this black gloom!

Or so, at least, I hoped. But I could do no more than I had done. A haze thickened before my eyes; my heart labored in my breast as if it would burst free of the cage of my ribs and fly to join her. Then I looked down and saw the spreading wetness across my chest, the red blood leaking from my severed arteries, pumping from the terrible wound just below my heart.

He had struck well, the hunched and sidling little traitor. Well, at least he had gone slinking before me down the road that led beyond the black gates of death. But I would follow soon after, that I knew.

The wound was mortal. No power in this world or another could save me now.

There was the sound of a woman weeping.

Siona bent over me, cradling me in her arms, her face distorted, twisted, wet with tears. I knew now why she had seemed so strange toward me, and why she had humiliated Niamh in my presence. God help me, I never suspected it before, but the Amazon girl loved me.

A momentary pang of despair went through me. Surely it could not end like this, surely the gods could not be so cruel, to take my life now when Niamh needed me most, when the armies of her enemies were already moving to march against defenseless Phaolon. I could not die here, leaving Niamh alone and lost and helpless in the great forest of worldtall trees …

Again I glimpsed her white face through the gloom as she circled the branch. Her dark eyes were enormous against the pallor of her face. She could see the horrible stain of blood that drenched me from breast to mid-thigh; she knew that the chance blow struck by a cowardly traitor had laid low the hero of a thousand legends in the very moment when he was needed most. Oh, the irony of it! How the gods of this world must have laughed at the irony of my ending!

With my last strength I lifted my voice and called to her to be gone, to fly off into the night, to hide that her enemies might not find her. And a sort of madness came over me at the end; I wildly promised that she and I would meet again—that somewhere, somehow, I would come to her.

Through the darkness and the haze that thickened before my eyes I drank in my last look of her. But then she was gone, a dark figure fading into the darkness, gone from my fading vision all too soon, vanished into the trackless night.

Niamh, Niamh! Somehow, somewhere, we shall meet again …

And then, as it comes to all men, however urgent their need for life, death came to me, and I began my long journey down that dark road to the gates from which there is no returning.

And so it is that the stories of most men reach their appointed ending.

But for me, the capricious Fates had reserved another, and a far more curious, ending.

In a way, I suppose it was a respite: but, in truth, this respite was far more cruel an ending to my story than the simple dignity of death could ever be.

I have said it already, that my tale is the strangest any man has ever told, and that the adventures through which I have passed are like those no other man has ever experienced in all the labyrinth of the ages. This may sound like wild and outrageous boasting, but it is nothing else but honest truth.

I do not know why God or Fate or Chance, or whatever nameless and unknown Power rules over the fortunes of men, reserved for me the strange, unearthly miracle. I wish I did know, for without understanding the thing, I can learn nothing from it—nothing but sorrow, nothing but a pain that will not leave my heart—nothing but a question that haunts me night and day and will not let me rest.

A question to which I have no answer.

A question that may never be answered …

But let me tell the thing exactly as it happened.

There was a darkness that was absolute, and a sleep that lasted forever.

And then, after an immeasurable lapse of time I was roused from that slumber which I had thought to be eternal. There was a hand that held a vial to my nostrils, a broken vial that lay in the wet folds of a handkerchief. I inhaled a pungent vapor that stung my nostrils and made me gag and cough.

And blurrily, through dim eyes, I could make out more.

There was a tall man in a long white coat who was bending over me. I could dimly make out his face—serious, thoughtful, a clean-shaven face with keen eyes and dark hair that grew white at the temples.

The shadows were clearing now. I could see beyond the tall man in the white coat who held the crushed vial of pungent chemical to my nostrils. Beyond him there was the plump, motherly figure of a woman who stood with a handkerchief to her face, wiping her eyes.

I seemed to recognize that woman. And beyond her were day-lit windows through which I could just make out green, rolling, wooded hills that also had a haunting familiarity to them.

“He is coming out of it now, I think.”

It was the tall man in the white coat who spoke. The language in which he spoke sounded curious to my ears, but oddly familiar at the same time. My brain was numb and sluggish, my mind dull and clogged as with the dregs of some long nightmare. I struggled to understand what was happening to me.

“Oh, thank God, doctor!”

It was the plump, middle-aged woman who spoke. Her words, too, were at once strange and at the same time familiar, as were her features. It seemed to me that I had known that face and that voice somewhere, sometime, as in another life …

As in another life.

And just like that, it came to me.

I recognized the anxious voice of my housekeeper, and her worried features.

And behind her, beyond the windows, I recognized that landscape of rolling hills. Those were the familiar green hills of Connecticut, and this was my house, and I—I yet lived.

Or lived again!

The doctor turned away, depositing the wet handkerchief and the crushed vial on the night table. Then his strong fingers fumbled at my wrist, seeking a feeble, erratic pulse.

“Will he—live, doctor?” my housekeeper asked anxiously.

He frowned, counting the beats of my heart.

“He lives, but just barely. A good thing you called when you did, ma’am. He would not have lasted very much longer, without medical aid. We must get him into an oxygen tent, and swiftly.”

“But whatever happened! Whatever is it!”

He frowned thoughtfully, pursing his lips.

“I wish I could say! Something quite beyond my experience, I’m afraid. Some sort of trance and coma, but not one induced by drugs or disease or injury, as far as I can tell. But there’s no time to waste in talk. You have a telephone here, of course?”

“In the hall.”

“Good. Let me call the hospital, have them get the intensive care unit ready to receive a patient … I assume there is somebody here—a gardener, a chauffeur—who can help me get him downstairs?”

“Of course. I’ll call Wagner …”

They left me then. There were footsteps in the hall, the sounds of a telephone being dialed. I lay, not moving a muscle, pervaded by a weakness that went beyond the flesh to include the spirit as well. An ironic smile twisted my lips. I would have laughed, had I been able. For I understood in full at last the bitter jest the Gods or the Fates had arranged for me. Yes, it was clear now, all too terribly clear. The death of the body of the Lord Chong had not meant the death of my spirit but merely the extinguishing of my consciousness for a time, during which my far-wandering spirit-self escaped from its borrowed mansion of clay and fled back across the cold, dark gulfs between the stars to the world where my own true body lay empty and waiting to receive it.

In time I recovered my strength again, but there were many days when my spirit clung tenuously to my wasted flesh and only the iron strength of a trained and disciplined will helped me to keep my hold on life.

I had been absent from my body for far too long, you see … far longer than I had expected to be, caught as I was in the swirl of events on a wonderful and alien world far distant from my own, a world that seems to me now but a peculiarly vivid and intensely realistic dream.

During the enforced leisure of my convalescence I have written down this record of my experiences on the World of the Green Star, impelled by an urgency I cannot quite name. Perhaps it is that I wish to remember everything as it was then, lest I forget the awe and beauty, the strangeness and terror, of that experience that must surely be the most weird and marvelous adventure ever lived by a denizen of this planet. This document shall be placed in a sealed vault, to be opened only in the event of my death; if ever curious eyes peruse these pages, I feel certain that this record will be termed nothing more than a work of extravagant fiction.

And now that I have reached the final ending of my story, I am aware of an odd reluctance to terminate it, as if by setting down those fatal words—The End—I am letting go of my adventure, thus permitting it to recede from me into the dim vistas of the past … while I am doomed to live on into the future. While I yet toil on, page after page, my strange adventures and my distant friends are real and very near; but once the manuscript has been finished and set aside, the thing is over and done and ended.

Ere long, they tell me, my strength will have been fully regained. I have dreamed many times of voyaging in spirit-form yet a second time across the dark cosmos to that strange world of eternal mists and towering trees and jewelbox cities. But what is there left for me to return to? I failed to save from the clutches of her mortal enemies the woman I love, who by now has surely suffered death at the hands of her enemies, whether at the hands of the tyrant Akhmim or of the vengeful Siona I cannot know.

Could I endure it, to go back to view the tomb of that dead loveliness? I do not need to venture there, for part of me lies therein as well. My heart is buried in the sepulcher of Niamh the Fair …

Only the other day, browsing through an old, well-loved book, I found a set of verses that might have been set down for my eye alone, so intimately did they speak to my sorrow:

Up front Earth’s Centre through the Seventh Gate I rose, and on the Throne of Saturn sate,

And many a Knot unraveled by the Road; But not the Master-knot of Human Fate.

Wise old Omar the Tent-maker! Did he guess somewhat of these matters, dreaming there by moonlight in the rose gardens of his native Persia? Who can say—who can know? For, whether it be by chance or accident or design, that verse plays upon a most peculiar coincidence.

“Up from Earth’s Centre through the Seventh Gate …”

The old Tibetan mystics whose soul-science I employed to unlock the portals of the spirit, to loosen the bonds, to set my astral body free that it might flee this clay and soar aloft to strange and marvelous worlds that lay beyond the moon itself—those sages call by that very name the orifice through which my spirit fled—“the Seventh Gate”!

Through which my spirit fled to a fate stranger and more wonderful than I could ever have dreamed. To a life of glory and heroism and adventure beyond the wildest imaginings of the romancers. And to a love so precious that I feel it yet, in another body, on another world. A love that death cannot sever …

Or is she dead? Lives she yet on that dim world of miracles that lies under the Green Star? Did Niamh make good her escape from the clutches of Siona’s foresters, who would sell her to the envoys of her hated enemy, Akhmim of Ardha? Is she lost and alone, wandering among the sky-tall trees, going every moment in peril, lacking my strong arm? Does she lie at this moment in chains in the dungeons of Akhmim, while her city and her kingdom lay down their swords and open the gates to the cruel hordes of the invader? Or did Siona save her for vengeance alone, to sit smiling while her fair flesh was torn beneath the knives of the torturers? Or did Niamh elude her pursuers, escape the savage predators of the giant trees, and find her way to the safety of her city of Phaolon? Perhaps at this very moment, the hordes of Ardha are locked in battle with the chivalry of Phaolon before the glittering gates of the Jewel City, while Niamh the Fair, armed like a warrior princess, leads her gallant soldiery against the foe … and I am here, here, unable to stand beside her in that last battle, and lend my strength and my sword to the defense of the woman I love and the kingdom that hailed me as its hero and savior!

It could be; it could well be. The last sight I had of her was as she flew off into the night, mounted upon the back of a fresh zaiph. Far could she have flown before the foresters of the Secret City could have mounted up and flown off in her pursuit. And in the ink-black night, in the moonless dark of the world of the giant trees, it would have been a mighty task to have found her, once she was flown.

Yes! she could have escaped! She could have lived to find her way to freedom! She might be living at this hour …

Will I ever know?

Will we live and die worlds apart, never knowing the ending of the story?

Will anyone ever know?

It will be a time yet before my flesh and my spirit are strong enough to make their weird voyage of the soul across space between the stars a second time. Will I voyage forth again to the World of the Green Star?

I do not think so.

For how could I return to take my place beside the woman I love? The Lord Chong is dead. His body was cut down by the knife of a traitor. And from that second death his body will not rise, as from the first. And how could I return to claim the love of Niamh as—another man?

It is that which restrains me.

It would be torment unendurable to return to the World of the Green Star a bodiless spirit—to look upon events in which I could not partake—to gaze upon the unattainable loveliness of the Goddess-Queen whose lips I could never kiss, whose slim, vibrant body my arms could not hold.

And yet … would that torture be any worse than the torment I suffer now, the torment of not knowing?

In truth, the Gods have played an ironic jest upon me. I died; I live again; and I must live on, and never know the ending of my own story!

The old Persian poet must have dreamed of my strange and terrible predicament, as he strolled there in the moonlit gardens of his beloved Naishapur so many centuries ago.

For as, musing, I read on in that old book of verses, I came at length to yet another quatrain he set down in golden Persia long ago: another verse that weirdly echoes the irony of my peculiar doom: another verse strangely meaningful to me alone of all men who have ever trod the dust of this Earth or read the pages of this book of song.

And with those words I close this narrative.