The girl seemed quite free and easy, relaxed and natural, she thought to herself, grudgingly. It could not be pretense, forced upon her by harsh circumstances.
Could there be… could there possibly be… something wrong with her own way of thinking… ?
Arjala stiffened, clamping her lips together. Nonsense! And sacrilege, as well! She must never forget—could never forget—that she was Divinity Incarnate, and all others were of a coarse and mundane breed. She must cling to that belief, or she would lose… belief in everything, even in herself.
“You will see,” she hissed venomously under her breath.
“My Divine cousins will yet come to rescue me from these intolerable circumstances! They will. They… must.”
Their morning meal completed, the four travelers rewrapped what meager scraps remained of their almost exhausted supplies of food, and stored the packages in the compartments of the sky-sled once again, against future need.
They were engaged in climbing aboard their craft and in strapping each other securely in place, in preparation for launching forth on the last leg of their flight, which, with just a bit of luck, would see them safely home in nearby Phaolon before the shadows of evening lengthened, when another kind of shadow darkened the treetop in their vicinity.
An enormous shadow.
An unthinkably enormous shadow.
A shadow nearly three miles long.
As the rim of darkness glided across them, they stared up in amazement—frozen—appalled—fascinated!
All but Arjala the Goddess Incarnate. Her beautiful features flushed with color, her imperious eyes flashed with radiant joy. Suffused with exultant emotion, she threw back her head in a superb gesture and laughed triumphantly at the vindication of her most cherished beliefs concerning her own divinity.
From the circular rim of the dark thing which floated far above them, incredible winged figures launched forth upon the brilliant skies. Figures such as their eyes had never before beheld… figures unknown even to their wildest dreams.
Fantastical, gigantic winged creatures with human riders came plummeting down toward them like falling stars. They stared upward, petrified with astonishment.
Except for Arjala. She felt no slightest twinge of fear, only the heady, ecstatic emotion of one who has been mocked and persecuted for an unpopular belief, who beholds herself proven correct after all.
“Fools!” she shrilled, glorious, radiantly beautiful in what she fancied her moment of triumph. “You thought me mad—me, mad! But I was right, in the end, and now you know it. Did I not say my Divine cousins would rescue me from your impious hands?”
Springing from the sky-sled, she threw her bare arms aloft and cried; “Descend, descend, Divinities! Rescue me from these insolent mortals!”
Her companions were too enthralled by the incredible thing floating above them to pay heed to her rantings. And in truth it was an astonishing vision to behold—the vast, clearly artificial, perfectly oval dishlike thing, crowded with fantastic and complicated structures.
So incredible was the flying thing above that they scarcely had time to notice the superhumanly beautiful black men, mounted on the immense blue-feathered hawk-creatures, which came hurtling down toward them from the hovering structure above. It was the hovering thing itself that held them rapt.
For it was a gigantic city… a city floating in the sky.
Chapter 7
The Skymen of Calidar
Janchan stared up, openmouthed in awe, at the incredible thing that floated above them like a metallic cloud. Beside him, Niamh the Fair shrank into the circle of his arms, which closed about her protectingly. She, too, stared in amazement at the incredible sight.
The city was a fantastic affair, a bewildering maze of many-tiered domes, truncated and oddly geometric towers, and strangely-shaped, slender and soaring spires. Everything was built of metal—a strange, brilliantly scarlet metal that flashed and glittered in the rich sunlight.
The style of architecture was bizarre and elaborate, and what they could see of the flying city was exceedingly ornate. The city was built on the upper rondure of an immense, bowl-shaped metal disk which must have been miles in diameter. For all the evidence of its metallic composition, and immensity, it was an undeniable fact that the scarlet city floated weightlessly on the air, no heavier than a cloud or a drifting leaf.
And this only compounded their astonishment. It was incredible that such a city should exist at all, since metals of any kind are extremely rare on the World of the Green Star, or, at any rate, are rare and difficult for the people of the treetop cities to obtain, since they never willingly descend to the actual continental floor of the gigantic forest, which is to them an unexplored abyss of utter darkness, filled with mythological horrors.
But that such a city should fly through the heavens was completely beyond belief, and struck them dumb with amazement. For, however cleverly constructed, or however light the metallic substance whereof the weird scarlet city was built, even the most conservative estimate of its weight would be in the millions of tons. It was so far beyond the technology of the Laonese civilizations, that a Flying City of scarlet metal was completely alien even to their wildest flights of imagination.
Nevertheless, the Flying City was real and actual and solid.
And from the mathematically regular lip of the vast metal saucer on which the city was constructed, giant hawklike flying creatures with plumage of metallic indigo launched themselves into the air and swooped down upon the astounded travelers who stood in a small group on the upper branch of the mighty tree.
It was merely one more amazing fact that these immense blue hawklike predators carried saddles strapped to their shoulders between their wings and at the base of their necks, and that they carried human-seeming riders in these saddles.
That the riders were members of a race or a branch of the human race hitherto unknown to the travelers was but one final incredible fact for their dazed brains to cope with.
The zawkaw—for such, of course, the indigo hawk monsters were—dived toward the branch whereon the four travelers stood dazzled with amazement. Coming to rest on the great branch, their savage hooked talons crunching into the hard wood of the branch as they landed, the zawkaw stared hungrily at the four with bright, flaring eyes. Their godlike riders dismounted from the giant birds and descended to the surface of the branch, and approached the four.
His mind still dazed and uncomprehending, Prince Janchan made no resistance as the riders of the zawkaw disarmed him and bound his wrists behind his back. There was not the slightest chance that he could successfully defend himself against the magnificent black demigods, for they had descended to the branch a full score in number and each of them was fully armed. To have fought at all would have been tantamount to committing suicide.
They were astonishing to look upon, the men from the Flying City. Each was a superb physical specimen, and most were a good head taller than Janchan himself, who was several inches above the height of the average Laonese male. The blackness of their skins was a further cause of amazement to him, for such a variation in skin-coloring was hitherto unknown upon the World of the Green Star. A visitor from the Earth, I should perhaps add here would also have found their appearance surprising. For, despite the darkness of their integument, which was similar to that of the Negro race, their features bore no slightest resemblance to Negroid features, being delicately carved, thin-upped and narrow chinned, with a high-domed and completely hairless skull. Obviously, the brains of the beautiful black men were of a superior order of development beyond the ordinary run of human kind.