By the light of the Green Star I saw the incredible vista fall away to every side; trees as mighty as mountains, bearing up masses of foliage like enormous clouds of glittering gold. And, here and there, the weird and alien life which teemed on this world of marvels could be glimpsed. Dragonflies the size of stallions… gauzy-winged moths and creatures which resembled enormous bees… scarlet-mailed tree lizards which are like nothing so much as the fabulous dragons of Earthly legend. Confronted with this tremendous view, my own concerns shrank into insignificance. I felt like a mote lost amid the colossal towers of Manhattan.
I yawned and stretched, taking in the breathtaking view. Oh, it was good to rouse oneself with dawn, to feel the hot blood pouring through your veins, to stretch sinewy muscles in the cool of morning, with all the day ahead of you.
To be alive—and young and strong and vigorous—what a thrill it was! I, who had lived the life of a hopeless cripple all my days, the coddled, sickly, pampered son of a millionaire whose fortune could not purchase health and vitality and strong legs for a son stricken with polio decades before the perfection of the Salk vaccine—I knew, better than most, the pricelessness of health.
And I gloried in it, even lost amid unknown dangers parted from the girl-princess I loved, pursued by a host of enemies. I stretched my arms in the glory of morning and felt my sinews ripple. I drew deep into my strong lungs the clean, fresh air of dawn, and could have laughed aloud from the sheer joy of merely being alive.
All about me, to every side, stretched the worldwide forest of giant trees—a vista of such incredible and awe-inspiring magnificence as to be breathtaking. True, dangers there were aplenty, in this world of marvels and mysteries, where weird beasts and dangerous foes fought continually for life in the savage wilderness.
But I had youth and strength and courage—a princess to fight for and a kingdom to win—a sword in my hand and a loyal comrade by my side. What had I to fear, even amid a thousand perils? And I smiled to myself, considering, not for the first time since I voyaged here in spirit and found a home in the body of the youthful warrior, Karn of the Red Dragon, that on this strange and awesome world of marvels and mysteries, the deeds and the doings of men are of little moment. His very cities are but jeweled toys clinging to the mighty branches of trees whose crests touch the misty sky above; and his wars and wanderings of no more importance to the mighty creatures who make this worldwide wood their home than the scurryings of a band of grubs or termites would be on my native Earth.
My dreamy thoughts were jarred from these tranquil and philosophical meditations when my idle and wandering gaze chanced upon the figure of my companion. His lean and wiry form still clad in the somber black of the Assassins’ Guild, homely, humorous little Klygon was crouched on the terminus of the branch, peering through a screen of golden leaves, each of which was a glorious tissue of fibrous gold the size of a ship’s sail. His figure was tense and motionless, and eloquent of danger.
Danger is ever-present on this World of the Green Star, where the very insects are immense and dangerous predators whose ferocity and blood-lust makes them the equal of Bengal tigers.
“What is it, Klygon?”
He hushed me with a hasty gesture and I got to my feet and scrambled out on the end of the branch beside him. On Earth, it would have been a feat to challenge the coolness of a veteran Alpinist, for the branchlet to which we clung was, at this end, no bigger about than a city sidewalk, and to every side the world fell away to an unplumbed abyss of impenetrable gloom two miles beneath our heels.
But the Laonese, as the men who inhabit the World of the Green Star name their race, are a miracle of evolution. A million generations of tree-dwellers have, by now, bred the fear of heights entirely out of the race. And the body my star-wandering spirit inhabited was as Laonese as was Klygon, and immune to vertigo.
Peering through the rustling foliage, I perceived a remarkable expedition. Delicate, slender, graceful men in fantastic garments of gilded and lacquered leather which resembled antique Japanese samurai armor, mounted on immense, brilliantly colorful dragonflies with drumming wings like thin sheets of glistening opal, flew in double file between the boles of arboreal immensities. They were armed with swords like needles of glass, with long spears like gigantic thorns, from which floated pennons of fierce canary-yellow, charged with an emblem of ominous black.
They were the flying warriors of Ardha.
But they were not hunting us, that much was certain. The escape of two Assassins was a matter of no importance to either Throne or Temple, as the major political factions of Ardha are termed. No—they pursued a quarry far more lustrous and desirable.
They pursued my beloved, Niamh, the fugitive Princess of Phaolon, a city with which the Ardhanese were at war. And they sought my friends, Janchan and Zarqa, who had carried off the sacred and inviolate person of Arjala, whom the folk of Ardha regarded with veneration as their Incarnate Goddess. And this flight was, must be, but one of the several the Ardhanese had dispatched on the trail of the fugitives.
Other eyes than mine, then, had observed the escape of the sky-sled. And when the absence of the temple captives, and of the Goddess herself, had been noted, it had not been difficult to put two and two together, and come up with four.
Grimly, I watched the aerial entourage dwindle from sight down the vista of gigantic trees. We were two men alone, and could do nothing to assist Niamh and the others in eluding their pursuers. All I could do was to hope that the sky-sled could outdistance, or outweary, the wings of the swift zaiphs on which the vengeful soldiery of Ardha were mounted.
“They aren’t after us, lad; that’s plain,” Klygon said in his hoarse, whiskey-voiced way. “Must be hunting them as carried off the Goddess and the Phaolonese girl. Still and all, best we take to the high terraces.”
I agreed, and we scrambled back down the branch to the place whereat we had spent the night. We broke our fast on globes of fresh dew the size of watermelons, caught on the upper surface of leaves, and on the sweet flesh of a fruit which tasted like strawberry but resembled the coconut. These horny, hard-husked “berries” grew wild on airplants which had rooted themselves amid the branches here at the two-mile level. Our zaiphs fed from syrup-sacks we had brought along in case of need; they thrust a hairy proboscis in the leathern sacks and sucked noisily at the sweet, heavy fluid which was their provender. I repressed a grin, for they looked for all the world like horses with feedbags hung about their noses.
By “the high terraces” Klygon meant a level of the forest which was about a mile above our present position, and which was thus some three miles above the actual continental surface. The high terraces are seldom used by fliers because the greater proliferation of tree branches makes flight hazardous. It also reduces the velocity at which you may safely fly by zaiph or dhua (as the huge, gauzy-winged moths are called); but our primary consideration was to elude contact with the sky warriors, rather than making any considerable speed.
Once our steeds had finished their repast and had refreshed themselves by drinking of the giant dewdrops, we mounted, strapped ourselves securely in the saddle, and were off. For a time we flew upward in a wide spiral, following the slanting glory of a green-gold sunbeam, until that uniquely Laonese sense of height informed us that we had reached the three-mile level. Then we continued in the direction we had been traveling the night before, which was more or less in the same direction Janchan and Zarqa had taken in the sky-sled.
“Well, lad, now that we do be free of Ardha, whither shall we wend, eh?” Klygon asked, expansively. His seamed face contorted in a grotesque wink. “On to Phaolon, or off to join the forest outlaws? There be ready employment for our skills in either camp, I’ll warrant!”