I cudgeled my wits for an appropriate answer. Phaolon was the city nearest to Ardha, so Klygon’s suggestion was a natural one, and there was no reason for me to suspect that he had cause to think my loyalties lay with the Jewel City. And I would prefer flying to Phaolon to searching out the Secret City of the Outlaws. For during a previous adventure I had found the desperadoes of Siona’s band dangerous and fairly inhospitable company. There was no reason for me to fear that Siona or her foresters would recognize me on a second visit, since then I had been a towering and magnificent warrior, Kyr Chong, and now I wore the body of a snub-nosed, gold-thatched, long-legged boy half Chong’s age and only a fraction of his inches. But it was, of course, to the Jewel City of my beloved princess that I most urgently desired to travel.
But, just then, Destiny took the decision out of my hands.
A gigantic black shadow fell upon us.
We looked up, and Klygon’s ugly, humorous face went pasty and livid with fear.
“Zawkaw!” he croaked, hoarse with terror. And, snatching at the reins, Klygon the Assassin swerved his zaiph about and sent his dragonfly-steed into a steep descent.
With one glance at the creature he had seen, I made haste to follow suit. My dragonfly hurtled into the dive on the heels of Klygon’s, as it were. And, indeed, the zaiph hardly needed our touch on the reins to flee from the zawkaw and seek safety in the lower terraces of the great forest.
For, whereas most of the brutes I had yet encountered during my perils and adventures on this weird and wondrous world had been the Laonese equivalent of insects, the zawkaw was something else.
The dhua is an enormous moth, the zaiph a dragonfly the size of a horse, and the zzumalak a giant bee swollen to the proportions of a bull. But the zawkaw is a bird—a bird more enormous than any whale that ever swam in Earthly seas, and a thousand times more dangerous than any creature of the Careen Star World I had yet encountered.
Chapter 4
Lightning Unleashed
A world where insects grow to monstrous size and where scarlet tree-lizards are as huge and as deadly as Bengal tigers should have other forms of life appropriately gigantic.
This was true of the avian forms as well as the other denizens of the sky-tall trees.
I suppose the closest Terrene equivalent to the zawkaw would be the hunting hawk or falcon. Back on Earth, such raptors are dangerous enough—swift, vicious, and deadly—although limited in size and seldom large enough to do more than wound a man.
But here on the World of the Green Star the ferocious hunting hawks grow huge as dinosaurs.
The monster zawkaw that came floating down upon us from the cloudy heavens above could make a mouthful of a full-grown man, and snap and gobble up half a dozen more. The monster looked rather like a sort of parrot or macaw and its plumage was blue—a metallic indigo, glittering and steely. Its hooked beak, though, was canary yellow, and the topknot or feathered crest upon its lean head was a startling crimson.
What was even more startling was that the zawkaw wore a saddle—and carried a rider astride its neck.
These things, of course, we but briefly glimpsed… and I am not certain whether or not my companion even saw the beautiful man who rode the gigantic hawk as a man might ride an elephant. “Beautiful” is a curious word to use when describing a man, for it generally suggests effeminacy. But the zawkaw-rider was manly enough, his broad-shouldered, long-legged physique as superbly developed as a Greek god, and nearly as naked, since he wore only a length of shimmering, silvery cloth wound about his lean waist and tossed carelessly over one powerful shoulder, so that it floated behind him like a glittering cloak of metallic lame.
For all his obvious masculinity, however, he was truly beautiful. His features, although cold and proud and arrogant, and set in a contemptuous expression of aloof hauteur, were of classic perfection. His face was like some mask of glistening black jet or obsidian, turned under the delicate hand of a master sculptor of supernal genius. They had no warmth or humanity or laughter in them, those cold, perfect features; but beauty was there, however frigid and soulless. His pate was as smooth and bald as that of my friend Zarqa the Kalood, save in that it lacked the feathery crest that crowned the Kalood’s skull.
These impressions I derived from a single, flashing glance. And, in the next instant, our zaiphs mad with terror of the blue hawk-thing, we hurtled down through the branches of the colossal trees. The zawkaw flew after us, and with every wingbeat it gained on us, despite our headstart, for its speed was incredible.
To be perfectly honest about it, my heart was in my mouth. Although destiny has cast me in the role usually reserved for a hero of romance, I am no braver or more indomitable than any ordinary man would be, were he to be thrust into such a sequence of perils and adventures as have been my lot. But having somehow come through a thousand fantastic adventures more or less unscathed, I have discovered a peculiar fact. And that is, while an adventure is happening to you, things are just happening too fast for you to afford the luxury of fear. Caught up as I have been in the whirlwind of events, I have found myself simply too busy to have leisure sufficient to be afraid. But afterward—once the excitement is over and the hazard is conquered and you can breathe easily again—then fear comes over you, leaving you weak in the knees with reaction.
Thus, with nothing to do but lean back in the saddle while my terror-maddened zaiph fled for its life, I had enough leisure to entertain fear. And I have seldom been as afraid in all my life as I was then.
Most of the ferocious beasts I had thus far encountered on the World of the Green Star had been dangerous adversaries, surely. But even the most terrifying of the monsters against which I had by this time matched my wits—or my blade, or both—had been more or less on the same general scat; as the brutes which roam the jungle wildernesses of my native world. There was the ythid, for instance, the scarlet tree-dragon I had fought that time we went hunting out of Phaolon to celebrate the mating of the zaiph. The ythid was twice the size of a full-grown tiger. And then there was the monstrous albino spider called the xoph, into whose mile-wide web Niamh and I had fallen after my faithful warrior friend, Panthon, had slain the ythid with his bow. The xoph had been as huge as any elephant.
Gigantic and fearsome as these terrible predators had been, they were nonetheless of a size whereof a man might have a fighting chance to fight and slay them. After all, Earth adventure—is such as I had faced and fought tigers or tuskers many times, and often from such encounters they had emerged triumphant and unharmed.
But the zawkaw… well, that was a bird of a different hue.
The mighty indigo-winged raptor was a hundred times the size of anything I had yet had to face on this terrifying and beautiful and mysterious world.
And, to fight it with but a slim-bladed longsword was madness and folly! But fight it somehow I must.
For the zawkaw fed on human flesh.
It would feed on anything it could slay.
And—with its cruel, hooked beak and horrible, sabrelike talons—it could slay anything that lived on the world of the giant trees.
And it had seen us. And it was hunting.
Like a hurtling meteor, the blue-winged death fell from the skies upon us. Indigo wings folded, it fell like a thundering avalanche. It was already so close I fancied I could feel its hot breath against my naked shoulders, as it panted hungrily, sharp yellow beak gaping open.