I told myself that it was unfair to expect him to go forward alone into danger, that one other should stand beside him to make the fight more equal. Now I laugh grimly at my pathetic and foolish attempts to pretend I crept from the camp from noble and altruistic motives. By such ignoble means does the human heart delude itself, feeding on lies; for it was a lover’s jealousy alone that goaded me into the night—jealousy that another should win the admiration and thanks of the woman I loved.
I began to descend the slope of the branch. I know now that I should have left behind a note for Zarqa to find at dawn, when he roused and came to waken me and found me gone. I try to pretend that it was only because I lacked writing implements that I did not leave a note for him; but the answer is, quite simply, that my mind was a seething maelstrom of jealous fantasies and I never once thought of it.
It is at night that the terrible predators of the Green Star World emerge from nest and lair to hunt their prey. So, of course, I got into serious trouble before I had been gone from the camp more than half an hour.
I was striding down a small branchlet toward the crotch of the great tree when I stumbled into a small, grim drama.
An immense monster bee was slaying a grub.
The bee was the size of a full-grown bull, and many times as dangerous. Its glittering oval wings were like sheets of veined opal and its furred body glistened with an oily sheen. The grub was a huge soft sluglike thing and the stinger of the bee had run it through the belly. It bled copiously, red gore splattering the branch in every direction, and despite the gaping wound it yet lived and clung to the stinger which transfixed it, flopping and squirming slowly.
At my approach, the monster bee turned upon me a glittering and soulless gaze. Eyes like immense, faceted jet beads stared as if seeking to ascertain if my approach indicated danger. The dim, small intellect behind the glistening helm of horny black chitin doubtless assumed I meant to rob it of the fat grub that was intended for its nocturnal meal. I, of course, desired only to pass and continue on my way.
However, the branch was rounded here, and fell away in a giddy curve to either side of where the enormous insect squatted above its prey. I could not easily pass to either side, without danger of falling from the branch. So I stood there, waiting for the bee to bear away its dinner.
That was, it proved, exactly the wrong thing to have done under the circumstances. For my motionless presence roused vague suspicions of my harmlessness in the minuscule intellect of the predator. It turned from the dying grub to face me on the branch, its stalked and many-jointed limbs scissoring as it wheeled about. I saw the honey-sacs on its rear limbs as it changed position, and knew that this must be none other than one of the creatures Zarqa had referred to as a zzumalak.
Then it hurled itself upon me with blurring speed.
The zzumalak flashed at me like a charging tiger, and for a fatal fraction of a second I was too surprised to move or even flinch.
Dry, clawed mandibles seized me up, coarse-bristled forelimbs brushing against my bare thighs. In the next second my sword was out and I was fighting for my very life, there in the dense gloom, on the insecure footing of a blood-splattered and perilously narrow branch.
The deadly sting was a tapering needle of black horn thrice the length of my arm. It stabbed at me with blindingly swift, convulsive thrusts. Karn’s muscles and reflexes were those of a trained hunter, but he knew little of the formal art of fencing. But my mind was that of a trained swordsman, and I remembered much of the skill that had been instinctive to me when I dwelt in the body of Kyr Chong. So we were not unevenly matched.
It was an eerie duel, there on the high, swaying branch, amid the leafy darkness—man against monster bee—sword against sting. I parried every stroke with desperate skill, using every trick of the art of fencing I knew. Again and again my agile point slid past the monster’s guard and my blade sank deep into its curving flanks or thick-furred belly. But the zzumalak seemed utterly insensitive to pain and did not tire or slow, although the oily ooze that was its vital fluid leaked slowly from many puncture-wounds.
I had hacked away two of its clutching limbs, but one great claw still clutched me, caught in the leather straps of my trappings. Thus it was that when the zzumalok rose suddenly into the air on drumming wings, I went with it.
I was lucky, though. Dangerous as my position had now become, it could easily have been worse. Those sharp claws could have been sunk deep in my belly…
As the zzumalak rose into the air the dying grub wriggled over the incline of the branchlet and fell. Thus it was that with dawn when Zarqa came searching for some trace of me, he found only the blood shed by the grub, but no grub, and formed the natural assumption that the gore was my own.
Either from the burden of my weight or from some internal injury my blade had caused, the zzumalak wavered drunkenly in its flight. Wings of sheeted opal drummed unsteadily, falteringly, and the monster bee hurtled across the span between the tree whereon we had battled and its neighbor. This, by a lucky chance, was the tree in which the city of Ardha was built; but it might easily have been another.
The winged horror tipped, staggering in its flight, and began to lose altitude. I clung to the forelimb whose claws were caught in my harness, lest the wounded brute should release its grasp on me and I should fall into the abyss.
The wind whistled about me, whirling my cloak and tugging at my hair. The sickening depths of the abyss below swung giddily. The lamps of Ardha were nearer now.
My position was incalculably dangerous. I clung desperately with one hand to the bristled, horny limb of the injured zzumalak, my other hand still clenching the hilt of my sword, which I dared not lose.
At any instant the flying predator might falter in its flight and fall, bearing me with it to a horrible doom in the unthinkable abyss miles below.
Or it might well soar on past Ardha, carrying me countless leagues away from the Yellow City which was my goal.
And there was absolutely nothing I could do to alter the situation to the slightest degree in my favor. I could, I suppose, have thrust my blade deep into the thorax of the flying thing from beneath, hoping to strike a vulnerable organ. But that, of course, would merely precipitate me into the abyss.
The lights of Ardha were below me now. I glimpsed torchlit processions streaming through the boulevards of the city, and lantern-lit gardens, and the lighted windows of the mansions and palaces. The zzumalak flew an erratic, meandering course across the breadth of the metropolis, wavering drunkenly in its flight.
My one-handed grip on its foreleg was loosening as my hand wearied. Risking much, I released my grip in order to hold my scabbard steady while I sheathed my sword, which would bree both hands for the task of clinging ahold of my unpredictable steed.
And then the zzumalak dropped me and I fell like a stone.
Chapter 22
BLACK MASKS IN THE NIGHT
Perhaps I cried out as I fell; I have no idea, for, if I did, the wind whipped the cry from my lips.
The instinct that bids a doomed man cling to life is a powerful one. For I reached out desperately with both arms to catch some obstacle and break my fall.
To my own amazement I caught hold of a slender shaft of wood.
At the time I had no idea of what it was. Now, looking back on my memories of that terrible, endless moment of falling through space, I think it must have been one of the long, slim flagstaffs that thrust from the rooftops of Ardhanese buildings and from which heraldic banners are suspended.