It came to me, then, what a mad thing I had done, entering the vacated body of the forest boy. For the body had been at the very point of death, and I, who had died once before in the flesh of Chong, knew that death was a trauma as shattering to the psyche as birth is said to be.
But I fought, clinging to life. Red mist gathered before my eyes. Excruciating torment flayed through my nerves as pulse and respiration began anew. Had I possessed the strength I would have shrieked aloud with the pain; but I had not breath enough to do so much as whimper.
After an endless time, the torment lessened. The red mist cleared from my vision and the roar of my blood moving through the inner ear faded.
To draw each breath was a struggle against enormous odds. My heart labored violently within my chest, battling for life. My consciousness faded as the powerful life-instinct took over control of the battle against death.
And I swooned or slept.
After an unknown interval, I struggled back to wakefulness again to gaze up into the cool, aloof eyes of the cowled magician who was regarding me with surprise and slight admiration. Above the muffled thunder of my struggling heart I could not make out the words he murmured as he spoke to me. He lifted my head and set a beaker to my parched lips. I drank down a potent, stinging beverage as effervescent as vintage champagne, as bracing as a tonic. The fluid bit my tongue and slid down my throat to form a center of warmth deep within me, from which waves of languid heat expanded through my extremities. The numbness faded almost magically from my flesh, and the agony of the poison ebbed. And I swooned or slept again.
For days thereafter I lingered, half-conscious, clinging to life. Gradually my hold strengthened, and I sensed myself no longer in danger of losing my precarious grip on life or my rash tenancy in this new body.
I slept much, while strange lights beat upon my flesh and curious potions circulated through my veins. Doubtless my mysterious savior kept me drugged much of the time with some narcotic.
Why I lived while the boy himself had died I cannot say for certain. Perhaps it was simply that I am a full-grown man, with a greater store of vigor and life force, while he was a skinny, mistreated, half-starved stripling. At any rate, I recovered in time from the effects of the sting of the phuol. The wound on my leg healed; the poison-rotted flesh reknit. At first I could only hobble; in time I limped; but before very long I could walk or run as good as ever.
That I lived anew in the body of another did not trouble me. The boy died and there had been nothing that I could do in my bodiless state, to help him. When the soul has fled, the empty body is dead matter. Had I not entered it as a wandering spirit and revitalized it, the body would have decayed, its elements returning to the matrix of nature from which it had sprung.
But my tenancy of this body was a strange and unique experience for two reasons. It was not that merely to inhabit a borrowed body was new to me, for I had known the phenomenon before, on my first visit to the World of the Green Star. Then I had dwelt in the body of Kyr Chong, the Lord Chong, whose spirit had been torn from his flesh and driven forth to wander forever among the stars by a hostile enchanter. The memories of Chong had long-since faded from his body’s brain, and other than an extraordinary ease and facility in learning the Laonese language, my tenancy of his flesh had occasioned no peculiarities.
But the body of this boy was very newly dead—if indeed his body can be said to have died at all, since I entered it at the very moment his spirit fled forth. In the case of the boy, his brain was still a living organ and all his memories were still fresh. Thus, for example, I knew his name, which was Karn—or “Karn the Hunter,” as he thought of himself. And I knew that he was an orphan lad, his family long-since slain by the monstrous predators of the wild, who lived alone among the giant trees, subsisting on the game he slew with bow or lance, or trapped in cunningly contrived nets. There were many such as the boy Karn who dwelt apart from the treetop cities amid the wilderness of the giant trees. Sometimes they banded together into tribes of small clans, but as often as not they dwelt alone and apart, living off the forest, eschewing the companionship of their own kind.
Life for such persons is hard, for the World of the Green Star is a savage wilderness—an ocean teeming with enemies, in which there exist only a few islands of civilization and safety.
Thus it had been for Karn the Hunter. And there was still fresh in his memory the moment of his capture by a hostile tribe from which his own parents had fled into exile before his birth.
It was an uncanny thing, to delve into the alien memories of another person and another life. But my curiosity was, I think, natural enough under the circumstances. Thus I searched into the memories of Karn the Hunter, and thus I learned of the circumstances which had led him to that grim scene in which I had first encountered him, bound to the death stakes, set out to die under the venomous sting of the scorpion monster…
His father had been named Athgar, and he had been a hunter of the Red Dragon nation, a tribe of wandering savages who roamed among the giant trees at eternal enmity with all others of their kind. Athgar the Hunter had seen and had fallen in love with the girl Dioma, the daughter of a chieftain. His love had been returned, for she had often looked upon him from afar, admiring his prowess in the hunt, his fearlessness in battle, his stalwart body, and his nobility of features and deportment.
Thus they met and thus they loved. But her father had promised her to another, and refused Athgar when he came to sue for her hand. Athgar’s rival for the affections of Dioma had driven him into exile on the pretext that he had broken taboo, but on the fateful day of the nuptial rites, when Dioma was to have been delivered into the arms of the rival chieftain, Athgar appeared, slew his rival, and carried off into the wilderness the woman he loved, who became the mother of Karn.
As I have already stated, life among the giant trees is hard. It is especially hard for a lone man encumbered by a woman and a newborn child. In time, both Athgar and Dioma succumbed to the countless perils of the wild, leaving the child Karn to live or die on his own.
But Karn the Hunter had not died. The blood of mighty warriors and of many ancient chieftains ran in his veins, and his young body swelled with sleek thews; in time, if he survived, he would grow into a tall and majestic warrior like his father, fit to bear up the standard of the Red Dragon nation in war, and to lead a mighty party in the hunt. And Karn survived—for, although still but a boy, he had inherited much of his father’s fearlessness and dogged determination, as he had his inches and his brave prowess and courage.
But the cruel laws of survival in the wilderness impose the sentence of unending warfare upon those who choose to live apart from their fellow men, or those who are driven into the lonely life. Rogues and outlaws, they are, for the most part, and to be slain whenever they are encountered.
Such had been the doom of Karn the Hunter, the son of Athgar the Hunter; for in time he had been captured by Red Dragon scouts from his father’s own people. They had imprisoned him, starved and beaten him, and staked him out to die a merciless and lingering death under the poisonous sting of the phuol.
It was an irony of fate. For the savage boy had survived in the wild forest where a city-nurtured child would have succumbed to the thousand predators who roamed the wilderness. These perils he had survived—only to fall prey to his father’s foes, to his own people, who had staked him out to die on a branch whereon the venomous phuol make their nest. And from this grim jest of fate the hooded savant had saved him, for some idle whim or perhaps a deeper purpose which as yet remained unknown.