Читать книгу In the Green Star's Glow - Lin Carter - Страница 11

After a few moments I learned how to control the sky-sled and sent the diminutive craft speeding in a direction which, on my home world, we would have called north.

Directions on the World of the Green Star are particularly difficult to ascertain to a nicety. The Laonese seem never to have invented the compass, either because they have little need for such an instrument, or because ferrous metals such as iron and steel are exceptionally rare upon their planet. On the world of my birth, it is not difficult to discern the cardinal directions, at least, from mere observance of the sun’s position in the heavens. On the planet of the great trees, however, this is seldom possible, due to the immense cloud-barrier which shields the surface of Lao from the fierce emerald beams of its primary. The silvery layer of impenetrable mists serve to scatter and diffuse the rays of the Green Star, spreading her luminance across the veiled heavens.

Komar soon dwindled behind me and was lost in the immensity of the dark sea. The islands of the archipelago floated by beneath the keel of my craft. Before long the shores of the mainland hove on the gloomy horizon, one colossal wall of monstrous trees whose mighty boles lifted up their leafy crest miles above the surface of the planet.

Slowing the velocity of the sky-sled, I drifted between the soaring tree-trunks and entered the gloom of the world-forest. Somewhere along this coast the aerial vehicle bearing Delgan and Zorak and Niamh the Fair had vanished from the knowledge of men. But where?

Their vessel could have entered the sky-tall woods at any point along the coast for scores or hundreds of miles in either direction. For a moment the immensity of my task overwhelmed me and the heart of Karn the Hunter sank within his breast. How, in all this vast, uncharted wilderness, to find the elusive mote that was the sky vessel? To seek the proverbial needle in the haystack seemed considerably simpler. . . .

After a while, my spirits rose within me. Difficult, even impossible, my task might consume months or perhaps years. But I was determined to undertake the search, whether it prove fruitless or not. To hunt, to search, to seek—whether or not with success—was preferable to doing nothing. Far rather would I roam the worldwide forests of this strange world forever, than to search not at all.

It was not long before I was forced to a realization that I must wait for dawn before attempting to begin my search for Niamh the Fair. Darkness amid the giant trees was absolute and unbroken, and the sled bore no running-lights. In this dense gloom I might float past the vessel of my beloved princess without knowing it. Moreover, it was dangerous to go blundering about in the blackness like this.

Therefore I slowed the forward velocity of the sky-sled to a mere crawl and watched for a safe place to berth the vehicle for the night. Before long I felt huge leaves brush the underside of the sled and discovered a twig which thrust up from the side of one great branch. I call it a “twig” for that is what it was; nonetheless, it was as wide about and of such a length as to have made a schooner’s mainmast back on Earth.

Unlimbering my mooring grapnel, I soon secured the sled to the twig and settled down for slumber. The confines of the sled were adequate for this purpose, and the nights on the Green Star planet were almost tropic in their warmth. But I could not find the rest I sought, nor did sleep come easily to one so troubled in his thoughts as I was. Fears for the safety of Niamh disturbed my mind, and unease for the future made me restless.

After tossing and turning for what seemed like hours, I managed to fall into a doze from which only the green-gold radiance of dawn awoke me . . . that, and the spear-point whose cold blade touched the smooth flesh just above my heart . . . .

My captors were, as it turned out, captresses. A band of young girls had crept upon me in the dim morning, and had clambered out upon the twig to which I had tethered my weightless craft. They were a wild-looking lot, with tangled hair and sunburned faces, clad in brief garments made of tanned leather hides which barely served to cover their lissome bodies and long naked legs. Sharp daggers were sheathed at their waist or strapped by thongs of gut to slim brown thighs. Many carried spears fashioned from long thorns, while others carried bows and arrows. There were an even dozen of them, and most were my age—that is, the teen-aged body my spirit wore.

Some looked as young as ten or eleven, but most of the wild girls were around fourteen.

Despite their tender years and their sex, I could not help noticing that they handled their weapons with the careless ease that comes to those who are long accustomed to using them.

I lay quietly, not moving, saying nothing, while they looked me over scornfully and chattered among themselves. Then one prodded me with her spear.

“You, boy! How did you come to be here in this flying thing? And from where? Speak, or I’ll plunge my blade into your scrawny chest!”

The girl who addressed me so scornfully was a long legged hoyden of perhaps thirteen, her supple form clad in a scrap of hide which bared one pink-tipped breast.

“I am Karn,” I replied quietly. “I am searching for lost friends who are somewhere hereabouts in a flying vessel much like this one. We are from Komar—”

“Komar?” the young girl repeated with a sniff. “I never heard of it, nor is it anywhere about.”

“Nevertheless, it was from Komar that I voyaged last evening,” I said.

She looked me over narrowly, fierce disapproval written on her snub-nosed, freckled face. Despite her warlike aspect and savage raiment, she was very beautiful in the way that young girls are beautiful; that is, in the burgeoning promise of the womanhood to come.

Like most of the dwellers in the treetop cities, she had ivory skin, drifting thistledown hair of silvery gold, and eyes as green as emeralds, set amid thick sooty lashes. Her lithe and supple body was slim as a young panther, without so much as an ounce of superfluous flesh. She was intensely exciting.

While pondering my fate, or my story, or perhaps both, the train of her thought was interrupted by the query put to her by another of the band, like herself, somewhat older than the little girls.

“What shall we do with him, Varda? Slay him? He is a man after all, and fit only for the knife.”

The girl who said this had flesh like old parchment and brilliant huge eyes that glared wrathfully at me through the floating locks of her silken hair. She looked to be fifteen, and her breasts were covered.

One of the littler girls, who was about ten and wore nothing at all except for a strip of hide wound about her loins, leather sandals on her feet, and the strap supporting her quiver of arrows across her boy-smooth breast, giggled.

“Let’s keep him for a slave, Varda,” she urged with a malicious grin at me.

I felt distinctly uncomfortable.

“No,” returned the older girl who had spoken before, and whose name I later learned to be Iona, “let us slay him now. He will grow into a man, otherwise, and do with us as the others of his vile kind would have done. Therefore, he deserves to die. I vote—death! Death to the man-cub!”

“Death!” hissed the naked ten-year-old, an expression of most unchildlike vindictiveness on her pretty face. I began to sweat, and to calculate my chances of wresting the thorn-spear from the strong hands of Varda before she could drive it through my heart.

As it turned out, I had little to fear. Some sort of rivalry existed between the two older girls, Varda, the nominal leader of this band of teen-aged Amazons, and Iona. Whatever Iona urged, Varda automatically opposed. And, I imagine, vice versa. So the bare-breasted Varda obstinately refused to turn me over to the eager blades of the other little savages, and ordered me securely trussed and borne along.

The girl Amazons, apparently, had been camping out overnight on a hunting expedition, and were en route to their hideout when the luminance of dawn had caught and flashed in the mirror-bright metal of the sky-sled, attracting their attention and curiosity.

They dragged me from the craft with my wrists stoutly bound behind my back. This was done with many a slap and kick and scratch of sharp nails. All of this I endured in silence, as I also endured the more intimate insults they subjected me to. For they stripped me bare and mocked me for my scrawniness and laughed at my nakedness and humiliation. I ignored this treatment as best I could, and maintained an impassive mien.

Off down the bough they led me, laughing when I tripped and fell, flogging me to my feet again with a switch laid against my rear. At length, wearying of mocking and striking one who neither complained nor winced nor cried out, they simply drove me along with thumps of their spear-butts. The younger girls, scampering along like wild naked little forest nymphs, giggled mischievously and made loud comments on my nude boyhood, but the older girls ignored me after a time.

We descended by a length of rope to a lower branch, and while the girl warriors clambered down as lithely as so many small monkeys, I was lowered like a bale of goods at the end of a line, much to the merriment of the girl-children. Then we followed the second branch until it intersected with another, and so on until by noon, when we reached the camp of the girl savages, I was thoroughly and hopelessly lost. I could not then understand why they had left behind my aerial craft, my weapons, which were superior to their own rude arms, and my stores and provisions. Later I came to the conclusion that their hatred and loathing of all things male was so excessive and virulent that it extended even to those things made by the hands of men.

In conceiving of this notion, incidentally, I was later proved wrong, as shall be seen.

So it was that I became the male captive, the only captive, of a wild band of prepubescent savages.

It was an experience which I would not wish on even the most dire and deadly of my enemies.