Читать книгу In the Green Star's Glow - Lin Carter - Страница 7

Delgan suddenly snatched back his hand with a shrill, unbelieving cry. For, out of nowhere, a green-feathered arrow had transfixed his hand. Paling to a muddy, unhealthy hue, his thin-lipped mouth pinched with pain, Delgan stared down at his right hand. The arrow had pierced completely through the bones of his wrist. Its gory-bladed point protruded from the other side of his arm. Red blood trickled down his hand to drip upon the cabin floor from numb fingertips.

In the next instant a deep, quiet voice spoke from somewhere behind Niamh:

“Do not give credence to his lying words, lady, for he is a faithless traitor, and the direst foe of your friends Janchan and Zarqa and Elam.”

Niamh turned about to see the speaker of these words, and saw a tall, bronzed bowman in the forest-green and silver of Tharkoon. His powerful scarlet bow was at the ready, an arrow nocked in place to be loosed upon the instant, should the blue man try to fire the zoukar he still gripped in his uninjured hand.

While Delgan had sought to trap her in his wily web of words, the bronzed bowman had drawn himself up with a surge of his mighty arms until he straddled the tail-assembly of the sky craft. Then he had inched his way along the smooth, sleek fusilage of the streamlined flying vessel, until he crouched just behind the spacious cockpit. From that vantage point he had observed all which had transpired between the lissome girl and the smooth-tongued ex-Warlord of the Barbarian horde. His intervention had been a timely one. So intent had Delgan been upon the slim girl he sought to ensnare with his lies and half-truths and clever distortions of fact, his keen and watchful eyes fixed upon her elfin face, that he had not so much as glimpsed the burly bowman crouched atop the cowling. Had he so much as lifted his fixed gaze from Niamh’s face for an instant, the encounter might have had a very different outcome.

Now holding his bow nocked and ready in one hand, the archer from Tharkoon swung his booted legs over the cowling and dropped like a great cat into the cockpit to stand protectively beside the bewildered Princess of Phaolon.

“He lies, lady, I swear it!” panted Delgan, his eyes wild, his calm controlled demeanor shaken for once. His mouth worked loosely and spittle foamed at the corners of his lips, to dribble down his chin. “He is a renegade—an outlaw!—who seeks to seize you and deliver you into the hands of your enemies. I, I alone, am your friend!”

His words were shrill and, for once, rang falsely on the ear. His very expression, wide-eyed, mouth working loosely, sweat beading his features, reeked of fear. Niamh did not believe him and shrank against the side of the towering bowman as the hysterical blue man gesticulated wildly, the death-flash forgotten in his hand.

The sky-ship borne on the swift wings of the morning breeze, had traveled a very great distance by this time. Indeed, the island city of Komar was by now lost from view somewhere behind them, cloaked from sight behind a pearly veil of morning mist. The Komarian Sea was not of any great breadth in these parts; indeed, the shoreline of the mainland was clearly in view dead ahead of their floating prow. They could see the immense boles of the miles-tall trees soaring up out of the abyss of darkness which was the floor of the world-encumbering forest.

The wind was carrying them directly into that mighty rampart of mountain-high trees. The eyes of Zorak were first to spot their peril, and with a grunt of surprise, letting his red bow fall, the bowman stepped forward to seize the controls and turn the prow aside before the hurtling craft drove into the mighty palisade of tree-trunks.

Eyes feral with desperation, goaded into viciousness like a cornered rat, the blue man, with the arrow through his wrist, fell into a defensive crouch as the bowman stepped forward. Lips writhing back from his teeth, which were bared in a fighting snarl, the blue man raised the death-flash in one shaking hand.

“Back, you island dog, or I’ll blast you where you stand!” he whimpered.

“But, man, the trees!” grunted Zorak, pointing at the wall of mighty trunks which swept up toward them. But Delgan, where he crouched near the low edge of the cockpit had his back turned against that forward view, and had no notion of the danger that was upon them.

“An old trick,” he snarled with a shaky laugh, “to trap a clever wolf. Do not move, on peril of your life, you hulking brute—”

Zorak gestured helplessly as a great branch thrust into their path, gold-foil leaves glittering in the light of the Green Star. Then, ignoring the threat of the crystal rod, the bowman turned and swept Niamh into his arms to protect the girl from injury with his own brawny body serving as her shield.

In the next instant the hurtling craft tore through the mass of foliage. Leaves huge as a schooner’s sails whipped past them. The pointed nose of the flying ship grated against rough bark and the fabric of the craft shuddered under the rasping impact of the glancing blow.

Delgan staggered before the buffet as one great leaf swept by him, knocking him from his feet. The backs of his knees struck against the edge of the low cockpit with stunning force. With a screech of blood-chilling fear the blue man fell backward over the edge of the cockpit and disappeared from view, still clutching the zoukar in a deathlike grip.

An instant later, like a sleek projectile, the flying vessel whipped through the mesh of leaves and went wobbling drunkenly into open air again, still reeling from the glancing blow. Zorak threw himself to the edge of the cockpit and looked over. They were among the boles of the sky-tall forest by now, and only an abyss of impenetrable gloom was visible below. He could not even glimpse the dwindling mote of Delgan’s writhing form as the unfortunate Warlord fell to his unquestioned death half a mile below, where great pallid worms squirmed through the fetid darkness of the forest’s floor. . . .

And this was the terrible sight which Zarqa and Prince Parimus glimpsed from afar as they pursued the flying ship in the air yacht of the science wizard: one minute body falling from the craft as it slipped between the soaring tree-trunks and vanished from their view.

From that great distance, of course, they could not tell which of the three riders had fallen to his or her death in the black abyss beneath the lurching keel. . . .

The sky craft slid between two towering boles and drifted into an uncanny world of more-than-earthly beauty.

Only those who have visited the World of The Green Star can picture the incredible vista that met the eyes of Zorak and Niamh. In every direction trees of dark scarlet wood towered, their trunks thicker than the mightiest of skyscrapers, soaring aloft mile upon mile to thrust their vastness of golden foliage into the stratosphere. Between these lofty boles, great shafts of pellucid jade-green sunlight fell, shining through momentary rents in the eternal cloud-veil whose silver mists shielded the planet from the fierce emerald fires of its parent star. Here and there between the towering trees floated dragonflies as huge as Percherons, drifting on wings like sheeted opal. There, stretched on mile-long cables between the mighty branches, a spider web of colossal dimensions hung, its sticky strands thick enough and strong enough to hold rampaging mammoths captive. Clinging by sucker-disks to the underside of branches whose breadth was that of six-lane highways, golden and green and crimson lizards, fearsome and enormous as fabled dragons, clung.

It was an awesome and mysterious scene of strange and terrible beauty, such as my native Earth can nowhere display. But to Niamh the Fair it was known and familiar, for the gem-bright city of her birth nestled somewhere in aboreal giants such as these, and these incredible vistas were all that she had ever known.

But to Zorak the Bowman it was a weird new world of unknown marvels, for home to the brawny archer was the city of Tharkoon on its isolated peninsula thrusting out into the calm waves of the Komarian Sea, and the giant trees of Lao were an unexplored mystery to him. Thus he gaped with amazement upon the sights that lay everywhere.

The winds that had propelled the sleek and weightless projectile across the narrow straits of sea between the isle of Komar and the mainland had died now. No matter how strong the morning breeze might blow, it broke and died against the looming rampart of the arboreal titans. Thus the sky craft floated more slowly now, drifted idly to and fro, eventually coming to rest between the two segments of a forked twig as large as a siege catapult. Waking from his entranced fascination, the bowman bent in puzzlement over the controls, eventually finding the switch that killed the power-source which drove the engines of the flying ship.

“Well, where to now, my lady?” he asked, once the danger of collision with one of the huge branches was past. “Delgan will trouble us no more, but we must be making our return to Komar, where your friends wait.”

Niamh turned to him eagerly. “Is it true, brave bowman, what I glimpsed in that brief moment above the palace roof? Has the boy, Karn, recovered his vision? Is it true that his eyes are healed?”

The Tharkoonian nodded. “Aye, lady, but whether it was from the cures slow nature works in her own good time, or from the science magic of my master, Parimus the Wise, who treated the youth’s eyes, I do not know. But Karn can truly see again.”

“I thank all Gods,” she breathed, tears glittering on her thick lashes. “And Prince Janchan, and the Goddess Arjala, and somber, unspeaking Zarqa the Kalood, my friends who rescued me from the Flying City . . . they too live and are well and unhurt?”

“Aye.” He nodded again. “All have come safely through our recent adventures in battle against the Blue Barbarians who held the island city of Komar and exiled her gallant heir, Andar.”

“Then let us be about and back to this city of Komar of which you speak, so that we may rejoin our comrades,” bade the girl breathlessly.

But when the bowman, obedient to her wishes, bent to the controls again nothing he could do could rouse the dormant engines into life. Some secret switch, it seemed, must first be engaged; but which it was, he did not know.

Weightless as a log upon the bosom of a stream, and as dead and lifeless, the sky craft hung moored between two branches . . . and they were lost, marooned half a mile above the world, in a part of the giant forest which even Niamh the Fair, for all her travels, had never visited before.

But not alone.

A deep-throated, menacing hiss woke Niamh from her frowning reverie as she bent over the panel, studying the multitude of dials, striving to remember which knobs and switches Ralidux had touched to pilot the craft.

She looked up into a snarling visage straight from the netherpits of some jungle hell . . . looked into the naked fangs and yawning jaws and lambent yellow gaze of a monster lizard, which had slithered out upon the nearer of the twin branches until it crouched now with twitching tail only an arm’s reach from the open cockpit.