Chapter 11

A NIGHT IN A TREE

My life on Earth had been such that I had never been called upon to develop resourcefulness. A man of great wealth, surrounded by loyal servants, confined to my bed or a wheelchair, I had never been flung into circumstances where my very survival rested on my abilities to exist unaided in the wilderness.

But now I had nothing else to count on. At my side, worn and pale from the horrible experiences through which she had suffered, lay a beautiful young girl thrust by hapless fate under my protection.

Our predicament was an utterly hopeless one. Hungry, bone-weary from our battle against the albino xoph, trembling with fatigue from our exhausting climb up the monster spiderweb, marooned in a giant tree a mile above the

world, we somehow had to find food and warmth and shelter from the night, and protection against the hideous predators who soon would be aprowl. And we had nothing but our bare handsl

Or did we? I still wore the leathern harness of a Laonese warrior, and the princess retained some tattered rags of her once-gorgeous gown, and perhaps something could be fashioned from the scraps. Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention; and few heroes of romance have suffered from the extremity of a need as great as ours.

The harness in which I was clad was a skimpy thing at best. An affair of belts and straps crisscrossed my naked chest; about my hips I wore a thick, heavy belt or girdle; my feet were shod in high, swashtop boots. Save for these, I was devoid of ornament or accouterment.

As for Niamh, she was left with mere tatters wherewith to clothe her modesty, and the brevity of her raiment was such as to leave naked her long, exquisitely slender legs and arms of mellow ivory; and, in truth, what little clothing she retained was full of rents through which gleamed glimpses of creamy flesh. A jeweled brooch, however, yet clung by its pin to the breast of her garment, and a large diamond, or some similar gemstone of smoky, lucent fire, adorned her hand.

As for my own harness, the heavy girdle clasped about my waist was fastened by a heavy buckle larger than a man’s open hand. The tang of this buckle was a slender blade of coppery metal slightly more than four inches long. It might well serve as a decent dagger blade, if I had the means to sharpen it or to hone its edges.

Had we not been aloft in the branch of the sky-tall tree, I have no doubt but what I could have found a bit of flinty rock with a little searching, and could have honed my makeshift blade to a keen edge with some labor. One does not, however, look for stones in the upper branches of a tree.

I could not ignore this problem with any serenity of mind, for without a weapon of some sort we would be helpless to avoid the attack of the numberless predators with which the World of the Green Star swarmed. Our success in battling free of the monster spider was pure luck and largely accidental; I could not rely on fortune or Providcnce alone to extricate us safely from a second such encounter.

While Niamh rested, I rose to my feet and began prowling about the branch, looking for I know not what, but unable to rest easy without exploring our vicinity to discover what chance coupled with ingenuity might do to improve our situation. Food and drink were a problem, but the necessity of finding or making some manner.of weapon occupied my thoughts to the exclusion of all else. Without a means of defending myself from attack, we would pass every moment in peril until help arrived from the Jewel City courtiers stranded somewhere aloft.

I explored first the crotch of the tree, the junction from which our branch sprang from the central trunk. The branch itself extruded from the trunk at a slight angle, and the place where it merged with the trunk formed a bowl-shaped hollow like a shallow pit. This slight depression contained a litter of dried leaves-each the size of outspread bedsheets. Here and there, pools of fresh rainwater had been caught in crevices in the rough bark. Thirst, therefore, would not be a problem of major concern, although lack of food might be.

After searching the crotch of the tree, I went further out on the branch to see what I might find. The branch extended for about a quarter of a mile, and, although it dwindled in width and angled upward at an everincreasing incline, I found no especial difficulty in traversing its length, as the roughness of the bark made my progress easy enough-rather like walking across a field corrugated by the plow marks of a tractor.

Suddenly I stopped short. I had discovered we were not alone on our airy perch, and I tensed in grim anticipation of another unequal combat with a forest monster. The hulking shape before me was shrouded in the gloom of leaf-shadow: all I could make out was a gradual creeping movement and the rondure of a curved back, or so I at first assumed it to be. At length, however, and to my immense relief, I discovered the creature to be some sort of tree snail and probably of a harmless nature and a sluggish disposition. The snail, however, was the size of a full-grown dog, and its shell was a swelling hemisphere of pearly yellowish stuff, half as big as a bathtub.

The smallness of the inoffensive creature puzzled me a bit. If moths and dragonflies on this World of the Green Star grew to the size of horses and were large enough to ride upon, and if spiders attained a virtually elephantine

bulk, you would think snails would grow on a comparable scale. This particular member of the species might, of course, be young; it might also belong to a dwarf genus.

Niamh, by now fully rested from her ordeal and either grown venturesome or reluctant to let me out of her sight, followed me to the terminus of the branch.

“It is only a houoma,” she said. “It cannot harm us. In fact, they are good to eat.”

I had not thought of the fact that not only is snail flesh edible and nutritive but, as the French know, delicious. Now that the princess mentioned the fact, I recalled that I had many times dined on escargot and found it a tempting delicacy. It was not difficult to slay the sluggish houoma and drag it back down to the crotch of the branch, and between us Niamh and I managed to break the shell away.

She pointed out that the shell, which had cloven neatly into two rounded halves, could serve as a bowl and that we could simmer the flesh of the snail in its own juices had we but the means of making a fire. Of course, like its near relatives the clam and the oyster, the meat of the snail is edible even when raw, but I would prefer to eat it cooked.

That presented another problem, but luckily not an insoluble one. It was not an easy task to make a fire with what we had to hand, but with patience I managed at length to strike sparks from the steel pin of Niamh’s brooch and we found the soft inner lining of the tree bark as flammable as punk, while the dry tissue of the leaves flared up easily.

While Niamh cooked the succulent flesh of the houoma over a slow fire, filling the air with delicious odors, I busied myself with the remainder of the snail shell. The substance of the shell, while brittle, was remarkably tough. And while unshelling the houoma, I had found myself thinking about that hard horny shell, wondering if its cleanly broken edge would be durable enough so that I could hone and sharpen the tang of my belt buckle against it.

Copper is one of the softer metals, and by dint of patient and tedious effort I did indeed put an edge on my makeshift dagger blade. Or on half of it, anyway, leaving the blunter end to serve as my handgrip. This part of the dagger I bound with thin supple leather from my harness.

So, tired but safe enough for the present, we ate dinner.

The houoma, by the way, tasted remarkably like clam meat and made a satisfying and very filling meal, there was so much of it. We could have done with a bit of tomato sauce, though, or a twist of lemon, but I suppose Crusoes cannot be choosy.

After dinner we were ready for sleep. I built the fire up with enough bark fragments and scrapings to keep it burning steadily during the night. The bark did not flame up as wood would have done, but smoldered, turning to long-lasting coals. The warm orange-red glow of the coals would serve to keep night-prowling predators away, or so I hoped, and would shed enough heat to keep us comfortable should the night turn cool.

We curled up for the night on either -side of our fire, using the less brittle of the huge yellow leaves to wrap around us like blankets. I was feeling a natural pride in my newfound skills of woodsmanship, although Niamh took my resourcefulness for granted and did not seem to think it worthy of praise. Of course, in her eyes I was Chong, a mighty hero out of the distant past, supremely able to cope with any manly feat. Only I knew that I was not the reincarnation of her hero but an impostor in a borrowed body. I did not dare disabuse her of her illusions. Before we fell asleep, we discussed our predicament, the hazards we would face in the days to come, and what few hopes we had. Niamh believed there was very little chance of our being rescued by those of her courtiers we had left behind on some branch far above us.

“They would not know where to look,” she said quietly. “The world is large and full of terrors; and we are small and frail. They could not be expected to know we survived our fall, for none who fall from such a height ever survive.”

“But surely they will search for us, nonetheless!” I argued. “I wonder they did not come flying down to find us hours ago-the descent to the web wherein we were entangled would only have taken them minutes, mounted on their dhua.”

She shook her head, silvery gloss of hair gleaming in the warm light of the coals.

“That they did not do so convinces me of what I had feared,” she murmured, “and that is that they are marooned as helplessly as we. For the dhua are the

natural prey of the fearsome ythid, and dread no beast with deeper terror. At the appearance of the tree dragon, the dhua would all have panicked, breaking tether and fleeing to the winds in their fright. I fear we can hope for no rescue from my people of Phaolon … .”

She sighed. The dim golden glow of the coals was warm on her lovely, heart-shaped face.

Her silken lashes fluttered down, veiling the glory of her depthless amber eyes. And she slept. I stared long at the beautiful young girl with whom I had fallen so hopelessly in love and, when at length I drifted into sleep myself, my dreams were filled with visions of a slender maiden with limbs of mellow ivory and an elfin face enhaloed with a silken cloud of hair like floating, silvery gossamer.

My life on Earth had been secluded, protected, luxurious-and lovely. But I did not miss the safety and comforts of my Terrene existence. I would rather be where I was now, for all the discomforts and dangers, than return to Earth. I would rather dwell in a sky-high tree under the strange light of the Green Star, battling with naked hands against fearsome monsters, than go home to a dull, tedious life of boredom and ultimate futility.

For here I was a man, a splendid savage, not a hopeless cripple. Never before had I truly lived, tasting life with an appetite spiced with danger, feeling pride in my own prowess, knowing that each day I would face new and more horrendous perils, but knowing, at least, that I lived each moment to the hilt, with verve and gusto, with excitement and suspense, with romance and mystery and adventure, by the side of the most beautiful woman of two worlds!