Chapter 12

THE SCARLET ARROW

When I awoke, the sky above me was a stupendous and fantastic vista of colossal trees soaring to unthinkable heights, and the heavens themselves obscured by an infinite canopy of leaves that stretched from horizon to horizon. The light of the Green Star fell through rents in this enormous canopy in vagrant shafts of glowing jade, and the arboreal leafage itself was struck to an incandescence of burning gold.

The air was fresh and heady with a wine-like tang. My exertions of yesterday .had left me aching with weariness and worn with fatigue. But a full belly and a night of deep slumber in the open air restored my vigor, and I rose with an exuberant vitality such as I have never known.

Niamh, too, rose refreshed and looking glorious. Gone was the jewelbox princess in her mandarin robes; in her place stood a lithe, long-legged girl with tousled hair, flushed cheeks, sparkling eyes, and joyous, merry laughter. A wild girl of the world-tall woods, true, in an abbreviated scrap of ragged raiment, but a fitting companion to the half-naked savage I had become, who faced the perils of the unknown forest armed only with a crude dagger!

We bathed in puddles of cold rainwater, breakfasted off the remnants of last night’s dinner, and felt fit and ready to face whatever perils the new day might bring.

The more remote extremities of our branch extended in several directions in leafy twigs as huge as the foremast of a schooner. Some of these twigs brushed a much larger branch above us, and we resolved to attempt the ascent, having exhausted the resources our present milieu afforded

us. There was no way of telling what we might find on the branch above us, and we could, of course, always return to our present place, should we wish to.

I think it was the pure, childlike excitement of our situation that urged us to explore as much of our strange new world as we could. This life of hand-to-hand struggle for survival against a savage world was as fresh and new and intoxicating to Niamh as it was to me, for all that she was native to the World of the Green Star. I once read of an emperor of China whose life was so artificial and circumscribed, so bound about by ritual and ceremony, that it was said he never once in his long life saw a bush or tree or field that was as nature had made it and not as it had been trimmed and shaped and grown by generations of gardeners. Niamh’s life, she confided to me in her artless way, had been no less artificial and sheltered. The life of the court was all she had ever known; sleek courtiers, rigid conventions, ornamented surroundings, artificial and sophisticated pleasures, were all that she had ever known. Although we prowled a hostile wilderness teeming with ferocious monsters, every moment pregnant with unexpected terrors, she felt a sense of liberation and freedom that was like a superb and golden wine to one who had for too long subsisted on bland, insipid milk.

It was, I think, this sense of freedom which kept her from worrying about the perils of our precarious position. To be hopelessly lost in this world of giant trees, the prey of unthinkable monsters, all chance of succor or rescue slim, should have plunged so delicately reared a maiden into an abyss of terror. But Niamh reacted to our predicament as if it were a spree, and the novelty of spending a night in the wild, of slaying our own dinner, of exploring a new world of mystery and beauty and savage peril she found exhilarating. As we clambered out onto the extremities of our branch, her eyes were sparkling with mischief, her cheeks flushed with excitement. With her ragged garments, long bare legs, smudged nose and tousled hair, she was absurdly like an adventurous boy-very different from the stiff, brocaded queen surrounded by a covey of suave courtiersl

The upper branch, which we attained with some difficulty, was very much larger than the one whereon we had spent the night. It was as wide as a four-lane highway and

it extended from the colossal trunk at a right angle, running parallel with the ground far below. It twisted and turned, curving and meandering away until lost from view in cloud-huge clumps of leaves.

We strolled out upon it for about a quarter of a mile. Again I felt a sense of awe at the enormity of the trees of this fantastic world-trees so immense they would have dwarfed into insignificance even the towering redwoods of my native Earth. And not for the first time did I wonder at the strange disproportion of men and trees on this World of the Green Star. I felt like a midge crawling on the branch of a mighty oak, and I pondered the mystery of the size of these arboreal colossuses. Could it be that these trees were actually of normal size, and that it was the dwellers upon the Green Star planet who were elfsmall? It could be: when first I came hither, voyaging in my astral form, I had naturally assumed beings so manlike in their appearance must be manlike in their height. But the more I saw of the gigantic trees and the monstrously huge insects that dwelt upon them, the more I wondered. My astral form had been a mere spark of life-a point of consciousness, without reference of size. Had I perhaps lost all sense of proportion, mistakenly believing the Laonese to be of an height comparable to the inhabitants of my own world? Were they, perhaps not a miniscule people, dwelling in trees which, to my physical self, would have seemed but average in their tallness?

To this question I had no answer then; nor can I answer it now. It was but one of the thousand mysteries I encountered on the World of the Green Star, not one of which I am able to explain.

We came suddenly upon a surprising marvel of beauty. It was an immense flower, waxen pale, its voluminous petals as creamy in hue as those of the camellia-but a thousand times larger than any flower that ever bloomed on my own world.

Niamh uttered a cry of delight and hovered entranced over the fantastic blossom. She confessed that her people seldom ventured far from the Jewel City, and that such flowers were unknown. She stroked the satiny petals, drinking in the heady perfume in an ecstasy of wonder.

The blossom sprouted from a tangle of rootlets like an air plant, and seemed to, be parasitic. A thousand hairy

green tendrils were insinuated between interstices of bark, anchoring the immense flower to the tree. The petals were half-open, like a trumpet lily or a morning glory, and from the deep center, where creamy white deepened to a ruddy hue, filaments of feathery scarlet floated limply. I stood, leaning on a branchlet, entranced at the mysterious beauty of the scene-the lovely, exquisite, elf-like girl hovering over the colossal flower: it was like an illustration from a fairy tale, and it would have demanded the genius of an Arthur Rackham or a Hannes Bok to capture the delicate nuances of the scene.

Suddenly Niamh shrieked in horror, and a scene of dreamlike loveliness turned upon the instant into a tableau of terror. For the feathery scarlet filaments suddenly lashed out at the entranced girl like striking vipers. They coiled snakily about her wrists, holding both arms pinned in a grip of surprising tensile strength. I sprang forward, grasping her about her slim waist, and sought to pull her free of the cannibal blossom, but to no avail. The tentacles that slithered from the core of the monstrous blossom had a steely resilience that was astonishing.

As I fought and tore at the writhing tendrils, more and yet more coiled about the helpless girl. At the terminus of each scarlet length a clubbed anther hung. This organ was furred with minute spines and now that Niamh was tightly enmeshed in the coils, the anthers sought out her bare flesh. One pressed flatly against the rondure of her shoulder-another flattened against the small of her back-a third settled on her thigh.

She hung limply in the tenacious embrace of the giant flower as if in a swoon. As I grimly fought against the slithering tendrils I felt a sudden dizziness cloud my brain. It was the heady perfume which hovered about us like a cloud of overpowering sweetness! My vision blurred; my heart thumped erratically. I fought on, senses dimming.

I had called the immense flower a parasite, not dreaming how close to the horrible fact my guess had gone. In truth, the colossal thing was a cannibal-a vampire for now I saw, with a thrill of unbelieving horror and revulsion, that the furry anthers pressed like great sponges against the naked flesh of the dazed and swooning girl gleamed wetly of a sudden-and in the next instant I realized that the creamy pallor of the huge petals was

flushing pinkly. The vampire blossom was drinking her bloodl

I went mad with berserk rage, ripping at the hideous flower in a spasm of killing fury. Now I had cause to thank whatever shadowy and mysterious gods bad guided me to this planet that I had honed that bit of copper into a crude dagger the night before. For the strength of my hands was as nothing against the rubbery constriction of the scarlet tendrils-but that sharp edge of copper cut like a saw blade into the flower flesh. In a few seconds I had managed to sever one of the anthers from its trunk, and I plucked the obscene thing from the small of Niamh’s naked back, hurling it from me, turning my attention to the anther that pressed her shoulder, sucking her blood through a hundred hollow spines. All the while she hung limp and unprotesting in the net of scarlet tendrils: the narcotic fragrance of the vampire blossom had bemused her and she had drunk too deeply of the cloying, drug-like perfume.

I slashed through another filament and pulled the anther from her flesh. It pulled clear with a loathsome sucking sound, and where it had been pressed tightly against her skin it left a minute pattern of pinpricks, beaded with blood. I flung the wet thing from me, roaring.

But now tendrils lashed about my limbs as well, and I felt a sudden stinging sensation on my leg and, looking down, saw a great spongy anther pressed against my thigh just above the knee. It stung me like nettles, but the bitter kiss of the vampire blossom soon faded to a numbness. I ignored the thing fastened to my flesh, as I hacked away at the third of the anthers that yet clung to Niamh. But as I fought desperately, my head was swimming groggily and I knew the narcotic perfume of the horrible flower was overcoming me.

The monster blossom, I now knew, was no innocent and lovely flower but a grisly abnormality-a hideous plantanimal hybrid, whose blood-lusting nature was cunningly masked with nature’s mimicry. Doubtless the loathsome thing was designed to resemble an ordinary flower, thus to lure the immense insect creatures of the World of the Green Star, the great dhua, the giant zaiph. Drawn by the sweet sorcery of its perfumed breath, the unsuspecting creatures would flutter near, either to be drugged into somnolence by the narcotic odor or to be caught by the

hairy tendrils as they sought to rape away the sweetness hidden in the flower’s honeyed heart.

But now the hybrid monstrosity had caught an unexpected treat in its silken trap. Human blood must have been a rare delight, for the now-crimson petals trembled with eager lust and the snaky tendrils lashed about the two of us in frenzied hunger. I sawed and slashed through the rubbery filaments with the dregs of my strength as the last flicker of consciousness waned. As my mind faded toward the twilight of drugged slumber, my last thought was that at least Niamh was unconscious, lulled by the narcotic fragrance, numbed by the anesthetic venom of the anthers, and endured no pain as the loathly vampire drained her blood. From that dim sleep she would never wake; her slumber would but deepen until she drifted over the dark portals of life and death, into a sleep from which there was no awakening…

Then, as my hands faltered, as my grip loosened, as my eyelids drooped, something caught and held my waning attention.

A strange thing suddenly flicked into being, transfixing the stamen of the enormous blossom. I blinked at it, vaguely, without comprehension.

It was a scarlet arrow.