Under the Green Star

The chase done, we dismounted on the branch of a nearby tree for a sort of court picnic.

The giant trees of the World of the Green Star are unbelievable in height and girth. In comparison, men and women shrink to mote-size, like ants next to skyscrapers. The main branches of these forest colossuses are broader than twelve-lane highways and sturdy enough to support entire cities. The branches whereat we paused for our midday meal, however, were less huge—say, of the width of ordinary streets.

Our perch was not really precarious. The branches are gnarled and whorled and knotted, their sheaths of bark rough and coarse as broken rock face. One would have to be amazingly clumsy to slip or fall—and the Laonese are nimble as mountain goats, utterly unafraid of heights, with a superb sense of balance.

All about us hung leaves the size of tents, lucently golden like vast sheets of antique parchment; emerald shafts of sun, striking down through filtering layers of leafage, drowned us in a dreamy haze of green-gold twilight.

While grooms tethered our dhua to twigs, domestics unpacked delectable food and drink from saddlebags. The lunch was a picnic sort of thing, of zesty, spicy oddments—narrow crusty cakes savory of almond paste, tiny cubes like anchovy sandwiches, slices and crisps of pickled fruit—all washed down with a foamy, effervescent drink that had the dry sparkle of champagne and the robust heartiness of dark beer.

We ate, clustered apart in couples and trios, scattered here and there about the branch. I had been favored with the honor of riding with the princess during the Dance of the Zaiph, now another was favored as her luncheon companion: a languid, lisping youth of ancient lineage and high rank named Awaiiomna, whom I particularly detested. The slender, elfin Laonese males are generally graceful and effeminate, but this particular princeling was foppish, limp-wristed and catty to a fault.

He and the princess retired to an upper curve of the bough, accompanied by Niamh’s maid; half-hidden from us by a screen of lucent gold leaves, I could not watch them with a jealous eye, as I longed to—I could only sit, seething, straining my ears to catch Awaiiomna’s sly whispers, and boiling with rude fury at Niamh’s frequent bursts of tinkling laughter.

My own luncheon companion was the High Bonze Eloigam, a dour priest whose conversation consisted of enigmatic homilies spiced with obscure texts from the Laonese scriptures. I understood hardly a word he said, and the grunts and nods and growls I gave in answer to his attempts at conversation must have been equally uninformative.

The High Bonze, it seemed, had been literally aching to get my ear, for he had a thousand and one queries of philosophic or metaphysical nature to try on me. In retrospect, I can sympathize with the crusty old cleric, for, after all, as one who had certainly passed through the portals of life and death and rebirth, I must have been a tempting potential source of enlightenment on the nature of the gods, the astral terrain of the World Above, and all the more arcane secrets of super-nature.

“The World Above,” incidentally, is the name the Laonese give their conception of heaven. I suppose it is only natural for the theological speculations of a cloud-wrapped planet to situate the country of the gods beyond the eternal cloudbanks; thus, at any rate, was the Laonese theory. I have never bothered to look very deeply into the native religion, a subject of great complexity at best, with endless pantheons of divinities, their various aspects and avatars, their multiplex natures each enshrined in a separate configuration, wrapped in its own apocalypse. Between the ultimate godhead and ordinary man, as well, are rank upon rank of saints and sages, prophets and miracle workers, angels and apsaras (a sort of Laonese version of valkyries), symbolic monsters, tutelary spirits, ancestral and clannish totem beasts, nature elementals, and guardian genies. The subject is worth a lifetime of study, for one so inclined.