In the Green Star's Glow

The girl savages lived in the most slovenly manner imaginable, rarely washed, argued constantly, and fought incessantly. They slept, for the most part, in hammocks out in the open, but some of the younger children, the nine or ten-year-old girls, shared cabins and slept in nests of furs.

I slept on a rude pallet in a tiny lean-to attached to Varda’s hut, which was larger and more comfortably fitted out with furniture than the rest of the living quarters.

When there was no cooking or washing up to do, I was sent out to gather food. This consisted in the main of nuts, berries, fruit, and a species of immense and edible mushroom which grew on the underside of one of the larger network of branches of the network that comprised the camp area. The Amazon girls usually went out hunting during the day, seeking the tender and enormous grubs, insect larvae, the defenseless and delicious tree-snails, and other easily killed varieties of game with which the upper terraces of the great trees teemed.

When on my expeditions to gather nuts and berries, I wore a choke halter around my neck and was only permitted out in the care of five or six of the little girls, who kept me constantly tethered. They would scamper about, dangling head down from the branch, or, perched in a row, sit kicking their heels, while I climbed gingerly down to the end of the twiglets and slowly, one by one, picked the nuts. These were like walnuts, but of the size of basketballs, and contained several pounds of delectable nutmeat. The berries grew from plant parasites which sprouted from some of the branches, their fruit resembling that of the strawberry.

The naked little imps delighted in shouting abuse at me, and tugged at my leash until they nearly throttled me, while giggling at my discomfort or my nakedness; probably at both. For some reason they took a particularly vicious pleasure in tormenting me. Before long I found out why.

I learned that they had been taken from their homes by a slave raid about nine months ago (insofar as it was possible to compute the passage of time). Their homes had been on the outskirts of one of the treetop cities previously unknown to me, a place called Barganath. The slavers had seized them for training and sale to the brothels of some of the other Laonese cities, and from the jabber I overheard, I got the impression that the girl-children had been abused and molested by their captors. From this mistreatment obviously stemmed their hatred and loathing of males, which was quite understandable, although it did not help me to endure with equanimity the humiliation and punishment I suffered at their hands.

It was Varda who had led their escape. The older girl had taken advantage of a sudden attack by zzumalak on the slavers’ camp. The zzumalak are honeybees, but honeybees grown to the size and proportion of tigers, and every bit as dangerous. While the slavers rallied to fight off the assault by these flying predators, Varda had led the girls to freedom. They had caught one of the slavers off guard, seized his keys, unlocked their cages, and swarmed over the men, pulling them down with nails and teeth and whatever weapons they managed to snatch up. Caught between the attacking zzumalak and the attacking girls, the slavers had died to the last man.