Under the Green Star

But the outlaws of Siona’s band were men through and through, and knew the meaning of discipline. In a trice the zaiph were saddled and ready, the outlaws mounted, the saddlebags containing the kills made on the hunt securely lashed to the baggage-zaiph, and all was ready.

Siona lifted her curved hunting horn and sounded a clear, imperious call. Squad by squad, in perfect order, the outlaws rose from the enormous bough. Wings drumming, the zaiph formed a double line with Siona’s mount to the fore, and hurtled up a long slanting ray of fading sunlight into the upper terraces of the giant forest. Darkness fell swiftly.

I wondered at the wisdom of traveling by night, which seemed to my thought far more dangerous than traveling by day. For one thing, the more dangerous predators were aprowl during the reign of darkness, and, as well, in the gloom that shrouded the world of giant trees after sunfall, traveling should be much more difficult, for it was easier to miss your landmarks and go astray. Summoning my courage, I asked Yurgon of this, since he rode to my right hand.

He shrugged. “There is little danger, Champion. The beasts avoid zaiph for they find them scrawny and their meager flesh unappetizing. And we are in little danger of straying from our route—see yonder gleam of light?”

He pointed to a smudge of greenish luminescence so faint I would not have noticed it had he not pointed it out to me. It was a dull glimmer of phosphorescence, scarcely visible amidst the gloom. I nodded, and asked him what it was.

“The slime exhuded by the phuol,” he said, naming a repugnant form of giant insect life which resembled the scorpion. “By day the slime is not visible; by night it sheds a pallid glow, wherewith our scouts have blazed a trail through the giant trees.”

“Very well,” I said. “But I still fail to see why you outlaws prefer to travel by night rather than by day, since you are in little danger from predators in any case.”

He gave a harsh laugh and for a moment his frank face was cruel. “The most dangerous of all predators is man himself,” he said. “And it is from our fellow men that our greatest perils come. For we of the woods, who prefer the freedom of the trees to the safety of cities, are deemed the enemy of every city man. In truth, the hand of every man is against us—the knights of Phaolon, in particular, hunt us like beasts and slay us when they can. But when the darkness reigns, the city dwellers fear to fly abroad, lest they lose themselves in the black of night.”

I was glad it was so dark that Yurgon could not see the expression on my face at his words. Now I knew why the princess had concealed her identity behind a mask of subterfuge, and why she had hidden her face as best she might!

We flew on for an hour or more. It would be meaningless to say that I became completely lost, because I had been thoroughly lost when the outlaws first rescued us from the vampire blossom. But I noticed that flight became slower and more difficult, that the web of interlacing branchlets tightened around us, and that screens of leaves blocked our path with ever-increasing frequency, until drawn aside by cunningly-concealed ropes.

We reached at last the secret city of the outlaws—if “city” is not too grandiose a word whereby to describe a huddle of huts in the crotch of a mighty bough, hung about almost entirely with immense clumps of golden leafage which most effectively screened from view the lair of the bandit clan. The site had obviously been selected for its solitude and remoteness, and as much as for its lack of visibility, which last feature, I later learned, had been considerably enhanced by art. For wherever nature had carelessly left open a vista through the screening leaves, the outlaws had with cunning artifice arranged to block the opening. Branchlets had been twisted awry, tied into position with stout thongs, and, with time, had grown into their new position.

We came to rest in the open space at the center of the outlaw village and dismounted. All was unbroken gloom; no slightest chink was left unblocked, to betray the hideout of the robber band by a vagrant gleam of light. Windows were heavily curtained with thick-woven fiber, or shuttered stoutly. Siona led us into the central structure of the encampment; the edifice was many times larger than the other huts, which were mostly low, hummock-like excrescences whose bark-and-branch fabric caused them to blend unobtrusively with the substance of the vast, gnarled and knotted branch itself.

But this central structure was at least three stories in height, and was built against the trunk of the tree, following and melting into its curves; thatched roofs artificially gilded the uniform gold of the living leaves. Even by daylight, the structure would have been difficult to identify as the work of human hands. The artisans of Siona’s troop were masters of the difficult and exacting science of camouflage—but such would only have been natural, I suppose. Survival depends largely on remaining unseen, or on becoming difficult to perceive; and the outlaw band had made of survival a true art.