Under the Green Star

I assumed the incident was closed, and put it out of my mind. But as the little thief turned to slink away, he shot one glance at me from scowling eyes. It was a shaft of pure scarlet hatred, that glance, and I would have done well not to have discounted it. However, I paid it and him no particular heed, and therein, as shall ere long be seen, lay my downfall and Niamh’s doom. On such slight accidents do the hinges of destiny turn.

Siona, who slept with the unwed women in another part of the keep, had missed the altercation and no one bothered to inform her of it. When she appeared for the morning meal she noticed the sorry condition of our garments, which by now had been reduced to mere rags hardly sufficient to conceal our modesty, and curtly bade one of the foresters to find us more fitting raiment.

After breakfast, the huntsman commanded to this duty conducted us to the storerooms and saw us outfitted properly.

The fellow in question, by the way, was a fresh-faced, eager young lad named Kaorn, who seemed to be about sixteen or seventeen as far as I could judge—which was not very far, as the age of the Laonese people and their average life span remains something of a mystery to me to this very hour. I have not yet had occasion to touch upon the mystery of time on the World of the Green Star thus far in the course of this narrative, but if my reader will permit a slight digression at this point, while Niamh and I are getting dressed, I will mention that there was something peculiar and extraordinary about time on this planet.

The passage of time went largely unmarked among the Laonese, and even in their conversation they hardly ever referred to it. Among my own people, it is very common to employ such words as day and night, hour and minute—all of which, of course, refer to minor time divisions commonly, indeed universally, understood. “I’ll be there in ten minutes,” we are accustomed to saying; or “I spoke to him only an hour ago,” or “I called him last week.”

Virtually every action and activity undertaken by us in our everyday lives is performed against, or rather within, a framework of reference to time.

This is, most mysteriously, not at all the case with the slender, ivory-skinned inhabitants of the World of the Green Star. Such familiar time references are almost wholly absent from their speech as from their way of thinking, although this fact is not at once noticeable and took me quite some time to become aware of. When I did begin to notice it I believe I put it down to two facts. The first of these facts is that the Laonese people are of a pre-industrial civilization which has not yet reached the level of technology appropriate to the invention of clocks. Without possessing clocks, or some kind of device to measure the passage of time, it is understandable that references to hours and minutes would be highly arbitrary and unlikely—a fact generally overlooked by the authors of popular historical novels.

The second fact is, simply, that the Laonese rarely observe their sun. Both their sun and the various stars and constellations are generally hidden behind the dome of pearly mists that veil the heavens from their view as effectively as if they were inhabitants of the planet Venus. On Earth, of course, the sun is continuously visible throughout the daylight hours, and its passage from dawn to dusk easily observed. But the Green Star that is the sun of this world can scarcely be seen through the clouds that cover the skies, and although it is even then dimly visible as a center of brightness, the heavy leafage and immense branches wherein the folk of this world commonly dwell further obscure their notice of it.

But above and beyond the fact that the Laonese seldom refer to time by its subtler divisions—their language lacking even the words for hour or minute—they make no reference to the seasons of the year, and seldom refer even to the passage of the years. Unfortunately, my stay on the World of the Green Star was far too brief for me to have observed the passage of the seasons, but it may well have been that this planet is not so severely inclined upon its axis for the differences in temperature between the seasons to be particularly noticeable. I am left with the feeling that the Laonese dwell in a world of perpetual summer, verging, it may be, on the beginnings of autumn.

At any rate, during the time I lived among them, the Laonese seldom referred to years in any sense and for any purpose. I believe that I have already mentioned how difficult it was to estimate the age of some of the individuals whom I encountered during my stay on this strange and alien planet. Khin-nom, the old sage of Niamh’s court who taught me the language spoken by the Laonese, was an example of this. He was clearly a man of more than mature years, lean and gaunt and bewhiskered, his keen eyes and measured tones indicative of long experience and deep thought. But I would be at a loss to guess his age, for the flesh of his face was firm and healthy and unlined, his step vigorous and not in the least halting, and his body preserved the elasticity and suppleness of youth.