Under the Green Star

“Almost ready—another moment,” the princess murmured from beyond us.

And then they were upon us, striking like silent wolves out of the darkness. I whirled, sword ready, catching one blade in mid-air and wrenching it from the hand of the forester who wielded it. Another blade flickered—and another—and another. For one long moment I held three swordsmen at bay; but it was for a moment only.

Behind me, I heard Niamh cry out, and the sound of a blow being struck, and a man’s hoarse bellow of pain. Then one of the foresters staggered out of the zaiph pens and fell sprawling with the mark of Niamh’s blade across his face.

“Chong!” she cried. “Ready—come swiftly! They are all around us!”

But men encircled me and many swords flashed for my breast. With a terrific effort I beat them back, but the effort used much of the small store of strength that was left to me.

“Niamh! Mount and fly! I will follow.”

“But—”

“Fly, my beloved!”

There came to my ears the drumming of great wings. A dark shape rose above us, blacker than the blackness. A heart-shaped face peered down at me through the murk a girl’s face white against the darkness. She was aloft! Thanks to whatever gods hold watch and ward over the World of the Green Star, she was aloft! And they could never catch her in this black gloom!

Or so, at least, I hoped. But I could do no more than I had done. A haze thickened before my eyes; my heart labored in my breast as if it would burst free of the cage of my ribs and fly to join her. Then I looked down and saw the spreading wetness across my chest, the red blood leaking from my severed arteries, pumping from the terrible wound just below my heart.

He had struck well, the hunched and sidling little traitor. Well, at least he had gone slinking before me down the road that led beyond the black gates of death. But I would follow soon after, that I knew.

The wound was mortal. No power in this world or another could save me now.

There was the sound of a woman weeping.

Siona bent over me, cradling me in her arms, her face distorted, twisted, wet with tears. I knew now why she had seemed so strange toward me, and why she had humiliated Niamh in my presence. God help me, I never suspected it before, but the Amazon girl loved me.

A momentary pang of despair went through me. Surely it could not end like this, surely the gods could not be so cruel, to take my life now when Niamh needed me most, when the armies of her enemies were already moving to march against defenseless Phaolon. I could not die here, leaving Niamh alone and lost and helpless in the great forest of worldtall trees …

Again I glimpsed her white face through the gloom as she circled the branch. Her dark eyes were enormous against the pallor of her face. She could see the horrible stain of blood that drenched me from breast to mid-thigh; she knew that the chance blow struck by a cowardly traitor had laid low the hero of a thousand legends in the very moment when he was needed most. Oh, the irony of it! How the gods of this world must have laughed at the irony of my ending!

With my last strength I lifted my voice and called to her to be gone, to fly off into the night, to hide that her enemies might not find her. And a sort of madness came over me at the end; I wildly promised that she and I would meet again—that somewhere, somehow, I would come to her.

Through the darkness and the haze that thickened before my eyes I drank in my last look of her. But then she was gone, a dark figure fading into the darkness, gone from my fading vision all too soon, vanished into the trackless night.

Niamh, Niamh! Somehow, somewhere, we shall meet again …

And then, as it comes to all men, however urgent their need for life, death came to me, and I began my long journey down that dark road to the gates from which there is no returning.

And so it is that the stories of most men reach their appointed ending.

But for me, the capricious Fates had reserved another, and a far more curious, ending.

In a way, I suppose it was a respite: but, in truth, this respite was far more cruel an ending to my story than the simple dignity of death could ever be.

I have said it already, that my tale is the strangest any man has ever told, and that the adventures through which I have passed are like those no other man has ever experienced in all the labyrinth of the ages. This may sound like wild and outrageous boasting, but it is nothing else but honest truth.

I do not know why God or Fate or Chance, or whatever nameless and unknown Power rules over the fortunes of men, reserved for me the strange, unearthly miracle. I wish I did know, for without understanding the thing, I can learn nothing from it—nothing but sorrow, nothing but a pain that will not leave my heart—nothing but a question that haunts me night and day and will not let me rest.

A question to which I have no answer.

A question that may never be answered …

But let me tell the thing exactly as it happened.