In the Green Star's Glow

The girl who addressed me so scornfully was a long legged hoyden of perhaps thirteen, her supple form clad in a scrap of hide which bared one pink-tipped breast.

“I am Karn,” I replied quietly. “I am searching for lost friends who are somewhere hereabouts in a flying vessel much like this one. We are from Komar—”

“Komar?” the young girl repeated with a sniff. “I never heard of it, nor is it anywhere about.”

“Nevertheless, it was from Komar that I voyaged last evening,” I said.

She looked me over narrowly, fierce disapproval written on her snub-nosed, freckled face. Despite her warlike aspect and savage raiment, she was very beautiful in the way that young girls are beautiful; that is, in the burgeoning promise of the womanhood to come.

Like most of the dwellers in the treetop cities, she had ivory skin, drifting thistledown-hair of silvery gold, and eyes as green as emeralds, set amid thick sooty lashes. Her lithe and supple body was slim as a young panther, without so much as an ounce of superfluous flesh. She was intensely exciting.

While pondering my fate, or my story, or perhaps both, the train of her thought was interrupted by the query put to her by another of the band, like herself, somewhat older than the little girls.

“What shall we do with him, Varda? Slay him? He is a man after all, and fit only for the knife.”

The girl who said this had flesh like old parchment and brilliant huge eyes that glared wrathfully at me through the floating locks of her silken hair. She looked to be fifteen, and her breasts were covered.

One of the littler girls, who was about ten and wore nothing at all except for a strip of hide wound about her loins, leather sandals on her feet, and the strap supporting her quiver of arrows across her boy-smooth breast, giggled.

“Let’s keep him for a slave, Varda,” she urged with a malicious grin at me.

I felt distinctly uncomfortable.

“No,” returned the older girl who had spoken before, and whose name I later learned to be Iona, “let us slay him now. He will grow into a man, otherwise, and do with us as the others of his vile kind would have done. Therefore, he deserves to die. I vote—death! Death to the man-cub!”

“Death!” hissed the naked ten-year-old, an expression of most unchildlike vindictiveness on her pretty face. I began to sweat, and to calculate my chances of wresting the thorn-spear from the strong hands of Varda before she could drive it through my heart.

As it turned out, I had little to fear. Some sort of rivalry existed between the two older girls, Varda, the nominal leader of this band of teen-aged Amazons, and Iona. Whatever Iona urged, Varda automatically opposed. And, I imagine, vice versa. So the bare-breasted Varda obstinately refused to turn me over to the eager blades of the other little savages, and ordered me securely trussed and borne along.