Under the Green Star

Bit by bit I pieced together a patchwork picture of the situation, gathering hints and clues from a careless word let fall in my presence, a scrap of conversation overheard, or veiled references murmured when I was not supposed to be listening.

The man in the yellow robes, it seemed, had been Akhmim, who was the prince of another tree-city called Ardha. His ultimatum was a marriage proposal!

It seems that precedent and tradition hallow the masculine gender, alone deemed fit to wield sovereignty. A Queen regnant is a novelty unheard-of in all the placid millennia of Laonese annals. It is not exactly that a woman ruler is forbidden by any law of gods or men: it is simply something new and strange and different. And to the timid, ephemeral Laonese, whose lives are dominated by ritual and antique custom, the new and novel is anathema, or at least highly suspect.

Niamh was a slave to custom, too; but it is the art of a monarch to interpret tradition in support of the royal will. And the will of princes is less subject to the ghostly authority of the past than are the wills of those who are accustomed to being ruled over by princes.

For ages a tension has stretched between the two tree-cities. Nothing so overt as war—that custom happily is most rare here on the World of the Green Star—but a certain rivalry, an unease. The folk of Phaolon, then, were on the horns of a particularly galling dilemma. On the one hand, every precept of custom and tradition cried out that a princess could not rule alone; on the other, they loathed the notion of yielding the hand of their beloved Niamh to the unwelcome and unloved Tyrant-Prince of Ardha.

Niamh had weighed the custom of masculine rule against the traditional envy and suspicion the folk of Phaolon felt for the men of Ardha, and had chosen the course of action least offensive to tradition—she would rule alone.

On the day of my resurrection, Akhmim of Ardha had come with an ultimatum. The benign will of the World Above, the unanimous precedent of a thousand regnant kings, the crushing weight of age-old authority, demanded she wed a prince of her rank and yield primacy to him. Only the shadowy divinities of the World Above knew what shattering thunderbolts of calamity and cataclysm would ensue, if a woman maintained her grasp on the throne of Phaolon in blind defiance of tradition and holy precedent. Did the Princess Niamh, in her mad arrogance and folly, possess some secret sign from heaven that the World Above would tolerate her mad ambition? Akhmim cried aloud to the Green Star for some token or omen that heaven favored her in her folly—

And on that fateful moment, I thundered to life in my tomb!

Small wonder that at the time I sensed my coming forth had disconcerted Akhmim, throwing him off-balance. “Off-balance” indeed! He had been petrified with horror, frozen with unbelieving shock. What sign could have been more dramatic than my springing to life, the shards of my splintered sarcophagus ringing about me on the glistening pave?

None could blame the Princess of Phaolon for interpreting my miraculous return to the lands of the living as a sign from the World Above. The timing of the event alone confirmed it. A more sensationally dramatic affirmation of Niamh’s sacred right to her throne could hardly have been imagined than the sudden reincarnation of the mighty Chong, hero of a thousand legends, the mythic defender of her own great dynasty in the age of her forefathers.

Akhmim, crushed, shaken to the core, had fled the hall in confusion, and no word had come from him since.

But his shadow lay over the Jewel City like a grim pall, like a cold gloom of ominous fate to come. So close had Akhmim stood to the throne he coveted, so swift had fate snatched it from his grasp, that few could doubt he would not seek again to fulfill his desires. And in his path, I stood alone!