The gleaming towers of a splendid city soared before him, rising like great slabs of shinestone above the jungle, and there were more of them than he could count, row upon row — this one an iridescent violet hue, this one a burning gold, this one scarlet rimmed with balconies of midnight blue, this one utter jet. Some were wrapped in strangling coils of vine, as the forest creature had said, but most stood clear.
Hresh resisted the urge to go plunging forward into the city itself. He stared at it a long while, drinking in its astonishing beauty.
Then, heart pounding, he hurried back toward the camp, crying out, “Vengiboneeza! I’ve found Vengiboneeza!”
He was less than halfway back to the camp when something thick and furry and incredibly strong snared him around the throat and hurled him to the ground.
Desperately Hresh struggled for air. He was choking. His eyes bulged in their sockets. Everything was a blur. He could barely make out his assailants. There were three of them, it appeared. Two were jumping up and down and the third held him prisoner with its long, ropy sensing-organ. If they were human, Hresh thought, they belonged to some very different tribe: their arms and legs were extraordinarily long, their bodies were thin and compact, their heads were small, their eyes were large and hard and gleaming, but without the light of intelligence in them. All three were covered from the crowns of their heads to their slender black toes by soft rank grayish-green fur of an unfamiliar texture.
“I — can’t breathe—” Hresh murmured. “Please—”
He heard coarse mocking laughter and a fierce babble of sounds in an unknown language, shrill and turbulent. Desperately he tugged at the whiplike sensing-organ that was choking him. He dug his fingertips in hard. Strangely, that produced no response, except perhaps a tightening of the grip. Hresh had never known of a sensing-organ so insensitive. The other seemed hardly to feel a thing.
“Please — please—” he said feebly, with what he knew to be his last breath. Everything was going black for him.
There was a sudden wild screeching sound. The pressure at his throat relented and he rolled free, doubling over, gasping and gagging. His head spun. The world reeled wildly beneath him. For a moment he was unable to see clearly: his eyes showed him nothing but spots and whirls. After a little while he felt himself recovering, and looked up.
Harruel and Konya stood above him. They had speared two of the three strangers and cast their bloody bodies aside like so much trash; the third had fled into the trees, and dangled there from its sensing-organ, screaming at them.
“Are you all right?” Harruel asked.
“I think so. Just — out — of — breath.” He sat up, kneeling, and rubbed his aching throat and filled his lungs as deeply as he could. “Another moment and it all would have been over for me.” He looked at the two crumpled-up dead things, and shuddered. “But you saved me. And see, there? The city! The city!” Hresh pointed with a trembling hand. “Vengiboneeza !”
Vengiboneeza, yes. The two warriors glanced toward the towers. The tips of them were barely visible from here. Konya grunted in surprise and dropped down and made the sign of the Protector. Harruel leaned in silence on his spear, shaking his head slowly in wonder.
Then Koshmar came running, and Torlyri, and most of the others after them. Hresh, though still wobbly and uncertain of foot, led them all through the tangles of vines and saw-edged grasses to the place where he had seen the shining towers piercing the sky. But the chattering gray-green folk were everywhere, scrambling by dozens in the trees, dangling by their sensing-organs, leaping from bough to bough, cackling, laughing, calling out defiance. They must have been watching me all the while, Hresh realized.
“What tribe is this?” Torlyri asked.
“A very stupid one, I think,” said Hresh.
“They look something like us,” Torlyri said.
“Very little like us,” snapped Koshmar.
“But they move swiftly, this strange tribe,” Hresh said.
“Not so swiftly that we can’t slaughter them if they bother us,” Koshmar said. “Gods! This is no tribe! These are no humans! All they are is animals. Vermin. And look: the city! Vengiboneeza will be ours. Spears, everyone! Torches! On to Vengiboneeza!”
Vermin they might be, and stupid vermin also, yet the strange animals proved very troublesome. They would not descend from the trees, but pelted Koshmar’s people with fruit and branches and even their own green dung, crying out incomprehensible insults all the while. Galihine was knocked down by a heavy purple fruit that struck her between the shoulders, and Haniman was struck by a huge papery gray globe that turned out to be the nest of a swarm of angry stinging insects half a finger’s length long.
But Koshmar and her warriors advanced steadily, using spears, throwing-sticks, darts, and the rest of their weapons; and gradually the other tribe retreated. Hresh, watching the battle from a safe place, was dismayed and horrified by these forest-folk. How ugly they were, how debased, how — inhuman! They had the shape of people, or something almost like it, but they acted and carried themselves like mere beasts. The torches terrified them, as if they had never seen fire before. They used their sensing-organs simply as a tail, like any trivial wild creature, as though that organ had no powers at all except that of allowing them to swing through the treetops.
All the same, Hresh thought, they look not so very different from us. That was the worst part. We are human, they are beasts; and they are not so very different from us! There but for the grace of the gods go we!
In half an hour the battle was over. The forest-chatterers were gone; the way to Vengiboneeza lay open.
“Let me go in first,” Hresh begged. “I found it. I want to be first.”
Koshmar, chuckling, nodded amiably. “You are still Hresh-full-of-questions, aren’t you? Yes. Go.”
Suddenly taken aback at having been granted with such ease the thing he had requested, Hresh nevertheless turned without hesitation, and slipped through the massive gate of three heavy green pillars that stood open at the threshold of Vengiboneeza.
To his astonishment, three figures that he recognized at once as members of the sapphire-eyes race waited just within. He had seen their like many times, when running his hands over the pages of the books of the chronicles: massive beings, standing upright on great thick-thighed legs, supported by heavy sensing-organs — or were they simply tails? They held their small forearms outstretched in a gesture that seemed plainly to be one of invitation. Their huge heavy-lidded eyes, of a blue so deep they seemed to be not eyes but seas, were radiant with wisdom and power.
Hresh reared back, startled. Twice these beings had ruled the world: once in the ancientmost times, before any humans had even existed, in a long-ago civilization that an earlier onslaught of death-stars had destroyed; and then again late in the human era, when the few survivors of that first lost sapphire-eyes empire had brought themselves back to greatness a second time. Reptiles by ancestry, of crocodilian stock, descended from creatures that had long been content to lie torpid in the mud of tropical rivers, they had managed to rise far above that level; but the return of the death-stars had shattered the sapphire-eyes’ realm once again, and this time there had been no survivors in that new terrible cold. Or so the chronicles in their misty difficult way declared, and so Thaggoran had taught.