RAIDERS OF THE SECOND MOON-2
377 Words
THE GIRL’S EYES FELL before his admiring gaze and warm blood flooded into her rounded neck and lovely cheeks.
“Brown-skinned one!” she cried with a stamp of her shapely little sandalled foot. “I am displeased with the noises of your tongue. I will listen to it no more.”
But her eyes gave the provocative lie to her words. This brown-skinned giant with the sunlit hair was very attractive....
The girl was still talking much later, as they walked together along the game-trail. “When my captors were but one day’s march from their foul city of Bis the warriors of the city of Konto, through whose fertile valley we had journeyed by night, fell upon the slavers.
“And in the confusion of the attack five of us escaped. We returned toward the valley of Grath, but to avoid the intervening valley where our enemies, the men of Konto, lived, we swung close to the Lake of Uzdon. And the Misty Ones from the Temple of the Skull trailed us. I alone escaped.”
Noork lifted the short, broad-bladed sword that swung in its sheath at his belt and let it drop back into place with a satisfying whisper of flexible leather on steel. He looked toward the east where lay the mysterious long lake of the Misty Ones.
“Some day,” he said reflectively, “I am going to visit the island of the unseen evil beings who stole away your friends. Perhaps after I have taken you to your brother’s hidden village, and from there to your city of Grath....” He smiled.
The girl did not answer. His keen ears, now that he was no longer speaking, caught the scuffing of feet into the jungle behind him. He turned quickly to find the girl had vanished, and with an instinctive reflex of motion he flung himself to one side into the dense wall of the jungle. As it was the unseen club thudded down along his right arm, numbing it so he felt nothing for some time.
One armed as he was temporarily, and with an unseen foe to reckon with, Noork awkwardly swung up into the comparative safety of the trees. Once there, perched in the crotch of a mighty jungle monarch, he peered down at the apparently empty stretch of sunken trail beneath.
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- Writer
