Darya of The Bronze Age Read online

  Darya of the

  Bronze Age

  by

  Lin Carter

  Zanthodon #4

  Contents

  Part One PRINCESS IN PERIL

  Chapter 1 KIDNAPPED!

  Chapter 2 THARN THE AVENGED.

  Chapter 3 TERROR FROM THE DEEP

  Chapter 4 - FANGS OF DOOM

  Chapter 5 THE BRINK OF DEATH

  Part Two PIRATES OF ZANTHODON Chapter 6 THE VOYAGE OF THE RED WITCH

  Chapter 7 EL-CAZAR

  Chapter 8 FLAME OF ARABY

  Chapter 9 FUMIO IS PURCHASED

  Chapter 10 A MYSTERIOUS FRIEND

  Part Three CONQUERORS OF EL-CAZAR Chapter 11 THE MISSION OF GROND

  Chapter 12 THE CUNNING OF YUSSEF

  Chapter 13 COUNCIL OF THE CAPTAINS

  Chapter 14 BLOOD ON COLD STEEL

  Chapter 15 ZORAIDA'S VENGEANCE

  Part Four THE HUNTERS AND THE HUNTED Chapter 16 SOTHAR ON THE MARCH

  Chapter 17 THE MYSTERIOUS CHAMBER

  Chapter 18 JAIRA'S FLIGHT

  Chapter 19 DARYA'S RESCUE

  Chapter 20 DEATH AND MARRIAGE

  Part Five BLADES OF THE BROTHERHOOD Chapter 21 THE VENGEANCE OF ZAR.

  Chapter 22 SEARCH'S ENDING

  Chapter 23 JAIRA STRIKES BACK

  Chapter 24 THE TRIBE DEPARTS

  Chapter 25 MURG HAS A SECRET

  Part Six BATTLE BENEATH THE WORLD Chapter 26 TRACKED BY THE UNKNOWN

  Chapter 27 KAIRADINE REAPPEARS

  Chapter 28 THE BATTLE IS JOINED

  Chapter 29 A TIMELY INTERVENTION

  Chapter 30 BATTLE'S END, JOURNEY'S BEGINNING

  Part One

  PRINCESS IN PERIL

  Chapter 1 KIDNAPPED!

  Darya of Thandar struggled helplessly in the iron grip of the giant Moor, Achmed, as he bore her through the jungles of Zanthodon. Thorny boughs whipped the naked thighs and kicking legs of the captive Cro-Magnon princess, sharpedged leaves scored her bare shoulders and panting young breasts.

  She writhed furiously, but in vain, against the powerful arms of the Moor which encircled her slim body and against whose burly strength she was as helpless as a babe.

  Events had transpired so swiftly that Darya was still dazed by the suddenness of her transition from freedom to captivity. One moment she had been torn from the safety of her tribe by the wily Xask and the treacherous Fumio-the next instant the Barbary Pirates had seized her from her captors and now bore her hastily through the jungles of the Underground World to the safety of their ship, the Red Witch.

  All too well did the Cro-Magnon cavegirl know what fate awaited her aboard the red-sailed galley. Only the courage and daring of her young fellow tribesman, Jorn the Hunter, had rescued her from the lustful embrace of the pirate chieftain, Kairadine Redbeard. To be recaptured so soon- after winning her freedom was cruel . . . and where now was Jorn the Hunter? Where, for that matter, was the mysterious black-haired man from the Upper World who called himself Eric Carstairs?

  Who, in all of the Underground World, could save her from slavery in the harems of the savage corsairs?

  Her heart sank within her breast as she contemplated the grim destiny which lay before her ....

  Achmed grinned triumphantly, white teeth flashing in his swarthy visage. The mighty Moor had been assigned the task of recapturing the Cro-Magnon girl when she had so curiously vanished from the galley. Her escape had aroused the rage and fury of Achmed's captain, Kairadine Redbeard, as much as her youthful and vibrant Loveliness had aroused his lust and desire to possess her.

  Privately, the burly Moor thought little of this assignment. To his way of thinking, the differences Darya of the Bronze Age between one woman and another were minimal-and the fortress isle of El-Cazar, mountainous stronghold of the Barbary Pirates, held many beautiful women . . . not the least of whom was the voluptuous and passionate Zoraida, Redbeard's mistress, and Achmed's chief rival for closeness to the Prince of the Barbary corsairs.

  To devote such time and energy to regaining one skinny, freckle-nosed, golden-haired savage girl seemed ridiculous to Achmed. Still, he had thought to himself with gloomy resignation and a philosophical shrug, an order is an order. And such as Kairadine Redbeard, master of El-Cazar and seventh in direct succession from the feared and ferocious Khair ud-Din of Algiers, do not view insubordination as a light offense.

  As for Fumio, the renegade Thandarian warrior, whom his men had taken captive at the same time as Darya, Achmed had certain reservations. But Kairadine Redbeard had commanded the Moor to fetch back both the Cro-Magnon cavegirl and her young jungle sweetheart-for so he had assumed Jorn the Hunter to be-and Achmed did not dare to disobey.

  He was aware by now, was the Barbary pirate, that his second captive was another than the boy Jorn, whom Kairadine ravished to punish for his untimely interruption of the ravishing of Darya, and also for the almost unthinkable crime he had committed, for the jungle boy had sprung upon Redbeard and almost throttled the life out of him before taking flight with the girl.

  But Achmed the Moor had not survived this long in the dog-eat-dog world of El-Cazar without developing cunning. And, having never more than glimpsed the boy Jorn, and that from a distance, he believed that he could safely get away with the pretense that, having captured the man in company with the girl, he took it for granted that the Cro-Magnon warrior was in fact Jorn.

  He was clever, was Achmed; and he was a born survivor.

  He was a magnificent figure of a man, was this Achmed of El-Cazar. Although his fellow pirates disparaged him for his "taint" of Moorish blood (being themselves mostly descended from pure Arab stock), he was swarthy rather than ebon-hued. Only his thick lips and kinky beard attested to his Negroid heritage. Beneath his voluminous turban, his bullet-head was clean-shaven; gold hoops bobbled in the lobes of his ears. Gold armlets clasped his burly arms; charms and fetishes, many of precious metals were strung on gold chains about his thickly-corded throat and fell upon his deep chest; he wore an open vest of red felt with gold froggings and loose, baggy pantaloons of pale green silk, whose bottoms were tucked into the tops of his calf-high boots of scarlet leather with up-curled toes. A wide sash of mustard-yellow and vermilion was wound about his thick waist; therein were thrust a long, curved scimitar very much like the cutlasses of the Spanish Main, a brace of wickedly-hooked daggers, and a fat purse of green leather fashioned from the hide of giant reptiles.

  He was a towering man with broad, sloping shoulders and heavy, apelike arms, a figure of barbaric splendor. Cruelty showed in the curve of his thick lips; avarice marked his hooked nose with the flaring Darya of the Bronze Age nostrils; but intelligence and loyalty could be read in his sharp eyes.

  Such was Achmed of El-Cazar, first mate of the Red Witch and crony and confidant of Kairadine Redbeard himself, dreaded Prince of the Barbary Pirates.

  And into such hands had Darya of Thandar fallen a helpless captive . . .

  In the forefront of the band of corsairs which Kairadine had dispatched to bring back the fleeing Cro-Magnon girl was one Tarbu-a lean, famished-looking rogue whose longjawed, lank-cheeked, clean-shaven visage was rendered vicious and sinister by the jagged, zigzag knife scar which stretched from the corner of one eye to one corner of his thinupped mouth, causing a perpetual, menacing leer. He wore a loose, torn blouse of white silk open to the navel, whose voluminous sleeves flapped about his scrawny arms, while his bony shanks were clad in tight trousers of fawn-colored leather, much stained with seawater and blotches of spilt wine and scabs of dried gravy. He wore high-heeled seaboots with silver buckles upon the instep, and in one thin, strong hand he clenched the hilt of a cutlass whose blade was nicked and dented.
r />   This Tarbu suddenly raised one arm for attention, halting the pirates behind him.

  "What transpires, O Tarbu?" growled the Moor, his arms full of struggling naked cavegirl.

  "The jungles end here, my chieftain," panted Tarbu, peering through the curtain of foliage. "Beyond lie the beaches upon which our longboats were drawn."

  "Is aught in sight, then?" demanded Achmed.

  "I see no one," admitted the other.

  Without further ado the Barbary Pirates left the jungle and dragged their longboats from under the cover of thick bushes where they had been concealed against chance discovery.

  They began to board the vessels.

  Before them stretched an astounding vista: steamy seas which extended into the misty distance where there uprose, instead of the blue and open skies, a titanic rocky wall which rose beyond the ability of the human eye to perceive its ending. And, in very truth, it did not end: for this was Zanthodon, the Underground World, a time-forgotten land far beneath the Earth's crust into which had fled for refuge from a thousand ages and millions of years the last survivors of their kind . . . the mighty dinosaurs of the primal Dawn . . . the shaggy cavebears and burly aurochs of the Ice Age, and their contemporaries, the hairy-pelted Neanderthal savages and the tall, handsome, blond Cro-Magnon warriors who were their perpetual foes . . . and other strange survivals, too, from lost eras, like the Barbary Pirates themselves, hounded from the Mediterranean by the avenging fleets of Europe . . . and the mysterious Darya of the Bronze Age

  Dragonmen of Zar, who were the last surviving colony of lost Minoan Crete, the very original of fabulous Atlantis itself.

  Some strange trick of phosphorescence causes the domed roof of the subterranean world to glow with a ceaseless luminosity that is not unlike the golden radiance of late afternoon. Below that eternal daylit

  "sky" stretch unknown rivers, trackless jungles, impassable mountain ranges, vast plains where roam herds of mastodons and woolly mammoths-and the enormous expanse of the Sogar-Jad itself, strangest and most unique of all of the seas of this world-the Underground Sea, upon whose watery surface have never gleamed the light of sun or moon or stars.

  And there, moored in a deep lagoon formed by the sheltering arm of the jungle-clad promontory wherefrom the corsair band had just emerged rode at anchor that proud galley, the Red Witch!

  It has been many generations, even centuries, since such a vessel plied the foaming waves of the Upper World. Gone from our seas and receding into the history books are such galleys as the Red Witch, with her booming sails and lean black hull and rigging that sings like harpstrings in the winds.

  No less a survivor from lost ages than the mighty beasts that roam and rule the savage jungles of the Underground World was the Red Witch . . . a vision of breathtaking romance would she have seemed to you or me, like some craft come a-sailing out of the golden pages of Treasure Island or Captain Blood or Porto Bello Gold ....

  But to Darya of Thandar she was a thing of horror, like a floating prison. For all that the beautiful young Cro-Magnon girl knew and loved lay behind her in the vast plains and mighty jungles of the subterranean continent.

  And all that lay ahead for her from this moment was a dreadful fate in the lustful arms of Kairadine Redbeard and a miserable and degrading captivity in the harems or dungeons of El-Cazar.

  As the longboats left the beach and the oars plied the foaming waters of the Sogar-Jad, Darya cast one mournful and despairing glance behind her as the jungle-clad continent receded into the mists of the distance.

  Then unbidden tears blurred her vision, and the unhappy girl could see no more.

  Chapter 2 THARN THE AVENGED.

  It was the cruelest irony that, even in the nadir of her hopelessness and despair, the blond cavegirl knew all too well that help and rescue were not far away.

  Only recently had the black-haired soldier of fortune from the Upper World, Eric Carstairs, led the captive warriors of the two Cro-Magnon tribes of Thandar and Sothar into freedom from their dire Darya of the Bronze Age captivity in the cavern city of the Gorpaks and the Sluaggh. Only a little while before the Barbary Pirates had carried off Darya had she and her people emerged from the caverns of the Peaks of Peril, to taste-in her case, but briefly-the daylight, the open air and freedom.

  At the very moment the longboats left the beach and crossed the misty lagoon to where the Red Witch rode at anchor, Eric Carstairs and burly Hurok of Kor, Jorn the Hunter, and her mighty sire, Tharn the jungle monarch, Omad of Thandar, were not very far away. That they were searching for her at that very instant was her firm conviction.

  And it was quite true. The warriors of Thandar and Sothar were even then combing the jungles of the promontory in search of Xask and Fumio, who had carried off Darya and my friend, the elderly scientist, Professor Percival P. Potter, Ph.D. At that moment the warriors had not yet discovered the corpse of the brutal Neanderthal, One-Eye, and had no idea that Darya and the Professor had eluded the clutches of Xask and Fumio, to run straight into the arms of Achmed the Moor and his band of corsairs. The time yet lay some little ways in the immediate future when we would discover the corpse of One-Eye and would surmise that it had been the Barbary Pirates who had carried off the Cro-Magnon Princess just after she had concealed Professor Potter in the tree where we later found him.

  Help and rescue were, then, almost at hand. Only moments divided the blond cavegirl from the arrival of her stalwart friends.

  But-as she knew all too well-we had no way of sailing out upon the steamy waters of the prehistoric ocean, or of either following or attacking the corsair galley.

  And that sealed her fate ....

  At the point in time when Darya of Thandar was carried off by the Barbary Pirates while the rest of us remained behind, shortly to pursue her rescue, my narrative of these adventures parts into two separate but parallel courses. One of these courses I have already followed at length in the third volume of these memoirs of my experiences in Zanthodon the Underground World. This volume traces my pursuit of Darya with a small band of warriors, which resulted in my capture by the Dragonmen of Zar and the many perils and adventures which transpired during my captivity in the Scarlet City, and of those which occurred to my friends Hurok and Jorn and the others who sought to free me from the grasp of Zarys the Divine Empress of the ancient Minoan colony.

  The second course, which consists of the dangers experienced by Darya herself in the corsair stronghold of El-Cazar, the present volume will trace. But it will be obvious to the reader of these adventures that the narratives, while separate in viewpoint, occupy the same interval of time.

  It has, then, already been told how we emerged at length from the cavern city, having slaughtered the vicious Gorpaks, exterminated their loathsome masters, the vampiric Sluagghs, and freed the pallid and listless cavern people, their slaves. And it has also been told how we learned of the carrying-off of Darya, how we sped in pursuit of the stolen Princess, discovered the corpse of One-Eye whom Achmed had cut down, rescued the Professor from his tree, and followed with all haste upon the trail of Darya and the pirates, only to be diverted by the Dragonmen of Zar.

  When the warriors of the twin tribes of Thandar and Sothar came out of the cavern city, they also followed on the trail of the kidnapped Princess. That same third volume of these memoirs gave an account of how young Yualla. daughter of Garth, was borne away by a thakdol (as the men of Zanthodon call that grisly flying dragon of Earth's remotest dawn, the dreaded pterodactyl), and of how the Sothar tribe parted company with the tribe of Thandar, the Sotharians heading across the great plains of the north toward the mountainous rampart which guarded the secret access into Zar in order to find Yualla, while the tribe of Thandar continued their pursuit of Darya and the corsairs.

  The mighty Tharn, Omad or High Chief of Thandar, determined to follow the coastline of the underground continent in the same direction taken by the Red Witch. So very recently had his long-lost daughter a
nd heir been recovered, only to be thieved from him again, that the jungle monarch with stubborn and redoubled resoluteness swore to follow upon her trail to the very ends of the world, rather than give over the quest.

  He and his warriors traversed the promontory, gained the northern plains, and followed the coastline as it meandered "north." When in the fullness of time the tribe of Sothar sundered their common path with their brother Cro-Magnons, he remained grimly determined to continue the quest alone, if needed. If his daughter had been slain by her cruel captors, at very least he could avenge her murder by the slaughtering of "The-Men-Who-Ride-Upon-Water"- which was the name by which his people termed the Pirates of Barbary.

  The Red Witch had set sail upon the steamy waters of Sogar-Jad, the Underground Sea, her crimson sails filled with the lusty winds, her sharp prow cleaving the waves. For too long had the Pirates been absent from their island stronghold of El-Cazar, busied with raiding the Cro-Magnon villages of the coast and the dwellers upon the isles of the Sogar-Jad. The hold of the galley was full to bursting with plunder looted from the savages, and with slaves taken during such raids.

  Also was it full of stores of food. For the rocky island of El-Cazar presents a stony soil too hostile, too scourged by the salt winds, to raise crops. In order to survive, the corsairs must loot the granaries and orchards and hunting grounds of the Cro-Magnons that shared this subterranean world with them. For they are great hunters, the blond and stalwart savages of tribes such as Thandar and Sothar: the plump and timid uld (or eohippus) fall to their arrows, as do the ungainly half-feathered reptile birds, the zomaks (or archeopteryx). But favored as game above all other of the bestial denizens of the Underground World, the Cro-Magnon huntsmen prize the mastodon and the woolly mammoth, whose titanic bulk provides rich feasts for an entire tribe at one kill. And the Barbary Pirates have grown very fond of mammoth steaks ....