Zanthodon Page 10

  I first became acquainted with the people of Sothar through one Rukh, a grizzled, gray-bearded chieftain of the scouts of that tribe. We were set to toiling together at various tasks and found some opportunities to converse without being noticed by the Gorpaks. Under such circumstances as these, it seemed, the natural hostility and suspicion between all of the several tribes or nations of the Underground World were more or less relaxed. Strangers in confronting the same peril, it seems, are considered comrades.

  Rukh pointed out to me the Omad of his tribe, a magnificent figure of a man called Garth, who stood almost as tall as Tharn of Thandar himself. Among the other Sotharians in captivity were the old wise man or shaman of the tribe, a personage called Coph, who bore a marked resemblance to Professor Potter, being skinny and white-bearded and baldish.

  Nian, the wife of Garth, was also among the captives, a superb woman in her prime, who toiled at the most filthy and degrading tasks without a word of protest or revulsion, maintaining a calm serenity of spirit that was truly admirable. Their daughter, Yualla, was a slim, ravishingly gorgeous girl of perhaps fourteen.

  These fifteen were all that were believed to have survived of the folk of Sothar; their village or encampment had been destroyed in the eruption of one of the many volcanoes that thrust smoky cones into the steamy, humid air of the Underground World. They had hastily fled the eruption, and had looked on helplessly from a high vantage point as the lava flows from the volcano had burnt and buried what remained of their village. Then, commencing a long trek toward the sea of the Sogar-Jad, hoping to find a new and safer land far from the volcano country, they had at length entered the regions adjacent to the Peaks of Peril, and had been ambushed by the Gorpaks, who apparently launched slave raids into the surface world on occasion, if only to replenish their stock of slaves, which would otherwise have dwindled rapidly before the rapacious hunger of the Sluaggh.

  With another of the men of Sothar I struck up an acquaintance, and this was a fine-looking warrior named Varak, who seemed to be about my own age and who possessed a quality of good-natured and playful humor that I admired. To be merry under such dire circumstances would be difficult for the happiest of men.

  To another of the warriors of Sothar, however, I took an instant dislike. This was a sallow, thin-lipped fellow named Murg, who was always sidling up obsequiously to the Gorpak overseers with much cringing and bowing, and engaging them in conspiratorial, whispered conversations.

  Every nation, race and class have their informers and quislings. I very much suspected that Murg was such. Varak, who thought the best of everyone, did not believe my estimate of Murg's character to be the truth, and Garth himself shrugged it off, saying that each of us must survive as best we can in the slave pens, and that Murg, although not much of a warrior or hunter, was a remarkably clever fellow.

  And so I waited, biding my time for some opportunity to occur or for some splendid plan to dawn upon me. For I had not the slightest intention of yielding to hopelessness and accepting these conditions. It is not in me to give up without a fight; neither was it in the Professor or Hurok. Even One-Eye, sadistic bully though he certainly was, proved brave enough in battle. And if the Sotharians were anything like their distant cousins, the men of Thandar, they, too, would fight even a completely hopeless battle, rather than die in the hideous embrace of the crawling leech things.

  I would personally prefer to die in battle, facing my foes and doing my utmost, rather than to succumb to the Sluaggh without hope or opposition.

  In other words, what we had here was a pretty decent nucleus for a slave revolt. We were sixteen men and three women, and two of the men, of course, were Drugars-superb fighting machines, larger and stronger and heavier than the rest. Although two of the men, the Professor and old Rukh, were relatively elderly and frail, neither was exactly useless in a fight; indeed, the Professor was pretty good in a scrap, once he stopped studying the flora or fauna or whatever, and managed to lose his temper. I have once seen him dress down and thoroughly cow a full-grown grymp, or triceratops, which was about the size of a Mack truck.

  That takes guts!

  During our sleep periods, unless the wary Gorpak guards were so close that they might be able to overhear our conversation, we managed to discuss the ways and means of escape. Sometimes, when the guards were lax or were otherwise occupied, we could exchange a few muttered remarks during the communal eating period.

  Before we had merely begun to explore the problem, however, everything quite suddenly changed. For the better, in some ways, but in others, for the worse . . . .

  On that particular occasion, the Professor, Varak, Yualla, One-Eye, myself and one of the Sotharian warriors whose name I am afraid I have forgotten, but which was something like Thusk, were assigned to sweeping out and mopping up a sector of the caverns which heretofore none of us had seen.

  While we were tackling the grime and filth, One-Eye all the while grumbling and griping, for he hated being put to "work fit only for shes," as he put it, another work party of slaves was led past us by a squad of Gorpaks. At the sight of these strangers little Yualla started and gasped, and Varak, for once, lost his good-humored banter in exchange for a cry of amazement. It was evident that among these other captives they recognized the faces of friends of theirs, fellow-Sotharians they had believed dead in the disaster which had so swiftly overtaken the village.

  I paid little attention to their emotion after the first instant. For my heart leaped up with a gasp of wondrous relief-Among the Sotharians were Jorn the Hunter and Darya, my beloved.

  As her eyes met mine she, too, uttered a cry of rapturous joy; then her glorious eyes misted with tears and her face fell in despondency, even as did my own as much the same thought flashed through our minds at the same instant:

  I thrilled to the knowledge that she was alive and seemingly unhurt.

  But rather would I have known her dead, than to see her here, in the ghastly den of the Sluagghs.

  Chapter 14. THEY SEARCH FOR DARYA

  Under the command of Achmed, first mate of the Red Witch, the search parties landed here and there along the beach in the longboats. The Moorish officer hastened to divide his men into groups of six, dispatching them to search the beach, the glade and the edges of the jungles which loomed nearby for any signs of the savage youth or the girl he had so boldly rescued from the very arms of Kairadine Redbeard.

  In truth, Achmed was reluctant to pursue this task. Not only did he consider the expenditure of so much time and energy upon what was, after all, merely another woman-in no wise, according to Achmed's way of thinking, very different from any other young woman-foolish and unwise, but, as well, certain trepidations colored his thinking.

  Seventh sons of seventh sons, such as the huge, burly Moorish first mate with the shaven bullet-head, receive eerie and inexplicable premonitions from the Unknown concerning those events yet to come from the womb of unborn time. And, over the long and sanguinary years of his piratical career, Achmed had seen such onimous foreshadowings proven accurate often enough to have learned to trust them.

  And the cold worm of fear coiled within the strong and valiant heart of Achmed of El-Cazar. Something whispered to his inner ear that this rash expedition in pursuit of an unimportant, although lovely, young woman, would bring down upon the officers and crewmen of the Red Witch a swift and thorough doom.

  But such men as Kairadine Redbeard, called Barbarossa, are both capricious and imperious, and seldom will they brook any interference with the direction of their will or desire. And such was surely the case with the reis or captain of the corsair galley: Achmed had seen men flogged to the bone for less than the disobedience he now wistfully entertained in his heart.

  Failure was one thing; disobedience quite another. And none could be so ruthless or so cruel in meting out swift punishment as Kairadine Redbeard, called Barbarossa.

  So, with foreboding gnawing at his heart, the Moor stood on the shore, watching wit
h keen and wary eyes as his men went about their search. He made a flamboyant, even barbaric, figure as he stood there, burly arms folded upon his naked breast, heavy brows lowering in a frown of displeasure. Achmed of El-Cazar was a huge man and heavily built, with broad, powerful shoulders and a bull-like chest. He wore an open vest of red felt with gold froggings, loose, baggy pantaloons of pale green silk, their bottoms tucked into the tops of short, calf-high boots with curling toes, made of scarlet leather. A wide sash of vermilion and mustard yellow was wound around and around his waist; therein was thrust a curved and long-bladed scimitar resembling a cutlass from the Spanish Main, a brace of hooked daggers, and a pouch of green leather fashioned from the hides of reptiles.

  His head was shaven bald, with a thick, brutal neck, an underslung jaw, broad, full-lipped mouth. His eyes were hard and wary. Although he thought of himself as a Moor, and was descended from that people, during the generations his ancestors had dwelt here in , many racial strains had entered his blood; instead of the inky-black complexion you or I would envision upon utterance of the word "Moor," Achmed possessed a coffee-colored skin and, among his features, only his wide, thick-lipped mouth suggested a Negroid ancestry.

  Jeweled rings were upon his strong fingers; great hoops of burnished gold bobbled from the lobes of his ears; armlets of bronze and gold were clasped about his massive arms; a necklace of polished but, of course, uncut opals glimmered upon his deep chest.

  Only a few men or women of Moorish descent were to be found among the Barbary pirates of El-Cazar; for the most part, not counting slaves and harem captives, the folk of the corsairs' stronghold were Arab to one or another degree. The few of Moorish ancestry were to some extent looked down upon, because of the "taint" of Negroid blood in their veins-that being the way the other Barbary pirates thought of the admixture.

  Of all his people, Achmed alone had achieved a position of some prominence among the Arab corsairs.

  This position he prized, as his proximity to the person of Kairadine Redbeard afforded him vast influence among those who would otherwise have accounted him of little importance and hardly worth the cultivating.

  Only one other of his people, a dancing girl called Zoraida, had risen so high in the ranks of the Barbary pirates as had Achmed of El-Cazar. And she was one of the women who belonged to Kairadine.

  Zoraida was his rival for the companionship of the powerful lord of El-Cazar. Were Achmed to fail in this mission, or to skimp in his duties on this assignment, thereby earning the swift and merciless displeasure of his master, it would afford the lithe and voluptuous dancing girl limitless pleasure.

  Achmed did not intend to fail, or to disobey.

  But always there whispered to him that inner voice which urged him to avoid the search for the girl and the savage youth, for the shadowy and mysterious doom in which that search would surely end.

  Erelong, one of his men approached the place where Achmed stood scowling and deep in thought, to report. He was a lean, famished-looking scoundrel called Tarbu, whose long, shaven, lank-jawed face was rendered sinister and villainous by a zigzag scar which ran from the corner of one eye to the corner of his thin-lipped mouth, raising one corner of his mouth into a perpetual and menacing leer. He was dressed in a torn blouse of white silk, open to the navel, whose voluminous sleeves hung loosely about his scrawny torso. His bony legs were trousered in fawn-colored leather, much stained with sea water, spilt wine, and old scabs of dried gravy, which breeches were tucked into high sea boots with silver buckles.

  Touching heart and brow in a perfunctory, careless salaam, Tarbu reported in a whining voice that footprints doubtless belonging to the missing youth and maiden had been found farther up the beach, and entered the edge of the jungles. Nodding curtly, Achmed took a brass whistle from his waistpouch and blew a shrill blast upon it, calling the attention of his men. As they turned to regard the Moor, he gestured toward the jungle, directing their search in that area.

  "Get thee hence, Tarbu, and show the men the place where the footprints entered the margin of the wild," he commanded gruffly. The scrawny pirate repeated his cursory salaam, and went trotting off toward the edge of the line of trees bordering the beach, where a long promontory (which has already figured rather prominently in this narrative) extended to transform what would elsewise have been considered a small bay into something more like a lagoon.

  Achmed followed, to take command of the search into the jungle.

  But he liked it not; and, with every step that led him into the gloom which lay thick between the tall trees, the foreboding which gnawed upon his heart grew sharper.

  As for Tharn of Thandar, the jungle monarch was also upon the trail of the lost girl, his daughter, and on the trail of Jorn the Hunter as well, although the mighty Omad as yet did not know that the youth and Darya were together. Komad, the chief of the scouts of the Thandarian war party, had discovered the same footprints which Jorn and Darya had left when emerging from the waves of the Sogar-Jad and fleeing into the jungles which clad the long peninsula.

  And even before the Barbary pirates had beached their longboats upon the mainland, the keen-eyed scouts and hunters of Thandar had followed the trail which the missing two had left as they progressed through the jungle.

  To such as Komad the Scout, for example, it was as if either Jorn or Darya had blazed a trail, so obvious were the signs of their passage through the jungle to his razor-sharp senses. A dislodged pebble or fallen branch recently broken underfoot; a smear, where a step had disturbed the heavy mulch of rotting leaves between the tall and soaring boles; long grasses not long since bent aside as a slim body wormed between tree trunks; a freshly broken branch on a thick bush, snapped in passage: these and a hundred other signs, which would have been passed over unseen by such as you or I, gave him clear and certain knowledge that he was on the correct trail.

  It is easy to become confused in so dense a jungle as this, whose trees and bushes dated from the Carboniferous for the most part, as beasts in passing through the foliage would naturally make much the same disturbances that the sharp eyes of Komad so easily noted. But here and there, in leaf mulch or a patch of muddy earth, the grizzled old scout unmistakably recognized the footprints of the youth and the girl.

  And so it was that he followed, unerringly, the trail of Jorn and Darya through the jungle, to where it seemingly ended at the blank wall of rock I have previously described.

  Squatting on his hunkers, eyes narrowed thoughtfully, Komad the Scout paused long as he studied the terrain between where he crouched and the cliff of apparently unbroken stone. The footprints of the gomad Darya and of one other ended here; they did not turn aside to reenter the jungle. This much was plain to Komad.

  That there had been others upon this spot, and that recently, was also obvious to him. Those markings he could not identify, for they would have been the footprints of the Professor (whom Komad the Scout had never seen or heard of) and, perchance, of the Gorpaks who had doubtless accompanied into the jungle the monster Sluaggh which the Professor had earlier encountered.

  Studying the signs before him on the trampled grass, Komad admitted himself nonplussed. But to his way of thinking, if footprints go to a certain wall and stop, neither returning the way that they had come nor seemingly turning off to either side, they could only have gone in one possible direction.

  That was, of course, up the wall.

  It is, I think, understandably more difficult for even the sharp eyes of a veteran scout such as Komad of Thandar to read the signs of passage up a wall of solid rock made by a barefooted girl and boy.

  However, when Tharn the Omad approached the scene, Komad in his terse, economical way announced in very few words to his Chief the conclusion which he had sensibly reached.

  It was, after all, the only possible conclusion which Komad could have been expected to reach, since the grizzled old scout had no reason to suspect that the seemingly solid and cliff-like wall of naked rock before h
im contained a cunningly concealed secret doorway, virtually invisible even to eyes as keen as his.

  Turning to one of his chieftains, Tharn delivered an abrupt command.

  "Ithar, take six of your warriors and ascend the cliff to its crest," he ordered.

  Komad touched the arm of the Omad.

  "With the permission of his Chief, Komad will also climb the wall," he said. "On the crest it may be possible for Komad to discern signs of the passage of the gomad Darya."

  Tharn nodded curtly in assent, and the climb began forthwith. Agile as so many acrobats, the scouts of the Thandarian host, led by the redoubtable Komad, swiftly and with breathtaking ease began their ascent of the smooth wall of seemingly unbroken stone.

  And, from hidden places of concealment behind the densely ranked trees of the jungle, lost in the thick-leaved gloom, Achmed and his Barbary pirates watched the strange actions of the Cro-Magnon war party, their swarthy fingers curling about the worn hilts of poniard, scimitar and cutlass ....

  Chapter 15. STOLEN MOMENTS

  From the moment I discovered that Darya of Thandar yet lived, and was imprisoned as was I in the underground city of the Gorpaks and the cavern people, here within the hollow mountains, I would have moved heaven and Earth-and all of itself!-for the chance to speak with her.

  Alas, slaves have little control over their movements or actions, and that goes for prisoners of the Gorpaks as much as for any other slave. But, as luck was with me for once, at least, the opportunity I hungered for and dreamed of came within my reach not very long after the moment when I saw Darya and her eyes met mine.