Darya of The Bronze Age Read online

  Kairadine groaned and climbed unsteadily to his feet. Holding his injured parts tenderly, the master of the Red Witch limped to a wall-shelf and poured himself a goblet of strong red wine from a silver-stoppered carafe.

  The juice of the vine might be, and was, forbidden by the Prophet of Islam, but there were times when a man needed a powerful restorative. Anyway, the sins of Kairadine, of El-Cazar were as scarlet as his beard ....

  Recovering himself, the corsair turned upon his helpless captive a gaze as cold and malignant and deadly as the stare of a basilisk. Violent and sudden were the caprices that ruled the heart of this Son of the Desert: in mere instants the lust for pleasure could be transformed to the lust to inflict pain.

  "You have spirit, wench, if you have not wisdom," he hissed between his teeth. "We shall see if we cannot find an implement able to break and tame that spirit. . ."

  Striding to the far wall of his cabin, the corsair chieftain selected and removed from its peg a long coiled whip of braided black leather with a handle of worked silver.

  Then, smiling a small and menacing smile, he went behind where the girl hung in her chains. For a long, breathless moment Darya saw or felt nothing.

  Then the man slowly and savoringly ran his caressing hand down her bare back to cup and finger her round and naked buttocks.

  He gave voice to a thick, gloating chuckle.

  Then Darya heard a sharply intaken breath-

  In the next instant a line of liquid fire seared her bare bottom and curled about her loins.

  Darya leaped in her bonds as every muscle in her slender body convulsed to the unbelievable agony of the touch of the lash. She sucked in her breath and held it to prevent loosing any involuntary cry, which would doubtless have given pleasure to her tormentor.

  An endless agony of suspense followed as, with tensed and trembling muscles she awaited the next stroke of the whip.

  Kairadine laughed silkily.

  "You did not respond to the touch of my hands, but I notice that you shudder under the kiss of the lash,"

  he said.

  A second stroke of the leather whip followed, this time curling about her shoulders to just flick with the tip of the whip the nipple of her left breast. The agony was even more terrible than before, but Darya did not utter a sound.

  "I was wrong, wench. You have courage as well as spirit," Kairadine said softly. "But the whip can break both in time . . . ."

  Then he came around to stand in front of her, looking her body over thoughtfully as if deciding where next to brand her with the lash. Darya eyed him resolutely, but her small chin quivered and her eyes were filled with the tears of pain. She said nothing, for there was nothing to say.

  His eyes crawled slowly down her nakedness to fasten greedily upon her perfect breasts. They rose and fell to the impulse of her panting breath, and the pink-tips were crisped in fearful anticipation.

  He licked his lips with a pointed tongue.

  "The breasts, I think . . . but not enough to scar them for life. 'Twould be a pity to mar such loveliness . . . ."

  But even as Kairadine Redbeard lifted his arm to strike his captive, a yell of hoarse alarm sounded from the deck. It was followed by the thud of running feet and by the harsh clangor of the alarm gong. Fists pounded urgently upon the cabin's door.

  Spitting a curse, Kairadine flung his whip into a corner and strode across the room to unlatch the door. A frightened corsair's face peered in, mouthing something that sounded like "Yith! Yith!"

  At the sound of that dreadful name, even the dark features of Kairadine paled and he licked his lips uncertainly. For there was no danger more dreaded upon the high seas than the Terror of the Deep, and even Darya's folk knew and feared that awful name.

  Leaving his captive still helplessly bound, the Redbeard gained the deck and found his men in disciplined turmoil. Even as he gained the deck, the snaky head of the plesiosaur flicked forward like the head of a striking cobra, to pluck the screaming lookout from the crow's nest. For a moment, no more, the legs of the hapless corsair kicked and struggled in the grip of those terrible jaws.

  Then there sounded the crunch of snapping bones and a horrible gulping as the yith swallowed its kill.

  But one man-morsel was far from being enough to satisfy the Dragon of the Depths. The ghastly head darted down to glide after a fleeing sailor: squalling with panic, the fellow sprang to the rail and dived into the restless waters of the Sogar-Jad, obviously preferring the unknown dangers of the sea to the horrible death that awaited him between the monster's hungry jaws.

  "Unlimber that catapult, you dogs!" Kairadine roared furiously, brandishing his scimitar. For his men, although carefully trained in the procedure, were taking what seemed an ungodly amount of time in removing the tarpaulin which covered their only defense against the terrible yith.

  Perhaps it was that sudden thunderous voice, or the flash of the waving blade, but something caught the attention of the hungry reptile and attracted his soulless and flaming eyes to the tall booted figure of the Pirate Prince.

  "O reis, beware!" wailed Achmed the Moor from the middeck.

  The huge head swung about and came darting down upon the captain of the Red Witch, jaws yawning to engulf him, fangs as long as cavalry sabers glistening as they fought to rip and mangle his flesh-Kairadine sprang nimbly backwards with a vicious snarl of defiance. Villain though he was, the lean desert princeling was no coward. And hopeless though the contest between man and monster reptile certainly was, Kairadine Redbeard would not die without a fight.

  He whirled the slender blade up and swung it down with all of the coiled and steely strength which slept in the sinews of his shoulders. The blade whistled down and cut into the scaly snout of the yith. It drew back, voicing an earshattering hiss of rage or surprise or pain-perchance, all three.

  Kairadine seized upon his momentary respite to spring backwards again, in order to put the cabin door at his back and gain a more secure footing. No acrobat could have moved more nimbly, but the desk was shrouded with the halfdisengaged tarpaulin, and it was slimy with salt spray from the waves which broke against the hull.

  His booted heels slipped upon the slick, stiff fabric, and he fell sprawling over backwards.

  As he did so, the head of the yith darted forward again to seize him, jaws snapping like castanets.

  Kairadine screamed as the fangs of those terrible jaws closed upon the muscled flesh of his right arm near the shoulder ....

  Chapter 5 THE BRINK OF DEATH

  After a march of some "wakes" and several "sleeps," Tharn of Thandar reached the northern extremities of the subterranean continent. Here the shoreline broke into scattered rocks and islets, washed by the slimy waves of the Sogar-Jad, which foamed and broke about their slick, wet sides. Nowhere could the jungle monarch perceive the slightest token of human habitation: beyond the shore lay further islands, large and small, drowned in veils of floating mist, beyond which stretched, presumably, the unbroken sea to the very walls of the cavern-world.

  To his "east" lay the immensity of the northern plains, a vast expanse of grassy flatlands roamed by the timid uld and the burly mastodon. Just at the limits of human vision there arose a mighty rampart of mountains that formed, although Tharn knew it not, the walls of Zar, beyond which, amid the waters of the inner sea, the Scarlet City rose upon its island.

  He had reached an impasse, had Tharn of Thandar. And if ever a man was entitled to feel despair and hopelessness, it was he at that moment. In which direction to go, where to search, and-for what?

  He decided to call a council of his chieftains, to draw upon their pooled wisdom and experience.

  Squatting on their heels in a wide circle, the Cro-Magnon primitives conferred on what next to do. The ideas brought forward were sparse and seemingly futile. Some counseled continuing along the coastline, others spreading out to comb the vastness of the plains. No one notion appealed to them all. Finally, Ithar, a chiefta
in of the huntsmen of Thandar, and a seasoned veteran whose judicious advice Tharn had more often than not found reliable, spoke up.

  "The-Men-Who-Ride-Upon-The-Water must do so for a reason," he pointed out. "What better reason, than that their home lies upon one of the islands in the 'northern' sea? Unless they found a means to traverse the waves of the Sogar-Jad, they would be forever marooned upon their island home."

  "Therefore, it is the counsel of Ithar that we search the watery expanse of the sea?" queried Tharn skeptically.

  His chieftain nodded silently. It was ever his wont to speak seldom, but then briefly, and ever to the point.

  "And how does Ithar suggest that we do this?" demanded another of the chieftains. "Since we lack the great floating log upon which the folk we seek may ride in safety . . . ."

  "There are many fallen logs which we may ride," countered Ithar. And he reminded the chieftains of Thandar of the dugout canoes in which the Drugars of Kor had attacked the mainland from their own island home of Ganadol.

  "Are we any the less skillful or intelligent than the accursed Drugars?" he asked simply.

  "But there are no trees hereabouts which may be felled and hollowed out for the purpose Ithar suggests!"

  protested one of the scouts. The chieftain shrugged.

  "Then the Omad would be wise to take us where many trees grow," he said. "There are forests to the south, along the borders of the Peaks of Peril."

  "That would mean retracing our path for many wakes,"' Tharn reasoned. Again, Ithar shrugged.

  "My Omad is unfortunately correct. But, having reached the grove and felled and hollowed out the trees, could not the host make good time by sailing 'north' along the coast? There is no need to march this way again overland, dragging the logs behind us."

  Much argument followed, but it was in vain, for the arguments of Ithar were reasonable. After the host of Sothar parted from their brother tribe, in order to search for the girl Yualla whom the pterodactyl had carried off in the direction of Zar, the men of Thandar decamped and marched south to where the trees grew by the Peaks of Peril. Their stone axes quickly felled the towering boles, and with smaller axes they trimmed away the branches. The women built bonfires of the branches and bark, which were covered with sand once they were fully ablaze. Shortly thereafter the sand was raked aside, disclosing beds of glowing coal. These were packed into shallow places scooped out by stone knives along one surface of the logs.

  It would seem from this that the Cro-Magnons were not ignorant of the methods employed by their distant cousins, the Neanderthals, to fashion crude dugout canoes. Although their own home, Thandar, lay inland far from the seacoast, and its rivers were small and few, it would seem that the Cro-Magnons were keenly observant, for they had deduced the methods used by the Apemen of Kor from a mere glimpse or two at their dugouts.

  All of this took longer in the doing than in the telling, of course, as is the way with writing. But in time a fleet of crude but serviceable dugouts was prepared in sufficient numbers to carry the entire host of the Thandarians. Once the trees were felled, and while the women and children and oldsters were burning them hollow with heaped coals, the warriors and huntsmen prepared rude paddles. Fortunately, a stand of Jurassic bamboolike treeferns grew near the edges of the grove, and these made excellent paddles.

  Once launched upon the waves, the canoe fleet began negotiating the waters along the coast. Their craft were sluggish and unpredictable, lacking such stabilizing elements as rudders or outriggers, but sail they could and sail they did.

  North, ever north, they guided the clumsy fleet.

  Somewhere in the northern sea lay El-Cazar, the island stronghold of the Barbary Pirates.

  And there they would find Darya, if anywhere . . . .

  Perspiration glistened on Achmed's shaven brow and dripped from the edges of his beard as he guided his men with a steady hand.

  "Now!" he boomed.

  The great catapult soared into the air with a whump!, hurling its burden, a heavy and jagged boulder of flinty stone, with terrific velocity.

  The missile whistled through the air and struck the monstrous yith at the base of the neck, just above the shoulder. The impact was staggering: the whole ship shuddered to the blow.

  The plesiosaur released its victim in order to give voice to a shrill screech of pain. From the way it flopped ungainly, huge paddle-like flippers churning the slimy waves into froth, Achmed guessed that the impact of the flung boulder had either broken the yith's shoulder-if yiths had shoulders, that is!-or had dislocated whatever it was they possessed in place of shoulders.

  As a matter of fact, the impact had broken the long spine of the monster. Releasing its hold upon the ship, and screaming all the while in mingled pain, outrage and frustration, the huge serpentlike thing sank sideways into the churning waves, its long tail whipping the water madly.

  Then it sank from view and the corsairs breathed easier again. Easy enough, in fact, to raise a cheer for their first mate. But Achmed had no ears for their cheering now.

  He sprang across the deck to where his prince lay in a pool of blood and knelt to swiftly examine, with hands that shook only a little, the terrible wounds inflicted by the fangs of the yith.

  The muscles of the upper arm and perhaps the shoulder seemed to have been cleanly severed, but they would mend with time and care. The immediate danger was that Kairadine Redbeard would bleed to death, for great arteries were punctured. Scarlet fountains arced in the misty air, and the face of the unconscious Redbeard was pale as wax.

  Hastily the Barbary Pirates came to the aid of their chief. Salt water cleansed the ghastly wounds, and the mangled arm was tightly bound with clean bandages and splinted with belaying pins, for the bone of the upper arm seemed to have snapped. Tourniquets were applied and the injured man was borne tenderly to his cabin, where the wondering eyes of Darya took in the scene.

  "Cut the wench down," growled Achmed, as he bore his chief to his bed and put water mingled with wine to the waxen lips.

  "Does the reis still live, O Achmed?" one of the corsair, a fat-bellied Turk named Kemal, inquired fearfully.

  "He lives, O Kemal, but barely," muttered the Moor. "He is standing on the brink of death . . . ."

  "Will the reis not lose the arm, then?" asked another pirate named Haroot, a lank, dour, delicate-featured Persian.

  Achmed of El-Cazar shrugged. "That lies with the will of Allah," he said fatalistically. "Fetch me that water bucket, and more clean cloth-"

  With hands as gentle as a woman's, he bathed the sweaty brows of Kairadine with a wet cloth and moistened his lips with wine and water again. The Redbeard seemed sunken deep in a coma, although his lips twitched and his shut eyes moved from side to side like one suffering in the clutch of a nightmare.

  Was there venom in the fangs of the yith? Achmed did not know: never before, in all the annals of El-Cazar, had a man escaped with his life from the bite of the yith. The jongleurs would make songs of this, if Kairadine lived, he thought.

  "What shall we do with the savage girl?" one of the sailors asked.

  Achmed rubbed his brow with a groan. The wench was already proving to be more trouble than she was worth-which was next to nothing. One beautiful young woman alone on a ship filled with woman-hungry men was a source of potential riot and mutiny-and if any of the crew touched her, and Kairadine lived to know of it, there would be hangings ....

  "Cover her body," he growled curtly. "Take her to my cabin and chain her to the centerpost. Then lock the door and bring the keys to me."

  The corsair saluted sketchily and bore Darya unprotestingly away.

  All the next "sleep," Achmed the Turk alternated between tending to his wounded captain and seeing that the ship was kept steady on her course to El-Cazar. With so many tasks to be seen to and so many decisions to be made, there was no time for Achmed to snatch so much as forty winks for himself.

  But that's the trouble with being f
irst mate, he thought to himself wryly. None of the pleasures of captaincy, and much of the responsibility ....

  The momentary flash of humor did little to relieve his gloom. For Achmed had been born and raised among the Barbary Pirates, and he knew how deeply they were torn into rival factions, and he knew that only the adhesive loyalty to the authentic descendant of the great Khair ud-Din of Algiers, Kairadine's ancestor, held the feuding corsair chieftains together in some sort of unity.

  Lacking that loyalty, with Kairadine dead, the fortress city would explode into civil war, destroying them all.

  "Live, O my reis . . . live!" he prayed between his teeth to the unhearing skies.

  Part Two

  PIRATES OF ZANTHODON

  Chapter 6 THE VOYAGE OF THE RED WITCH

  Darya composed herself upon the floor of Achmed's small cubicle of a cabin, but with no thought of slumber in her mind. A length of bedding taken from Kairadine's bunk covered her nakedness. She had drawn it about her slender body like a loose robe, and used the remainder of it to cushion the planking of the deck beneath her.

  By one ankle was she securely tethered to the center post which supported the afterdeck overhead. After several busy minutes spent futilely attempting to free herself, the cavegirl gave the task up as a hopeless one. Now, stoically but with an inward fear she strove to conceal, she awaited whatever fate was to be hers, determined to sell her life dearly, and her maidenhead no less dearly.

  When the corsairs had brought her into the first mate's cabin, she had taken in her new surroundings with a swift, all-encompassing glance. The mate's cabin was naturally smaller and less luxuriously appointed than was the cabin of the Pirate Prince of El-Cazar. A rude bunk was built into the wall, with shelves and drawers beneath it. One small porthole admitted light and fresh air, but even Darya knew all too well that it was too small to permit her to squeeze through it, should she be fortunate enough to set herself free from her bonds.