The Zanthodon MEGAPACK ™: The Complete 5-Book Series (13 page)

“In this dense jungle where one tree looks very much like another,” smiled the girl comfortingly, “it is terribly easy to become confused about one’s direction. Perhaps we should rest here, find something to eat, and seize this opportunity to sleep—for we are all quite weary after our exertions.”

Her companions agreed that her suggestion was a sensible one. While Jorn began to build a fire, using, the Professor noticed, flints to set the wood ablaze, Darya decided to go hunting with the light javelin they had taken from the villainous Fumio.

“If my princess will wait until I am finished with this task, I shall be pleased to try my skill while both of you rest,” the Hunter offered.

Darya shook her head determinedly.

“I feel restless, despite my weariness,” she said. “Continue building your fire, Jorn, while I endeavor to make my kill. I shall not be gone long.”

With that, the girl strode into the dim aisles of the jungle and was soon lost to view.

“Heh! I wonder, Jorn, if we should have permitted the young woman to go off by herself,” murmured the Professor a trifle nervously. “The beasts of the jungle are immense and ferocious and Fumio’s spear seems to me a frail implement.”

Jorn smiled.

“Like most of the women of Thandar,” he said quietly, “the princess is an accomplished huntress and knows well how to avoid the larger and more dangerous predators; have no fear.”

“Eh? Well, perhaps so…still and all, I shall breathe a lot easier once the child has returned to camp, safe and unharmed!”

“That will not be long,” said Jorn confidently. “The jungle teems with game, and I’ll wager even at this moment Darya has made her kill.”

* * * *

Nor was Jorn’s confidence in Darya’s skills as a huntress misplaced. For it had been child’s play for the Stone Age girl to bring down an uld, a small mammal that may have been a remote ancestor of the horse, and even as Jorn made his prediction to the Professor, she was engaged in gutting her kill and trussing it with woven grass ropes; slinging the carcass over her shoulder, the girl crossed the clearing, intending to return to her companions.

Now the jungles of Zanthodon, as the cave girl knew all too well, are the hunting grounds of many fierce and mighty predators. There was the heavy-footed thantor, or wooly mammoth, and the spike-horned grymp, as the Cro-Magnons call the triceratops, and many another fearsome beast as well, the vandar and the goroth, the yith of the seas, and many more.

But none are more to be feared than the dreaded thakdol. On its motionless wings, the tireless reptile can soar aloft, riding the updrafts for hour upon hour, while searching the landscape beneath it for game.

While the thakdol can fight and slay, it is a lazy brute and vastly prefers to feed on someone else’s kill.

Like the vultures of the Upper World, whose habits are so similar, the pterodactyl is essentially a scavenger, a carrion-eater, although it will kill when it has to.

On this particular day, a monstrous thakdol whose ribbed, membraneous, batlike wings measured thirtyfive feet from claw-hooked tip to claw-hooked tip, was floating above the jungle on silent wings. It was hungry, the aerial reptile, for in two days it had found but sparse rations. And now there wafted to its keen senses the fragrant aroma of fresh-shed blood…

Craning its scaly neck, the thakdol peered down through the tatters of flying mist, to spy a small clearing and a CroMagnon girl striding for the forest’s edge with the carcass of an uld across her shoulders.

Uttering the almost inaudible hissing cry that was its hunting call, the huge pterodactyl folded its batlike wings and plummeted earthward, falling like a thunderbolt.

And Darya was not even aware there was a thakdol in the sky until suddenly she was buffeted by drumming wings and a scaled and heavy body slammed into her, driving her to her knees.

Ghastly claws ripped and tore, striving to dislodge the carcass of the uld from her back. But Darya had lashed the body of her kill across her shoulders with tough ropes of woven grass, and they held firm even against those terrible claws.

Losing patience, the thakdol sank its razory claws deep within the carcass of Darya’s kill—spread its monstrous wings—and rose on drumming vanes into the air—

Carrying Darya with it!

The jungle girl screamed in terror as those beating wings lifted her off the earth and into the air. She had not dreamed it possible that a thakdol—even one so huge as this thakdol—was strong enough to carry off a fully grown human being, although betimes its grisly kin have been known to fly away into the sky, gripping babies or small children in its terrible claws.

And in truth the thakdol labored mightily to reach the upper air, fearing to remain on the ground where it could become the prey of beasts greater than itself. Only in the skies of Zanthodon was it safe, for therein no other predator could venture. But the young woman dangling from its claws was a more weighty burden than the small brain of the flying reptile had realized, and it swayed drunkenly in its flight, just barely skimming above the tops of the trees.

Once safely aloft, the pterodactyl made for the distant cliffs where it had built its nest. And it bore the Stone Age girl with it on its voyage through the misty skies.…

* * * *

At the sound of Darya’s scream of terror, Jorn sprang to his feet, snatched up a cudgel from his heap of firewood, and hurled himself into the jungle with the frightened Professor at his heels.

The swift-footed savage veritably flew through the jungle aisles, heading unerringly in the direction from which the girl’s scream had emanated.

Only moments after Darya had cried out, Jorn and the Professor burst into the clearing, and stared about them, wideeyed with amazement. For she was nowhere to be seen!

There, to be sure, was the trampled turf and blood-splattered grasses where her javelin had brought down the small uld.

There, too, her light javelin lay fallen on the turf. Jorn snatched the light weapon from the ground, examining it.

But where was—Darya?

“She cannot have vanished into thin air—such things simply do not happen,” panted the Professor, staring wildly about.

“I agree,” said Jorn briefly. “But where, then, is she? Had she been chased away by one of the great beasts, a grymp or a goroth, say, the grasses and the soil would be trampled, displaying the marks of their tread. But no such marks are to be seen…”

They looked about them. It was, of course, even as Jorn the Hunter had said: the grasses which clothed the floor of the clearing lay smooth and undisturbed, save for the small area where the ground had been torn by the soft hooves of the little uld, as it had scrabbled in its death agony, pinned to the earth by Darya’s spear.

No other marks were to be seen.

Jorn bared his strong white teeth, eyes glaring. From his deep chest there sounded a menacing growl.

The caveman wore but the thin veneer of civilization; beneath that layer of social custom, he was pure savage, a primitive man, filled with superstition and primal night fears.

Suddenly the Professor seized the Hunter’s upper arm, gripping it tightly.

“Shh!” he whispered fiercely, gesturing for silence. “Did you hear it? What was
that
?”

Jorn had heard it too, that far, faint, despairing cry…so thin and weak that it was as if it had come a great distance.

His nostrils flared and the skin crawled upon his forearms. For it had come from…
above
.

Suddenly, Jorn threw back his head, staring into the sky, searching in all directions the misty heavens.

And then he gasped, pointing.

The Professor cried out in astonishment as he saw the same terrible sight that had frozen Jorn in his tracks: the tiny figure of a blond girl in abbreviated fur garments, being carried through the skies by an enormous pterodactyl!

Jorn muttered under his breath, signing himself superstitiously. For the reality of Darya’s plight was, in its way, even more horrible than that which he had feared.

Which, after all, is worse: to be spirited away by ghosts, or to be carried off in the claws of a flying monster?

Only for a moment did Jorn linger. Then he turned and left the clearing, trotting rapidly in the direction in which the thakdol had flown.

It was not possible for the loyal heart of Jorn of Thandar to desert his princess in her peril. He would track the dragon of the skies to its lair, and then rescue the girl, if she lived. If she no longer lived, then he would do his utmost to avenge her.

Racing through the jungles, he vanished from the sight of the Professor within a few moments.

And then it slowly dawned upon the old savant that now he was completely alone and helpless, in the midst of the most deadly and dangerous jungle upon the earth.

“Eternal Euclid! What am I doing, lingering here?” muttered the Professor to himself with a wild look in his watery eyes. Clapping one hand atop his head, to hold secure the battered old sun helmet he had so carefully clung to through all of his perilous peregrinations, the scrawny savant trotted off in the direction taken by Jorn the Hunter.

“Just a moment, young fellow!” he called quaveringly after the running figure. “Wait for me…bless my soul, I believe I shall accompany you and lend moral support to your noble attempt at rescue…!”

And, summoning all such speed as his bony legs and wobbly knees could muster, the old scientist followed the retreating figure of Jorn, joining him amid the plains which stretched wide beyond the jungle’s edge.

PART V: THARN OF THANDAR

CHAPTER 17

THE MEANING OF FRIENDSHIP

The Cro-Magnons were swiftly organized into four-man hunting parties and the search for Darya commenced at once. Tharn dispatched his chieftains with a masterly air of command, retaining only a small cadre of scouts and hunters to remain behind.

As his warriors entered the jungles to launch their search for the daughter of the Omad, the primitive monarch turned his attention once more to me, scrutinizing me carefully. I could tell that he was still puzzled by my black hair and gray eyes, as had been all of the inhabitants of Zanthodon which I had heretofore encountered. But he seemed more interested in the khaki fabric wherefrom I had fashioned my crude shorts, and in the tough materials of my high-laced sandals, which I had manufactured, you will remember, from the remnants of my sodden boots.

“You puzzle me, Eric Carstairs,” Darya’s father admitted frankly. “Never before have I seen a man with your coloring of hair and eyes, nor a man accoutered with such strange garments, which seem made from materials heretofore unknown to me. You have come a vast distance, I perceive, from your remote homeland, where doubtless you are a great chief.”

I confessed that my homeland was indeed far off, but modestly disclaimed the rank he would have assigned me.

“Tell me, then, how you encountered the gomad my daughter, and of that which passed between the two of you,” he demanded.

I nodded; there was not, after all, very much to tell, for the time Darya and I had spent together had been very short. I simply related how the Professor and I had been taken prisoner by the same slave raiders that had earlier captured Jorn, Darya, Fumio and the others. I told the savage monarch that we had been assigned to a position close to each other in the slave column, and that we had talked and become good friends—all but Fumio. And I told him how we had managed to escape just before the Neanderthal men had gotten us into their dugouts, and that my last glimpse of the girl had been when she had fled with Professor Potter into the depths of the wood while I remained behind to engage the foremost of our pursuers.

Evidently, my words had contained the ring of truth, because Tharn relaxed his posture of stern vigilance, and clapped me upon the shoulder.

“It would appear that you have dealt well and honorably with the gomad of Thandar,” he said with a slight smile. “And for that you have won the friendship of Tharn, Omad of Thandar! But tell me, Eric Carstairs, how is it that you come to be in the company of this Drugar? For, surely, even in your own homeland, no matter how remote, the Drugars and the panjani are eternally at war one with another…?”

I shook my head; it was useless to try to explain that in my country there were remarkably few Neanderthals to be found.

“Are you his captive,” he inquired,” or was he yours?”

Hurok watched me stolidly, waiting for my reply. Perhaps our brief acquaintanceship had been of too little duration for him yet entirely to trust me. But, since the Cro-Magnons had appeared on the scene, the hulking Neanderthal had said nothing, his eyes dull and listless, as if he expected momentarily to be put to death.

And I suddenly remembered that war was constant and unending between these two branches of primitive man, and that death or slavery is undoubtedly the fate that would have been dealt out to any other in his place.

“Neither, O Tharn,” I said firmly. “We are comrades in misfortune. More than that, we are—friends.”

“
Friends?
” ejaculated the jungle monarch incredulously.

I nodded. “Yes, friends.”

He shrugged, helplessly. “Eric Carstairs, the ways of your people must be greatly different from the ways of my own nation…for never before in all of my years have I even heard of a Drugar befriended by a panjan, or a panjan who had won the friendship of a Drugar! It is true what this man says, Drugar?” he demanded of Hurok.

The Apeman stolidly met his inquiring gaze.

“Black Hair speaks the truth,” he grunted.

Tharn shook his head baffledly, and shot me a glance that was almost humorous.

“Someday, perhaps, you will explain to me how this marvel came to pass, Eric Carstairs,” he said “And, no doubt, in time I will come to understand it, if not to believe it entirely…but if you are to remain under my protection, you must part company with the Drugar here and now, for I will not share my camp with the creature.”

“Hurok will go,” said the other, dully. “He will rejoin his people in Kor. There is no need for the lord of the panjani to drive forth Black Hair from his camp, merely because he is Hurok’s friend.”

Well, I could hardly stand there and be outdone in nobility of soul or greatness of heart by a Neanderthal savage, so I stepped forward, confronting Darya’s father.

“Together, Hurok and I survived the waves of the Sogar-Jad when the dugouts were overturned by the flippers of the great yith,” I said. “Together we faced the perils of the jungle, and the jaws of the mighty vandar. I will not stand idly by and abide here in safety, while Hurok my friend goes forth alone into the dangers that await all who venture within the jungle. If Hurok must depart from among the men of Thandar, then Eric Carstairs will go forth with him.”

Tharn stood there, strong arms folded majestically upon his mighty breast, head bent a little in deep thought. He made no slightest indication that he had heard or understood my words, but I knew I had given him something to think about.

Then he lifted his head and looked me fully in the face, and turned to examine the huge and hairy form of Hurok at my side.

“We shall speak on this matter some later time,” decided the Cro-Magnon; and, with that, turned to stride away to direct the construction of the camp.

* * * *

If Professor Potter had only been there, he would doubtless have been fascinated at the way in which the Neolithic warriors built their encampment.

They paced off an area forty feet on a side, driving stakes into the turf of the clearing at each corner.

Then while half of their number began raising tents of tanned hide on center poles, the remainer erected a rude palisade about the perimeter of the camp, using sticks and logs and branches lashed together with rawhide thongs.

The barrier was crude but looked stout and effective.

While thus employed, Tharn’s men ignored Hurok and me. They not only paid us no attention, but did not so much as glance in our direction. I had an uneasy feeling that the two of us were in Coventry, as far as the Cro-Magnons were concerned. It partly amused me and partly saddened me to learn that these handsome, stalwart warriors were innately racist, despising the Neanderthal men because they were different from the men of Thandar, and despising me because I had openly claimed Hurok as my friend.

I could have hoped that prejudice would prove to be a vice acquired by decadent, civilized men; instead, I am very much afraid that it is a universal human weakness. This disheartened me.

Hurok was not insensitive to what was going on. He came over to where I sat brooding a short while later, and laid his great hand upon my shoulder.

“It is not good that Black Hair should be enemies of the panjani because of Hurok,” said the huge fellow quietly, and with a simple dignity that made me blush for the failings of my own kind. “Let Hurok go forth alone. Always will friendship exist between Black Hair and Hurok, and doubtless they will meet again, for the world is small…”

I shook my head determinedly.

“That I will not do,” I swore. “If needs must, we will leave the warriors of Thandar here and search for the girl Darya on our own, since we seem unwelcome among her people. But I will not permit you to face the jungle and its dangers alone!”

Something glittered briefly in the Apeman’s sunken little eye; he brushed it away with the back of his hairy hand, nodded, and strode away. And I felt a bewildering rush of emotions within my breast.

For that which my companion had brushed from his eyes had been…a tear.

* * * *

After some hours, the hunters returned. They had found signs of Darya’s presence in the jungle, they reported to her mighty sire, but not the girl herself. And a tall, leathery old scout with grizzled locks and beard described a small clearing where the soil had been disturbed as if by a struggle, and displayed upon his open palm a hide thong and collection of smooth, white stones.

“It is Darya’s sling,” breathed Tharn of Thandar. “And stones such as she would have collected to rearm herself with! Beyond these things, Komad, found you aught else?”

The old scout shook his head, reluctantly.

“How far distant is this place where you found the sling and the stones?”

The chief scout, Komad, indicated that the clearing and the pool lay half a mile or more in the direction of the cliffs which lifted in the distance.

“Let us break camp here, and go thither,” suggested Komad. “If my Chief agrees, we would be wise to use the clearing of the pool as the center of our search, which can widen therefrom in circles until some further token of the gomad Darya is found.”

Tharn nodded briefly, and the men at once began to dismantle the encampment, preparing to depart.

During the orderly confusion, the old scout came over to where I stood on the sidelines.

“The Drugar you call your friend bade me say unto you that he appreciates all that you would sacrifice in order to be true to his friendship,” he said to me in low tones.

I had a premonition, and my heart leaped within me, knowing what was to come. I laid my hand on the fellow’s lean, sinewy arm.

“Where is Hurok?” I cried.

“He has gone forth alone into the jungle,” said Komad the scout, “and he begs you not to follow him. ‘Let Black Hair stay with his own kind, and Hurok will rejoin his,’ were his words. And he bade me give you this—”

The old scout put something heavy, cold and metallic into my hand. I looked down, blinking through sudden tears.

It was the automatic which the saber-tooth had struck from my hand!

And it was thus that Hurok, hulking, illiterate savage from the Stone Age, taught to Eric Carstairs the true meaning of the word “friendship.”

CHAPTER 18

THE PEAKS OF PERIL

It was hopeless for Jorn the Hunter and Professor Potter to expect to keep up with the pterodactyl. Even heavily burdened as the winged reptile was by Darya’s weight, it could traverse the misty skies of Zanthodon far more swiftly than could the two men go the same distance on foot.

However, they persevered: for Jorn would not abandon hope of rescuing his princess until he became absolutely certain that she was dead. And, as for Professor Potter, mourning what he believed to be my own demise, he was equally determined to affect the rescue of the Stone Age girl, if only as a tribute to my memory.

“It is no more than the dear boy would have expected of me,” puffed the Professor, valiantly striving to keep up with the younger man.

They had left the edge of the jungle, finding before them an immense and level plain which stretched to the foothills of the cliffs which rose, dim and purple, in the distance.

In the misty air of Zanthodon’s eternal day, the two could perceive little of the plain which lay about them, save that it seemed a broad and level tract of thick grasses.

Jorn searched the plain with keen eyes, but nowhere could he discern the slightest token of human habitation. And neither did he discover any signs of dangerous predators, although a herd of wooly mammoths could be seen browsing on the long grass in the middle distance.

These the Hunter ignored, knowing well that the thantors are grass-eaters and not of carnivorous habits.

He knew, as well, that they are relatively harmless unless men disturb or attack them, and he had at present no intention of doing either.

“Do you happen to know this part of the country at all, young man?” inquired the Professor, panting slightly from his exertions. The Cro-Magnon man nodded slightly.

“Only by reputation,” he admitted. “During the time when Jorn was in the captivity of the Drugars, he overheard them discussing their route. They had intended to set forth in the dugout canoes for the island of Ganadol at a point where the edges of the jungle approached very closely to the shores of the Sogar Jad. And they hoped that Tharn of Thandar and his warriors were not so close upon their heels that they would have to venture any farther up along the coast, for—as they said—that would bring them too near to the Peaks of Peril for comfort.”

The Professor shuddered suddenly, as if a chill breeze had blown upon his naked skin.
The Peaks of Peril
…in truth the name had an ominous and frightening ring to it!

“Why did the Neanderthal men call those cliffs by such a name?” he inquired timidly.

His companion shrugged his bronzed and brawny shoulders.

“That Jorn does not know,” admitted the Hunter.

But the Professor had a feeling that before long they would find out for themselves.

Without another word, Jorn again broke into a rapid, jogging stride, trotting across the plains in the direction of the purple peaks.

There was nothing else for Professor Potter to do but follow him.

* * * *

When Darya awoke from her swoon, it was a time before the Cro-Magnon girl quite remembered where she was, or realized her present danger.

At some point during her dizzy, swooping flight across the misty skies of Zanthodon, consciousness had left the girl and she hung unconscious from the hooked claws of the thakdol, which were still sunk deeply in the carcass of the uld.

Thus she had not been awake when the flying reptile reached its noisome lair and deposited therein its double burden.

She recovered her consciousness in conditions so weird and frightful that, for a long, breathless moment, the Neolithic princess believed herself either blind or dead. For all about her stretched inky blackness, a gloom so intense as almost to be palpable to the touch. And to such as Darya of Zanthodon, reared in a cavern-world of perpetual day, the darkness was a thing of utter terror—

She screamed…then fell into a shocked silence as the echoes of her frightened cry boomed and resounded about her. From this the girl quickly discerned that she had not, after all, been deprived of her eyesight, but was trapped in an enclosed space of some sort. And, looking up, she discerned a faint trace of day far above her head.

Above her present place of confinement, daylight gleamed at the end of a tall natural chimney of naked rock, and the brave heart of the Cro-Magnon girl fainted within her at the knowledge of her predicament…for never could she hope to climb that chimney to reach the exit she could see far above her.

Or could she? For, if the huge pterodactyl had been able to descend through the shaft to leave her and the dead uld in this place, why could she not climb up it again? She was, after all, slender and slim, and her agile body was less than the bulk of the winged reptile.