The Zanthodon MEGAPACK ™: The Complete 5-Book Series (24 page)

And Hurok had the indifference to such things of which the Stoics boast.

But if he was too late to save me from my foes, Hurok solemnly resolved to see me avenged before returning home to rejoin his people on the island of Ganadol. It was the least and last thing he could ever do for Eric Carstairs, and the plain and honest justice of revenge would at least help him to forget the only man who had ever been his friend except his brethren of the Drugars.

And then, quite suddenly, Hurok ran into a wall
.

Well, he didn’t exactly run into it headlong, for he was and had been for some time feeling his way along with caution and care. But, quite unexpectedly, the Apeman found his path barred from any farther continuance by a smooth wall of dressed and mortared stone.

That is not to say that Hurok knew what dressed and mortared stone was, for none of the tribes of Zanthodon familiar to him were capable of erecting masonry. But he recognized the barrier to be the work of intelligence, through the regularity of the shapes of the individual stones whereof the wall was composed.

“What men could live here, in the black bowels of the world, shut off from the light of day?” he muttered aloud, puzzledly, scratching his matted head with one horny nail.

Then the hackles raised on his nape and along his spine. For it had occurred to the Neanderthal that perhaps this place was
sujat
…and better to be avoided. Now sujat is a sort of all-purpose word used by the folk of Zanthodon to describe what we of the Upper World would call a religious or supernatural experience.
Sujat
, to them, describes anything strange, uncanny or inexplicable. The fever that strikes strong men down in their tracks, the dreams that haunt them in slumber, the madness of a disordered intelligence—all of these are
sujat
. The word incorporates everything we would describe as totem or taboo, sacred or infernal, and all mysterious and frightening phenomena.

And a man-made wall, here in this black hole in the side of the mountain, was very definitely
sujat
as far as Hurok was concerned.

He prowled the length of the barrier, touching it gingerly from time to time to ascertain that it still existed. At this point, the cavern widened into a considerable breadth, and so it took the Apeman some time to reach the farther end.

And when he did, he found a door.

Unlike the wall, the door was built of wood, and the wood was old and rotten. It creaked uneasily when Hurok set his shoulder against it and heaved. With not too much effort, he broke it open.
Sujat
this place might be or not, his curiosity had got the better of him. And if
sujat
it was, then probably he was already doomed; and if doomed, well, at least he could have the pleasure of satisfying his curiosity before the taboo took its toll.

The rotten wood yielded before the pressure of his shaggy shoulders, and the rusty hinges gave way with a shriek. Ripping the wreckage away, Hurok peered within. An enormous dimly lit chamber met his eyes, its farther wall holding a row of black, rectangular openings which he knew must be doorways leading to other parts of this amazing hollow mountain.

Holding his weapons at the ready, alert for the slightest sign of danger, Hurok entered the huge open room. The roughness of the cavern floor had been smoothed away and the floor itself was now tiled with flagstones. A faint light pervaded the vastness of the chamber and the light came from odd-looking torches clamped here and there along the walls. They burned dimly, shedding just enough light for the Korian to see by. But it puzzled him that the illumination should be so faint; it must, he decided uneasily, have been the deliberate choice of the as yet unknown denizens of the mountain, for even the Drugars knew how to fashion crude torches from dry wood, and they burnt more brightly than these.

He crossed the immense room and peered within the doorways. Each opened into a corridor, and some of these were lit by the queer torches while others were not. From the unilluminated hallways came unpleasant stench, as of slimy rottenness overlaid with a sickish sweet smell Hurok knew but could not at once identify.

Entering at random one of these openings, Hurok prowled its length and found many doors, some barred and some unbarred. Peering cautiously within several of these he discovered them to be storerooms filled with stocks and provisions. Dried meats dangled on hooks set in the ceiling beams, and barrels were filled with various fruits and quantities of round, hard breads.

No longer need he suffer the pangs of hunger, Hurok realized with considerable relief. Taking down one of the slabs of dried meat, he bit off a mouthful and chewed and swallowed. It was of an odd texture and a flavor unfamiliar to him, but it was certainly nourishing enough.

Satisfying his appetite with the fruits, the meat and the bread, Hurok left the chamber and continued his cautious explorations.

Without warning he emerged onto a sort of balcony without railings which hung over a lower level. Peering down over the edge, he saw a dim lit room even larger than the first chamber he had seen. And therein were a considerable number of panjani, both warriors and shes, all of them stark naked.

They sat or lay or crouched about the stone chamber, some alone and some huddled into small groups. And there were children among them, he saw. They were of a different tribe of the panjani, he noticed, for their hair was redder than his own, their skins much whiter than the warriors of Thandar—indeed, they were unhealthily pale. Also, they seemed listless and wan, as if long held captive by some unknown foe.

Abruptly, he heard the sound of marching feet. And there came into the chamber a number of curiouslooking individuals, armed with weapons unfamiliar to Hurok. They were short little men; with bandy legs, and complexions peculiarly sallow, clad in odd, complicated garments such as the Apeman of Kor had never before seen. With harsh, squawking cries and blows of whip and cudgel, they herded along between them the naked, listless folk who had been sprawled dreamily about the chamber, but who scrambled fearfully to their feet as the crooked-legged little men came among them.

They were formed into two lines, the naked people of the caverns, by the barking little men in the odd garments. And it was only now that Hurok noted with puzzlement that the little men with the whips and cudgels had hairless heads and beardless faces, a style previously unknown to him.

And then it was, as Hurok watched, helpless to interfere, far above the cavern floor, that there transpired a scene so atrocious and appalling that it was worse than any nightmare.

Sick with growing horror and revulsion, the huge Apeman of Kor looked on, as—

CHAPTER 10

The People of the Caverns

When One-Eye came pelting toward us across the sward, the monster which pursued him emerged into view, shouldering through the underbrush between the trees. From its shaggy, reddish coat, heavy, bisonlike head and the breadth of those massive and terrible horns, we recognized it at once.

To the folk of Zanthodon it was the goroth; but Professor Potter had earlier identified it as the mighty aurochs, the prehistoric and long extinct ancestor of the bull.

For a moment, the huge, shaggy creature paused, eyeing the four puny men in its path. Then, lowering its heavy head, which it shook from side to side, and tearing at the earth with one ponderous forehoof, it gathered itself for the charge. And came thundering across the greensward toward us like an express train.

Directly in its path, and waddling toward us with all the speed his bow-legs could command, One-Eye peered fearfully over his shoulder as the earth shook underfoot from the goroth’s tonnage. Squalling with terror, the Apeman flung himself out of the path of the great bull-so close did it come that the tip of one horn sheared through the flesh of One-Eye’s shoulder. Clutching at the injured part, red blood leaking between his fingers, the Drugar yelled, curled fetally in the trampled grasses.

Xask, white to the lips, rose to his feet, staring with wide wild eyes at the oncoming goroth. Then, snatching up the .45 automatic, he ran to the left, skirting the edge of the boulders that lay strewn about near the flanks of the mountains. The last I saw of him, he was dwindling into the distance, running for his life without looking back.

Fumio stood there, shaking like a leaf, licking his lips and looking indecisively from right to left. Then he bolted in the opposite direction.

Which left me smack in the middle, and right in the path of the goroth, who came thundering down upon me like a runaway locomotive.

I had been sitting propped up against a boulder, with my wrists and forearms bound behind my back. Now this is an uncomfortable position to be sitting in, and a position from which it is peculiarly difficult to get to your feet, especially without the use of your arms. The only thing I could do was to roll over, which I did, and squirm and wriggle until the huge round rock was between the aurochs and myself.

The prehistoric bull came to a stop just before he would have rammed into the boulder. He snorted thunderously at me, then went trotting off in the direction in which Fumio had fled.

Which left me alive, at least, but also alone. And bound and helpless.

After a while, by bracing my shoulders against the rock, I managed to push and wriggle to my feet, minus a square inch or two of skin which had rubbed off against the rough stone. And I caught my breath, grateful to be alive, but wondering what to do next. A man alone in this savage wilderness has small chance of survival without weapons, and Xask had carried off my automatic.

A man whose arms are tied behind his back has no chance at all of staying alive for very long. I would be a late-afternoon brunch for the first reptilian monstrosity to come stalking by. You can’t run very well with your arms tied behind your back, and you certainly can’t climb a tree to get out of reach. So the first problem I had was to free my hands somehow.

A little stream meandered through the woods on its way down to join the steamy waters of the Sogar-Jad. And something occurred to me that might just find a way out of my predicament. So I went across the grassy space between the boulders and the trees, waded out into the deepest part of the stream and sat down in the cold, rushing water. I leaned back, resting against a small rock in midstream, so that my hands and arms were under the surface. And then I waited with as much patience as a man can be expected to have when he is completely helpless in a world filled with gigantic monsters and primitive savages.

It took about thirty minutes.

You see, it had occurred to me that Fumio had bound my wrists and upper arms with rawhide thongs. He had bound them tightly enough, I assure you.
But rawhide expands when immersed in water
. And the trick I had thought of was that the stream just might loosen my bonds enough for me to wriggle free of them.

Well, it did work. After a half-hour or so, the thongs tied about my wrists grew slack enough for me to free myself of them. The straps which bound my upper arms were a little harder to wriggle out of, but before long I climbed out of the stream and sat on the bank, rubbing my hands and arms vigorously, chafing them to get the numbness out, and suffering all the agonies of returning circulation.

I was still doing this a while later when a shadow fell over me and I looked up to see One-Eye grinning nastily down at me, a heavy club hovering over my head.

I groaned inwardly: “out of the frying pan, into the fire,” as they say.

But, anyway, at least I wasn’t alone any more.

* * * *

As he progressed, the cavern within the hollow mountain became a maze of chambers and tunnels and levels. The Professor was amazed at the sophistication of the masonry, the roof braces, the ventilation. Whatever race had devised this labyrinth, this fantastic city built within a mountain, had achieved far higher standards of technology than he would have thought possible for a world so primitive in all other ways.

From time to time he encountered other humans such as himself. To his astonishment, these paid him no attention at all and merely went about their business, viewing his presence with utter indifference.

There was, however, something odd and curious about them. For one thing, while they resembled the Cro-Magnons in many particulars, and their bodies were as well-developed, as symmetrical, and as free of hair as those of the men of Thandar, they differed from the Thandarians in strange little ways.

For example, all of the Thandarians whom Professor Potter had seen were splendid, strapping specimens of Stone Age manhood, their lithe, tanned bodies in the flower of glowing health.

The people of the caverns, however, were wan and listless, they shuffled about their duties as if enfeebled, their eyes were glazed with indifference, their faces lined as though with suffering. And, while obviously well-nourished, their bodies wore an unwholesome pallor, as if they had never in all their lives been exposed to fresh air and daylight.

Whatever could possess a race this intelligent to spend all of their existence locked within these dim caverns, avoiding the outer world? It was a baffling mystery.

It was obvious to the Professor that, while of the same racial stock as the Cro-Magnons of Thandar, the people of the caverns came from another tribe or nation. The gene pool of such tribes and small clans, he gathered, was limited through inbreeding; and, whereas all of the men and women of Thandar were blond and blue-eyed, the people of the caverns had red hair and eyes that were either brown or green. Well, it was to be presumed that more than one tribal grouping or nation of the Cro-Magnon race existed here within Zanthodon, so this was not in itself surprising.

Professor Potter had become so accustomed to being completely ignored by the pale, shuffling, zombie-like denizens of the hollow mountain, that he almost walked into trouble.

He was about to turn a corner into yet another portion of this level, when it occurred to him that since these parts were amply if dimly lit by torches placed at intervals along the stone walls, he may as well douse his own and save it for a later time. So he lingered to crush out the flame in a corner, and as he did so a harsh, barking voice came to his ears from beyond the corner.

Peering cautiously about, the Professor gazed with horror on a scene of unexpected brutality. A very young woman of the cavern people, scarce more than a child, was being flogged by a peculiar-looking individual.

Now the people of the caverns went stark naked, unlike the folk of Thandar who generally wore sandals and something about their loins. But the male who was flogging the writhing naked child was dressed in a tunic of overlapping leather scales, with a clout of crimson cloth between his legs and high-laced buskins on his feet.

He was bandy-legged and somewhat shorter than the cavern people; also, he was either naturally bald or his head was shaven.

And he bore weapons, while the cavern folk, at most, bore tools or cleaning implements. He was armed, in fact, with a blunt-tipped, three-pronged weapon like a trident, and a whip composed of many lengths of braided leather thongs. It was with this last device that he was whipping the little girl.

The scene of cruel and brutal punishment was of itself repellent; but what made it so shudderingly unnatural was that while the child whimpered and writhed, she made not the slightest attempt to escape or to fight back. Indeed, she did not even attempt to shield with her hands the more tender portions of her anatomy. And it was these portions that her attacker sought out with his whip—the budding, sensitive little breasts, the hairless loins and tender upper thighs, and the round little bottom.