The Zanthodon MEGAPACK ™: The Complete 5-Book Series (39 page)

Yet still Achmed’s soul felt a queasiness and a tension, as if something unexpected and disastrous were about to happen. It was a feeling distinctly unsettling, and the Moor did not enjoy it. But he could not with impunity disturb his prince at his pleasures over anything so flimsy as a mere
feeling
.…

Then it was that the slimy waves of the Sogar-Jad broke in an explosion of foam right before Achmed’s eyes.

There came lifting into view a hideous snaky head, but larger than any snake’s head had a right to be.

The head rose and rose at the end of a thick but tapering neck that seemed of endless length. It rose until the head of the enormous serpent stood as tall as the crow’s nest, which was the height of the ship herself.

And then—at last!—Achmed knew the name of the shadowy fear that had for so long plagued him.

The name was
yith
.

And, as
yith
is the name by which the mariners of Zanthodon call the great plesiosaurus, the original Sea Serpent of legend, the Crusher of Ships, the Devourer of Men, the Terror of the Deep, it would seem that Achmed’s fears were very well grounded, indeed.

CHAPTER 4

FANGS OF DOOM

Panting, the cavegirl watched as the corsair princeling advanced toward her, grinning.

He was a superb figure of a man, was Kâiradine Redbeard, although this fact did nothing to assuage the fear and loathing which seethed within the breast of Darya of Thandar. Tall and lean and swarthy he was, hawk-faced and imperious. There was nobility and breeding in the fine lines of his face and high brow, and intelligence shone in the depths of his dark, liquid eyes. His strong jaw was fringed with a trim line of crisp, curling beard either naturally red or dyed that hue in emulation of his notorious ancestor, the feared Barbarossa of the Seven Seas.

A commanding figure he was, clad in his barbaric finery. Upon his chest he wore an old-fashioned corselet of overlapping bronze scales over which was drawn a loose robe of coarsely woven cloth striped with alternating bands of orange and cobalt blue. A sleek turban of scarlet silk was knotted about his brows; his lower limbs were clad in tight breeches of canary yellow and upon his feet he wore gleaming boots of polished leather with up-curling toes.

A wide leather girdle, embossed with arabesque designs, cinched in his narrow waist. Jeweled rings flashed upon his long, coffee-colored fingers. A slender scimitar of glittering steel was thrust through a loop fastened to his girdle, the blade slapped his lean thigh whenever he moved. All in all, he was an imposing personage of gorgeous, if unfamiliar, splendor.

All of this, however, was belied by the gloating and lustful cruelty visible in his smirking smile, and by the tigerish ferocity which burned in his febrile gaze.

Helpless to move or to resist, the naked girl hung there in her bonds as the corsair chieftain advanced upon her. She gritted her teeth as his subtle hands explored her nude flesh. Her nostrils wrinkled as she inhaled the heavy scent of the perfumes of his beard. The sweet odor sickened her, and, coming from his body, it seemed instinctively to be unmanly.

“By the Beard of the Prophet, wench, but you are as luscious as the fruits that grow in the garden of Paradise,” he breathed hoarsely, fondling her bare breasts.

“And as slim and graceful as the palm trees which grow beside the Sacred Well of Zemzem,” he added, as his hands glided down her slender waist to caress her tanned and naked thighs.

Biting her lip, the girl endured it as best she could as his clever hands insulted her body.

Then she could endure no more—

Although her ankles were fastened to rings set in the deck-flooring of the cabin, these permitted of a certain slack.

Darya used every fraction of an inch afforded by this slackness as her firm and rounded knee rose and drove with every ounce of vigor she possessed directly into the Arab’s groin.

He spluttered an agonized curse and fell staggering back, clutching at his genitals, his swarthy face paling to a sickly hue.

Then he sagged to his knees and writhed, gagging and gasping, the spittle running from the corners of his thin-lipped mouth to besplatter his crisp trim beard.

Darya threw herself into furious contortions, striving with all of the strength in her slim, sinewy body to wrest herself free of her bonds. Every second counted, and the respite from the caresses of Kâiradine Redbeard might be only momentary.

Strive and struggle as she did, it proved impossible to even so much as free one wrist or one foot from her bondage.

At length she relaxed and hung listlessly, panting, her blue eyes blazing like those of a trapped beast through the golden tangles of her loose, disheveled hair.

Kâiradine 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 Kâiradine, 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.

Kâiradine 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,” Kâiradine 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 Kâiradine 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, Kâiradine 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 Kâiradine 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!” Kâiradine 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—

Kâiradine 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, Kâiradine 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 ear-shattering hiss of rage or surprise or pain—perchance, all three.

Kâiradine 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 half-disengaged 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.

Kâiradine 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 chieftain 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.