The Zanthodon MEGAPACK ™: The Complete 5-Book Series (73 page)

Jorn sprang to his feet, clutching his small bronze dagger futilely. It was, in fact, an imposing weapon filched from the guard he had felled, and long enough to hold at bay a human foe. But, against the giant bear that came lurching down upon him, seemingly as huge as a hill, the blade seemed small and useless. Nor was Yualla any better armed; now had both the youth and the maid good reason to regret not having taken up the spears their guards had let fall.

At the time, they had hastily reasoned the cumbersome weapons were too large and clumsy to be safely borne in flight.

Now they wished they had thought twice about that.

But now, of course, it was too late.

CHAPTER 2

AT THE BOATS

Intent on punishing the blond savages whom she believed to be the same host of barbarians that had earlier defeated her upon the great plains of the north, Zarys of Zar led her mailed legions forward at the charge, and assaulted the rear ranks of the Barbary Pirates who were also attacking the Cro-Magnons.

Who these other adversaries were, the Divine Zarys neither knew nor cared to know. It sufficed for the imperious and prideful young woman that they were in her way.

Her well-disciplined legions carved their way through the rear of the buccaneers, who scattered in all directions in surprise and consternation. The corsairs fell before the thrusting spears and tridents of the Zarian legion in the dozen and the score. In less time than it takes to tell, the Empress had cut a red path into the very heart of the strange, swarthy men who wore such curious and ridiculous garments.

As she did so, she came to the attention of Kâiradine Redbeard, who stopped fighting and stared at her with open mouth. She was certainly worth staring at, was Zarys of Zar: supple, half-naked, slim and lovely, her fiercely lovely face crowned with a curling mass of golden hair, her wonderful body clad in strangely shaped bits of gold-washed armor. High greaves, worked with scenes of the hunt and war, adorned her slender, graceful legs; a breastplate, cunningly molded to fit her figure, clad her high breasts and shielded her belly, and it was carven with mythological events and monsters. A sparkling, jeweled coronet completed her riding costume.

But it was not the stunning beauty of the ravishing girl that seized the astounded eye of the Redbeard, but the fact that he instantly recognized her as Darya, the jungle princess for whom he had conceived so violent a passion as to pursue her in her flight to this very scene of battle.

I have elsewhere remarked upon the fact that the Empress of Zar bore an amazing resemblance to my beloved Princess, despite the fact that they came of different races. Indeed, upon first laying eyes upon the Divine Empress of the Scarlet City, I myself had mistaken her for my darling Darya. So it is quite understandable that Kâiradine Redbeard made the same mistaken assumption.

He flung himself upon her without a moment’s hesitation, battering down her blade and seizing her lithe and supple body in his strong arms.

While he struggled to subdue the astounded and, naturally, infuriated young woman, Kâiradine directed his personal retinue of well-armed corsairs to engage the guards from whose midst he had seized Zarys. These were quickly dispatched.

The midst of a battle was no place to try to take captives, and had Kâiradine been less madly desirous of the girl he held in his arms, this might have occurred to him. But the Prince of the Barbary Pirates felt a violent and consuming lust for Darya of Thandar, and heretofore—quite maddeningly—she had managed to evade his embraces. Now that he had her at last, the farthest thing from his mind was to let her go.

When, exhausted, Zarys finally ceased struggling against him, the Redbeard swiftly bound and gagged the young woman. Then, turning abruptly to the amazed Moustapha, his second-in-command, who had watched these actions without comprehension, he curtly directed his lieutenant to take what actions he could to hold the corsair lines firm against their adversaries.

Without waiting for a reply, the Redbeard turned and began cutting his way through the confused and milling battle toward the distant beach where his longboats lay concealed.

In the whirling chaos into which the three-way battle had degenerated, he vanished from the knowledge of men and was gone, leaving the unhappy Moustapha to strive to hold together a rapidly deteriorating situation, which soon because quite hopeless.

* * * *

It had probably been in Kâiradine’s mind to leave his captive bound and helpless in the boats, returning to take command again. And here you see demonstrated one of the disadvantages of inditing a factual narrative, a difficulty not usually faced by the authors of mere fiction. This is, I have no way of knowing what was in the Redbeard’s mind and am only reconstructing the sequence of events from information which has come to me long after these events took place.

At length he reached that stretch of sandy shore bordering a swampy area, where pools of stagnant water were thickly grown with mangrove trees whose long and frondlike branches formed a veil of leafage. Here it was the corsairs had dragged their longboats up the beach to a place of hiding in the edges of the marsh, among the heavy shrubbery. They had chopped down with their cutlasses long palmlike leaves to drape across the boats, further concealing them from chance discovery.

And when he reached this place, the Prince of the Barbary Pirates found an unwelcome and unpleasant surprise awaiting him.

This beach formed part of the shores of the Sogar-Jad, as the subterranean sea was known to the Zanthodonians. And the waves of that steamy ocean are filled with innumerable varieties of marine life, dominant among which are the great aquatic saurians of Earth’s remotest dawn age.

Those who have perused the earlier volumes of these memoirs will recall the ferocious yith, or plesiosaur, which inhabits the depths of the Sogar-Jad. This monstrous reptile, and veritable double for the famous Sea Serpent of legend, had intervened in these adventures on two previous occasions. Most recently, one had attacked the flagship of Kâiradine himself, nearly biting off the right arm of the Redbeard.
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The monster which Kâiradine found browsing among the boats with no yith. It was seven times the size of the plesiosaur! Like a moving mountain of glistening, leathery flesh it was, with its slick hide covered with scaly excrescences and a neck long enough to top the tallest of the prehistoric conifers which lined the edge of the sandy beach.

Had Professor Potter been present, I imagine that the scrawny little savant would have identified the lumbering monstrosity as none other than the brontosaurus itself, the largest mammal that ever walked the world.

The Zanthodonians refer to the giant reptile as the gorgorog. I had yet to encounter a member of its species during my own travels and adventures through this prehistoric world, for they are few and but seldom encountered by men. The men of Zar had domesticated a smaller, lighter variety of the brontosaurus, which they call the thodar. But this was surely no thodar! It would have taken three of the smaller brutes to make up the huge bulk of this moving mountain.

Kâiradine shrank into the shelter of the trees, snarling Moslem curses. The Prince of the Barbary Pirates was no coward, but even his curved saber of shining Damascus steel would be as useless as a wisp of grass against six hundred tons of meat and muscle.

The reptile, unknown to Kâiradine, was no meat-eater but a vegetarian. It lumbered through the shallows on four legs thicker about than treetrunks, dipping its blunt-nosed head into the tidal pools, gulping and munching seaweed and other marine growths, as mild and harmless as a browsing milk cow.

As it lumbered through the marshy places, however, its huge and ponderous feet had heedlessly trampled into matchwood three of the longboats, and others had been dislodged from their moorings and were floating out to sea.

Kâiradine was in a quandary! He could hardly leave Zarys in one of the boats, so near to the giant reptile. Greatly daring, he might have gained one of the boats and rowed out to sea, where his ship lay at anchor. But the gorgorog was too close to the boats for him to attempt this.

What, then, to do?

The Redbeard narrowed his eyes, staring thoughtfully about. He noticed how the lazy washing of the waves caused the loose boats to drift to and fro. The tides were not strong enough at this point along the shore to suck them out to sea.…

I have never exactly understood why the underground ocean had tides at all, since, surely, the attraction of the moon as it waxed and waned could exert no influence on a body of water miles beneath the planet’s crust. Perhaps that the Sogar-Jad had tides at all, no matter how slight, was due to centrifugal force, caused by the Earth as it revolved upon its axis.

I do not know, and this is no place to inquire into such arcane matters. But one of the boats, freed of its mooring, had been carried a ways off down the shore, and lay floating in the shallows some considerable distance away from where the huge lumbering gorgorog browsed.

Kâiradine transferred his wriggling feminine burden to one broad shoulder, and crept through the trees, emerging from the cover of the trees at the point where the floating longboat was closest to the shoreline.

I suppose it was the plan of the Pirate Prince to board the boat, deposit his wriggling burden aft, and row her out to where the Barbary ship was anchored.

It was as good a plan as Kâiradine could have devised, given the circumstances.

But not quite good enough.

For the stealthy figure of the turbaned corsair with the half-naked blonde woman across one shoulder caught the glazed, indifferent eye of the brontosaurus.

Through what passed for its brain—a miniscule, atrophied organ probably no longer than a peanut—there flickered a gleam of idle curiosity.

Doubtless, never before in all its days had the monster reptile seen a bearded, swarthy man in brilliantly colorful silk pantaloons slinking along the beach with a struggling goldenhaired woman across one shoulder and a saber flashing in one gemmed fist.

Mild wonderment entered the gaze of the placid reptile. Its endless appetite momentarily lulled to repletion by the sea-salad which had served as its luncheon, the brontosaurus decided to investigate. A casual stroll along the beach, after all, is good for the digestion after a hearty meal.

Over his shoulder, Kâiradine looked and saw the great lumbering monster heading for him. Growling a curse, he turned on his heel and sprinted farther up the beach, away from where the empty long-boat bobbed up and down, so tantalizingly close.

At a leisurely pace, which shook the ground underfoot only slightly, the six-hundred-ton dinosaur followed inquiringly.

Soon both the pursuer and the pursued were far down the beach and out of sight.

CHAPTER 3

HUROK HAS A PROBLEM

While these things had been taking place, the battle had collapsed into a vast, noisy mob of confused, bewildered, leaderless men—in which only the Cro-Magnon warriors managed to keep their wits about them and press their advantage.

The corsairs had lost many of their number while trying to attack from the front and defend themselves from the rear. When Kâiradine Redbeard had vanished from their midst, many had lost heart and prudently flung down their weapons to take to their heels. Moustapha could do little or nothing about this, since even the leader of a host cannot be everywhere at once.

As for the Zarian legion, once their impetuous Empress had hurled herself into the van, only to disappear as if the earth had opened to swallow her up, they, too, fell into a demoralized disarray, which was only aggravated further with the discovery that the second-in-command, the nefarious Xask, had also mysteriously disappeared.

The Cro-Magnon tribe, augmented by the timely arrival of mighty Tharn of Thandar and his own host of warriors, found little difficulty in achieving the victory. The Barbary Pirates and the men of the lost colony of Minoan Crete, already deserting in droves, now flung down their weapons and sullenly surrendered.

Garth of Sothar and Tharn of Thandar, not wishing to needlessly encumber themselves with such a host of prisoners, simply confiscated and surrendered arms and let the captives go. Perhaps the defeated warriors would fall prey to the monstrous prehistoric beasts that roamed the wilderness, perhaps they would, after long wanderings, manage to find their way safely back again to their homelands. That was up to them, and, for their part, the Pirates and the Zarians departed hastily from the scene of their defeat.

The women and children, the aged and the injured, the twin tribes had sent through the mountain pass to the relative safety of the southern plains. Now heavily armed with sophisticated weapons of edged metal taken from the Barbary Pirates and the men of Zar, the fighting men of the tribes wasted no time in crossing the Peaks of Peril and rejoining those that had gone before.

* * * *

We made our camp on the plains of the south and rested and ate and took care of our wounds. Also, the chieftains conferred in council as to future courses of action.

“With the recovery of the gomad Darya, your daughter, my brother,” said Garth of Sothar, “no further reason exists to keep you and yours from returning to your homeland.”

Tharn solemnly agreed. He said: “My only remaining wish could be that your own daughter, the gomad Yualla, had survived the perils of the north, so that you could rejoice in the recovery of your child as I do in the recovery of my own.”

Garth thanked his fellow monarch for the sentiment, and said nothing further on this subject. At this time, my reader will understand, none of us had any way of knowing that Yualla still lived, or that young Jorn the Hunter had survived his dive into the mountain lake.

Once we were fed and rested and had bound our wounds, we departed, to cross the plain and enter the jungles. As explained earlier in these memoirs, the tribe of Sothar were homeless, for their country had been devastated by earthquake and volcanic eruption, precipitating them into hasty flight, followed by long wanderings. The two tribes had joined together out of a desire for the mutual protection afforded by numbers; since then, they had become close friends, and Tharn had offered them room in his country for their living places, for the forested plains of Thandar were broad and much land lay empty.

So the host that headed south into the jungles was far more numerous than the host that had originally marched north on the trail of the lost Princess Darya.

And to this number had also been added the many slaves who had fled with the Professor and me when the mad god, Zorgazon, had destroyed the Scarlet City of Zar
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. These were men taken by the Zarian slavers from other scattered Cro-Magnon tribes which inhabited the little-known northern parts of the subterranean continent. Tharn and Garth had offered them a place among us, which they had gratefully accepted.

Several of them, in fact, had volunteered to join my own company of warriors, for I had become a chieftain high in the councils of the twin tribes. Among these were my stalwart friends, cheerful, merryhearted Thon of Numitor and that stolid but faithful giant, Gundar of Gorad, who had become my friends during the time we were penned up in the Pits of Zar, awaiting the Great Games of the God.