The Zanthodon MEGAPACK ™: The Complete 5-Book Series (75 page)

At least, her hands and legs were free of their bonds; that was
one
good thing about her present uncomfortable predicament! Strong as he was, with his newly healed shoulder, Kâiradine Redbeard could hardly have climbed the tree encumbered by one hundred and fifteen pounds of furiously struggling woman. So he had cut her bonds and urged her up the trunk ahead of him at sword-point.

By this time, it had become perfectly obvious to the Pirate Prince that he had carried off the wrong girl. Not that the voluptuous descendant of the ancient monarchs of Crete was not worth carrying off, of course: it was simply that she was not Darya, although her resemblance to the Cro-Magnon girl was incredible.

For one thing, Kâiradine knew that the savage tribes which inhabited the Underground World—Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal alike—share in common the same universal tongue I have called Zanthodonian. Only the Zarians and the Barbary Pirates have languages of their own: the Zarians speak an obsolete, classical form of the little-known ancient Minoan tongue, while the corsairs converse in a debased form of Arabic.

Never before having encountered any of the people of the Scarlet City, the Pirate Prince had no idea what language it was that Zarys was cursing him in. But he knew that Darya of Thandar could speak only in Zanthodonian, so this could not be she.

Also, he had discovered to his surprise that the young woman was bald as an egg!

Her golden hair was thus revealed as naught but a wig of spun gold wire, which had been knocked askew as had his own turban by collision with the same unseen branch.

All in all, it just had not been Kâiradine’s day.…

* * * *

In time, things got a little better. For one thing, the rains stopped as abruptly as they had begun. For another, the great bronto had forgotten about the humans it had pursued out of harmless and idle curiosity, and went lumbering off in search of a second helping of sea-salad, dragging its huge and heavy tail behind it.

They clambered down the tree and stood there for a moment, looking at each other.

Kâiradine had never seen a woman clad in gold-washed armor and jeweled coronet—a woman who acted so imperiously as this one, being accustomed to harem women and tavern wenches. He looked her over puzzledly, rather liking what he saw.

For her part, Zarys had never encountered a man anything like Kâiradine Redbeard before, either, and she was looking him up and down with much the same curiosity.

He was lean and dark-skinned, this descendent of Desert Hawks and the Wolves of the Sea, and taller than the men of Zar, with an impressive musculature and long legs, wolfishly handsome with his aquiline nose and brilliant eyes.

He was quite a lot of man, was Kâiradine; a black-hearted villain, of course, but still…quite a lot of man. Zarys was intrigued in spite of herself. Accustomed from childhood to cringing and servile courtiers—all oily flattery and seductive gallantries—she rather liked the looks of this hard, rangy island princeling, with his unfamiliar but colorful raiment and sheer virility. He was
so
unlike the men she had always known…!

“Well?” she snapped, after a good long look. “Are you going to stand there gawking at me? Why did you carry me off—where are we—what are your intentions—where are you going—and what are you going to do?”

A bit dazed by the directness of this torrent of inquiries, the Redbeard hemmed and hawed a bit, trying to figure out just what he
was
going to do. He stared up and down the beach, striving to remember from which direction he had come. The tide had erased his footprints by now, and the rain had finished up the job. Also, he had turned this way and that, back-tracking and circling about, dashing hither and yon, crawling into thickets, hiding in tall grasses, all in a vain attempt to shake the pursuing brontosaurus off their trail. But the inquisitive, if slow-thinking, monster reptile had simply come lumbering on, refusing to become confused.

Anyway, all this running about and doubling back and so on—while it had not managed to confuse the inquisitive saurian—had certainly gotten Kâiradine Redbeard confused, to such an extent that he could not at once with any certainty reckon his present position in relation to the whereabouts of his embattled corsairs or his ship. Strain his hawk-sharp eyes as he might, he could see no sign of the corsair vessel. Either he had run a greater distance than he had first assumed, or it could not be seen because of the misty, humid atmosphere.

It did not at once occur to Kâiradine that his men, slouching back from the battle in which they had suffered so humiliating a defeat, had found the surviving boats and rowed back to their ship and sailed away for El-Cazar.

I suspect this was the case, for we never ran into the Barbary Pirates again, but I do not really know. The Empress seated herself on a fallen log, straightened her golden wig, and crossed her arms upon her perfect breasts, eyeing the Barbary Pirate with an aloof and lofty expression.

“We are hungry,” she informed him coolly.

Well, so was Kâiradine, by that time. He looked about in a determined but helpless fashion. Dirk and dagger and slim saber of Damascus steel were his only weapons, useless for slaying seafowl or bringing down a plump uld. He began to scout around for sustenance.

He was quite unhappy.

In time, with a disdainful sniff, Zarys deigned to join him in the food-shopping. It was Zarys who found the seaside nest of the zomak, or archeopteryx, filled with large, succulent and unhatched eggs. It was also Zarys who found clams and other edible shellfish in a tidal pool. All that the Redbeard was able to come up with was a few ripe fruits, berries, and a handful of nuts which the Empress disdained as too green to eat.

They made a fire in a hole dug in the beach, cooked the eggs and boiled the shellfish in a hollow gourd full of saltwater. They munched this crude repast moodily, and Kâiradine gamely and stubbornly chewed and swallowed down the green nuts which Zarys had rejected.

After this scant meal, weariness overcame them. They went to sleep in the bushes, Zarys careful to keep well apart from the Barbary Prince.

They slept.

Kâiradine awoke in acute discomfort, discovering that the woman had been right, after all: the nuts
were
too green to be safely eaten.

He trotted down the beach a ways and was noisily sick into the sand. Not yet asleep, Zarys smiled a catlike smile of deep, feminine satisfaction to hear him at it, then curled up cozily and fell into a deep, refreshing slumber.

It served him right.…

PART II: THE BLACK AMAZON

CHAPTER 6

NIEMA THE AZIRU

The spear which just touched the throat of Jorn the Hunter was in itself curious, a smooth, tapering shaft of firehardened wood, very unlike the flint or bronze-bladed spears used by the Cro-Magnons, but the person holding the spear was so remarkable in appearance that it was she who seized and held their amazed attention.

She was naked, save for sandals of tough stegosaurus hide, and a narrow strip of hide worn low on her slim hips and wound between her thighs, leaving belly, buttocks and thighs quite bare. Save for these, and a rude necklace of animal fangs strung about her throat on a thong, she was completely naked.

Her skin was black as polished ebony and she stood two inches over six feet in height, with broad shoulders, a lean waist, narrow hips and long, exquisitely shaped legs. Exquisite, too, were her naked breasts, pointed and thrusting and flawless in their rondures as ripe fruit.

But it was the color of her skin that amazed the blond boy and girl. Never before had they seen or even heard of someone with skin as black as ink, and the novelty of the hue intrigued and fascinated them.

She had a lovely face poised atop a long neck, and her features were subtly different from those of the Cro-Magnons. Her brow was high and round; her hair closely braided to her scalp in corn-row style, and copper bangles hung from the lobes of her small ears. Her nose was small, her upper lip long, her mouth wide, mobile, full-tipped. She was stunningly beautiful in a new, exciting way.

She regarded the two warily, her expression ominous, her brilliant and expressive dark eyes studying them carefully. Eventually, she lowered the assegai until its needle point touched the boy’s chest above his heart.

Niema the Aziru had lived in the eastern part of these mountains for some weeks now, without seeing another human being, and she had come upon the sleeping pair unexpectedly. Her first instinct had been to protect herself by taking the initiative; now, she realized they were as astounded to discover her in this place as she had been when she stumbled upon them. Nor did they look like the advance guard of a migrating Cro-Magnon tribe, as she had feared at first.

In fact, they looked to her like savage sweathearts who had run away from their tribal grounds to be alone together. And the way the boy’s strong arm went protectively about the girl’s slim shoulders, while she nestled her cheek against his breast, gave further evidence of this. Her alert gaze softened and her full lips widened in a smile, revealing flawless teeth of snowy white.

“I am Niema,” she said in a husky voice, “and my people are the Aziru tribe. Who are you, and why are you alone here in this mountainous wilderness, where very little water is to be found, but very many dangerous beasts roam and hunt? Are you lost—or runaways—or fugitives?”

Jorn the Hunter was much relieved that he was not going to be stuck with the long spear which the strange black woman held and wielded so knowledgeably, before he had an opportunity to speak.

“I am Jorn, a hunter of the tribe of Thandar, and this girl is the gomad Yualla of Sothar, the daughter of the High Chief,” he explained boldly. Then he added: “She is under the protection of Jorn the Hunter!”

The young black woman suppressed a grin at this, and listened seriously as the Cro-Magnon boy briefly explained how and why they had come to be here.

“We have been held captive by a people who dwell far away in the north,” said Jorn the Hunter. “We managed to break away and were seeking our own people, who are encamped not very distant from here, when weariness overtook us. We are not your enemies.”

“And would be your friends, if you will let us,” added Yualla demurely. Privately, she found Niema fascinating to look upon and was instantly curious to know her better.

Niema spread long-fingered hands in an eloquent shrug and put away her assegai. Squatting comfortably upon her heels she told them about herself and her people.

* * * *

There were facts that Niema did not know, and her sense of the passing of time was hazy, so I will interpolate here her story and the story of her people as we later pieced it together, rather than keep my readers mystified.

The Aziru tribe had formerly inhabited the great veldt to the south of the Sahara Desert, beneath whose sandy vastness lay the Underground World. Driven from their grazing grounds when famine had decimated their herds, they wandered north, led by a visionary chief named Imre, to whom the Ancestors spoke in his dreams. In time, the survivors of the tribe found their way down into Zanthodon through one of the numerous volcanic fumeroles which gave entry into the gigantic cavern world.

They found the plains of the thantors to their liking, and, far to the east of those portions of the plains we had seen and visited, built their huts and erected their palisade of sharpened stakes. In this kraal, the remnants of the Aziru lived for what Niema referred to as “nearly seven generations.”

Professor Potter believes the Aziru took refuge in the Underground World no more than a hundred years ago, when many of the black tribes of North Africa were in turmoil. Niema’s concept of time is based on generations from mother to daughter, and a generation to her is the number of years between the birth of a woman and the time in which she, herself, becomes a mother, which in the case of the Aziru is fifteen years.

Her people had found it difficult to adapt to the world of Zanthodon, due to the absence of cattle. They had tried to domesticate the uld, and a species of deer which roam the far eastern plains, but they had been forced at length to adopt the ways of hunting and agriculture.

By this time, however, her tribe was dying off rapidly. At length, none were left alive save for her aged mother and herself, and a young man her own age named Zuma, the son of the chief. Remaining unmarried until her mother’s death, Niema had trekked into these mountains for the mating ritual, for it is the custom of the Aziru for the young women of marriageable age to remove themselves into a place of hiding for a time, while suitors for their hand search for them.

By this time, Niema had hidden in the mountains for several weeks, waiting for Zuma to track her to her lair. Since he had not, as yet, found her, and she was getting heartily sick of waiting for him to come, Niema had decided to travel back toward the kraal. In other words, she planned to make it easier for Zuma to find her, she added with a grin.

* * * *

Niema had concealed her gear behind a rock on discovering she was no longer alone in the hills. Now she led her new friends to the place where she had concealed her possessions, and squatted expressionlessly while they examined her treasure. There was a longbow strung with catgut and a hide quiver of arrows feathered with plumes from the zomak, a long dagger of sharp flint which she customarily wore strapped with thongs to her right thigh, and a blanket roll.

They began traveling together, with Niema generously offering to guide the youngsters toward where they believers their tribes to be encamped. Her bow brought down a brace of fat archaeopteryx, which they roasted over a bed of glowing coals, and her two charges devoured the succulent meat with hungry gusto.

“If Zuma is looking for you to the east, where lies the town of your people,” asked Yualla, “is it not going far out of your way to accompany us west toward the sea?”

The black warrior woman shrugged carelessly.

“It will not take long, and Niema will not go far,” she said. Then she added, with a mischievous twinkle in her eyes: “Besides, it will give Zuma more time to yearn for the embrace of Niema!”

Yualla laughed and the two women exchanged a glance, understanding each other perfectly.

They continued west, with Niema striding along in the lead and the two young people at her heels. She moved with a gliding, pantherlike grace, and the rolling of her naked hips and the grace of her long, tapering legs was entrancing to watch.

Indeed, Jorn the Hunter could hardly keep his eyes off the black woman. The daylight glistened from her naked body as if from oiled black satin. He thought her stunningly beautiful, even breathtaking, in a new and different way from any woman he had ever before seen. And it did not take Yualla long to notice his rapt gaze was always fixed upon the bare buttocks and long legs of the Aziru amazon. Very much a woman for all her youthful years, Yualla first pouted, then became piqued. Before long, she left Jorn’s side to join Niema, whom she engaged in conversation as if oblivious to Jorn’s very presence. From time to time, the two women glanced back at him and giggled.

Jorn flushed scarlet with mortification, and his firm jaw became truculent.

“Women!” he muttered to himself.

* * * *

They came to a pool in the rocky flanks of the Peaks of Peril, and the two girls decided to bathe. They sternly ordered Jorn to turn his back and stand guard while they divested themselves of their few garments and plunged delightedly into the cool silver shock of the fresh mountain stream which fed the lucent pond.

The two women looked each other over with frank curiosity. The part of the plain of the thantors where the Aziru had built their kraal was very far from the nearest tribal grounds of any of the Cro-Magnon nations, and, while Niema had occasionally seen one of the blond, blue-eyed barbarians from a distance, Yualla was as much a novelty to her as she was to Yualla. She admired the silky softness of Yualla’s golden, fluffy hair, and her wide blue eyes, which were very beautiful.

For her part, Yualla found Niema equally interesting. The Cro-Magnons, both men and women, have very little bodyhair, but Niema had even less. And her nipples were protruding studs of milk-chocolate brown, different from Yualla’s own rosy nipples.

“What is Zuma like?” she asked, as they lolled in the cold embrace of the pool. The black woman sighed.

“He is very beautiful,” she said wistfully, “in the ways that men are beautiful. He is as tall as Niema, and no older, a mighty hunter and a brave warrior. It has been long since Niema saw Zuma, and she longs to feed her eyes upon his body.…”

“What do you think of my Jorn?” asked the other girl, shyly. Niema grinned.

“He is very handsome.” And they went into this fascinating subject in much more intimate detail than I care to record here. Suffice it to say, that Jorn’s ears would have burned crimson had he been able to overhear their words.

CHAPTER 7

GORAH OF KOR

When Hurok the Apeman disappeared so mysteriously during our sleep period, the first explanation that sprang to my mind was an alarming one. I feared that Hurok thought himself unwelcome among the Cro-Magnons, and that once we had found our way to Thandar he would be lonely and unliked.

I said as much to the warriors of my company as we broke our fast. In their opinion, I was wrong.

“In the opinion of Varak, my chieftain is mistaken,” said my Sotharian friend. Parthon and Warza agreed with him, and they quickly told me how Hurok had risen by popular acclaim to the rank of chieftain of my band, when I had lain captive in the Scarlet City. His strength and endurance, his indifference to danger, and his innate wisdom and common sense, had won first their grudging respect, then their admiration, finally their love.

I had been reunited with my friends too briefly to have heard more than a sketchy account of their adventures during my absence. Now this cursory narrative was filled in with further corroborative detail. I was heartily relieved to learn that my huge friend had won the affection and liking of my warriors, but puzzled as to what had impelled him to flee from us, if it was not the fear of finding himself alone and unwelcome.

Ragor the Thandarian shrugged philosophically.

“That we may only know when Hurok tells us, my chieftain,” he said, sensibly enough.

“The
real
question, my boy,” puffed Professor Potter impatiently, “is: what are we going to
do
about it?”

I looked at my friends thoughtfully.

“My first impulse is to follow the spoor of Hurok through the underbrush, while it is still fresh, and catch up with him if I can,” I said. They nodded at each other, grinning.

“The huge fellow will move more slowly than will we smaller and lighter men,” remarked Thon of Numitor mischievously, adding, with a sly glance at the gigantic Gundar: “All of us, save, of course, for Gundar!”

The warrior from Gorad looked at him stolidly, and grunted as if disdaining to reply to the quip. Gundar is the biggest man in the twin tribes, this side of Hurok himself, as I have already explained.

Without further ado, we collected our gear and moved out. I disliked letting the women go with us, but their mates insisted as loudly as did they.

“I will help as best I can in the finding of Hurok, and please do not worry about me!” said timid little Jaira stoutly.

“Or me, either, Lord Eric!” added Ialys of Zar.

“There you are, my boy!” said the Professor explosively. “It is all the tribe or nothing—we are with you, my boy, to the last man and, ah, um, the last woman, too.”

I grinned and accepted the offer, glad that my friends were willing to join me in the search for the missing Hurok. In the little time he had been among us, the huge, hairy Neanderthal warrior had won the admiration of all for his courage and strength and prowess, and had made many firm and fast friends.

Without further ado we packed our gear, assembled, and entered the jungles. I dispatched the fleetest of foot among us, young Thon of Numitor, to apprise the two Omads of our brief (we hoped) absence from the twin tribes, together with our reason for departure. He soon rejoined us, having delivered the message.

We moved due west, following the track of Hurok, whose huge splayed feet had left a trail easy enough to follow. We knew that we could catch up with the rest of the host without trouble, since they were journeying south by slow and easy stages. An army moves no swifter than its weakest member, and mighty Garth of Sothar was still healing from his wound, having not quite fully recovered his former strength.

* * * *

Hurok’s motive for leaving us so abruptly was really not so very mysterious, if you stop to think about it.

In his slow, ponderous way, the huge fellow had been thinking about what his future life would be like when we reached Thandar. That he would be the only one of his kind among us did not really bother him, for he regarded me as his brother, and had become good friends with many of the warriors of Thandar and Sothar, and knew that his place in our councils was as secure as his place in our affections.