Under the Moons of Mars (16 page)

Sola was asleep, but Dejah Thoris sat up as I came near her. Her hands were bound, but she put her face next to my snout and said, “Dear Woola. You always know the right thing to do. Listen well: You must escape from this camp and find John Carter. Do you understand, Woola? You must find him and bring him to us. He will save us from the Zodangans.”

I had no way of telling her that John Carter had fallen, and was either dead or a captive among the Warhoons. But she was right, without his aid, we had no hope among the Zodangans. Her command released me from his—I would go find my master and if he still lived, I would help him in any way I could.

I growled deep in my throat, nuzzled her cheek (too roughly perhaps, because I almost sent her tumbling backward), and then turned and crept, silently, through two rows of guards. Just as I had reached the edge of their line, one of them spotted me and shouted, “Stop!” So I rose and ran as swiftly as I could through the boulder-strewn ravine where we had camped. I heard shots, and once I felt a pain in one of my legs. But I did not stop running until I was deep into the shadows of the canyon walls. There, by the light of the moons I saw a small cave, and deep into it I crept, to sleep until morning.

Before me, I saw a valley ringed by mountains. I had come from dry gullies and ravines, but here there were ighur plants, even small bushes and trees growing over the valley floor and up the sides of the mountains. And in the distance I saw—could it be possible? Sunlight glinting on what looked like a lake in the middle of the valley.

I stared in amazement. Where had I come to? And how had I gotten here?

“In the name of Lal, who are you, stranger?”

I heard the voice in my head. It was low, melodious, like no voice I had ever heard before, except perhaps when our mother sang us lullabies, my clutchmates.

I looked around. There, standing by a bush with red leaves, were three—were they calots? They looked like me, and yet they were smaller, their hides not bare but covered with fur of various colors. One was orange, one brown, and one a sort of pale cream. The orange one was striped, and the brown one had patches of lighter brown. They had no tusks.

“I am Woola, son of Awala,” I sang. “I fled from Thark but was captured by the Zodangans. Again I fled, and was wounded by their projectiles. By moonlight, I crawled into a cave in the side of the mountain. When I crawled out again, I found myself here. By Lal, since you know our Great Mother, tell me where I am. What is this place?”

“I am Azorn, son of Razd,” sang the orange one. “Come with us, Woola. We will take you to Orda, who will tell you what this place is. It has been a long time since we have seen one of our kind from beyond the mountains. Orda will want to know what is happening in the world outside. You are injured and hungry, so we will tend to you and feed you, for that is the way of our kind. Follow me.”

“I am Lilla, daughter of Tal,” she sang. Her mindsong was the most melodious I had ever heard. “Do you realize what this place is, Woola?”

“I cannot imagine,” I responded. “Unless this is the Valley Lal, about which my mother Awala sang to us, when we were still in the egg.”

I heard a high tinkling, as though bells were ringing all together, and realized that Lilla was laughing. “This is indeed the Valley Lal, where our Great Mother laid the first egg. Woola, you have come home.”

I walked beside her in stunned silence, scarcely knowing whether to believe her. But the plants around me, their red and purple leaves swaying in the sunshine, and the fresh, scented air I was breathing—these could not be dreams.

“You crawled into a cave and fell asleep, you told Azorn. You must have woken and crawled the other way, to the cave’s other entrance. There are several caves that go right through the mountain walls, where they are narrow. Once, they were used to communicate with the outside world, but they have not been used for a thousand years.”

“Then, you have lived here all your life?” I asked her. For the first time I remember, I felt shy and awkward. She was like no calot I had ever seen, soft of fur rather than hard of hide, and her tusklessness made her seem even more gentle. I had never seen such a beautiful creature.

She asked me about Thark, and I told her our story, my clutchmates. She was shocked at the cruelty of the Tharks, and when I told her how we had been separated, so that we could no longer sing together, she almost wept.

By this time we had come to a place where there were many dens dug into the sides of small hills, within sight of the lake. And I saw something, my brothers and sisters, that gave me a pain in my chest, around the region of my hearts. I saw clutchmates playing together, rolling in the dirt in mock battles, then lying together in the sun. Together, as we should have been.

So many of them gathered around me and greeted me, wanting to hear my story, that Azorn told them to follow us to my meeting with Orda—although I still did not know who or what that might be.

But I soon learned. We came to the largest den of all, dug into the side of a hill. Sitting before it was the oldest calot I had ever seen. Her hair was entirely white, and so thin that I could see her hide, which was white also.

“Greetings, Woola,” she said as we approached.

I wondered how she knew me, but she sang, “Even as you slept in that cave, I heard your mindsong. It was I who confused you so that you went the wrong way, into our valley rather than back into the hands of the Zodangans. I hope you can forgive me for reaching into your mind, causing you to come to us. But in your mind I saw such images! Calots enslaved, separated from their clutchmates, forced to kill and die in the arena. We did not know that our brothers and sisters outside this valley had fallen into such a state! I am old, and I can hear your mindsong in a way the others cannot. Tell them, Woola. Tell them your story so they can hear how calots live in the world outside.”

“Once, all calots looked like us,” sang Orda. “Do you know the story of the calots, Woola? I hear in your mind that you do not. In this valley, we have always lived as you see, since the first clutch was laid by Lal. But long ago, when the Orovars built their cities and sailed the seas, calots were their companions. They could hear our mindsongs, and we traveled with them to distant lands, or hunted with them and guarded their houses. We sat beside their chairs and lay at the foot of their beds, participating in their lives. But as the seas dried up and the Orovars died out, they created the Red and Green warriors, who could not hear our mindsongs. We could not be companions to them. The Red warriors left us alone, but the Green warriors still used us for hunting and guarding. I see from your mind that over a thousand years, since we last heard from the outside world, the Green warriors have grown more savage, and they have treated our kind with the same savagery. And worse, I see from your hide and your tusks, which can gore an ilthur, that the Green warriors have changed the calots, breeding them for fierceness, to become fighters. This cannot continue.”

“Orda,” I sang, “if you have heard my mindsong, you have also heard of John Carter. In his mind, I found the story of a great war, a war for freedom that was fought in the place where he comes from. Can we not fight for the freedom of the calots?”

I could hear their minds together: one clear, ringing song of affirmation.

“Then I will go back, Orda,” I sang. “I will spread this story to every calot, and it will spread through song so that all calots will come to know that the Valley Lal is real, and will welcome them. But before I can do so, I must find my master, John Carter, if indeed he is still alive, and help him to rescue Sola and Dejah Thoris.”

“First you must rest, Woola,” she answered. “You are tired and hungry, and you must heal before you can return to the outside world.” And so for many days I rested in the Valley Lal, learning from the calots there, allowing my wound to heal. I saw how loving their clutches were, heard what songs they sang as the moons rose. I ate my fill and swam in the lake with the other calots. And Lilla became my friend.

“Come back to me, Woola,” she sang when I had recovered my strength and was ready to return, to begin on the mission Orda had given me. “I would like to see what strange-looking calots hatch from our clutch! Will they have fur, do you think? Or tusks? Or both?”

I had not forgotten my promise to Dejah Thoris, so I headed toward Warhoon, hoping that I would find John Carter alive. It was a long journey, and I was hungry and thirsty again by the time I saw, by the light of the first moon, a gar fighting—was it a Red warrior? No, it was John Carter! At last, I had once again found my master. I fought the gar and drove my tusk through its throat. Afterward, I sat beside John Carter, sharing food and drink, and I thought that he was not truly my master, but my companion, as the calots once were to the Orovars. Perhaps, with time and patience, I could teach him to hear my mindsong.

Would that he could hear it now!

I do not know where he is, my clutchmates. At the edge of the city of Zodanga, he bade me return to Thark, and although I wished to go with him to rescue Sola and Deja Thoris, I obeyed. So here I am, fulfilling Orda’s mission. I am singing you the song of the Valley Lal. Go and sing it to the other calots who are held here in captivity, and tell them to sing it to their clutchmates and the other clutches, so that the song spreads, calot to calot. Let all calots know that there is a day when we shall be free.

Will I see John Carter again? Will he have rescued Sola and Dejah Thoris? I do not know. We do not know our fates, although we must fulfill them. My task now is to spread this story among you. Spread it to the calots of Thark, and then begin to disappear. Calot by calot, one by one, go across the desert to the north, toward the star we call Ird. There you will find a mountain with two jagged peaks. The calots of the Valley Lal will be waiting for you, singing. Follow their songs, and you will find our ancient home. There, learn and plan, so that one day all calots may be free. And the blessings of Lal go with you.

One fact of life on Barsoom is that any form of organized religion usually turns out to be a cruel hoax. When they reach the age of a thousand, most Martians float down the sacred River Iss, believing they’ll arrive in a heavenly paradise called the Valley Dor. What they find instead is a nightmarish deathtrap full of hideous monsters and ruled over by a clan of cannibalistic priests. In
The Master Mind of Mars
, Earthman Ulysses Paxton encounters the people of Phundahl, who worship the god Tur. Their absurd rituals include bumping their heads against the floor and crawling madly in a circle. They also have two chants, “Tur is Tur” and “Tur is Tur.” When Paxton observes that these two chants are in fact identical, he’s accused of having a lack of faith for being unable to appreciate the important differences between the two. Burroughs was an atheist who often expressed dislike for churches and who wrote a newspaper article in defense of schoolteacher John Scopes (when Scopes was put on trial in Tennessee for teaching evolution), but Burroughs also believed that an author’s first responsibility was to entertain, and he felt that some of his contemporaries, such as Sinclair Lewis, had gone too far in promoting their own anti-religious views. Though organized religion on Barsoom is always a dodgy proposition, the world is nevertheless suffused with a powerful sense of wonder and mystery, which our next tale explores to great effect.

I
walked through the night beneath the twin tumbling moons of Barsoom, gaining on my deadly pursuers even as I led them farther and farther out onto the dead sea Korus and closer to my goal, the spiral towers of the accursed city of Pra-Ohn. Kai-Wen and his ragged band of Warhoons followed me doggedly, though I had twice mauled them in previous encounters only to retreat in the face of superior numbers. In the still air of the Martian midwinter the remainder of his barbarian crew would have no trouble following the prints I left in the smoothly piled sands, which even by moonlight sparkled dully with a mineral unknown to terrestrial science.

I had lost my supplies in the first encounter, and since then I had journeyed for a day and a half with little rest under a cloudless sky. I was nearly dead of thirst when I beheld at last the starlit azure spires and ivory domes of Pra-Ohn, once the greatest port on the mightiest ocean on the face of the red planet, before Barsoom’s southern ocean receded into who knew what dark areological cavity.

It stood on a granite cliff next to what was once the titanic waterfall where the river En-Kah-Do, sacred to the deity of that name, tumbled into the sea after its thousand-mile journey from the Mountains of Zont. I climbed from rock to rock up the dry cascade, then stood on the docks looking out over the dead sea. The beached hulls of antique watercraft lay scattered across the sand like chips of bark, double-hulled pleasure-barges and Martian ships of the line bristling with cannon. Immense skeletons of cetaceans whose half-buried ribs arched forty feet into the air and whose spines stretched the length of a football field, greater than any Earthly whale.