Mind Wizards of Callisto

Chapter 11 Winged Death!

As the skiff slid away from the hull beneath the keel of the Jalathadar and caught the up-draft blowing from below, its light, fragile wings shuddered from the impact. The slim little craft bounced―veered away sickeningly―and fell into a steep, descending spiral.

Cursing villainously, Lukor wrenched at the few simple controls, his silver hair whipping in the wind, his eyes watering from the icy gale. He didn’t dare put too much stress on the ailerons or on the rudder-fan, for the full force of these winds could shatter them to fluttering rags in an instant. So, pumping away at the pedals like a madman, he attempted to ride down the wind as if he were in a glider. Within the next few minutes the canny old sword-master learned the tricks of operating the kite-like craft in winds of such velocity, and the ride became smoother and less hard on the nerves.

They glided in a great circle, entirely about the peak, searching the cliffs and ledges below for some sign that Tomar and I had come this way. Precisely what they were looking for, neither of them could have described with any precision―perhaps a fallen garment, a discarded weapon, or the body of an injured Zarkoon. Or our own bodies, I suppose …

However, they found nothing.

Widening their search to include the nearer pinnacles of rock, they flew for some time round and round the peak in ever-broader circles, and through the maze of rocky spires that thrust up against the night like fingers on the hand of a dead colossus. Craning over the sides of the craft, they searched and stared as broken rock and soaring pinnacle slid rapidly by them.

The moonlight was tricky, but it was far less difficult for them than it would have been for me. I am accustomed to the steady, unvarying silver light of a single satellite; they, from birth, were accustomed to the mingled and many-colored illumination of several. At any rate, they saw nothing which seemed to them to point a clue to the way my captors had carried me.

They searched till dawn lit the skies with its sudden, swift, silent explosion of golden radiance. By this time they had reached the broad slopes of the southern face of the larger of the mountains, and it was Koja who spied a fairly smooth and almost level incline on which it looked likely they could set the craft down without undue hazard. Both were by now pretty tired of pumping away at the pedals and Koja, in particular, was stiff and cramped from the narrow confines of the cockpit which was, of course, designed with the proportions of the human buttocks in mind.

So they coasted down and came to an abrupt halt near a jutting spar or splinter of stone, which Lukor lassoed with an adroit flip of the wrist. No more than could the mighty Jalathadar herself, the little skiff could not actually come to land on the surface, for she was as weightless as a helium-filled balloon. Moreover, to skid to a stop on the flint-bestrewn slope might easily puncture the paper-thin pontoons, releasing the levitating gas. So, anchoring the skiff securely to the spar, the two climbed out of the cockpit onto the dual pontoons and sprang lightly to the ground from there, leaving their aerial craft floating about six feet above the slope.

“I’m beginning to think we’re searching in the wrong direction entirely,” Lukor complained. “Not a sign nor token the winged men bore our comrades this way. Or, if they did, they may simply have flown over this part of the mountain as it lay in their path.”

“You believe, then, that the winged ones are still traveling?” Koja rasped in his harsh and droning metallic voice.

Lukor shrugged dispiritedly.

“No, that hardly seems likely, my chitinous friend. A full-grown man and a husky boy must afford quite a burden to even so huge and powerful a creature as a bird-man! No, I’ll wager the monsters have gone to ground somewhere …”

“But where?”

“Ah, that’s the question―where?” Lukor grumbled, tugging his woolen cloak about him against the cold bite of the wind, which bit keenly into old bones at this height. His features set in a glum expression, the gallant master swordsman stared about him at the mighty panorama of mountains which marched away to every side. “Where?” he repeated, thoughtfully.

“Where would you nest, were you a bird-man, Lukor?” asked Koja tonelessly after a time. The Ganatolian adventurer shot him a keen, questioning glance; then his lean-jawed, trim-bearded face became thoughtful.

“Well, now … on some high ledge, mayhap, or up there among those giddy peaks … somewhere like that, I suppose … up where my natural enemies couldn’t reach me.”

“Or in a hole in the ground, perhaps?”

“Eh? What d’you mean by that?”

Koja flexed the knobbed antennae on his brow in a shrug typically Yathoon. “I don’t know; but while tells roost on peaks or ledges, as far as I am aware, yaks roost in caves.” Koja did not refer, of course, to the Tibetan draft-animal, but to a small bat-like denizen of the Callistan caves who bore the identical name, by one of those small, trivial coincidences.

“That looks like quite a large cave over there,” Koja added, pointing. Following the gesture with his gaze, Lukor spied a round black hole of considerable size in a nearby slope. He had not noticed it before, or, if he had, it hadn’t occurred to him to think so large a depression might afford an excellent haven for such as the bird-men. Now that he measured it with his eyes, it looked large enough to conceal dozens or even scores of the flying monsters.

“You may have something there, friend Koja!” he said zestfully, forgetting all about the ache of weary legs and the bone-deep chill of hours spent in the wintry mountain wind. “Let’s take a closer look …”

Scrambling down the slope, the two crouched cautiously by the mouth of the pit and peered within. After the brilliant glare of the Callistan day, it took their eyes some time to adjust to the dim gloom within the aperture, but even without being able to make out much in the way of the details, they could see that the interior of the cavern was truly immense―that, in fact, the whole center of the mountain seemed to have been hollowed out by geological forces.

“Now, then! That’s what I call a proper cavern―why, you could hide a full-sized city down there!”

“And anything large enough to conceal a city ought to be big enough for a whole flight of the Zarkoon to roost in,” Koja remarked solemnly.

It was decided that they would venture into the cavernous subterranean realm and explore it further before venturing on. The two trudged back to the place where they had left the skiff tethered to its spire of rock, boarded the little craft and cast loose the line. By this time it was midmorning and the wind-currents had changed considerably, as the heat of day had by now warmed the air. Koja and Lukor found it a tricky business, trying to maneuver their fragile and ungainly craft into the mouth of the pit, and, once within, found themselves flying blind in a region of dense gloom. It took them some time before their eyes adjusted to the dimness, but when they had, the two found that sufficient illumination seeped through the hole in the roof to enable them to navigate safely within the confines of the cavern-world.

It was Lukor whose keen eyes perceived our minute figures clinging to the ledge on the opposite wall of the cavern. He sent the craft gliding swiftly through the dimness towards our precarious perch, but such was the immensity of the cavern that Koja and Lukor were forced to watch without being able to assist in my desperate battle with the nesting Zarkoon. As the slain bird-man toppled over the ledge and my young companions rescued me from a similar fate, the skiff swung up past the ledge―and it was this sudden and unexpected apparition that caused Ylana to shriek in alarm.

A moment later Koja brought the craft to a halt and held it motionless, drifting in the idle air-currents just above the ledge, while Lukor sprang down to clasp my hand, beaming with delight. Introductions were hastily made, and before Ylana had time to fully recover from her alarm and to adjust to the fact that the odd little man and the gaunt, gigantic insect-being were friends and their amazing flying vehicle a safe and useful tool, we bundled the jungle maid and young Tomar into their seats, and I climbed aboard, and we angled the craft about, heading back to the circular hole in the roof.

For, due either to the fall of the dead Zarkoon I had slain or Ylana’s scream―or perhaps both―the slumbering bird-warriors were by now fully aroused from their diurnal slumbers and aware that their dinner was in the process of escaping. From the nests which lined the ledges all about the walls of the enormous cavern, winged figures were hurtling themselves into the air, and many of them clenched in their sharp talons rude, stone-tipped spears or flint axes or toothed swords of glittering obsidian. Some, in fact, were armed with bows and arrows.

We soared out of the crater only moments ahead of the foremost flight of our pursuers, and as we flashed out over the flanks of the mountain, riding the air-currents in a long, gliding curve, I looked over my shoulder to see angry black flecks boiling out of the pit behind us. They looked for all the world like a swarm of angry bees pouring in a vengeful stream out of a nest which had been disturbed by an unwary or careless intruder. Soon their eyes adjusted to the brilliance of day, which, in the extremity of their rage, they did not let deter them from their pursuit of us. They came after us, flying at amazing speed, squawking like angry hawks.

Neither the Jalathadar nor any of the other ships of the armada were visible aloft. Either the four aerial vessels were out of sight behind the mountains, busily searching for us, or they had for some unconjecturable reason quit the scene entirely. With a quick decision, Lukor decided he could attain the utmost velocity by riding the current of air which presently sustained us, so he followed it rather than attempting to ascend to a higher level from which the armada might well have been visible.

Glancing back at the two youngsters, I suppressed a grin. For all her flaunted contempt and derision, the jungle girl had flung her arms about Tomar’s neck and had buried her face in his chest. Looking distinctly uncomfortable, the scarlet-faced boy was awkwardly embracing her, gingerly patting her bare and rounded shoulder by way of trying to comfort her. I assumed correctly that the jungle maid was finding her first experience in a flying machine rather unsettling.

The winged men were hurtling after us in a long line, and they were obviously gaining upon us. For all the speed of the little craft, the powerful pinions of the Zarkoon drove them through the air at astonishing speed. The nearest of the monster-men was so close that I could see his glaring eyes, bright with fury, and his red tongue as his yellow beak parted to give voice to a screech of rage.

I could also see the great warbow he clutched, and the long, barb-tipped, blue-feathered arrows in the quiver slung across his tawny breast.

I did not like the look of those arrows.

It was impossible to discern the direction in which we were flying. I assume it was due north, or north and west, perhaps, but as the sun is not visible in the daylight skies of Thanator, it is peculiarly difficult to ascertain the cardinal directions. Burdened down with the weight of five passengers, the little skiff was flying sluggishly, wallowing from side to side in the air-stream, and I feared that at any moment it might sink from our combined weight, and descend into a region of calm

and motionless air, which would greatly reduce the speed at which we were flying.

Nevertheless, it soon became obvious that we were going to be able to hold our slender lead over the Zarkoon who pursued us. The aerial machine was tireless, but the bird-men were not. Their distaste for sunlight was beginning to overcome their rage and fury, and I saw that some of them had thrown away their weapons and were turning about, arms shielding their little eyes from the glare, heading back for the comfortable darkness of their cavern home. And as for those who still hurtled after us, their wings, although powerful and capable of spurts of surprising speed, were obviously unable to sustain that speed for long. Rapidly beginning to tire, even the most determined of our pursuers were beginning to fall behind as their pinions failed and faltered.

But the foremost of the pursuit, the enormous birdman who clutched the bow and the quiver of long, blue-feathered arrows, refused to tire or to turn back. I recognized him from the distinctive marking on his indigo plumage: he was the chieftain, Zawk, the one who had captured Tomar and myself at the start of this adventure.

We flew on. Ahead, in the distance, a ridgeline of serrated peaks blocked our path. If we continued in our present course, we should have to rise above that ridge, perhaps losing the advantage of riding the air-current which was now all that gave us our slim lead on the Zarkoon. Of course, it was possible that the wind-stream rose to pass over the lip of the ridge, and would carry us with it. There was a possibility that this was so, but of course we could not be sure.

The skiff flew on, buoyant hull riding the wind. The barren landscape of tortured rock swept by beneath our gas-filled pontoons. Fang-like peaks flashed past as we threaded through a maze of steep pinnacles of stone. Ahead, the clifflike rampart rose in our path, blocking away the golden sky like a wall of granite. I must confess that my heart was in my mouth as we hurtled on with the vengeful Zarkoon warriors soaring like hunting hawks in our wake.

One by one, however, they fell away behind us. Their eyes could not endure the torture of daylight and, as their great wings tired, they fell back and sought again the cool gloom of their cavern home. At last, only Zawk remained following us. And then he, too, gave up the chase. Brandishing his great black bow with a last fierce cry, he turned about and soon was lost to sight, a winged mote floating among the peaks.

Now the cliffs rose before us and, lifted on the wind, we rose to meet them.

Lukor was wrestling with the controls. I could not see what he was doing. Then he turned a despairing glance over his shoulder to me. I leaned forward to hear above the winds as he shouted something.

“Something is wrong!” he cried, the wind whipping his words away until I could barely understand him. “We are sinking―the craft is losing buoyancy for some reason!”

“Well, no matter―we can land at any time now,” I shouted in reply. “The Zarkoon have given up the chase.”

He shook his head furiously, the wind whipping his silver locks into a tangle about his high, noble brow.

“That’s just it, Jandar, my friend! We can’t―the wind has us in its grasp now, and we are traveling too swiftly. If we try to land now the skiff will be torn asunder, hurtling us against the rocks below!”

And he was right, for at that moment we were flying through space at a terrific rate of speed. Here the air currents were drawn through narrowing walls of rock, like a broad river forced between the banks of a tight gorge. Focused into a narrow stream, the wind howled like a banshee and thrust our flimsy craft before it like a chip on the surface of a torrent.

And directly ahead of us the cliff rose like a mighty barrier. Within instants, unless we could break free from the grip of the gale, we would smash against that terrible wall and be shattered to atoms.

We could not descend; but if we could rise above the gale, we would enter into a region of calmer air where our headlong velocity would slow, and we could curve aside.

But we could not rise, for unaccountably the craft was losing her buoyancy almost visibly. Moment to moment we hung heavier in the roaring wind, and already the wings were shuddering under the buffeting of the blast. The craft wallowed sluggishly, wobbling from side to side. But what was wrong? Had the gas-filled pontoons sprung a leak?

I bent over the side of the cockpit, trying to see what was the matter. The wind made my eyes water and whipped my long yellow hair. Blinking the tears away, squinting into the blast, I searched the pontoons with a fierce, intent scrutiny.

And there I saw it.

Ere turning back, Zawk had sent one arrow after us in a final gesture of defiance.

Nor had his great bow failed him.

For, thrusting from the portside pontoon, the long shaft protruded, feathered with indigo-blue.

The Zarkoon bow had launched a feathered messenger of hate against us. And that feathered shaft would soon prove a winged messenger of death!

For, sunk deep in the pontoon, it had torn a ragged gash in the molded paper hull―through which our levitating gas was swiftly leaking―

Chapter 12 The Monster from the Lake

“Hold on!” Lukor shouted, jerking the lever frenziedly.

The cliff-wall loomed up before our prow, blocking out the sky.

Here the wind rose, fiercely, soaring up and over the jagged edge of the barrier. And the skiff rose with it, climbing at a steep, impossible angle.

Lukor slammed the ailerons into their vertical slot, and kicked at the rudder pedals with every ounce of strength lie possessed-fighting madly to coax every scrap of lifting power out of the hurtling machine.

Leaking gas though she was, the trim little craft was still made of laminated paper, tough and light as a kite. She was borne before the rushing winds like a cork in a millstream.

We rose at an incredible angle, virtually standing on our tail, prow pointed into the sky! Up … up … up … the rugged cliff flashing by … the serrated crest expanding as we flashed towards it―

And over it―

The little skiff shuddered like a live thing. Caught in the tide of wind that flowed up and spilled over the wall, we scraped over the crest. With a shattering impact one taut wing slammed against a boulder―and flew apart in flying rags and splinters―

Over the top of the wall we coasted. We got one swift look at the weird and fantastic thing which lay beyond the barrier―a vast plateau, circled with a cliff-like barrier, a dense tangle of scarlet jungle, threaded through with silvery rivers, and the broad glimmering shield of a huge lake.

Then, unbalanced because of the shattered wing, we cartwheeled madly, losing height and hurtling down at sickening speed. The tangled carpet of crimson jungle whirled up towards us. Lukor fought the controls, trying to ease the spinning craft into a glide, but we fell like a stone.

“Jump!” I yelled as the shimmering lake swung up to slap us. I sprang from the cockpit of the spinning craft, followed by Tomar and the jungle maid. I caught a glimpse of old Lukor standing up to spring over the side―

Then a thousand tons of cold water smashed into me and I sank into gathering darkness …

Gagging and fighting for air, I returned to my senses in a numb silence. I lay face down on a stretch of wet mud, soaked to the skin and vomiting a barrel full of cold fresh water. I staggered to my feet, lurched drunkenly, and fell to my knees.

I was dazed with shock, and momentarily deafened from the impact of striking the lake from such a height, and I ached all over as if I had been beaten with rubber truncheons. But I still lived, and no bones seemed to be broken.

Further down the beach I came upon Lukor, his clothes a soggy ruin, pouring water out of his boots and cursing because he had lost his favorite stiletto. He was not exactly disarmed, however, as he still wore his trusty sword. He was in a fine temper, but looked little the worse for wear. It would take more than a ducking in the lake to beat the spirit out of the gallant old Ganatolian!

“Where are the others?” I asked. He made some reply, but I could not understand him, because of the ringing in my ears. At first I feared lest my eardrums had been ruptured when I slammed into the lake, but it proved only a momentary discomfiture and already I was recovering, although I still could not hear him.

Sensing my problem, he pantomimed, and I turned to see the girl, sleek with water as any mermaid, half dragging the floundering form of Tomar out of the lake. She waded up to us and cast the boy down before us with a little pretty expression of disgust.

“Pooh!” she snorted. “The boy is useless. He cannot even swim!”

And she was right―poor Tomar looked as if he had swallowed half of the lake. And from the amount of water he began gagging up, I believe he had done so. But, though sodden and green about the gills, he had survived the crackup of the aircraft with no serious hurt that I could see.

“Hah!” Lukor cackled with fierce pride. “I am not so bad a pilot after all! I believe, Jandar my friend, I will ask for a command in the sky navy, when we are out of here.”

“Not so bad?” I laughed. “You nearly killed us! It’s sheer luck we aren’t all drowned! And if you call that a landing … !”

“Pah, my boy―anything you can walk away from is a good landing―ask Zantor sometime! And, outside of a ducking, we are in fine enough shape, I’ll warrant!”

It was Tomar who asked it.

Still lying in the mud, he looked about him dazedly, then up at me, eyes wide and questioning in his pale face.

“But where is the lord Koja?” he asked.

His clear young tones faded into silence. There was no sound, save for the ripple of wavelets on the beach and the distant cry of sea-tells.

Lukor looked down at the sodden boots he held in his hands. His features were averted but I saw them go blank and empty. Was it a tear went trickling down his cheek, or a drop of lake-water from his damp head? I cannot say. But I think I know.

For Koja was not on the beach.

Towards evening we built a fire at the edge of the jungle and cooked a fat, waddling lizard-thing Ylana had brained with a stone. She and Tomar had built a bonfire, gathering dry leaves and fallen branches, and

Lukor touched it alight with his flint-and-steel. We chewed half-burnt, half-raw lizard meat in a moody silence.

We had spent the afternoon searching the beach in both directions for what must have been miles. The lake was very large―so large that we could not see the further shore, save as a dim, misty line against the dark cliffs beyond. But we found no sign of Koja.

The warrior princes of the Yathoon horde roam the Great Plains of Haratha from the Black Mountains near the pole to the fringes of the Grand Kumala. There are no lakes or seas for thousands of miles in the southern hemisphere of Callisto, and only one river.

There is no reason to think, therefore, that any of the Yathoon have ever learned how to swim.

“‘Tis my fault,” Lukor muttered. “I am not such a good pilot after all.” Suddenly, and for the first time, he looked old, his shoulders stooped, his eyes dull and weary in a face lined and scored with wrinkles.

I put my hand on his shoulder. “You did the best that you could do, under the circumstances,” I said quietly. “No one could have brought us down without a crackup with one pontoon empty and one wing shorn away. At least you took us down in the lake. If it had been the jungle, or the shore, none of us would be alive now. You did the best you could, Lukor.”

“I know. I know,” he sighed.

After the meal we slept huddled about the fire. The night was made hideous by the distant cry of beasts, but we kept the fire piled high with dry wood and nothing dared come near the blaze in the night.

We slept like dead men, the sleep of the utterly exhausted.

And, thank God, there were no dreams.

Dawn woke in the skies, a blaze of pure golden fire. We were stiff and lame from our exertions, but woke refreshed and ready for whatever the new day would bring. Ylana told us that her people camped along the hunting trails to the north of the vast plateau, and that the lake in which we had fallen was situated in the southern part. We debated as to what to do. Ylana was reluctant to rejoin her people, for even though her own father, Jugrid, was chief of the Jungle People, he had been forced by the all-powerful Elders to give her up in marriage to the man whom she detested, a fellow named Xangan, a surly, repulsive, overbearing lout who had often accosted her and attempted to force his attentions upon her. This Xangan, it seemed, was the favorite grandson of one of the Elders, an old man named Quone, and thus enjoyed a favored position among the jungle warriors. The Elders had sided with Xangan against Jugrid in this matter of the disposal of his daughter’s hand in marriage. Ylana did not say so in so many words, but I got the distinct impression that the Elders were happy to seize upon this pretext to diminish the authority of the jungle chieftain, thus enhancing their own position as interpreters of the will of the Unseen Ones.

It was, I reflected, an old and oft-told tale―the struggle for supremacy between the temporal and the spiritual authorities for the dominance of a realm. The covert contest between king and high-priest had repeated itself over and over again in the history of my native world, and it seemed that in this respect, as in so many others, the inhabitants of Thanator proved their essential humanity.

“Then you would, of course, prefer not to return to the country of your father?” I asked.

The jungle maid nodded. “When captured by the Zarkoon, I was trying to reach my mother’s folk, the River People,” she said. “Their country lies east of here, beyond the Stone Hills, in a lush meadowland through which the River of the Groack wanders, on its way to the Great Waterfall …”

“And what might the groack be?” I inquired.

The girl shivered slightly. “Fearsome reptiles which infest the Great Lake and the river, as well.”

“All right, then: how can we help you find the country of the River People?”

Ylana crouched on her knees and sketched a crude map in the sand. It showed that we had come out of the lake on the north shore, and that the River of the Groack emerged from the lake almost exactly one-quarter of the way around it, wove between the Stone Hills, and then traced a curving path through the meadowlands which occupied the extreme eastern portion of the plateau.*

We breakfasted sparsely on nuts, berries, and a large, sweet fruit the Thanatorians call the temorak, a term I might translate crudely as “wine-melon,” since it is from the juice of this melon-like fruit that the vintners of Thanator ferment their vinous beverages. Tomar and Ylana gathered this meager meal while Lukor and I sought to procure something in the nature of weapons wherewith we would be able to defend ourselves against whatever predators or human foes we might chance to encounter on our journey to the River Country. We found a clump of orange, bamboo-like trees which, with a trifle of labor, could be snapped off cleanly at the joints, which were spaced fairly evenly about eighteen inches apart. From these we fashioned rude quarterstaves or poles about six feet long, which would have to serve as our only means of defense. Tomar also rigged a crude sling on directions from Ylana, who was expert in the use of this weapon, while the girl gathered smooth, rounded stones from along the lake-shore. By early morning we were ready to depart.

As we made our way due east along the shoreline, I had leisure to reflect on the curious information Ylana’s map revealed. I refer to the fact that, unlike terrestrial rivers, the River of the Groack towards which we were bound did not feed into the Great Lake, as the body of water was called, but out of it. My knowledge of these matters is admittedly a trifle hazy, and marooned here on Callisto as I am, I am, of course, quite a few million miles away from the nearest reference library, but I am of the opinion that the River of the Groack presents an unique phenomenon.*

All that day we tramped along the shore of the Cor-Az (which is Thanatorian for “Great Lake”), and by early evening we were foot-weary and very hungry. Lukor, wistfully eyeing the lake along which we strode, made some remark about fishing-poles in connection with a speculation as to what manner of plump, delicious denizens the waters might contain.

As I was feeling half-starved by this time, the notion struck me as a highly promising one. We had the fishing-poles already, for our bamboo staves would serve that purpose admirably; and, as for fish-hooks, the coil of copper wire the jungle maid wore about her upper arm could be as easily put to that use as it had been for the purpose of a pick-lock.

We decided to stop for the night and to see what sort of a dinner the Cor-Az could afford us. While Tomar and Ylana searched for dry wood along the edges of the jungle, Lukor and I worked short lengths of the flexible wire into something rudely resembling hooks, affixing these to the end of our staves by means of long threads unraveled from our garments―or from Lukor’s garments, that is, since my raiment still consisted of nothing more than a ragged loincloth and a pair of sky-boots.

Considering the make-shift nature of our fishing gear, it is surprising that either Lukor or I achieved any measure of success in our efforts at providing piscatorial provender for our dinner-table. The lake, however, seemed to be teeming with some Thanatorian variety of fish unfamiliar to me, for in no time Lukor, to his great delight, succeeded in landing two enormous salmonlike fish which Ylana brained with a flat rock. During the next few minutes I landed a remarkable specimen myself, which must have weighed ten pounds, and our prospects of going to sleep that night with full bellies seemed assured.

Matters turned out otherwise, however, as is so often the case on the Jungle Moon. For, in providing for our dinner, it seemed we were robbing another “fisherman” of his own. Our crude fish-hooks, I assume, had landed right in the middle of a school of fish a hungry groack had been engaged in herding together to satisfy his own ravenous gullet. And he did not appreciate our poaching on what he evidently considered his private game-preserve.

Our first inkling of this fact followed shortly after we had succeeded in landing the third fish. Quite suddenly, about twenty yards out from the shore, the placid waters of the Cor-Az exploded into spray and an immense, serpentine neck thrust itself up from the waves. An alligator-like head the size of a barrel swiveled towards our direction, and two lidless eyes, lambent with cold ferocity, fixed us in their gaze. In the next instant we were scrambling up the shore in several directions as a vast, scaly form came slithering through the shallows at something close to the speed of an express-train.

The colossal Plesiosaur on Earth has been extinct, I suppose, since the Jurassic era. But I can assure you, from personal experience, that here on Callisto the giant reptile, or something remarkably like it, is still going strong. This particular specimen, which came slithering out of the lake hot on our heels, must have measured at least thirty-five feet from fanged snout to the tip of his tail … and that’s about thirty-four more feet of reptile than I feel comfortable with!

The groack had flippers rather than legs, but he could cover the ground at a fast clip for all of that. As we took to our heels in all directions, Ylana slipped in the wet sand and fell to her knees. This did not escape the cold gaze of the lake-dragon, and he swerved in his pursuit to bear down upon the jungle girl. I believe the original reaction of the groack was simply annoyance at finding someone poaching on his private supplies of food, but by this time, having caught a whiff of juicy manflesh, he abandoned his original intent of chasing away the fisherman, deciding to feast on fishermen rather than fish.

Tomar was the nearest of any of us to Ylana when she slipped and fell. Without a moment’s hesitation the boy turned back to help the girl. Snatching up the fishing-pole Lukor had flung aside in his haste, the boy ran directly between the girl and the lake-monster. As the groack bent to investigate the helpless maid, Tomar jumped in front of it with a loud yell and gave the brute a staggering buffet across the snout with the bamboo staff. I don’t imagine the blow caused the reptile much hurt, but it certainly made it angry.

Giving voice to a deafening hiss like a steam-whistle, the groack lunged after the boy. Tomar dodged nimbly to one side, scooped Ylana up in his strong young arms, and headed off in another direction.

Before the groack could lumber off at this new tangent, I had turned back to intercept it and gave it a good thwack with my own pole, which for some reason I still held. Then Lukor came dancing in from the other side. The spry little Ganatolian was the only one of us who still retained a real weapon, and in his case he had his trusty steel rapier with the basket-hilt. This blade he sank into the throat of the groack, who again screeched like a locomotive whistle, and went lumbering after Lukor, forgetting to go after Tomar or the girl, who had reached the edge of the jungle by now.

I gave it another whack on the head from my side, and as it swung its head back towards me, Lukor again sprang to the attack, sinking his point into the brute’s neck. Groggily, the reptile swung hissing to deal with this adversary, and I came in again to deal it a smashing blow alongside the skull. The rhythm of battle was established by now, and I had learned a valuable bit of information about the lake-dragon: its dim little nubbin of a brain was only large enough to contain one idea at a time, and thus between us, Lukor and I could probably keep the brute baffled and at bay for some time. Had it hurled itself in headlong and undeviating pursuit of any one of us, that unlucky person would doubtless have soon served the groack as its dinner. But it was unable to keep on one track, and acted in response to each individual stimulus in turn. Soon Ylana, nursing a twisted ankle, entered into this dance of death with her sling. One well-placed stone smashed out one of the groack’s gnashing fangs, and a second injured its left eye. In the meanwhile, Lukor kept pricking it in the neck, hoping with one of his strokes to penetrate the monster’s tough scaly hide deep enough to sever its spinal cord.

Things were taken out of our hands, however.

Thunnk! A black-feathered arrow suddenly materialized in the brow of the reptile, protruding from between its glaring eyes.

Thunkk! Thunkk!

Two more arrows flashed, burying themselves in the soft flesh of the unprotected throat, just beneath the jaws.

Black gore gushed between the gaping jaws as the giant reptile lurched groggily to one side, eyes glazing. The first arrow had pierced its tiny brain by a lucky shot, but it took it quite a time to realize the fact that it was already dead.

We sprang back from the floundering monster, staring around to discover the source of the mysterious arrows. Night had fallen during our battle with the lake-dragon, but several moons were aloft and by their many-colored light we saw a large party of men standing at the edges of the jungle.

The foremost of these was a hulking, unshaven lout, naked save for a tanned hide slung about his hips and a necklace of ivory fangs. He held, nocked and at the ready, a fourth arrow, ready to loose from his great sorath-wood bow.

The other warriors in his party sprang forward to dispatch the dying reptile with their flint-tipped spears.

But he stood facing us, a leering grin on his heavy features.

I did not care for his looks.

Neither did Ylana. In fact, when the girl spun about and saw our rescuer, she gasped aloud, and her taut face went pale. I gathered from this that she was acquainted with our rescuer; and, soon enough, this supposition became a fact.

“You!” she said faintly.

The big man grinned at her nastily.

“Ylana, are you acquainted with this warrior?” I asked, wishing I had something other than just a splintered fishing-pole wherewith to defend myself. She nodded wearily.

“He is Xangan, the man they would force me to mate with,” the girl said with despair eloquent in her tones.

“Seize the girl and kill the men,” ordered Xangan. The others sprang upon us with spear and club and stone ax.

Chapter 13 I Make an Enemy―and a Friend

There were twenty of them to the four of us, and considering that we were outnumbered five to one, it might have seemed the height of folly to have attempted to fight the jungle men. But it goes against my grain to yield supinely, even to a superior force. It is like giving up―and if I have learned one thing from a lifetime of adventure, it is: never give up―fight to the last!

Someday, I have no doubt, my luck will run out and the blade of an adversary or the claws of a jungle beast will take my life. Until that day comes, however, I will fight for life and freedom even against impossible odds.

So―when the first jungle man sprang at me with his stone-tipped spear―I batted the shaft aside and knocked him sprawling in the sand with a right to the jaw. The second, who attempted to brain me with his ax, I kicked in the pit of the stomach; he promptly lost interest in the conflict, sagged to his knees, and began losing his lunch all over the sand.

Lukor, to my left, had already run one warrior through the shoulder with his rapier, and was holding two others at bay with his flashing steel. Tomar had laid one jungle man unconscious, using the bamboo pole as a club, and was fighting off his companion, while the girl Ylana was employing her sling with devastating effect. Recalling that David had felled even the giant Goliath with just such a weapon, I caught a flying glimpse of the sling in action as she felled the third of the warriors who had sprung upon her. I don’t think we killed anyone, but there were more than a few broken teeth, pierced shoulders, and aching heads, before we were done. Xangan, I noticed, displayed the prudence of a born general by staying out of the fight entirely. He lurked on the edge of the jungle, dodging behind a tree whenever one of Ylana’s missiles came hurtling his way. His major contribution to the battle was that of urging his men on with loud shouts, while remaining safely out of harm’s way himself. I began to understand why the jungle maid despised him so.

It was soon over, of course; and, of course, we did not win it. There had hardly been a chance that the four of us, armed with bare fists and sticks and stones, could defeat twenty full-grown men armed with spears, clubs and stone axes. But when, at the end, they crushed us down by sheer weight of numbers, I had at least the grim comfort of having fought for my life.

Once we were safely trussed with leathern thongs, Xangan left his place of safety to strut about, puffing out his chest, and giving us dangerous, evil looks. From the way he postured boldly, glaring threateningly on four helpless, bound captives, you would have thought he had captured us all by himself. I could have laughed at him, except that I lay face down in the sand with someone kneeling in the small of my back, a position hardly conducive of risibility.

While the warriors stood about, puffing and blowing from their exertions, gingerly fingering this or that painful portion of their anatomies, Xangan strode up to Tomar―who had fallen while trying to defend Ylana to the last―and, with one eye on the girl to see how she liked it, gave the helpless boy a cruel kick in the side. Tomar took it in silence, of course, but I gritted my teeth and made a silent vow to repay Xangan for that cowardly blow someday.

Ylana spat sand from her mouth, and gave the smirking bully a glare that would have shriveled most men in their tracks. Then Xangan strode over to where she lay and looked her over gloatingly. Her abbreviated garments were torn and disarranged, and generous portions of girlflesh were bare to his greedy scrutiny. He said nothing, but his gaze was insult enough. The girl bit her lip, crimsoning. I could cheerfully have killed him.

Then he walked over to where Lukor and I lay bound and looked us over suspiciously. I gave him look for look.

“You,” he growled, prodding me with one foot. “Where did you get that yellow hair?”

“It was a birthday present from my mother,” I said calmly. “Where did you get that yellow stripe down your back?”

The other warriors laughed at this, but Xangan flushed with rage and made as if to kick me as he had kicked the boy. Something in the cold, level look I gave him made him change his mind. He flushed even darker―which roused a few chuckles from those of his men who had not missed the exchange. I got the impression that Xangan was none too popular, even with his own warriors. This was only to be expected. They had fought like men, as had we. They had no reason to despise us, and every reason to feel contempt for Xangan, who had hid until the fight was over and he could safely emerge.

“Shut up, you fomak,” he blustered. A fomak is a venomous cave-spider, and the term is not one of endearment.

“It takes one fomak to recognize another,” I responded with a smile. This got a laugh, too. He growled an oath, looked me over with an elaborate pretense of contempt, and turned on his heel.

“Slay the men,” he said. And my heart sank within me. Was my long road to end here, in an alien land, among strange men? Here, where my princess should never know the manner of my death, nor my comrades avenge it?

“I don’t think we should do that, Xangan,” said one of the warriors, most unexpectedly. He was a good-looking fellow, somewhat more clean-cut and intelligent than the others, from his stance and features. I had noticed him watching me with an expression of something very like admiration in his face, while I had given Xangan taunt for taunt. Now he stepped forward to confront his chief, who stared at him slack-jawed in surprise.

“I don’t care what you think, Thadron―my orders come from the Elders,” Xangan blustered.

The young warrior whom he had addressed as Thadron shook his head firmly.

“Whatever orders you may have from the Elders could hardly cover this present situation, Xangan,” he said in a calm, reasonable tone of voice. “For none of us, and least of all the Elders, could have guessed we would discover Jugrid’s daughter after all this time, and in the company of strangers.”

Xangan tried to stare him down, but failed. “You will obey my orders,” he grumbled weakly. Thadron shook his head.

“Not in this case, I fear. We must find out who these men are and from whence they come. The Elders will want to question them, surely. So we must take them back to the caves with us.”

The others seemed to agree with this, for they nodded to each other, murmuring assent. The sharp eyes of Xangan observed this, and evidently he decided this was not the time for a showdown. He made a hasty attempt to reassert his authority.

“We will let the Elders decide the manner of their death,” he said loudly. Then, with a wicked gleam in his eye, he added nastily, “and the degree of punishment for your insubordination, Thadron!”

If he had hoped to disconcert the other by this pointed remark, he failed signally, for Thadron smiled and said serenely: “Yes, let us abide by the decision of the Elders in this as in all other matters, Xangan―including the punishment of chieftains who overstep their authority!”

And so we were saved―for a time, at least. The jungle men got us to our feet and marched us into the trees, which closed about us with a rustling of scarlet foliage. Within moments all sight or sound of the Cor-Az was lost to us; and within half an hour, so twisting and winding were the jungle trails, we were thoroughly lost ourselves, and could not possibly have retraced our steps to the shores of the Great Lake unaided.

Lukor and Tomar and I were en route to an unknown fate. Our deaths, at best, had but been postponed for a time. Well, I cannot speak for Tomar in this, but as for such as Lukor and I, adventurers of our breed regard any respite with a high degree of optimism mingled with hopes for an even more fortunate turn of events in the near future. We do not give up easily, even when marching to face the unknown.

With Ylana, however, the fate towards which she was being forced was all too known. With every step she took, the jungle maid was drawing closer to a miserable fate in the arms of a cowardly bully whom she despised. This being so, I could only admire helplessly the gallant courage of the brave, resourceful girl. She walked the jungle path with her shoulders back, her head held high, and a resolute expression of aloof contempt on her features. Whatever horrors and degradations awaited her at the end of the trail, she would face them boldly and unafraid.

I felt proud of her, and my only regret was that she had fallen into this dismal situation through my own misfortunate attempts to help her avoid this very fate. She was a lot of woman, for all her tender years, and the boy who truly won her heart would be a very lucky man.

Xangan strode on ahead of us, with the stride of a victorious conqueror, for all his sneering cowardice. But the other jungle men, I noticed, seemed a manly lot. They treated us with dignity and offered no discourtesies even to the helpless girl. Xangan may have been a rarity among his people―even the finest barrel can hold a rotten apple or two―but I judged that, on the whole, Jugrid’s people, while they may have occupied a lowly rung on the ladder of social evolution, were of a superior breed.

Thadron in particular seemed to be a decent fellow. He fell into line at my side, and, once Xangan had taken his place in the lead and was well out of earshot, opened a conversation with me. He was curious as to my coloring and inquired, politely enough, as to my homeland. I was cautious about revealing overmuch concerning our true origin or mission into this hemisphere, for it was impossible to know if word of our presence among the jungle men might somehow come to the attention of our enemies the Mind Wizards, so I responded to his interested queries in an off-hand manner, replying that my homeland lay at a considerable distance from this region.

Thadron sensed my reticence, although he could hardly have guessed my reason for it, and respected my desire to keep my native land a secret. Considering his innate courtesy and gentlemanliness, I was thankful that it was not necessary for me to lie to him. For of course I had but told him, strictly speaking, the truth. Since my native land was at that moment something like three hundred and ninety million miles away, it could certainly be said to be at “a considerable distance” from these jungles.

To his other questions, I responded in more detail. Thadron was curious to learn if men with yellow hair, fair skins and blue eyes were common in my homeland, and I told him that such as I were common enough in my land, but that we came in a variety of shades, which seemed to satisfy him. He also displayed a certain curiosity in the peculiar means by which I had laid out several of his fellow-warriors, armed only with my bare hands.

“Do the men of your land commonly fight with balled fists, rather than with spears or aces?” he asked. I repressed a smile, and soberly told him that such was, in fact, the case. Few Americans these days fight with spears or stone axes, I said with a straight face, whereas the art of fisticuffs enjoys considerable popularity. We chatted for some time over the fine points of pugilism. I have elsewhere* observed that the manly art of fisticuffs, for some reason, is quite unknown upon Thanator. It is not that fighting with bare hands is despised as an ungentlemanly method of combat. It is, simply, that it has yet to be invented upon the Jungle Moon, and the man lucky enough to know how to use his fists is never without a weapon on this world.

“I should like to see you demonstrate this peculiar mode of fighting,” Thadron remarked.

“Free my hands, and I will be delighted to give you an exhibition,” I said, with a slight smile. “I should greatly enjoy demonstrating it upon the person of your chieftain, Xangan,” I added, which brought a smile to Thadron’s own lips. We exchanged a glance, and I knew that he agreed with my rather low estimate of that individual.

As we penetrated more deeply into the jungle, the foliage closed above us, locking out the illumination of the many moons which had lit our way. Now we went forward in a darkness which was all but impenetrable, and this struck me as being just a bit curious. My experience with jungles is somewhat limited, but I have always found that the hours of darkness are the most dangerous time to be abroad in the jungles of Thanator, for the terrible predators which inhabit such regions generally prefer to sleep by day, prowling the jungle aisles by night. I asked Thadron about this, and he seemed puzzled at my query.

“Save for the fomaks in the cave regions, and the occasional pack of wild othodes,” he said, “what is there in the jungles which could do us harm?” The fomak, as I have already explained, is a large and venomous kind of spider whose bite is deadly, and the othode is a burly, frog-faced animal with short purple fur, which rather resembles a mastiff and which can be domesticated. Neither creature is commonly found in the jungle countries of the one hemisphere of Callisto with which I am most familiar, although packs of othodes are sometimes encountered in the southern parts of the Grand Kumala. I asked Thadron if there was no reason to fear such jungle predators as the deltagar or the vastodon, but he seemed never to have even heard of these monsters. At length it occurred to me that the jungle country atop this plateau was insulated by hundreds of miles of barren, rocky wilderness from other jungles. It had been isolated for untold ages, and perhaps formed a refuge for forms of life elsewhere either rare or extinct, much like the “lost world” of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous novel, which was also situated upon an isolated plateau, if I recall the details of the romance correctly. There were already several reasons for me to assume such was the case, for neither Zarkoon nor groacks were known in the other hemisphere of Callisto, save as legends.

All that night and much of the next morning we wound our weary way through the gloomy jungles. Some hours after dawn we emerged into a hilly region, where many caves could be seen. Here savages of Xangan’s breed could be seen, women tending the cook-fires before the caves, old men scraping hides, naked children scampering about. All fell silent and ceased whatever they were doing as we came into view.

Xangan now strutted and swaggered about, feeling that all eyes were upon him. In loud, blustering tones be described to the crowd, which rapidly assembled to observe us, how we had been subdued with great difficulty after a terrific battle. Without exactly saying so in so many words, he left an impression in the minds of his rapt audience that he had occupied a position of importance in the forefront of this battle, and had performed deeds of ferocious and daring courage. Thadron smiled quietly to hear him brag, but most of his fellow tribesfolk seemed to believe his boasting.

We were led through the narrow ravine, whose rocky walls were lined on both sides with the black mouths of caves, to a flat space before a large, imposing cavern. There a number of scrawny old men bedecked with colored beads and plumes sat comfortably in the hot daylight. These, I correctly assumed, were the Elders of the tribe. Xangan swaggered in front of them, describing all over again the mighty battle in which he and his twenty warriors had with great effort overwhelmed one warrior, one silver-haired old man, and two teen-agers. Several of the Elders looked amused, obviously seeing through his bragging, but others seemed to take his words at face value, including one keen-eyed Elder whom, I guessed correctly, was Xangan’s own grandfather, the chief of the Elders, Quone.

“What do you think will happen to us, Thadron?” I asked in a low voice, while Xangan bragged and swaggered. The young warrior shrugged.

“I imagine the Elders will be too confused to deal with you themselves, as the case lacks all precedent in our tradition. They will probably call upon the Unseen Ones to decide what should be done with you.”

Ylana had mentioned these “Unseen Ones” back when we had been prisoners in the cavern-world of the Zarkoon. She had not explained what she meant by the term, and for some reason I had not pursued the matter at the time, assuming that she referred to the gods her tribe venerated. Now I asked the friendly young warrior who these Unseen Ones were. He looked at me in surprise.

“Why … they are the Unseen Ones, Jandar―the Masters! Is it possible that the Elders of your tribe, however distant your land may be from our own, do not serve the will of the Unseen Ones?” There was incredulity in his voice. I shrugged.

“Apparently such is the case,” I admitted, “although perhaps we know them under some other name. What do they do―what are they like?”

He spread his hands helplessly.

“Only the Elders converse with them and can interpret their will,” he confessed. “I have only seen them once, and that was when I was a child and a terrible plague was devastating the tribe. The Elders begged for their assistance, and when they came, I saw them only briefly and from a distance.”

“Oh? And what did they look like?” I asked―never dreaming how his answer would petrify me with horror.

“Like men, but different from us, of course. They were smaller than men, with slant black eyes, yellow faces, and they wore strange grey raiment which covered their entire bodies …”

And 1 went cold, stunned by his words.

For well did I know the little, dwarf-like yellow men with slant black eyes and robes of neutral grey.

The Mind Wizards of Callisto!

Woe unto us, if Thadron’s estimate of the situation was accurate, and if the Elders should summon their unseen masters to decide our fate.

For we would be given over into the hands of the very enemies the armada had flown here to root out and destroy!

Chapter 14 The Flint Knife

The Elders interrogated us at some length, once Xangan had put the finishing touches on his own version of our capture. The one who asked us the most pointed and searching questions was Quone. He was a tall, gaunt old man with a bald, knobby skull, crowned with fugitive wisps of silky, colorless hair, and a remarkably homely visage. His nose was prominent and hawk-like, and this, taken in conjunction with his air of cold hauteur, his supercilious expression, and his manner of elevating his chin, lent him a physiognomy strikingly Roman. I have seen precisely that same combination of features on Roman portrait-busts in the Metropolitan Museum, but in the case of Quone, he looked like a Roman senator fallen into barbarism, for his scrawny frame was draped in tanned animal hides whose fringes flapped and dangled about his bony shanks, and his noble brow was crowned with gaudy feathers, while his wattled throat was adorned with necklaces of colored beads, shells, and the ivory fangs of beasts.

His questions were acute and perceptive. Whereas Thadron―and even Ylana―had unquestioningly assumed us to be strangers from a tribe as primitive as their own, the Elder instantly guessed us to be aliens from a more advanced civilization. He examined our clothing with keen and curious eyes; Lukor’s clothing, that is, since Tomar and I wore nothing but sky-boots and ragged loin-cloths. Lukor, of course, wore the sleeveless, open-necked leather tunic, voluminous white blouse with tight cuffs, girdle and short cloak commonly worn by members of the warrior class throughout the other hemisphere.

Quone was interested in the brilliant red gem Lukor affected rakishly in one earlobe, in the supple, suedelike leather of his tunic, which was dressed and tanned in a manner superior to anything the jungle men knew, and in the ornaments of precious metal wherewith the sword-master’s girdle was adorned. Lukor, whose stiff-necked sense of the proprieties was ruffled by the personal nature of Quone’s interrogation, made terse responses to each query. He gruffly denied knowledge of the techniques of tanning leather to such suppleness, and declared himself likewise ignorant of the weaving methods used to produce such fine fabrics as composed his cloak and blouse.

The other Elders―there seemed to be seven of them in all―were a gaggle of toothless, rheumy-eyed old fellows who lazed sleepily in warm daylight, content to leave the questioning to Quone. I got the impression that he quite dominated the group.

I tried to keep my answers to his questions as unspecific as possible, when the interrogation got around to me. We were adventurers from a far-off land, I told him, strayed here by accident. We had been captured by the Zarkoon, and, together with Ylana, had narrowly managed to escape from the clutches of the cannibal bird-men. Fortunately, Xangan and his band had encountered us too late to see the flying machine in which we had descended to the plateau, so I was spared the necessity of explaining our possession of such a craft, and Ylana said nothing of it.

Jugrid, the king of the jungle tribe, had arrived on the scene during our interrogation. He was a big man with stalwart, clean-cut features and a powerful physique, and had about him a certain natural majesty. He was a born fighting-man and I must confess I liked him from the first. Together with Ylana and Thadron, he seemed to represent a superior strain; there was a definite innate nobility about these three which set them apart from the bulk of the tribesmen, who, save for a few tall, well-built, intelligent-looking men and women, seemed otherwise composed of hulking, unappetizing specimens like Xangan, or vulgar and slatternly women.

The glances of pity and commiseration Jugrid silently exchanged with his daughter did not escape my eye. Jugrid had evidently hoped the girl had by now long since effected her escape and had found safe refuge among her mother’s tribe, the River People. He took no part in our examination and his very presence was pointedly ignored by Quone and the other Elders. I got the distinct impression that the Elders seized every possible pretext to put the jungle king in his place, which they obviously conceived to be definitely subordinate to their own.

Although Xangan had loudly argued we should be put to death at once, to prevent our escaping and returning at the head of a war-band of our people to avenge our capture upon the tribe, Quone was much too canny to acquiesce to his grandson’s bullying demands.

“They shall be hostages,” he croaked, “wherewith we may bargain should others of their tribe come seeking them.”

Xangan grumbled and blustered, but Quone had made up his mind and that was the end of the matter.

“And, as well, I doubt me not the Unseen Ones will be interested in them,” he concluded. As you can imagine, my blood ran cold at his words. The very last thing I wanted to do was to have our presence on the plateau brought to the attention of the Mind Wizards. With their uncanny telepathic powers, they could penetrate my mental defenses in a moment, and discover the existence and the purpose of the armada in this hemisphere, and we should lose the slight advantage of surprise we perhaps still possessed.

Quone ordered us held in a small cave whose mouth was blocked by a palisade. That is, he ordered Lukor and Tomar and I thus imprisoned. As for the jungle girl, she would be held by the unmarried women of the tribe until “the moons were right” for her long-delayed wedding with Xangan. By this term, I assumed the Jungle People placed some superstitious value on astrology, and deduced from the movements of the Jovian moons times deemed propitious for various tribal activities.

We were thrust into the narrow cave, together with food and drink, and left to our own devices until such time as the Mind Wizards could be informed of our existence and give their judgment on our disposal.

And there was nothing to do but wait.

We searched the cave thoroughly, but found it secure. It ended in a passage which narrowed into a small pocket, blocked by a massive boulder. The roof arched above us, without chimney or fissure, and the sides of the cavern were smooth and unbroken. The only way out was the cave mouth itself, and the palisade wherewith this was closed was made of heavy logs, deeply buried in the soil and trimmed off to meet the lintel of the entrance with only a half inch of leeway. There did not seem to be any way we could effect an escape and we were guarded night and day by two warriors who squatted before the palisade, alternately dozing and playing some sort of dice-like game with knucklebones for pieces.

So we resigned ourselves to durance vile, keeping our eyes open for any opportunity to get away. Our chances for such seemed rather slender. There was simply no way out of our cave, and we soon decided that if we were going to make a break for it, we could only do so when the palisade was opened. This happened three times a day, when the gate was opened to replenish our supplies of food and water and we were escorted out of the cell for the purpose of relieving nature. Alas, on these occasions we were so heavily ringed about with guards that to try for freedom would be either an exercise in futility or in suicide.

Time weighed heavily on our hands. There was simply nothing to do but sprawl about, and either nap or converse. From time to time our boredom was relieved by a visitor. Xangan came strutting by to insult us in his loud, blustering way―staying safely on the other side of the bars and well beyond our reach. After a time we simply ignored him and pretended he was not there, and before long he found the baiting of men who ignored his baiting so lacking in savor that his visits dwindled and eventually ceased altogether.

A much more welcome visitor, however, was Thadron, the handsome, intelligent young warrior who had prevented Xangan from slaying us on the spot when we were captured. He visited from time to time, conversing through the bars, and seemed sympathetic to our predicament, although his words were guarded and neutral, due to the omnipresent guards, hulking louts of Xangan’s cut who listened with suspicious ears to every exchange.

Ylana also visited us now and again, for she was only watched, and not caged up as we were. I strove to find out how long it would be before the Mind Wizards were made aware of our captivity and would come hither to decide our fate. She did not know the answer to this question, for the Elders jealously guarded from the knowledge of the rest of the tribe the method by which they communicated with the Unseen Ones, as it was their exclusive monopoly of the channel of communication from which they derived their authority over their superstitious fellow-tribesmen. It would be many days, however, as she guessed from previous experiences.

To relieve the indescribable tedium of my captivity, I begged some writing materials from her. The Jungle People lacked the art of writing, but I had noticed they kept a domesticated breed of thaptor-like four-legged fowl, and it is from the quills of the thaptor that the Shondakorians and other civilized nations fashion writing implements. It was easy enough for her to slip me a handful of feathers through the bars on her next visit, and she also gathered at my request a quantity of gurom-bark from a grove on the borders of the tribal area I had noticed upon first entering the vicinity.

The gurom tree sheds thin shells of flexible, starchy white bark with a very smooth surface on the inside, and it peels into thin sheets and may be used for writing much in the same way the American Indians used to employ birch-bark in my native land. The guards raised objections to her procuring this bark, but the maid faced them down and browbeat them into surly, grumbling silence. I admired the way she invented a plausible lie on the spur of the moment, saying I wished to compute the astrological signs for the most propitious time for her mating with Xangan. Evidently, to the primitive minds of these savages, an astrologer is worthy of much of the veneration that would otherwise be displayed towards priests, if the Jungle People had a priesthood, which, in common with the other nations of Thanator, they do not.

Using the smooth white bark for writing-paper, and trimming the quills into pens, I made a crude kind of ink from drinking water mixed with some black powdered mineral I scraped from an outcropping of ore, and thus had something wherewith to pass the time. We devised a game to while away the hours: I marked the largest sheet off into squares and taught Lukor and the boy the old terrestrial game of checkers, which we played with colored pebbles.

Ylana had brought me such a supply of bark and quills, that I also decided to pass the tedium of our imprisonment by setting down this account of my adventures since the Zarkoon carried off Tomar and me from the pilothouse of the Jalathadar. My “ink” was thin and watery, and my pens were not of the finest quality, but I found that by printing the English characters in capitals rather than by using the ordinary cursive I generally employed in the composition of my journals, I could set down a narrative which was fairly legible. Since I had filled my spare time aboard the airship by recording the more recent events, I decided to pass my enforced leisure in the same manner, and thus brought my narrative up to date, picking up the story where I had left off, and incorporating into my account the tale of Lukor and Koja’s own adventures, which the gallant little Ganatolian had long since recounted to me.

I became so caught up in the relating of this narrative, that I devoted most of the waking hours of my next several days to completing the makeshift journal. Luckily, during this same period, Lukor and Tomar fell in love with the game of checkers and amused themselves while I was engaged in my literary labors. The Thanatorian mind is singularly intrigued with board games, I have noticed, and they have invented any number of games strikingly akin to chess and Parcheesi, and one that is virtually identical to the popular game of scrabble. From the fascination my two comrades displayed in the simple game of checkers I quickly taught them, I perceived an Earthling stranded by chance on Callisto could easily make his fortune by introducing the Thanatorians to a variety of such games, providing he could secure the local equivalent of a copyright to them.

It was in this manner that we passed the tedious period of our imprisonment without the grueling boredom such an interminable waiting-time would otherwise have inflicted upon us. I lost track of the number of days we endured in our Stone Age dungeon-cell, but it must have been a week at least. If not, then it certainly seemed that long.

However the Elders established communication with Kuur, the shadowy country of the Mind Wizards was evidently at some considerable distance from the caves wherein the Jungle People dwelt. And then one afternoon Ylana came by to exchange a few words with us through the bars. The plucky jungle maid seemed even more downcast than usual, and I asked her the reason for her woeful looks.

“It is just that we shall see each other no more, after tomorrow,” she said sadly, “and that this makes me unhappy.”

Her words were directed to me, but I noticed that her eyes strayed in the direction of Tomar, who lay watching her as we conversed. Something had passed between the two youngsters during our adventures together, despite all the tauntings and rivalries, and from Tomar’s moody silences and her lingering, backward glances after one of her infrequent visits I imagined that the two had conceived of an affection―doubtless nothing more serious than the teenage crushes I had suffered through when I had been their age, but none the less painful and hard to endure for all that.

But at the moment I was not thinking of “puppy love,” but of the more serious implications in her sad words.

“Why is that, Ylana?” I asked. She regarded me with a long, pitying look.

“Because that croaking old zell, Quone, has just gone about the village informing the tribe that by dawn tomorrow we will be visited by an emissary of the Unseen Ones,” she said.

Lukor broke off his game with a startled expletive.

“By the Red Moon, girl, d’you mean those uncanny yellow rascals will be here by morning?” he demanded.

Ylana nodded sadly and Lukor exchanged a fierce, meaningful look with me.

“Then we must make our escape tonight or never, lad,” he said to me in tones too low to reach the ears of the guards who squatted on their hunkers to either side of the cave-mouth.

I made no comment on this, nor did Ylana. But something in the intensity of the stare with which she caught my gaze alerted me. When her gaze dropped deliberately and meaningfully to her right foot I followed her look. She stood near the barred gate, negligently resting the tip of one foot on the bottom crossbar, so that her buskin-shod toes thrust through the narrow grill just a bit. And I saw with an inward thrill of excitement that her buskin was bound about the toe with an extra thong

There was something tied to the sole of her footgear which she wanted me to take from her!

I signaled Lukor with a fierce gesture. Sensing my meaning without words, the old fellow came over to the bars and began loudly questioning the maid as to what sort of a dire and grisly execution we might expect, when at the tender mercies of the Unseen Ones.

He stood, blocking the sight of the guards, while I dropped to my knees, swiftly untied the thong, and slid my fingers under the sole of Ylana’s buskin. As the thong loosened, a short, hard, thin object dropped into my palm, which I slid into the top of my own boots. I did not have to look at it to guess what it was, for my fingers had traced its outline.

It was a flint knife.

And at last we had a weapon!

“So farewell, Jandar―old man―Tomar,” the girl said, turning away. “We shall not speak again, I think. Farewell!”

“Farewell to you, Ylana, and … thanks for everything,” I said. She smiled faintly, turned on her heel, and departed.

It would have to be that very night, we decided. But not when we were let out after the evening meal for sanitary purposes, for at such times ten or a dozen of the jungle warriors escorted us. It would have to be later, on some pretext or other.

As soon as Ylana left, we three retreated to the back of the cave and discussed our chances of escape in whispers. Deciding on a plan of action, we returned to the front of the cave, and tried to busy ourselves at our usual occupations. Tomar and Lukor pretended to play checkers, although their hearts were not really in the game, and as for me, I scribbled away writing these pages. Nothing in our behavior could possibly have suggested that we contemplated making a break for freedom that very night, I am sure.

The hours of afternoon wore on. Never had time seemed to move with such a dreary, dragging pace. The minutes slid by with a leaden slowness. Finally, just as our nerves were frayed almost to the breaking-point with the suspense of waiting, night fell. The guards opened the gate, shoved in our dinner, and, a while later, escorted us to the banks of a narrow stream used by the tribe as a jakes, and escorted us back, locking us in securely.

Like most primitives, the Jungle People are wont to retire as soon as night has fallen. Stuffy, ill-ventilated caves are badly designed for lamps or torches, and there are few things savages can do in darkness―hence they have the habit of crawling into their sleeping furs when darkness falls. One by one the men of the tribe strolled back to their caves, yawning sleepily. One by one the scampering urchins were summoned to bed by the women. Finally the narrow little valley-like open space between the cave-lined cliffs was empty of people. Even the burly, dog-like othodes went indoors, since by night the Zarkoon fly the skies over the plateau, and have been known to swoop down upon the village, carrying off a stray child or beast.

Only our guards were left, and they were curled up, snoring loudly, before the mouth of our cave.

I gave Lukor the signal and he rose from his furs, went to the front of the cave, and rattled the gate, calling loudly.

“What do you want?” one of the guards grunted sleepily.

“I need to relieve myself,” Lukor informed him with prim, fastidious dignity.

“You had your chance earlier, with the others,” the guard yawned.

“I am an old man, and I cannot wait till dawn,” Lukor said. “Take me down to the stream like a good fellow.”

“Go back to sleep, or do it in the back of the cave.”

“I have no intentions of doing either! Take me down to the stream, will you?”

“Oh, take him down, Brokar, or we’ll never get any sleep,” grumbled the second guard.

“Why don’t you take him, Cadj, if it bothers you so much,” Brokar suggested. “I’m just getting comfortable!”

“All right, I will! C’mon, you, and no tricks now―”

The second guard, whose name seemed to be Cadj, climbed out of his furs, unlatched the gate and let Lukor out. He loomed head and shoulders above the smaller, frailer, silver-haired Ganatolian, and was a burly specimen of primitive manhood. In his eyes, the silver-haired Lukor was a feeble senior citizen on a par with the tottering old grandfathers who made up the seven Elders, and the furthest thing from his mind was doubtless the possibility that the old man might attack him.

Which is exactly what happened!

Just as he unlatched the gate, Lukor and Tomar hurled themselves against it. The wooden gate slammed open, knocking Cadj sprawling. It was so unexpected that, save for one startled squawk of surprise, the guard did not even voice an alarm before Lukor hurled himself upon him, and slit his throat with the stone knife. The other guard uttered a bubbling groan and relaxed even as the first man, curled sleepily in his skins, was struggling to his feet. Tomar and I were upon him in the same instant. The boy kicked him in the stomach as he got halfway to his feet and Brokar fell to his knees gagging and gasping for breath. Before he could do anything I knocked him cold with a karate-chop to the nape of the neck and he fell forward on his face, out cold.

In complete silence we bundled the two in their furs, closed and latched the gate behind us, snatched up their flint-tipped spears, and ran for the edge of the jungle. I suppose we should have knifed Brokar as well as his comrade, but I am too squeamish to kill a man in cold blood and even Lukor, pragmatic old rascal that he is, was too innately chivalrous to do the deed. But with any luck we should be miles deep into the woods before anyone discovered our absence.

One last thing I had taken with me, and that purely through the sudden impulse of the moment. I seized up the bundle of manuscript I had worked on during our imprisonment, to relieve the tedium. I kept it neatly bundled in a scrap of hide, together with my pens and quantity of the black powder from which I manufactured my crude, homemade ink, which was tied in a twist of leather. I don’t know exactly what possessed me to salvage the manuscript from our cave. Perhaps it suddenly occurred to me that it would be unwise to leave behind any clue by which the Mind Wizards might be able to ascertain my identity. Whether or not they knew I had come hither from a distant world I could not be sure, but it seemed unwise to chance it.

We raced through the light of the many moons, out of the narrow vale without discovery, and through the hills. Ahead of us loomed the black-and-scarlet wall that marked the beginning of the jungles. Lukor had passed to me our precious flint-bladed knife: thus it was that I clenched the small weapon Ylana had given to us in my right hand as we covered the last few yards that stretched between the rocky, barren region and the edge of the dense jungles.

And thus it was that in the same instant a gaunt, monstrous figure stepped suddenly from the gloom of the jungle’s verge to block my path I drove the dagger, swift as thought, directly at its breast to pierce its heart

In the same instant Lukor behind me cried out―

“Koja!”

Chapter 15 The Last Farewell

It was indeed Koja who blocked my path, although I recognized the familiar casque-like face and blackly-glittering compound eyes of the faithful fellow a fraction of a second too late to halt or to turn aside my dagger.

Had it been any other than the mighty Yathoon, he would have died in the next few moments, his loyal heart transfixed by my keen-bladed knife. But thank God it was Koja and not one of the human inhabitants of Thanator, for Koja is a Yathoon, and the Yathoon are arthropods-insectoid creatures, whose gaunt bodies are sheathed in crab-like chitin. The slick, horny integument armored his breast as might some cuirass, and thus my blade as it struck his bosom, glanced aside, inflicting no hurt and merely scoring a long scratch on his tough chitin-clad breast.

We halted there in the gloom of the jungle’s edge, Koja solemnly assuring me he had taken no harm from my involuntary blow. I was shaking like a leaf from nervous reaction. Again I thank God it was Ylana’s little knife I had held, and not one of the long spears we had taken from the guards. I can think of few fates more horrible than to be the inadvertent cause of the death of a friend, and Koja had been the first creature on all Callisto to give me his friendship.

“My-dear-old-friend!” Lukor gasped, clapping the giant insectoid in an impulsive embrace, “we―why, we thought you dead, days ago―drowned in the lake―”

“As Jandar would say, `I yet live,’ ” the expressionless Yathoon said in his uninflected metallic voice. It was the nearest thing to a joke I could ever recall the humorless great creature having said, and I regret I was still too shaky from having almost slain him to laugh.

“But what happened to you―how come you here?” Lukor burbled. There were tears in his eyes and he kept touching Koja repeatedly, giving him little taps and affectionate slaps on the back as if to reassure himself the gaunt giant was real and solid and not the Callistan equivalent of a ghost.

“We of the Horde cannot swim,” Koja explained simply, “so after I rose to the surface, I clung to the wreckage of the skiff which of course could not sink, as one pontoon was still filled with gas. It seemed to take forever before we drifted ashore, but eventually the skiff beached itself on the sand, evidently at some considerable distance around the curve of the lake from where you yourselves emerged from the waters. I arrived at the place where you had apparently made a fire after you had already departed down the shore towards the east, and have been tracking you ever since.”

“Oh, Koja,” Tomar cried, “we searched and searched for you, ever so far up the shore, truly we did!”

Koja flexed his brow-antennae in the Yathoon equivalent of a shrug.

“I know you did, little one, for I saw your footprints in the mud. And by the same markings I followed your path easterly around the curve of the lake until you evidently were attacked by the monster lizard―”

“The groack,” I said, nodding.

“Is that what they are called? Well, anyway, from the mark of many feet upon the ground, and the arrows left in the body of the monster, I deduced you had been seized by a war-party and since then I have been following your trail through the jungles. I have been lurking about for some days in this place, trying to discover where you were being kept prisoner, and, having once ascertained that fact, trying to figure out some method of setting you free. You can imagine my surprise, just now, to watch as you freed yourselves by some ruse and came fleeing exactly towards the place where I stood concealed, spying upon the cave-village.”

“It’s wonderful to see you alive and well, Koja, old friend,” I said, “but we had better continue the explanations later. Right now we should be putting as much distance as possible between ourselves and the jungle men, who will be hot on our trail as soon as they discover we are missing.”

Koja solemnly agreed as to the wisdom of this, and led us off into the jungle. It was dark as pitch once we were deeply within the jungle and the boughs had woven together above our heads into an impenetrable screen of foliage through which only an infrequent and fugitive wisp of moonlight managed to filter. But the great many-faceted eyes of the Yathoon arthropods can see far better in the darkness than can our relatively feeble human organs of vision, and we followed his lead, covering ground far swifter and easier than we could possibly have done alone and without his aid.

The Yathoon are superb huntsmen, and I have elsewhere noted they have remarkable powers of observation. The big fellow led us unerringly through the tangle of jungle paths and by dawn we had penetrated quite deeply into the central regions of the jungle-clad plateau. By now, I had no doubt, the jungle men had discovered the slain guard and the fact that we had escaped; also by now the Mind Wizards would have arrived at the cave village to examine us. It yet remained to be seen whether or not Xangan and his warriors would attempt to track us down. There was a good chance that they might not even try … after all, the plateau covered an enormous expanse, and was mostly jungle, and we could be anywhere by this time. Still, I thought it likely that they would be on our trail.

Our problem was, quite simply, that we had nowhere to go. Unless we tried to reach the edge of the plateau, and then attempted to climb down the sheer cliff and somehow escape into the mountains, we could only hide in the jungle. Lukor broached the subject of the River People, whose territory to the east we had been attempting to reach when Xangan’s party had intercepted us. This, we decided, was a dubious refuge at best; at worst, it might be a trap. For, if only two primitive tribes shared the jungle plateau between them, and one of these lay under the thumb of the Mind Wizards, could the second tribe have escaped the same dominance? By now, it was at least possible, war-parties of the River People might be searching for us, as well.

Koja then voiced an idea which seemed the most promising of the few alternatives open to us. Surely the armada would be searching for us, or for Koja and Lukor, at least, knowing they could not have flown very far in the skiff. The Jalathadar of the Xaxar might in fact be cruising overhead at that very moment. If that were so, they could neither see us nor we them, due to the dense jungle foliage. He therefore suggested we take the shortest route to the shores of the Cor-Az, for there in the open we had the best chance of spotting one of the vessels of the armada or of ourselves being noticed by our friends who would certainly be searching the landscape beneath their keel with sharp eyes, alert for any sign of us.

“The wrecked skiff, at least, should easily be seen and noticed from above,” Koja said. “I dragged it well up out of reach of the waves, and arranged the one wing left intact so that it stands out, throwing a prominent shadow whose regularity should draw the attention of our friends aloft. It is there beside the skiff, if anywhere, we are most likely to be seen.”

“Makes sense, I suppose,” Lukor said. Then, clearing his throat, he ventured: “But is it likely the armada is still cruising about near here? Surely they would have scanned the plateau region many days ago, and, having found us not, have either widened their search into more distant regions, or, I fear, given up the search entirely by now, resuming the postponed expedition against Kuur.”

Koja regarded him owlishly.

“There is logic in what you say, friend Lukor, but I can think of no plan with better chances of success.”

Nor could any of us, so we decided upon Koja’s plan then and there.

By mid-morn we reached the lake-shore and Koja led us unerringly to the remains of the skiff. As he had pointed out, it certainly made an unmistakable marker on the beach, whose surface was otherwise smooth and empty in either direction. We searched the skies until our necks ached, but, alas, the heavens were as empty as the beach.

“If our friends have not abandoned the search, they must have left the vicinity of the plateau or surely we could see the ships,” Koja admitted somberly. “Lukor was correct, and I am guilty of wishful thinking.”

“I wonder,” Tomar spoke up unexpectedly. The boy felt himself very much the junior member of our little band, and seldom voiced an opinion, as if hesitant to intrude on the councils of his elders. We encouraged him to explain himself, so he added: “They may have flown on to search the mountains surrounding this plateau … but doesn’t it seem likely they will be coming back this way for one final look before sailing on to Kuur?”

We agreed there was much in what he said, and decided to wait a while before attempting to circumnavigate the Cor-Az and find our way down the cliffs. The hours dragged by at a dreary pace, and I passed the time by writing these last few pages in my journal, since I had impulsively carried the manuscript and my writing materials along with me when making the escape from the jungle men. It has occurred to me that even if we do decide to move on before the armada returns to the vicinity of the Great Lake for one last look around, I might be wise to bury the manuscript beneath some sort of marker which would catch the eye of our friends. Pursuant to this notion, Tomar gathered for me from further up the shore a quantity of stones from which we could hastily build a cairn to make the hiding place.

Towards late afternoon a peculiar grunting cry, deep-throated and guttural, came to our ears. Koja listened to it for a time before deciding that it was coming nearer.

“They are hunting us with othodes,” he said in his metallic expressionless voice.

Othodes are husky, burly brutes about the size of bull-mastiffs, whom they rather roughly resemble if you can overlook their six short, stumpy legs, remarkable purple hide, and ugly neckless head whose principal features are goggling eyes and a froglike gash of a mouth that stretches from ear to ear and from which blunt, powerful tusks protrude. They hunt in packs in their wild state and are ferocious, intelligent beasts whom certain of the nations of Thanator domesticate and use as we Earthlings use hunting-dogs.

I had never before chanced to hear the hoarse, grunting cry of othodes, but I did not care to dispute Koja’s judgment in the matter.

So the jungle men were on our track, after all! Well, I had feared as much. And there was nothing we could do but attempt to elude recapture as long as possible. Luckily, night was about to fall, which ought to help us a little.

And now it occurred to us to curse our lack of foresight. If we had hit upon the idea earlier in the day, we might have cobbled together a crude sort of raft from fallen tree-trunks and jungle vines, and poled out into the lake, putting miles of water between us and the vengeful savages who now pursued us. True, the Cor-Az was probably the lair of more than one such monster reptile as the groack which had attacked us many days ago, but with a modicum of luck we might have gotten across the lake by now and be climbing down the cliff-like side of the plateau before Xangan and his cohorts had any idea of our whereabouts.

Well, it was too late now to try it, for the jungle men were getting closer with every moment, and I have

never seen the sense in crying over spilt milk! The best thing to do would be to strike off into the jungle and lead our pursuers as far away from the wreckage of the skiff as possible. And to elude capture until daylight, if we possibly can.

Night has just fallen with that swift, sudden extinguishing of light that makes the coming of darkness so remarkable here on Callisto. I am hastily scribbling down these last few lines by the bewildering, many-colored moonlight as Tomar and Koja and Lukor are bundling up our few possessions, ready to flee into the jungles.

In just a moment I will place this final sheet together with the rest of the manuscript in the hole Tomar has dug, and we will pile the stones he gathered upon it, making a tall cairn or marker which we hope will catch the eye of any of our friends who may fly over the shore for one last look before going on to Kuur.

Perhaps it would have been wiser had I written this narrative in the Thanatorian characters, rather than in English. But, surely, any of you who notice the cairn, and land to investigate, and dig up the cache, will recognize the manuscript for what it is. Luckily, Zastro, the old sage or savant of the Ku Thad, is among you; he is the only being on all this Jungle Moon who can read and understand the English language, save myself. I know this, for I have been his tutor in my native tongue, and he has proved a brilliant student.

It is to him, then, that I must address these last words. They must be few, for the eager baying of the othodes is growing nearer and nearer, and my companions are ready to depart and are anxious to be gone.

Zastro―if indeed you ever read these words―know that we are heading due northwest into the jungle, and then intend to angle off directly west to the very edge of the plateau, where we hope to find a way down the cliff and may perhaps lose ourselves in the mountain-country. If we can at all do so, it is our intention―as of right now―to find our way back to the range of peaks which Ylana called the “Mountains of the Zarkoon.” The only landmark known to us is the great crater-like hole in the flank of one of these peaks, the hole which leads into the cavern-world of the birdmen.

It will of course be dangerous for us to lurk very long in the vicinity of the entrance to the subterranean lair of the Zarkoon, but somewhere on that slope, in an open place, look for another cairn like the one under which you found this manuscript. There I plan to deposit further instructions as to the direction in which we will be traveling, if indeed we are not seized by the Zarkoon themselves, or fall prey to some other monstrous and unexpected peril.

Very soon now we shall leave this place, leading the jungle men as far away from the wreckage of the skiff and the cairn we will have built above this hidden manuscript as we can do. Koja plans to return to a point further up the jungle trail by which we came here, and then to strike off anew into the west. He hopes by this stratagem to confuse the othodes, to mix our trails, leading them away from the skiff, in order to prevent them from discovering the cairn and, perhaps, destroying or carrying off this manuscript.

Only you will know for certain if our plan succeeds! For if you find this manuscript and are reading these words, then our trick will have worked and we will have succeeded in leading our pursuers astray.

Look for a similar cairn on a flat, open space near the entrance to the cavern of the Zarkoon.

If you do not find it, then that will mean we were either recaptured by the jungle men before escaping from the plateau, or fell victim to some predator or catastrophe on our way to the mountains.

And if we are recaptured, the chances are very great that we will be taken into Kuur itself as prisoners of the Mind Wizards. Surely they will want to drain every bit of information from us they possibly can, before slaying us.

As it is possible I will be dead or a slave in Kuur shortly after you read these words, we may never see each other again. It is difficult for me to realize that my long adventure perhaps ends here. To all my friends and comrades, I say―farewell!

To my beloved princess―farewell, my beloved! I love you with all my heart. My last thought in this life will be of you. The last word I will speak with my dying breath will be your lovely name.

And to our child, whom I may never see again, whom I may never watch grow to proud manhood―farewell, Kaldar, my son! Grow strong and manly―make your mother as proud of you as I would be, were I there by your side!

And never give up hope until you have proof of my death.

For I yet live. And while I live―I have hope.