Thunder Jim Wade

by Henry Kuttner

  Wade’s hands were manacled behind his back. First of all, he rolled onto his back and doubled up his legs, knees under his chin. Without much difficulty he slipped his manacled hands over his feet, so that they were no longer chained awkwardly behind his back. A chain still bound them to his ankle-fetters, but by keeping his knees bent he could get slack.

  The bronze could not be cut or broken easily, especially without lever or chisel. But the cuffs might be slipped off, over Wade’s hands. Until his hands were free, anyway, he could do little. But at least he could escape from his fetters. That wouldn’t get him out of the Labyrinth, of course, yet it would decrease his handicaps.

  Skin tore from his knuckles as he worked the cuffs free. Even for his trained, limber agility it was difficult. But it could be done.

  It was done! Wade’s hands were free now! Without hesitation he began to work on his leg irons. They could not be slipped off like the wrist cuffs. The locks must be picked.

  Miggs could have done the job no sooner. Within five minutes Wade was free, and stood up, stretching his lean body. His stiff joints cracked audibly. He stared around.

  No sound—nothing. What was the next step? A weapon?

  He had one. The chains. They could make a formidable mace, and Wade carried them dangling from one hand as he moved noiselessly toward the source of the dim light. His sandals made no sound on the stone.

  He rounded a bend of the corridor. A lamp glowed high up on the wall, on a shelf placed out of reach of any prisoner. The corridor branched here into three forks, with lamps placed at intervals along all of them. The labyrinth—the maze from which no one ever escaped, and in which all the passages led toward the center—the lair of the Minotaur.

  Faintly, from far away, came a whisper of sound. It grew louder, echoing through the tunnels till it roared out ominously.

  It was the deep-throated, ominous bellow of a bull.

  As it died another noise came, a muffled thunder Wade did not recognize. It was like the beating of an incredibly huge drum.

  His fingers tightened on the bronze chains. He froze into a statue, still listening.

  And now he heard water—rushing, tumultuous.

  It seemed to come from the left-hand corridor. On impulse, Wade hurried into and along it. The lamps recurred at frequent intervals. He had not walked more than a few minutes before the tunnel branched; the muffled roar of a torrent sounded from the right-hand fork this time. It seemed close.

  IT was close. The passage ended at an underground river that tumbled along swiftly to vanish into a gaping hole in the rock wall. The road stopped here, Wade realized, and with a shrug turned to retrace his steps.

  He had passed the first fork when he heard the bull’s bellow again. It was much louder this time. Louder, too, was the hollow thunder of a drum.

  Far down the tunnel, a monstrous figure raced into view. It was a man with the horned, malformed head of a bull.

  A priest! So this was part of the Labyrinth’s secret—a priest with a bull’s mask! The man paused at sight of Wade, and lifted a trumpet to his lips. From it came a roaring, piercing bellow.

  For answer there was a thundering rattle of drums. In the priest’s wake sounded a clashing of hoofs. Around a bend of the corridor came pouring—bulls!

  They filled the passage completely, a raging, horned flood that bore down relentlessly upon the priest, who seemed unconscious of his danger. He raised the trumpet to his lips and blew again. The drumming was a clashing roar now.

  So this was the secret! A herd of fierce bulls, trained to kill at the priest’s command! In the bare passages of the Labyrinth few men could escape the beasts’ charge.

  The priest was armed, nevertheless, Wade saw. He carried a javelin, and there was a knife at his side. The blind, weird mask of the bull glared balefully at its victim. Again the trumpet simulated a bellow.

  The herd thundered on. But they did not harm the priest. They split to right and left about him, as a stream splits on a room, and bore down on Wade, a welter of tossing horns and clashing hoofs. The thunder of their passage roared back deafeningly from the walls.

  There was no possible hiding-place, no niche in the rock where Wade might take shelter. He thought of the underground river. If he could get back to that and hurl himself into it—

  Then, with flashing suddenness, a plan came into his mind. It was desperate enough to seem almost completely hopeless, but not quite. And if it succeeded, triumph might be snatched out of disaster.

  It meant killing the priest, first of all!

  The bulls came on. There must be a hundred of them, at least, Wade judged. They crammed the passage to the walls, squeezed so closely together that no man could have lived or kept his footing among them.

  But upon them!

  It would be like trying to cross a river on ice-floes! But there was no time to consider danger now, or the possibility of failure. There was just sufficient time to race forward toward that avalanche of horned death, gather every ounce of strength for a straining, desperate leap.

  High in the air Wade flung himself, while the first wave of the herd crashed beneath him. He came down precariously on a swaying, shaggy back, felt himself falling, and leaped again before he could be shaken off his insecure footing. Horns swung viciously, menacing him from all sides. But the bulls had lost sight of Wade momentarily, and the impetus of their savage charge carried them on.

  Once, in Wyoming, in the United States, Jim Wade had known an old-time stage-coach driver who had been famous for his handling of bullock-drawn wagons. Old Cyram Haggart, cracking his whip, would spring up and race along the backs of the bulls, springing lightly from one to another.

  It could be done. And now, in the narrow tunnel, the beasts were jammed so closely together that Wade could not have fallen between them had he tried.

  His years of acrobatic training carried him safely through the menace of the sharp, swinging horns. The real danger lay in pausing, even for a moment. He flung himself forward atop the surging mass of the bulls.

  Chapter XIV

  Out of the Jaws of Death

  ON THE bulls came, pouring into the left-hand fork of the passage. Wade hurled himself forward in desperate leaps, the bronze chains gathered into a ball about his fist. And suddenly, incredibly, the last of the herd fled past him—under him—and he sprang down to the floor of the corridor, hazy with the dust-clouds raised by innumerable sharp hoofs.

  Only the priest faced him. The weird figure was running forward, javelin raised. The bull-mask lay discarded on the stones. Its purpose served, it was only an encumbrance now. The swarthy, ferocious face that had been beneath it was twisted into a snarl of hatred.

  Caught off balance, Wade hurled the balled, heavy mass of bronze chain he held in one hand. Simultaneously the javelin flashed at him, ripping flesh from his shoulder as he fell.

  Instantly he was on his feet, waiting for the priest to attack with drawn knife. But the man did not come. He was lying motionless, his face a bloody, crimson mask where the bronze missile had crashed through flesh and bone.

  He was dead. The thin temporal bone had been broken, and the Minotaur’s priest lay silent and still in his Labyrinth. From the distance the pounding of hoofs beat a requiem.

  Wade’s eyes were cold. He took the priest’s knife, found the trumpet, and placed it to his lips. He blew a shattering, peremptory bellow.

  That done, he placed the bull-mask upon his own head. It was merely a light framework, not uncomfortable, and he could see through eye-slits cut in the hairy throat.

  Would the bulls obey him? The mask and the horn seemed the vital things—the horn to lead the herd to attack, the mask to safeguard its owner.

  Wade went down the right-hand fork of the Labyrinth until he was near the river. It must mingle its waters with the Argo, but probably it flowed underground for some distance before the juncture. Yet the larger stream was not far from the Labyrinth. On that realization Wade based his hopes—on that, and t
he supposition that the bulls were trained to blind obedience.

  He saw them come plunging into the main tunnel, and blew his trumpet again. The herd turned and came at him. He waited until they were uncomfortably close, then dropped the horn from his lips and raced before them.

  The brink of the river loomed at his feet. Without hesitation Wade leaped out over the rushing water. The icy shock of its cold numbed him. He came up gasping for air, saw the black gap in the wall rushing toward him, and realized that the bulls were following.

  Trained to blind obedience—yes! The herd did not hesitate. The great beasts came pouring along the tunnel, over the brink, into the stream.

  Blackness swallowed Wade. He clung desperately to the trumpet. He might need that. Would the bull-mask stay in place? As he wondered, it was torn away, and he saved it only by a blind clutch in the dark.

  Gripping the mask with one hand and the trumpet in the other, he went spinning and tumbling through the Stygian gloom, the roar of the torrent a deafening thunder in his ears, the snorting and bellowing of the bulls all about him.

  ABRUPTLY sunlight flamed above. The stream spewed Wade out into a broad, swift-flowing river under a precipitous cliff. The Argo!

  He was borne downstream. The huge statue of the Minotaur was visible in the distance, then gone as he drifted along into the pass that led to the larger valley. The surface of the water was alive with tossing heads and churning hoofs. The snorting of the bulls mingled with their bellows.

  Wade chanced a glance at his watch. Far past noon. The attacking army had arrived at Minos, and perhaps were already in the city. Unless the defenders, guided by Red and Dirk, had held them off for awhile.

  Cliffs rose to the left, broken by ravines that led up to the plateau on which Minos stood. Presently Wade glimpsed the long wall of the city ahead, rising like a precipice above the river. Instantly he sounded the trumpet, donned the bull-mask, and struck out for the east shore.

  The bulls followed, splashing and churning. They were trained from calfhood to obey that sound, and to follow the priest who wore the Minotaur mask. Now they swam toward the figure of Wade who stood on the bank, the trumpet at his lips.

  Gunfire crackled in a staccato outburst from far away. Wade glanced up. No sign of the Thunderbug. It was still disabled, then.

  He had landed at the foot of a broad gulch that ran up at a steep angle to the plain above. Now he turned and raced along it. The bulls were landing, stretched out in a long curve across the river. There were still nearly a hundred.

  But they were the strongest of their species, chosen for power and ferocity and trained to kill with raging fury. All the better! Wade’s eyes were cold as he fled up the gulley, the Minotaur’s herd thundering at his heels.

  The crash of dynamite boomed out from above, and then the roar of toppling masonry. The wall of Minos had fallen!

  Wade felt a shock of apprehension. Was he too late? If the hordes of Yaton burst into the city before he arrived with his terrible army, he would fail. With an effort that brought twinges of pain to his tired legs, he spurred himself over the last few yards of the ravine. He came out on the plateau, the great plain that spread before Minos wall.

  Parallel to the gulley, on his right, the rampart stretched from the river eastward across the valley. Atop it were the soldiers of king-priest Cardoth, armed, Wade saw, with guns as well as with their own weapons. Red Argyle’s flaming head shone burnished beyond the gate. He held a submachine-gun that stuttered out death. Dirk Marat was not visible to Wade.

  But the wall had fallen. A great gap had been breached in it, and dust clouds were still rising like a pallid pall. Drawn back out of spear range were Yaton’s soldiers.

  There were at least six hundred, Wade saw. Few of them were mounted. Horses had almost died out of the lost valley in the centuries since they had been brought in from the outer world. But the three leaders—Yaton and Quester and Duke Solent—rode steeds, as did a few others.

  The army, Wade thought, had drawn back out of range, while the wall was being dynamited. Mostly the attackers were composed of Minoan priests and soldiers. There were only a score of Solent’s imported killers. But of guns, grenades, rifles and pistols there was no lack. The natives carried them, as did their allies.

  BEYOND the fallen pile of rubble and masonry that marked the breach in the wall the defenders were gathering, many of them, but armed chiefly with spears and swords and bows, useless against modern guns. The Thunderbug’s arsenal was not large. When the invaders poured in through the gap, blasting a path with grenades and machine-gun fire, nothing could stop them. They would be in Minos—and the city would be lost!

  But for a brief moment the attackers waited, ready for the charge. In that second Wade raised the trumpet to the gaping mouth of his mask, and the roaring bellow of a bull boomed out over the plain!

  Every eye turned toward him. And what the Minoans saw was fantastic enough. On the edge of the plateau stood a man in the garb of a priest, with the hairy, horned head of a bull. It was the Man-Bull—the Minotaur!

  And out of the gulley, pouring past Wade, spawned as though from the depths of the earth like the soldiers Cadmus made by sowing the dragon’s teeth, came horned and terrible beings—the bulls that served the Minotaur! Excited and enraged by their swim, dripping with river water, eyes blazing, the herd thundered past Wade. Dust rose in great clouds from their clashing hoofs. Their horns tossed and gleamed in the hot sunlight.

  Bulls, chosen for their strength, trained to kill ferociously at the command of their master—the bulls of the Labyrinth thundered down on the attacking army!

  They had been searching for their prey, puzzled by its vanishing when Wade had escaped them. Now the roaring blast of the trumpet sounded in their ears, the familiar figure of the Minotaur had led them to this place—and before them were men! Men, to them, meant victims. Victims to be trampled and gored and slain.

  Like an avalanche the hundred bulls swept across the plain!

  They had not far to go. Erratic gunfire broke out from Solent’s men. But the Minoans, priests and soldiers alike, reacted in an entirely different way. Yaton’s scheme had rebounded to his own ruin. The superstitious natives remembered their high priest’s words:

  “The Minotaur aids us….”

  Was this the Minotaur’s aid? No, rather his vengeance! The god of the lost valley had taken sides with Cardoth, king-priest of Minos!

  A concerted attack might have turned the bulls or stopped their charge. Even Solent and his men, alone, might have done it with their guns. But the ranks of Minoans broke in frantic, terrified confusion. They were faced with the avenging figure of their god, and the concrete weapon of his vengeance. They forgot the new, deadly weapons that had been given them. They forgot their own words and spears. Mad with fear they broke ranks and were lost!

  THE scene exploded into a blind blur of action. Dust rose up in a gray, whirling pillar, a cloud that hung over the milling army. The three leaders, yelling commands, were caught in the maelstrom, their voices lost in the confusion of shouts and screams, the shrilling of horses, the bellowing of the bulls and the clashing pound of their hoofs.

  Into the edge of the army the herd drove like a wedge. The bulls knowing nothing but to kill, went mad with blood-lust. They gored savagely, charging like thunderbolts through the mass of surging, leaderless men.

  From the wall came gunfire, vicious and deadly. Red Argyle had marshaled his men into a competent fighting force. The defenders were picking off targets with painstaking care, concentrating, Wade saw, upon Solent’s men.

  The renegade Minoans were already broken. They were scattering across the plain, fleeing in a panic of superstitious fear. But many of the bulls were down now, killed by well placed bullets.

  Yaton yelled futile commands. Abruptly Wade saw the priest’s horse rear, terrified by the smell of blood or by the confusion. Yaton was flung off, a shrill scream breaking from his lips as he went down.

  He did n
ot touch the ground. A huge black monster of a bull was under him. Yaton’s scream rose still higher as the sharp horns pierced through his body. Then he slipped off the ground, and the bull’s head lowered as it snorted and gored savagely at its victim.

  The priest’s army was scattered, fleeing across the plain, pursued by the raging bulls. Only Solent’s men remained. Wade, crouching in concealment at the gulley’s head, saw a gaunt, bald-headed figure break from the group and race toward him. It was Quester.

  “Trying to get away,” Wade thought. “He hasn’t seen me.”

  But he slipped back into the ravine, crouching behind a rock, though it offered little concealment. Still, there was no other place to hide.

  He took the bull-mask from his head, drew the knife he had won from the priest in the Labyrinth, and waited. Distantly the crackle of gunfire grew fainter. But now there came the sound of thudding feet, louder and louder.

  Chapter XV

  Vengeance of the Minotaur

  QUESTER burst into view, face shining with sweat, blood smearing his bald head. His clothing was in rags. He held an automatic in one hand, and swung it up instantly as he caught sight of Wade. His lips twisted in a screaming oath.

  Thunder Jim flung the mask. It made a good missile, light, but bulky. For a second it distracted Quester—enough to make his bullet go wide of its mark. Then Wade, gripping his knife, had launched himself over the boulder and was diving at his opponent.

  Again the gun blazed, the flash of its explosion blinding Wade. He felt a sickening agony tear along his side.

  “Rib broken,” he thought, and his clenched fist felt a thudding shock.

  For a second the tableau held, breathless and immobile. Wade realized that his knife was sunk to the hilt in Quester’s chest. Instinctively he ducked aside the gun as the dying man’s trigger finger sought to contract. But there was no shot.

  Quester’s mouth gaped open, as though he sought for breath.

  “Thunder Jim!” he said, in a soft, oddly surprised voice.