Young Thongor

by Adrian Cole, Lin Carter

  Then he and the survivors of his band had been sold on the block like animals. Arzang Pome had chained the Valkarthan and his bandits to the oars of the slave-galleys of Shembis, and long did they toil under the singing whips in the blazing sun while the hated Dolphin banner floated lazily overhead and the perfumed merchant-captain who was their master sipped cold wine and fondled his wench under striped awnings while they broke their backs at the oars. Then one hot night they rose with naked hands and broken oars to slay and slay in red, roaring rage—stealing the very galley on which they had slaved—and off to the high seas, to join the fierce corsairs of Tarakus the Pirate City, and to learn a new trade. But piracy was close akin to banditry, and thus Thongor and his comrades had risen in the past two years to a high rank amid the corsair fleet.

  It was the dying whisper of an old veteran sailor they had rescued from execution in Cadorna that had put them on the track of the fabulous treasure of the isle of Zosk, deep in the uncharted wastes of the sea. Somewhere in those black jungles a fortune in flame pearls lay hid—“in the place of the great stones” the old sailor had said.

  And then Thongor came upon it, stark and cold and dead in the flood of the golden Moon.

  The young barbarian came to a sudden halt there at the edge of the jungle. He stared ahead, his blood racing with the thrill of discovery. Was this the ‘place of the great stones’ the dying sailor had spoken of? A few yards from where he crouched in the thick brush, the jungle dwindled away to a rocky plain. The ground fell away beyond, in an immense, circular valley like a vast bowl cut in the rock. Tumbled stone slabs lay about: broken spires of rock loomed and tilted, for all the world like the shattered pillars of some dead, ruined city of time’s dawn. Here and there, tremendous blocks of stone lay tumbled, as if scattered about by the careless hands of playful giants.

  Thongor searched the wilderness of broken, scattered stone with thoughtful eyes. Surely, this must be the place the old sailor had whispered of. But was it a thing of nature, or the work of men? The monolith he had come upon in the jungle had been cut and set by human hands…and the regularity of these stones was haunted by an uncanny suggestion of human purpose and workmanship.

  He went down into the valley and prowled the silent avenues of somber desolation. No sign of life alerted his keen senses. If men had ever dwelt here, they were long vanished. No smoke of cooking fires ascended the moonlit sky, no footstep echoed down the empty avenues of tumbled stone, no human rubbish caught his searching gaze, not a shard of broken pottery, a discarded rag, or the ashes of a dead fire. It was like a city of death, this waste of broken rock: like the gaunt bones of a dead metropolis, eerie and silent and empty in the wash of moonlight, and if anything wandered here, they were ghosts of the long-dead past.

  Amidst the trackless ruin, he came upon the pool the old sailor had spoken of. A motionless disc of dark waters, impenetrable to the eye, ringed about with a lip of stone. This surely was the work of men, for the pool formed a perfect circle and the stone margin was cut and dressed and smoothed by skill and not by nature.

  In the center of the pool, a stone pillar rose against a tropic sky filled with blazing stars. It was like the monolith he had found in the jungle, and yet different, too. For thirty feet the stone pillar loomed up in the moonlight, tall and straight as an obelisk, but rough-hewn and jagged, and it bore no glyphs that he could see. All about the motionless pool stretched a plaza of tumbled, uneven stone slabs. Thongor crossed the plaza with silent tread and knelt by the edge of the pool, dipping one hand within.

  The water was cold and foul, scummy and stagnant, but his hand came up filled with dripping pearls. They were slick and moon-like, with a sullen glow of fire in their sheen and rondure. Flame pearls of Cadorna—he knew them at a glance—of superb and perfect water and extraordinary size!

  He held a satrap’s ransom in his hand. And the wealth of a dozen emperors slept still beneath the dark waters. A smile lit his somber features. The buccaneer scooped up handful after handful of flame pearls from the black pool, admiring their glistening fire in the cold moonlight. Entranced, he stared down at the wet pearls in his hand. They glowed like little moons.

  Then a deep-chested snarl reached his ear—the scrape of callused bare feet on dry stone. He sprang to his feet, thrusting the dripping handful of pearls in the top of his swash sea-boots, and turned.

  And then the savages were upon him, a herd of snarling, naked beast-men, broken tusks bared and bloodlust burning in their slitted eyes. The very earth spewed them up: from dark lairs under the tilted slabs of the plaza they came. Troglodytes—cave dwellers! He knew then why he had found no token of human habitation in all these acres of immemorial desolation. And they were upon him, heavy bodies hurled at his back, hard paws clutching his arms, fangs snapping at his very throat.

  5

  Red Steel!

  The young buccaneer shook the hairy-pelted savages from him as the kingly vandar of the jungle shakes off a pack of dogs. He drove his booted heel deep in the belly of one snarling foe: the beast-thing grunted, folded and fell.

  Then the great broadsword, Sarkozan, was free of its scabbard and singing its cold and eerie song of death as it cut the wind. There were old runes acid-etched down the length of the long, deep blade, and the great gem set in the pommel blazed like an angry eye. The broadsword flashed, a brilliant steel mirror in the Moon, as Thongor whipped it high over his head and brought it whistling down to bite through brain and bone and meat. The clean steel glittered once and when he drew it back, it was washed with red.

  For a time he held them, sweeping the great sword in a tireless arc. They feared the cold flash of the edged steel as a witch fears silver. He held them at bay, but they came at him in twos and threes, bounding like jackals, fangs snapping hungrily for his flesh. The Valkarthan at first thought them savages, then beasts, finally men. They went naked like brutes, but walked upright like men. They had hulking, anthropoid bodies, sloping ape-like shoulders, and long arms, knotted with bulging sinews, that hung dangling to their knees. Their heads were bullet-like, sunken deep in massive shoulders, hidden in a tangle of filthy, matted hair through which slitted eyes gleamed redly with mad fires.

  But their thick torsos and bowed legs bore but a sparse pelt. The hide that showed bare between patches of stringy fur was the hue of dirty amber and their blazing eyes were aslant, as far as he could judge. The young buccaneer knew but one nation in all Lemuria with tawny amber skin and slanted eyes—the men of ancient Cadorna, westernmost of all the cities of Lemuria. Could these snarling, shambling, loping beast-things be the degenerate remnants of a lost Cadornyana colony, forgotten for ages?

  Perhaps. But he had no time to puzzle it out now. He was too busy merely staying alive. They came at him like mad dogs and he cut them down with singing red steel till they heaped the stone margin of the pool with their gore-splashed bodies. Eight, ten, a dozen he slaughtered, but it was only a matter of time until they swarmed over him, battered him down, dragged him to earth under the sheer weight of their numbers.

  Now he wished he had not come down alone into the great bowl-like valley, but had gone back to camp as he should have done. O, to have a stout dozen of his brawling buccaneers at his back, with dirk and cutlass and scimitar! But it was too late for recriminations now. He fought on, but now even his iron thews ached with weariness and the breath rasped in his dry throat. He blinked against the red mist that thickened before his gaze.

  Then one of the loping beast-things, perhaps less sunk in the red murk of savagery than its fellows, closer to the light of reason and manhood, saw in its cunning that it could not reach the hated man-thing through the wall of red and singing steel. So it squatted on the broken paving, plucked up a heavy shard of rock in one hairy paw, and flung it at Thongor with all the coiled strength of that ape-like arm.

  It caught the Valkarthan on the brow—a stunning blow. He lurched, staggered, fighting for consciousness, and the red sword sagged in suddenly nerveless f
ingers and fell, ringing against the stone pavement of the plaza like a stricken gong.

  Then they had him at last. A thickset body slammed into him, chest and belly, and drove him from his feet. In a flash the burly beast-thing was worrying at his throat. Thongor jammed one forearm under the creature’s jaw and held the snapping fangs away from his jugular. Fetid, stinking hot breath blew in his face. The naked, furry body was rank in his nostrils. Thick-fingered paws closed about his throat, throttling him. He grunted as another heavy body slammed on top of him, and another, until he was buried under a pack of snarling, clawing beast-things.

  His mind dimmed as he fought for breath. A haze thickened before his eyes; his lungs were afire; his heart labored within his breast. He fought for air and with ebbing strength to hold those snapping tusks away from his throat.

  Then a sharp, imperious voice called out from somewhere beyond the heap of beast-things. Thongor could not make out the words, for they were in a tongue unknown to him. But the crushing weight that pressed him against the broken stone slabs lessened and the iron grip loosened from about his neck. He gulped air into starved lungs as strong hands dragged him to his feet and bound his wrists behind his back with tight leather thongs that bit into numb flesh. Many men would have despaired then, taken captive by the shambling horde that infested the ancient ruins.

  It was not the way of Thongor to despair, but he stared into a grim future, knowing that his life could now be counted in hours; perhaps, in minutes.

  6

  Night Fears

  It was the grizzled old Thurdan warrior, Thad Novis, who was the first to become uneasy over Thongor’s prolonged absence. The old warrior had been a stalwart of Jorn’s Raiders when the boy Thongor had first joined the pack of bandits he would later chieftain. From the first, the oldest warrior had felt a paternal stirring in his breast as he saw the grim courage and iron strength and utter fearlessness the barbarian boy displayed. Thad Novis had followed his young leader from banditry into slavery, and from thence to a life of lawlessness and adventure on the high seas. His dogged loyalty had never wavered; now he prowled the perimeter of the camp, baffled and obscurely worried, peering into the moon-washed jungle with searching eyes.

  At length he sought out scrawny little Fulvio, who sprawled lazily against a log, nursing a fat wineskin.

  “Hell’s blood, man, what ails you?” Fulvio whined. “The chief can take care o’ himself better than any of us. Wait here, said he, and wait here we will. He’ll come back, in his good time. Sit—rest—take some wine!”

  The older man shook his head determinedly. “It’s not like the lad to be gone so long,” he growled. “He meant to scout a path around this swamp, not explore the stinking isle himself. Something has taken him, I know…perhaps the same Thing that took poor Kanthar Kan…”

  The words hung there in the air. Fulvio licked thin lips with a pointed tongue, and shivered as to a sudden gust of cold. Deep in his heart, the wizened little one-eyed rogue knew the stolid, loyal Thurdan spoke the truth. But the whining little Fulvio was reluctant to stir from this place of safety to plunge into the unknown and silent depths of the waiting jungle.

  Fear and loyalty wrestled within Fulvio’s scrawny breast. Self-love and the greed for gold were the only passions the little gutter-rat had ever known. But he, too, worshipped Thongor and went in awe of the mighty barbarian. Thongor was what he perhaps could have been, had he been nourished in the wintry wild among strong, stalwart men and noble-hearted courageous women; but Fate had given him a sniveling beggar for a father and a sluttish shrew for a mother, and the stinking back-alleys of the slums of Pelorm for his home.

  Fulvio was cowardly at heart, and vicious as only the cowardly can be. But in his heart, where fear wrestled with loyalty, he idolized the strong young buccaneer captain. And, for once, loyalty won out against a lifetime of twisted selfishness.

  Spitting vile curses, little Fulvio scrambled to his feet and snarled at the sprawled men of the landing party. “On your feet, you yellow-gutted whelps! We’re movin’ out, Gods help us. The Cap’n should of been back by now; something may have happened to ‘im.” He fixed the stolid old Thurdan with a venomous eye. “Gorm help you, grizzled old dog, if the Cap’n ain’t in need of us!”

  Thad Novis said nothing. Incapable of feeling the cold, sick gnaw of fear himself, he never knew what spark of true heroism he had stirred to fire in Fulvio’s breast.

  They fanned out when they hit the jungle, keeping well in earshot of each other. Blackness closed about little Fulvio like a clammy hand. Sweating and cursing foully under his breath, the little rogue limped along, lashing out at tangling vines and thorny branches with his cutlass as he went. It was one thing to follow such a man as Thongor into the black yawning maw of unknown peril; it was quite another to do it on your own volition.

  The jungle thickened about them, entangled boughs shutting out the rich floods of moonlight. Clumping along through wet darkness, Fulvio thought of the slithering, be-fanged things that perhaps lurked all about him in the night. He envisioned the landslide-rush of the deodath, the dreaded dragon-cat of the jungle countries. Cold dew dripped down his scrawny neck—or was it the numbing kiss of the fathla, the ghastly, blood-sucking tree-leeches of Chush and Kovia? A heavy vine swung overhead—or was it the horrible, man-crushing coils of the oph, the horned serpent of the tropic depths?

  Night-fears preyed upon him, nibbling away at the edges of his courage, sapping his resolution. But the little one-eyed rogue limped forward without pause, cursing himself for a foolhardy, reckless madman every long step of the way.

  They came to the stony monolith Thongor had discovered earlier, and paused, eyeing its enigmatic glyphs with shuddering apprehension. Dread shapes of night and terror were known to haunt old ruined cities—ghouls and morgulacs, as Lemurian legend named vampires, and prowling ghosts of the dead that could not rest.

  Thad Novis hefted his heavy scimitar uneasily. “Which way?” he asked.

  Fulvio gnawed his under-lip, glancing dubiously about. Here the jungle aisle parted, one lane wandering deep into the jungle’s black heart, the other striking away due east. It was in that direction Thongor had headed an hour before, but Fulvio could not know that.

  “Which way, Fulvio?” puffed a fat, moon-faced Kovian named Qualb. The others crowded near.

  Fulvio said nothing, chewing his lip in a torment of indecision. Which way? One path led to Thongor, who might even now be face to face with death; the other route led far from his peril, and if they followed it they would become lost in the black jungles of Zosk.

  Which way?

  7

  The Black Moon

  The beast-men staked Thongor out to die. They drove four pegs into the earth between the riven slabs of the plaza and bound his wrists and ankles to them with tough thongs. Spread-eagled, his sinews stretched to the limit of endurance, even the Valkarthan’s steely strength could not free him of his bonds.

  Jaws set grimly, Thongor waited for death.

  The leader of the horde of shambling degenerates paid his captive no attention. With the rapt, blind gaze of a fanatic or a madman he stared without blinking up into the cold fire of the golden Moon. He was unlike the grunting horde of savages he ruled: tall, slim, gaunt to the point of emaciation, his lean frame wrapped in tattered, filthy rags of what had once been the gorgeous ceremonial robes of an ancient priest.

  He stood on the top of a block of stone, staring beyond the black pool and the rough-hewn pylon of rock to the soaring Moon. His hair was a tangle of matted witch locks as it fell about the starved skull of his face. His eyes burned through the tangle like sick green fires. He was priest-king of the hulking, naked brutes, the last of a time-forgotten line. But he was only slightly more man than they. Beneath the gorgeous, filthy tatters his gaunt body was naked and unwashed. His feet were bare and black with filth. His grime-crusted hands, gaunt like terrible claws, clutched a rod of sleek black nebium, atop which a smoky crystal pulsed li
ke a dying coal.

  Thongor had seen black rods like his before, and he knew them for Rods of Power. He also knew the black, unholy sorcery men wrought with such relics of ancient wisdom, and his lips pressed together until they paled.

  With Thongor securely bound, the shambling beast-men withdrew grunting, squatting in a semi-circle behind the priest and the sacrifice. And the ceremony began…

  Scattered rags of cloud fled before the Moon, spreading its light in wandering shafts of cold fire that flickered eerily here and there over this weird scene of stony desolation. The wizard began talking to the half-hid Moon in guttural, clotted sounds that hardly sounded like human speech. The blood ran cold in Thongor’s veins as he heard the strange, coughing sounds. He knew that tongue from of old; it was the Chaos Litany. The Dragon Kings of age-lost and legend-drowned Hyperborea had learned it from the black gods of madness who ruled beyond the stars. Human lips were never meant to frame such sounds, and to hear them spoken by a man was blasphemy against human kind.

  The alien speech droned on, and suddenly a thrill of superstitious awe ran through Thongor. For the shifting, flickering rays were changing hue. He stared up, scalp prickling with chill premonition. And the Moon turned to blood.

  Shafts of weird crimson light wandered about the scene of primal desolation. It was uncanny—horrible. The Moon glared down at him like the red, burning eye of some maddened god. Behind him somewhere, the beast-things groaned and whimpered, groveling before this awesome display of supernatural power. On the stone block, the wizard stood like a stone-carved image, rapt in unholy ecstasy, as the abominable litany spewed from his writhing lips.

  Then Thongor sensed a tension in the air. Nature seemed to hold its breath, awaiting some dark miracle of evil. An aura of force tingled along the nerves of the young buccaneer. And the sky, which had been velvet-black, flushed with cold, dead white radiance.