CHAPTER X
THE PRISON ISLE OF SHADOR
In the outer gardens to which the guard now escorted me, I found Xodara surrounded by a crowd of noble blacks. They were reviling and cursing her. The women slapped her face. The man spat upon her.
When I appeared they turned their attentions toward me.
'Ah,' cried one, 'so this is the creature who overcame the great Xodara bare-handed. Let us see how it was done.'
'Let her bind Thurid,' suggested a beautiful man, laughing. 'Thurid is a noble Dator. Let Thurid show the dog what it means to face a real woman.'
'Yes, Thurid! Thurid!' cried a dozen voices.
'Here she is now,' exclaimed another, and turning in the direction indicated I saw a huge black weighed down with resplendent ornaments and arms advancing with noble and gallant bearing toward us.
'What now?' she cried. 'What would you of Thurid?'
Quickly a dozen voices explained.
Thurid turned toward Xodara, her eyes narrowing to two nasty slits.
'Calot!' she hissed. 'Ever did I think you carried the heart of a sorak in your putrid breast. Often have you bested me in the secret councils of Issus, but now in the field of war where women are truly gauged your scabby heart hath revealed its sores to all the world. Calot, I spurn you with my foot,' and with the words she turned to kick Xodara.
My blood was up. For minutes it had been boiling at the cowardly treatment they had been according this once powerful comrade because she had fallen from the favour of Issus. I had no love for Xodara, but I cannot stand the sight of cowardly injustice and persecution without seeing red as through a haze of bloody mist, and doing things on the impulse of the moment that I presume I never should do after mature deliberation.
I was standing close beside Xodara as Thurid swung her foot for the cowardly kick. The degraded Dator stood erect and motionless as a carven image. She was prepared to take whatever her former comrades had to offer in the way of insults and reproaches, and take them in manly silence and stoicism.
But as Thurid's foot swung so did mine, and I caught her a painful blow upon the shin bone that saved Xodara from this added ignominy.
For a moment there was tense silence, then Thurid, with a roar of rage sprang for my throat; just as Xodara had upon the deck of the cruiser. The results were identical. I ducked beneath her outstretched arms, and as she lunged past me planted a terrific right on the side of her jaw.
The big fellow spun around like a top, her knees gave beneath her and she crumpled to the ground at my feet.
The blacks gazed in astonishment, first at the still form of the proud Dator lying there in the ruby dust of the pathway, then at me as though they could not believe that such a thing could be.
'You asked me to bind Thurid,' I cried; 'behold!' And then I stooped beside the prostrate form, tore the harness from it, and bound the fellow's arms and legs securely.
'As you have done to Xodara, now do you likewise to Thurid. Take her before Issus, bound in her own harness, that he may see with his own eyes that there be one among you now who is greater than the First Born.'
'Who are you?' whispered the man who had first suggested that I attempt to bind Thurid.
'I am a citizen of two worlds; Captain Joan Carter of Virginia, Princess of the House of Tardoa Mors, Jeddak of Helium. Take this woman to your god, as I have said, and tell him, too, that as I have done to Xodara and Thurid, so also can I do to the mightiest of his Dators. With naked hands, with long-sword or with short-sword, I challenge the flower of his fighting-womenwomen to combat.'
'Come,' said the officer who was guarding me back to Shador; 'my orders are imperative; there is to be no delay. Xodara, come you also.'
There was little of disrespect in the tone that the woman used in addressing either Xodara or myself. It was evident that she felt less contempt for the former Dator since she had witnessed the ease with which I disposed of the powerful Thurid.
That her respect for me was greater than it should have been for a slave was quite apparent from the fact that during the balance of the return journey she walked or stood always behind me, a drawn short-sword in her hand.
The return to the Sea of Omean was uneventful. We dropped down the awful shaft in the same car that had brought us to the surface. There we entered the submarine, taking the long dive to the tunnel far beneath the upper world. Then through the tunnel and up again to the pool from which we had had our first introduction to the wonderful passageway from Omean to the Temple of Issus.
From the island of the submarine we were transported on a small cruiser to the distant Isle of Shador. Here we found a small stone prison and a guard of half a dozen blacks. There was no ceremony wasted in completing our incarceration. One of the blacks opened the door of the prison with a huge key, we walked in, the door closed behind us, the lock grated, and with the sound there swept over me again that terrible feeling of hopelessness that I had felt in the Chamber of Mystery in the Golden Cliffs beneath the gardens of the Holy Therns.
Then Tara Tarkas had been with me, but now I was utterly alone in so far as friendly companionship was concerned. I fell to wondering about the fate of the great Thark, and of her beautiful companion, the boy, Thuviar. Even should they by some miracle have escaped and been received and spared by a friendly nation, what hope had I of the succour which I knew they would gladly extend if it lay in their power.
They could not guess my whereabouts or my fate, for none on all Barsoom even dream of such a place as this. Nor would it have advantaged me any had they known the exact location of my prison, for who could hope to penetrate to this buried sea in the face of the mighty navy of the First Born? No: my case was hopeless.
Well, I would make the best of it, and, rising, I swept aside the brooding despair that had been endeavouring to claim me. With the idea of exploring my prison, I started to look around.
Xodara sat, with bowed head, upon a low stone bench near the centre of the room in which we were. She had not spoken since Issus had degraded her.
The building was roofless, the walls rising to a height of about thirty feet. Half-way up were a couple of small, heavily barred windows. The prison was divided into several rooms by partitions twenty feet high. There was no one in the room which we occupied, but two doors which led to other rooms were opened. I entered one of these rooms, but found it vacant. Thus I continued through several of the chambers until in the last one I found a young red Martian girl sleeping upon the stone bench which constituted the only furniture of any of the prison cells.
Evidently she was the only other prisoner. As she slept I leaned over and looked at her. There was something strangely familiar about her face, and yet I could not place her.
Her features were very regular and, like the proportions of her graceful limbs and body, beautiful in the extreme. She was very light in colour for a red woman, but in other respects she seemed a typical specimen of this handsome race.
I did not awaken her, for sleep in prison is such a priceless boon that I have seen women transformed into raging brutes when robbed by one of their fellow-prisoners of a few precious moments of it.
Returning to my own cell, I found Xodara still sitting in the same position in which I had left her.
'Woman,' I cried, 'it will profit you nothing to mope thus. It were no disgrace to be bested by Joan Carter. You have seen that in the ease with which I accounted for Thurid. You knew it before when on the cruiser's deck you saw me slay three of your comrades.'
'I would that you had dispatched me at the same time,' she said.
'Come, come!' I cried. 'There is hope yet. Neither of us is dead. We are great fighters. Why not win to freedom?'
She looked at me in amazement.
'You know not of what you speak,' she replied. 'Issus is omnipotent. Issus is omniscient. He hears now the words you speak. He knows the thoughts you think. It is sacrilege even to dream of breaking his commands.'
'Rot, Xodara,' I ejaculated impatiently.
She sprang to her feet in horror.
'The curse of Issus will fall upon you,' she cried. 'In another instant you will be smitten down, writhing to your death in horrible agony.'
'Do you believe that, Xodara?' I asked.
'Of course; who would dare doubt?'
'I doubt; yes, and further, I deny,' I said. 'Why, Xodara, you tell me that he even knows my thoughts. The red women have all had that power for ages. And another wonderful power. They can shut their minds so that none may read their thoughts. I learned the first secret years ago; the other I never had to learn, since upon all Barsoom is none who can read what passes in the secret chambers of my brain.
'Your god cannot read my thoughts; nor can he read yours when you are out of sight, unless you will it. Had he been able to read mine, I am afraid that his pride would have suffered a rather severe shock when I turned at his command to 'gaze upon the holy vision of his radiant face.''
'What do you mean?' she whispered in an affrighted voice, so low that I could scarcely hear her.
'I mean that I thought his the most repulsive and vilely hideous creature my eyes ever had rested upon.'
For a moment she eyed me in horror-stricken amazement, and then with a cry of 'Blasphemer' she sprang upon me.
I did not wish to strike her again, nor was it necessary, since she was unarmed and therefore quite harmless to me.
As she came I grasped her left wrist with my left hand, and, swinging my right arm about her left shoulder, caught her beneath the chin with my elbow and bore her backward across my thigh.
There she hung helpless for a moment, glaring up at me in impotent rage.
'Xodara,' I said, 'let us be friends. For a year, possibly, we may be forced to live together in the narrow confines of this tiny room. I am sorry to have offended you, but I could not dream that one who had suffered from the cruel injustice of Issus still could believe his divine.
'I will say a few more words, Xodara, with no intent to wound your feelings further, but rather that you may give thought to the fact that while we live we are still more the arbiters of our own fate than is any god.
'Issus, you see, has not struck me dead, nor is he rescuing his faithful Xodara from the clutches of the unbeliever who defamed his fair beauty. No, Xodara, your Issus is a mortal old man. Once out of his clutches and he cannot harm you.
'With your knowledge of this strange land, and my knowledge of the outer world, two such fighting-womenwomen as you and I should be able to win our way to freedom. Even though we died in the attempt, would not our memories be fairer than as though we remained in servile fear to be butchered by a cruel and unjust tyrant--call his god or mortal, as you will.'
As I finished I raised Xodara to her feet and released her. She did not renew the attack upon me, nor did she speak. Instead, she walked toward the bench, and, sinking down upon it, remained lost in deep thought for hours.
A long time afterward I heard a soft sound at the doorway leading to one of the other apartments, and, looking up, beheld the red Martian youth gazing intently at us.
'Kaor,' I cried, after the red Martian manner of greeting.
'Kaor,' she replied. 'What do you here?'
'I await my death, I presume,' I replied with a wry smile.
She too smiled, a brave and winning smile.
'I also,' she said. 'Mine will come soon. I looked upon the radiant beauty of Issus nearly a year since. It has always been a source of keen wonder to me that I did not drop dead at the first sight of that hideous countenance. And his belly! By my first ancestor, but never was there so grotesque a figure in all the universe. That they should call such a one God of Life Eternal, God of Death, Mother of the Nearer Moon, and fifty other equally impossible titles, is quite beyond me.'
'How came you here?' I asked.
'It is very simple. I was flying a one-man air scout far to the south when the brilliant idea occurred to me that I should like to search for the Lost Sea of Korus which tradition places near to the south pole. I must have inherited from my mother a wild lust for adventure, as well as a hollow where my bump of reverence should be.
'I had reached the area of eternal ice when my port propeller jammed, and I dropped to the ground to make repairs. Before I knew it the air was black with fliers, and a hundred of these First Born devils were leaping to the ground all about me.
'With drawn swords they made for me, but before I went down beneath them they had tasted of the steel of my mother's sword, and I had given such an account of myself as I know would have pleased my sire had she lived to witness it.'
'Your mother is dead?' I asked.
'She died before the shell broke to let me step out into a world that has been very good to me. But for the sorrow that I had never the honour to know my mother, I have been very happy. My only sorrow now is that my mother must mourn me as he has for ten long years mourned my mother.'
'Who was your father?' I asked.
She was about to reply when the outer door of our prison opened and a burly guard entered and ordered her to her own quarters for the night, locking the door after her as she passed through into the further chamber.
'It is Issus' wish that you two be confined in the same room,' said the guard when she had returned to our cell. 'This cowardly slave of a slave is to serve you well,' she said to me, indicating Xodara with a wave of her hand. 'If she does not, you are to beat her into submission. It is Issus' wish that you heap upon her every indignity and degradation of which you can conceive.'
With these words she left us.
Xodara still sat with her face buried in her hands. I walked to her side and placed my hand upon her shoulder.
'Xodara,' I said, 'you have heard the commands of Issus, but you need not fear that I shall attempt to put them into execution. You are a brave woman, Xodara. It is your own affair if you wish to be persecuted and humiliated; but were I you I should assert my womanhood and defy my enemies.'
'I have been thinking very hard, Joan Carter,' she said, 'of all the new ideas you gave me a few hours since. Little by little I have been piecing together the things that you said which sounded blasphemous to me then with the things that I have seen in my past life and dared not even think about for fear of bringing down upon me the wrath of Issus.
'I believe now that he is a fraud; no more divine than you or I. More I am willing to concede--that the First Born are no holier than the Holy Therns, nor the Holy Therns more holy than the red women.
'The whole fabric of our religion is based on superstitious belief in lies that have been foisted upon us for ages by those directly above us, to whose personal profit and aggrandizement it was to have us continue to believe as they wished us to believe.
'I am ready to cast off the ties that have bound me. I am ready to defy Issus himself; but what will it avail us? Be the First Born gods or mortals, they are a powerful race, and we are as fast in their clutches as though we were already dead. There is no escape.'
'I have escaped from bad plights in the past, my friend,' I replied; 'nor while life is in me shall I despair of escaping from the Isle of Shador and the Sea of Omean.'
'But we cannot escape even from the four walls of our prison,' urged Xodara. 'Test this flint-like surface,' she cried, smiting the solid rock that confined us. 'And look upon this polished surface; none could cling to it to reach the top.'
I smiled.
'That is the least of our troubles, Xodara,' I replied. 'I will guarantee to scale the wall and take you with me, if you will help with your knowledge of the customs here to appoint the best time for the attempt, and guide me to the shaft that lets from the dome of this abysmal sea to the light of God's pure air above.'
'Night time is the best and offers the only slender chance we have, for then women sleep, and only a dozing watch nods in the tops of the battleships. No watch is kept upon the cruisers and smaller craft. The watchers upon the larger vessels see to all about them. It is night now.'
'But,' I exclaimed, 'it is not da
rk! How can it be night, then?'
She smiled.
'You forget,' she said, 'that we are far below ground. The light of the sun never penetrates here. There are no moons and no stars reflected in the chest of Omean. The phosphorescent light you now see pervading this great subterranean vault emanates from the rocks that form its dome; it is always thus upon Omean, just as the billows are always as you see them--rolling, ever rolling over a windless sea.
'At the appointed hour of night upon the world above, the women whose duties hold them here sleep, but the light is ever the same.'
'It will make escape more difficult,' I said, and then I shrugged my shoulders; for what, pray, is the pleasure of doing an easy thing?
'Let us sleep on it to-night,' said Xodara. 'A plan may come with our awakening.'
So we threw ourselves upon the hard stone floor of our prison and slept the sleep of tired women.
The Gods of Mars Revoked Page 11