Thongor and the Wizard of Lemuria

by Lin Carter

  He went out on the deck, and stood amazed at the unexpected sight. It was the sixth hour, and the sun of morning lit the sky with rose and gold. But beneath him gleamed not the long quays of Kathool on the Saan, nor even the wide swath of cultivated lands that stretched for miles around it. Beneath him lay the deepest jungles of Chush.

  He rubbed one hand over his jaw in puzzlement. He should have left these jungles behind many hours ago. How could his estimate have gone wrong? Then he noticed how the floater drifted beneath the strong and steady wind that blew out of the east. With a muffled curse to Gorm, it came to him in an instant. When the rotor power had failed, the weightless airboat had not simply hovered above the regions of Kathool, but had moved slowly west, driven by the strong winds. He was now hours away from where he had wanted to be, above the darkest, most impenetrable jungles of Chush. Nothing to do, however, but crank up the springs again and head east to Kathool.

  But before he could do so, there came again that harsh, metallic cry that had helped to awaken him. Scanning the morning skies, Thongor felt his blood chill as he saw a terrible sight.

  Winging down at his floater out of the upper regions was a monstrous and fantastic flying thing. Its scaled and writhing body was fully the length of the floater, and its gigantic leathery wings spread bat-like fully forty feet from tip to tip. Above the body reared a head upon a snaky neck—a head hideous almost beyond belief, with a monstrous hooked beak and cruel scarlet eyes beneath a blue crest of bristling spines. A long snakelike tail floated behind, tipped with a barb the shape of an arrowhead, and cruel-taloned bird-claws reached from beneath the creature’s yellow belly.

  Thongor had heard of the great grakks, the lizard-hawks of Chush, before but had never seen one till now. They were the fiercest and most deadly fighters of all Lemuria—rivaled only by the mighty dwark, the jungle dragon itself. And now one was descending with the speed of a lightning bolt toward his head.

  He threw himself flat as the vast shadow of the grakk’s wing fell over the deck. The monster struck the floater a glancing blow and swooped off, climbing for another attack. As the airboat wobbled beneath the first blow, Thongor was nearly thrown off and only saved himself by seizing the rail with one iron hand. He drew himself up as the weird flying reptile came at the floater again. This time it hovered, wings thundering, while it groped for the floater with an outstretched claw. The foot-long talons closed over the needle prow, and even the strong urlium with which the prow was sheathed was not tough enough to withstand the terrific strength of the lizard-hawk’s grip. It crumpled like paper.

  Thongor sprang to his feet and dove into the cabin, coming out with a length of cord and the great war bow he had found clamped to the cabin wall the night before. While the monster shrieked deafeningly and battered at the sleek hull of the floater, he threaded the cord through his belt and fastened it around the rail to hold himself securely even if the lizard-hawk succeeded in tipping over the airboat. Then he notched the bowstring with a mighty effort, almost cracking his shoulder muscles, and laid the long shaft of a war arrow across the string.

  The first arrow caught the grakk squarely in the chest. It sank halfway to the feather between the tough scales, and a dribble of green blood ran slimily down the monster’s heaving flank.

  It shrieked like a sheet of steel being torn in half by a giant. Releasing the prow, it fluttered away—but not for long. Tracing a wide circle through the sky, the deadly thing came arrowing back toward the floater, which drifted helplessly above the jungle.

  True to Thongor’s expectations, the second blow hurled the airboat spinning end over end through the morning sky. Tightly gripping the war bow, the Valkarthan swung dizzily at the end of his rope. As the floater drifted back into a horizontal position, the flying reptile hovered beside it with booming wings, smashing the sides in with its cruel beak. Dangling at the end of his rope, Thongor sent a shaft winging for the head. It missed the weaving, snakelike neck and hissed on by. But the second shaft caught the lizard-hawk in the throat, just below its powerful jaw. It screeched furiously, mad with the pain of the keen-barbed arrow, threshing wildly with its wings.

  One wing caught under the rail of the floater’s deck, overturning it. As it spun through the air, Thongor was hurled with stunning impact against the hull. He dangled at the rope’s end, unconscious.

  The bow and quiver dropped from his hands, falling into the jungle far below.

  Hissing with fury, the winged reptile now settled on the upturned keel of the airboat, much as a bird settles on a branch. Its claws tightened about the long rib of the keel, crunching on the smooth blue-white urlium.

  Beneath its heavy weight the floater lost much of its buoyancy and sagged down toward the treetops.

  Thongor still dangled head-downward, unconscious.

  And now a new danger threatened him. Up from among the trees came the hideous horned snout of the dreaded dwark, the jungle dragon. It snuffled at the sinking floater. Leaning its forepaws against the trunk of a gigantic lotifer tree, it extended its enormous length of mailed neck into the sky.

  Lower and lower sank the floater, borne down by the massive weight of the grakk.

  As it sank, Thongor’s helpless body dangled nearer and nearer to the opening jaws of the giant dragon. Still stunned from his collision with the floater’s hull, he was not even conscious of the approaching head of the monster saurian.

  The dwark’s entire existence was one unending and continuous quest for food, to fill its monstrous belly. It was literally capable of eating all day long. Vast quantities of meat were needed to drive the gigantic muscles in its lumbering body.

  The limp form that swung helplessly at the end of the rope smelled like food.

  The huge saurian opened wide its cavernous jaws. Two rows of needle-pointed fangs lined each jaw, and the largest teeth were longer than the Northlander sword that hung at Thongor’s thigh.

  The yawning jaws came closer as the jungle dragon strained its neck to the fullest length. Slimy saliva, reeking like an opened grave, slid down its scaled jaws. The scarlet eyes flamed with the lust of hunger.

  Then another screech rang out. Down from the sky came a second and a third lizard-hawk. As the dwark paused, scanning the sky above, observing the weird shapes that hovered above, the first winged reptile at last felt the deathly power of the war bow’s mighty shaft. It slid drunkenly from its perch atop the crippled airboat and fell flopping down into the jungle, virtually at the jungle dragon’s feet.

  Released from its burden, the weightless ship bobbed upward again, bearing Thongor out of the dwark’s reach—and into the view of the two lizard-hawks.

  While the tiny, dim brain of the giant saurian was striving to understand why its dangling prey was suddenly wafted aloft, far beyond its reach, the scent of the dead lizard-hawk at its feet reached its senses. Abandoning Thongor, it bent to feast ravenously on the body of the winged reptile.

  Thongor came to his senses, taking in the grim situation. Not one, but two lizard-hawks to contend with—the war bow gone, leaving him armed only with his broadsword.

  And the monster dwark directly below.

  He pulled himself up the rope hand by hand and clambered aboard the floater once again, which had returned to its normal horizontal position. If he could crank up the springs that powered the rotors before the two lizard-hawks attacked, he might yet escape. He opened the trap in the deck and began turning the wheel. Gradually the long springs wound tight.

  Meanwhile the two grakks circled the floating craft warily. Their tiny reptilian intelligences dimly comprehended the fact that this weird invader of their skies had in some unknown manner slaughtered one of their kind, whose half-eaten corpse lay far below, under the great jaws of the ravenous dwark.

  Red murder blazed in their hideous eyes.

  Wings folded, they struck the floater s
imultaneously.

  Still securely fastened to the deck at the end of his rope, Thongor was hurled from his feet by the impact. The ship was batted from the skies as by some monster hand. It crashed prow first into the thick branches of an enormous lotifer—and there it lodged, tightly wedged between bent branches.

  The rail crumpled and the rope snapped. Thongor fell, down through whipping branches, to land groggily on the springy moss that carpeted the jungle.

  A hundred yards away the jungle dragon lifted its dripping head at the sound of the floater’s crash.

  The lizard-hawks, clamorously screaming in their triumph, circled and flew off.

  Thongor unfastened the rope from his harness and examined himself. Despite a number of bruises and small cuts, he was unharmed. He crept out of the dwark’s view and was lost in the thick jungle gloom within moments.

  Lost, he thought grimly, is the correct word. He was marooned in the deepest, most dangerous and impenetrable jungles on all Lemuria. Fully one hundred leagues of impassable, dwark-haunted jungle stood between him and the nearest city.

  The great war bow, which alone might have made it barely possible for him to stand against the terrific monsters of the jungle, was hopelessly lost.

  Perhaps even worse, the trees grew so thickly here that he could not see the sky. He therefore had not the vaguest notion in which direction he must travel to reach Kathool or Patanga.

  Marooned alone, hundreds of miles from the nearest haunts of men, with only his broadsword to protect him against the jungle terrors whose least member weighed a dozen tons, is it any wonder that even Thongor of Valkarth felt his spirits sag?

  He set out doggedly through the thick underbrush, hacking his way with the great Valkarthan broadsword. Along toward midmorning he stopped to break his fast on ripe sarnberries and a handful of waterfruit. He jogged along, hoping he was going the correct way, but completely unable to ascertain his direction by observing the position of the sun.

  Several times he thought of climbing one of the giant lotifers that grew so thickly in Chush, their tall boles towering as much as two hundred yards above the mossy turf. But each tree was thickly grown with the dreaded slith, the bloodsucking vampire-blossoms that were the horror of Lemurian jungles. Grimly he decided not to attempt the trees. He had narrowly escaped death from the slith which the Sark of Thurdis kept in his arena. He would not go out of his way to court their attention now.

  And was it, he wondered, humanly possible for one man to cross a hundred vom of jungle on foot? What would he do during the long watches of the night, still many hours away, when every mighty predator of the jungles would be out roaming for food? His situation by night would be doubly dangerous, for due to the prevalence of slith in the trees, he would not be able to take to the upper world of branches to avoid the larger brutes.

  Still he slogged on. The dense, humid heat of the rank jungle underbrush bathed his naked body in sweat. Time and again he paused to pluck from his flesh the huge tree leeches that clung loathsomely to his arms and legs, sucking his blood painlessly through their hundred microscopic mouths. Once he sank unexpectedly to his waist in a bog and only saved himself from the sucking embrace of the yellow mud by tying one end of the floater’s rope to the hilt of his sword and hurling it into the nearest tree trunk, then drawing himself slowly through the slimy muck hand over hand.

  At first he paused to rest only every hour, but gradually, as even his iron strength ebbed under the oppressive heat, his pauses grew longer and the intervals between them shorter.

  As the first touches of darkness fell over the jungles of Chush from the late afternoon sky, he sagged down to the bed of moss beneath a tremendous lotifer, completely exhausted.

  He did not know how far he had come, for he had been forced to detour from a straight path many times in order to avoid one beast or another, or a group of trees too thickly intergrown for him to penetrate. At a rough guess, he would estimate that he had covered fifteen miles, perhaps more.

  And he did not know if he had been going in the correct direction. If he had been aimed away from Kathool, he was a doomed man, for the first city that lay due west was Cadoma, more than a thousand vorn distant, and his bones would rot beneath the sucking fangs of the slith before he could reach its walls.

  Then he became aware of a danger far closer—the tread of mighty feet crushing the underbrush flat not far behind him. From the way the ground shook, he knew with a deadly certainty that it could only mean one thing—the jungle dragon was stalking him.

  CHAPTER 4

  Dream Lotus

  Aye, it was an age of magic, when the might of wizards strove against the tides of darkness that hovered over the lands of men like threatening wings. And the world shall not again see such wizardry as reigned of old when proud Lemuria was young…

  —The Lemurian Chronicles,

  Book Four, Chapter One

  The great Valkarthan broadsword sang from its leathern scabbard into the mighty hand of Thongor. His jaw tightened grimly, and beneath his black and scowling brows, his eyes glared with gold fires like the eyes of lions.

  The earth shook about him beneath the massive tread of the lumbering saurian. He could hear the rustle and crack of breaking boughs as the giant reptile shouldered a path through the thick jungle. There was no question that it was a jungle dragon, but whether the same one that had threatened him before when he had dangled limp and senseless from the airboat—this the Valkarthan could not know.

  Nor did it greatly matter. The dwark was hungry—and it had caught his scent.

  Now the young barbarian was no soft, city-bred weakling. The cruel and frozen wilderness of the Northlands had been his boyhood home, and among those weird glaciers and snowy hills no weakling long survives. He had faced and fought a thousand foes ere now. His mighty broadsword had cut a crimson path through a hundred perils. Men, beasts, and demons howling from the scarlet mouth of hell had he been set against, and never had he winced or fled from danger.

  But a mere man alone, however brave, however mighty in battle, had little hope against the titanic reptiles of Earth’s Dawn Age. Against those moving mountains of muscle, the swords of a score of warriors would prove futile. Thus Thongor chose the way of discretion, although it wrung his heart to turn and flee in the face of danger. Yet the warriors of his magnificent race knew there was no taint of cowardice in seeking to avoid combat with the lumbering saurians of their prehistoric age.

  Thus he turned to seek a haven. The nearness of peril drove new strength surging through his weary thews and limbs. He hurled himself through the jungle at the utmost speed possible, seeking the thickest-grown places wherethrough the jungle dragon might be slowed in seeking to crush passage.

  Thom vines slashed his shoulders with needle-sharp barbs as he plunged through their dangling loops. Wiry branches whipped his naked legs. He struggled on, for the thundering tread of the saurian was nearer now. It was gaining on him. Earth shook beneath its massive pads as it crashed through the age-old trees, shouldering a path through the brush and toppling those patriarchs of the Chushan wild that had stood unshaken for centuries ere this hour.

  Panting for breath, he halted by one such tree, and a soft weight fell over his arms. A sweet odor drifted to him and his senses swam. With horror he saw he was in the grip of a slith. The swaying blossom spread soft petals to bare rows of hollow fangs that could drain the blood of a full-grown bouphar in a single hour.

  The vampire-flower emitted a narcotic cloud of perfume that rendered its victims insensible. Senses blurring, Thongor strove to peel the thick, soft petals from his flesh. He felt a numbness spread up his arm as the slith sucked his hot blood. His knees gave way and he sagged to the springy moss, his arm held aloft in the fleshy jaws of the loathsome flower.

  As Thongor watched groggily, a faint crimson blush filled the waxen petals. It
was his blood, soaking up into the spongy blossom.

  At that moment the great saurian came upon him.

  Thongor summoned his uttermost reserves of energy. The broadsword flashed through the ropy stem of the slith, severing the blossom from its stem. It continued to cling to his flesh until he tore it off, trampling it underfoot with revulsion.

  Still dazed from the vampire-flower’s narcotic fumes, Thongor turned to meet the dwark. Seizing the initiative, he sprang forward, swinging the sword. Keen steel bit into the monster’s slavering jaws.

  He tugged the blade loose and swung again. The red sword slashed into the thick folds of flesh at the hinge of the jungle dragon’s jaws. Blood spurted in hot jets, washing Thongor’s arm with crimson.

  With a thunderous snort, the monster swung its head from side to side to free it of the stinging pain. The scaled snout struck Thongor with the impact of a battering ram, hurling him a dozen feet away. He sprawled on his back, the broadsword spinning from his hand.

  Before he could rise to regain it, the dripping jaws opened before him. He could see the curved white sabers of the saurian’s mighty fangs as the crimson maw gaped to gulp him down…

  “Hold your breath, swordsman.”

  A tall, robed figure stepped in front of him. In one hand he held a small metal chest. Who—or what—he was, Thongor did not know, but he obeyed.

  As the jaws came down, the old man opened the chest and hurled its contents into them. A thick cloud of blue powder whirled about the jungle dragon. It swung its head away as the swirling veil of blue mist entered its nostrils. The fires of ravening hunger died in the scarlet eyes, and as Thongor staggered to his feet, the enormous length of the saurian came thundering to the ground, shaking the earth as it fell. The beast was either dead or unconscious.