Thongor and the Wizard of Lemuria

by Lin Carter

  “So I see,” the barbarian grunted. “And on foot, as well, unless your generous hospitality extends to lending me a zamph.”

  The magician nodded. “That will I do, and gladly, if need be. But there is a chance that your flying boat can be repaired, in which case you can traverse the distance between my palace and Kathool in ease and swiftness.”

  “Know you aught of these flying ships?” the young barbarian inquired.

  Sharajsha shrugged. “Something I know of the inventions of Oolim Phon, and still more I conjecture. But these matters must await our attentions till tomorrow, when we shall return to the jungle and seek out the wrecked air-boat. I will be able to say more when I have inspected the wreckage. As for tonight, at least, you are my guest.”

  Thongor nodded. Then:

  “You said you had need of a warrior,” he demanded bluntly. “But you have not mentioned anything more about it. What is it all about?”

  The old Wizard of Lemuria pondered, staring deep into the roaring fire as one slim hand stroked his long beard thoughtfully.

  “I do indeed; yet of this I would reserve speech until another time, if you will indulge me, swordsman. After we have found the ruin of your sky floater and have ascertained the full extent of its damage, I may very well make you an offer of employment for a time. Let us leave this question, too, until tomorrow. Now it is time for bed. Old bones grow weary, and young ones too, when they have striven as mightily as you have this day. Come, I will conduct you to your room.”

  * * * *

  That night Thongor slept a deep and dreamless sleep. His first suspicions of the age-old Wizard of Lemuria were quieted, for it was obvious that the ancient sage meant him no harm.

  And thus were they met at last, Thongor of Valkarth and Sharajsha of Zaar, and thus were the feet of the youthful warrior set on the first steps of that mighty road that would either lead him to the glory of a kingly throne—or to a black and terrible death.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Science of Sharajsha

  It was Sharajsha who read the dark schemes of the Druids, and against their stupendous plot he stood alone and set his hand against their dread wisdom. And thus the world stood trembling on the brink of ultimate and conquering chaos in the days before the coming of Thongor the Mighty into the kingdoms of the West.

  —The Lemurian Chronicles,

  Book Three, Chapter Ten

  An hour past daybreak the warrior and the wizard arose from sleep and broke their fast with a hearty meal. The sage was eager to examine the wreckage of the airboat as soon as possible, that the mighty predators of the Chushan jungles might not damage it further; so they made their meal in haste and were ready to depart ere the sun was scarce risen into the blue vault of heaven.

  They mounted two zamphs which the old wizard kept penned in one of the outer chambers of his cavernous home, beyond the gates of his underground palace. With Sharajsha in the lead, they made their way out of the gigantic cave, through the rocky foothills of the mountains, and into the jungles of savage Chush.

  Alone and unaided, Thongor would have found it difficult if not impossible to retrace his steps to the place whereat the stolen floater had crashed into the treetops. But the old Wizard of Lemuria had watched the fall of the airboat and had carefully marked the spot in his mind; hence they found no great difficulty in making their way to the spot, although the journey consumed some hours of morning due to the dense growth of the jungles and the difficulties of making passage.

  Most of the more dangerous meat-eaters that roamed the wild did their hunting at night and slept in secret lairs by day; hence the two had little fear of coming upon one of the mighty jungle dragons of Chush. But Sharajsha took special precautions to make doubly certain that their journey should not be interrupted by the saurian predators of the jungle. He bore with him at his waist a flacon of some peculiar drug which he had concocted in his laboratorium. To the sight it was a dark, thick, sluggish oil. It had no odor, or at least none that even the keen nostrils of the youthful barbarian could detect. But Sharajsha assured him that the drug would frighten off any large brute that came within a certain distance and caught the scent. Thongor noticed that even the zamphs were uneasy in their proximity to the strange fluid, although they were not meat-eaters.

  Whether or not the drug and its repellent powers were the cause, the fact was that no animal life came within view during the length of their journey through the jungle to the wreckage of the floater. They located the site without any particular difficulty. The airboat was still tightly wedged between the bent branches of a giant crimson lotifer tree, and it looked in sorry state.

  The glistening uriium plating of the hull was crumpled like a crisp sheet of parchment that had been crushed in the grip of giant hands. In many places seams had been ruptured so that the steel girders of the inner construction were exposed to view like portions of a skeleton glimpsed through torn flesh.

  The problem looked hopeless to Thongor. But Sharajsha did not seem discouraged. With the aid of the giant barbarian, the old magician rigged strong cables and pulleys, and in an hour or two, with much labor, they succeeded in dislodging the airboat from the entangling branches. They pulled it down to ground level so the wizard could examine it more closely.

  “It is the hull plates of weightless urlium that make the flying car buoyant,” the old wizard mused. “The motive power comes from the long, coiled springs that run from stem to stern beneath the deck. Although torn and bent and battered, the urlium hull still has power to resist the pull of the earth, and the rotors themselves do not seem to have suffered any damage.”

  “You mean to say this wreckage can still fly?” Thongor demanded incredulously.

  The old man nodded. “Yes. The dents in the hull can be hammered out again and the bent plates can be straightened. A little carpentry will soon repair the crushed cabin. Come—let us bring the flying car back to my workshops where I can begin the task.”

  Thongor was amazed but kept his silence. The old wizard displayed astounding resources.

  They fastened the airboat’s cable to the saddlebow of the wizard’s zamph and bore it back to the subterranean palace. It floated in midair behind the great beast.

  Thongor helped maneuver the slim craft through the cavern and into Sharajsha’s laboratory. The proud, immaculate flying boat that had shimmered in all its sleek perfection above the citadel of Thurdis was now a battered hulk. It looked a hopeless wreck to the giant barbarian, but the wizard again expressed certainty that he could repair the craft.

  “By the luck of the Nineteen Gods the floater lost none of her urlium plates. Those I could not easily replace. Everything else can be made like new again. And I am eager to examine the structure of the rotors and the control system. Yes, swordsman, in a few days you will be able to fly on to Kathool—or to anywhere else you might desire—as if the lizard-hawks had never driven you from the sky.”

  Sharajsha put on a leather working-smock and began laying out his tools. Thongor gazed restlessly about the laboratory. Athanors and crucibles were ranged about on long benches, and tables were littered with odd-looking flasks and tubes of glass. Aludels, curcurbits, alembics, cupels, and other mysterious vessels and devices lined the walls of the long room.

  “Can I help?”

  “No. Amuse yourself by exploring my home.”

  His offer of aid rejected, Thongor left the wizard to his task and wandered restlessly through the strange chambers, exploring the underground castle.

  One great room was lined with books of magical science—books small and huge, some of them as tall as a full-grown man. Some were bound in bouphar leather. Others were bound between plates of worked metal or unfamiliar carven wood. They were written in a dozen tongues, and Thongor, idly opening one bound in the thick fur of a green wolf, was repelled by the weird hieroglyphics painted
upon the vellum sheets in inks of scarlet, black, and gold.

  Another chamber was the wizard’s chemical laboratory. Tanks of green-glowing phosphor fluids bubbled beneath magic fires. Earthen crocks and metal tubes bore seething liquids through the tortuous spirals and windings of some strange experiment beyond Thongor’s untutored comprehension. A wired human skeleton stood on a rack in one corner. A man’s brain hung suspended in a large globe filled with cloudy fluid. Bundles of dried herbs and canisters of colored powder filled the air with pungent, repellent fumes.

  Thongor wrinkled his nose in disgust.

  “Magic!” he growled.

  Another room was more to his liking. The walls bore weapons from a hundred cities, clamped with iron to the stone. Swords, spears, bows, and javelins…the crooked dirks of the assassins of Dalakh and the leaf-bladed knives of Darundabar hung beside the feather-crested spears of Vozashpa and the giant war axes of lost, immemorial Yb. He spent a pleasant hour testing the weight and balance of the wizard’s armory.

  These were all enchanted weapons with magical powers, the barbarian assumed. Some of the blades were scratched with Northlander runes; others bore the acid-etched sigils of Zaar, the Black City of the Magicians. On some he recognized the protective signs used by the gigantic Blue Nomads of the eastern plains. Magic weapons were not to his liking.

  In one sword’s hilt an enormous ruby was set. It gleamed like a watchful eye. And like a living eye, it turned in its socket as if to observe him as he passed from the chamber.

  * * * *

  That night after dinner, the old wizard and the barbarian warrior sat talking over goblets of chilled wine and bowls of fresh waterfruit while firelight cast huge shadows that leaped and capered over the stone walls.

  The wizard reported on the day’s progress.

  “I have softened the urlium prow by heating the plates in my furnaces. And I have hammered and bent them back into shape again. Now I must do the same for the keel and hull plates. But that task I shall leave for tomorrow. Let us discuss other matters. Tell me, Thongor of Valkarth, what are your plans? Where will you go once the floater is repaired and you may fly where you will?”

  Thongor shrugged lazily. “Kathool, possibly. As I told you, I had thought to seek service under the Sark of that city. Or perhaps back into the Northlands again. I don’t really know, nor does it greatly matter.” With a grim smile, he quoted a maxim from The Scarlet Edda: “‘A good sword never goes far without finding hire.’”

  The old magician eyed him shrewdly. “Then you have not committed your sword to the service of the Sark of Kathool?”

  “No. I shall go where Father Gorm guides me.”

  “Very well, then. Let me tell you a story, Valkarthan. Perhaps there shall be an offer of employment at the end. As you may remember, I said I had need of a strong warrior.”

  Thongor nodded impassively. “Yes. I wondered what you meant by that, old man. Why a wizard of your powers should need the steel of a warrior to fight his battles I cannot puzzle out. But go ahead with your tale, if you will.” The wizard stared for a long moment into the leaping flames while Thongor poured himself another goblet of chilled wine. Then:

  “It is a strange story, and an old one, and the ending is not certain.… I cannot clearly see it—even I, to whom the unwritten future is as an open book…but I fear me, Barbarian. Aye, I, Sharajsha, fear!”

  Thongor glanced at him curiously.

  “Fear?” he repeated. “Fear what?”

  The old magician spoke five words in a slow, solemn voice. Five words that sent a chill down Thongor’s spine and made his nape-hairs prickle as if with some obscure presentiment of unknown terrors to come.

  “The destruction of the world.”

  CHAPTER 7

  The Thousand-Year War

  With dawn we rode from Nemedis in all her pomp and pride.

  The white road thundered beneath our tread and the white sea at our side.

  The wild waves broke on the naked rocks and returned to break once more,

  Where the grim black walls of the Dragon Keep loomed on the grim black shore.

  —Diombar’s Song of the Last Battle

  Sharajsha began his tale in a low, somber voice. Thongor listened stolidly at first; then, as the emotional intensity of the old magician’s words reached him, he listened more closely.

  It was a strange story the Magician of Mommur told him there in the firelit hall of his subterranean palace. A strange tale, and an ancient one…in fact, it was the most ancient of all tales, and it told of the dim red aeon of Time’s Dawn, long ages ere the coming of Man.

  In the beginning, before men came forth upon the Earth, all of the world was under the dominance of the giant reptiles. The titanic dragons of the dawn battled and bellowed in the dim ages before man. The earth they trampled to slime beneath the thundering tread of their gigantic weight. In their numberless millions, the titanic reptiles roamed the misty swamps and steaming fens and seething jungles of the Dawn Age, and man’s primal ancestors fled naked and helpless before their mailed and colossal might.

  And then, from amongst the dragons of the Dawn, came one in whose cold and glittering eyes the glimmer of intelligence burned. No sage hath dared conjecture what dark god or demon of Chaos wedded the ferocity and strength of the great earth-shaking dragons with the cold light of reason and thought, but it was done…and a race of intelligent reptiles arose to dominate the aeon.

  They were called the Dragon Kings. Theirs was a cold, cunning intelligence: malign, clever, and inhuman. No man could follow the tortuous and intricate pathways of their alien minds. No man could understand the weird and darkling emotions that seethed in their cool ophidian blood. Forever were they to be unintelligible to man, their lore strange and enigmatic, their science frightful and awesome, their ways repellent and evil.

  Smaller were they than their lumbering and mindless brethren, manlike in shape and size was their form, and the cold, cruel intelligence of these serpentmen was perhaps as far beyond that of man as their lifespan was lengthier than the human.

  All of the world went under the rule of the Dragon Kings of elder Hyperborea. They used the great strength of their reptilian brothers to raise monolithic cities of black stone wherein they studied strange arts and practiced grim sorceries.

  And then it was that the Nineteen Gods created the First Men. The spark of life was struck in the breast of Phondath the Firstborn, and from his loins sprang a mighty line. Nemedis, the first city, was built on the shores of the ultimate East of Lemuria. But hither the Dragon Kings had come when the snows whelmed and conquered their mysterious realm at the pole.

  And there was war…

  The old wizard’s slow, deep voice was hushed as he recounted the mighty saga of the Thousand-Year War, when the heroism of the First Kingdoms of Man stood against the overwhelming might and science of the Dragon Kings. For a thousand years the First Men strove magnificently against the reptilian hordes. And slowly, slowly, they beat back the Dragon Kings although death took a mighty toll of the warriors of the First Kingdoms.

  Mighty were the heroes of Lemuria in the Dawn, and epic were their stupendous wars against the Dragons of Chaos!

  But the serpentmen could command the titanic strength of numberless reptilian monsters—colossal saurians beside whose fighting fury even the mindless ferocity of the dwark seemed small—and men gradually lost heart. They clung to their walls, in the ancient cities of Nemedis and Althaar, Yb and Yaodar.

  “Then their great leader, the Lord Thungarth, called upon the Father of the Gods,” said Sharajsha. “In a storm of whirling clouds of lightning, Gorm descended on the heights above ancient and immemorial Nemedis. He gave unto Thungarth a weapon called the Sword of Nemedis, the Star Sword which the Gods had forged, and in whose steel heart the force of thunder was sealed
by God-magic.

  “Armed with this sword of power, the last heroes set forth. They broke the Dragon Kings in mighty battles and drove them back to the northern shores of Lemuria, to the Black Keep, the last fortress of the Dragon Kings. There Thungarth fell and the Star Sword slaughtered the last of the Dragons.”

  “I remember the story,” Thongor said. And he chanted the lines of Diombar, the Singer of Nemedis:

  “And Khorbane fell and proud Konnar and gallant Yggrim too,

  Yet still we strove with the Dragon Kings as the great war trumpets blew;

  And for every hero of Phondath’s breed who on that black shore fell,

  We sent a dozen Dragons down the iron road to hell!”

  The crashing strains of the old war saga rang out in the flickering firelight, raising dim echoes from the shadowed rafters. Sharajsha raised one gaunt hand.

  “Yes, with the strength of the Lords of Nemedis and the magical power of the Sword, the Dragon Kings were slain and their last fortress overthrown, and the five-thousand-year history of the first kingdoms of Lemuria began. But Diombar the Singer did not know the full story.”

  “What is the full story, then?”

  The wizard’s eyes burned strangely in the firelight.

  “The Dragon Kings fell at Grimstrand Firth, yes, but the Dragon wizards escaped. Transported by their magic arts through the air, they took to hiding far from Nemedis. In hidden castles they survived undiscovered, while the long ages passed by them—plotting vengeance with their cold and evil serpent brains. Ages passed and Nemedis fell, but the Children of Nemedis spread over Lemuria and built new cities, conquering new kingdoms: Valkarth in the North, and Thurdis in the South; Patanga and Tsargol. And still the Dragons hid, waiting for the moment of their revenge. That moment is very near. Like black phantoms from an age of myth, they live on yet, preserved by their curious sciences. And the hour of doom is coming down over Lemuria, doom not only for the lands of men, but for the very planet upon which we dwell, and the Universe itself!”