The 7th Golden Age of Weird Fiction MEGAPACK®: Manly Banister

by Banister, Manly

  “Why are you traveling,” he asked, “instead of remaining safe in your father’s house in Gipar?”

  At once he knew he had somehow managed to say the wrong thing, for her face clouded instantly with distrust and she fell silent.

  “Why don’t you answer?” he pressed.

  She frowned at him and her fright hand fondled the hilt of the sword at her waist. “You seek Surandanish,” she said accusingly. “Are you a servant of the Dingir?”

  “Who or what are the Dingir?”

  “Which of the eight continents that float upon the Dimgal Abzu is that one you call Earth that you know not the Dingir?” she cried. “Or would you lie to a princess of Gipar?” Her sword rattled half from its scabbard.

  “Put up your weapon,” he returned sharply. “I do not fight women, neither do I lie. I am a stranger as I have said and I come from a world that is not of Eloraspon. Your people and your ways are as strange to me as I am to you.”

  Her answering silence was alert and still suspicious but she put up her sword. Strange thoughts roamed Jarvis’ mind. Dimgal Abzu—where had he heard words like that before? And Kullab! Gipar! These names struck responsive notes that took his thoughts back and back…to where? This was no less mysterious than the fact that Ilil spoke in a tongue he could comprehend. He needed time to think it out.

  CHAPTER III

  Herbs gathered, crushed and mingled by Ilil healed Jarvis’ ultul-inflicted wounds overnight.

  “Wonderfully quick to heal, these herbs are known to every fighting man of Eloraspon,” she had explained.

  “We must skirt the desert to eastward,” she told him as they traveled. “After many days, we shall come to the river the Tharn call Idnal. Beyond the hills that lie past the Idnal is Gipar. Every step of the way is full of danger, for the Tharn are ferocious and hate all who are not as ugly as they.”

  “It must have been Tharn who attacked me at sea,” Jarvis said, and quickly described the encounter.

  “It was Tharn,” said Ilil, “though you did not see their faces. They are giants with blue skins and fangs for teeth! And their natures are as cruel as their looks!”

  Jarvis had not known feminine company since his wife, Jo, had died in childbirth, and the presence of the maid at his side both comforted and exhilarated him. She strode in armored regalia, face half-hidden by the cheek-plates of her helmet, but none of it diminished the fact that she was a woman, and Jarvis knew a strange, long-unfelt tugging at his heart. Could it be love? Was he to find at last an answer to the bitterness and loneliness of his life in the person of this lithe, sun-tanned warrior-maid?

  In the days that followed, this feeling not only consolidated itself, but he also found the answer to the question of Ilil’s speech. It came to him out of the blue, so to speak, and left him thunderstruck—more astonished than he had been when he had thought she spoke idiomatic English. Ilil was a Mag! She did not know it herself, but they were of the same race, he and she. He was a mutant of the future—she the descendant of a race long gone. There could be no other answer. When she spoke to him in Elorasponese, the contact of their Mag minds made her speech intelligible to him and his to her!

  As time went on, he found himself as capable of conversing in her language as in his own, and so now he often found her unconsciously speaking in English, in words she had learned from him.

  When he told Ilil about this, it only confused her, for she could not understand. And how could she know if there were others like herself, when she had not known what it was to be this way? And the strange place names—he remembered those, too. They were one with Ilil’s language—words in the ancient Sumerian tongue of Earth, which he had studied in a course in archaeology. It had always been a mystery to archaeologists to explain the origin of the Sumerians. The Sumerian story of creation spoke of the Earth as floating upon a great sea called the Dimgal Abzu—the very sea surrounding this continent of Dimgal! How had the mountain-loving Sumerians got from the world of Eloraspon to the plains of Chaldea where flowed the Tigris and the Euphrates? If there was an answer anywhere, it was undoubtedly to be found in the city of Surandanish!

  Legends, Ilil explained, told of a race of gods from whom the Lulu, or men of Eloraspon, were descended. Once there had been thriving commerce between the eight continents of Eloraspon. But this was so long ago that actual records had long since rotted away. She knew only that men were not as they had once been; that Eloraspon was today a world changed from its ancient glory, of which the only remaining remnant was the shining cities dotting the globe.

  “The Dingir came and told the Lulu never more to inhabit the cities of the gods,” she said soberly. “That, too, was long ago. And the Lulu went forth and built their own cities, and thus it is everywhere, save in Tharnland, where the Tharn still live in the ancient towers and do not worship their builders.

  “At first, Jeff Jarvis, I “thought you in league with the Dingir as many are, but now I know you. You have told me the truth about yourself and your dead world of Earth. The Lulu once thought the Dingir gods and built staged towers upon the tops of which were offered worship and sacrifice. Now we know they are not gods, even though they are immortal.”

  “That is impossible,” Jarvis retorted. “No living thing is immortal.”

  “Then the Dingir are not living things,” she came back stubbornly, “for they certainly are immortal. Those of the Bronze Men, as they are also called, who walk today the length and breadth of Dimgal walked also in the days of our fathers and in the days of our fathers’ fathers and were here also in that long gone age when the true gods from whom the Lulu are descended also lived and ruled.”

  “You hate the Dingir and fear them,” Jarvis pointed out. “Why?”

  She trembled. “From their windowless city of Surandanish they come at intervals and walk among us and examine the newborn. Some they mark—” She tore the cloak from her right shoulder, showing a small red mark in the shape of a twisting serpent. “—and then they return to their city in ways as mysterious as those in which they came—by flying through the air or sinking into the ground.”

  “This mark—what does it mean?” Jarvis asked.

  “It is thus they mark some of us for their own. When we are grown, they come for us, and we must go with them.” Her dark glance searched his face. “That is why I am here in Kullab, Jeff Jarvis. I fled when they came to take me!”

  The Bronze Men of Surandanish! Jarvis was pensive. It was of these that Eamus Brock had spoken briefly to him and said no more. He began to sense that the intellectual leader of the Mag race had known all this but had failed to tell him. It had been Brock’s plan that he, Jarvis, seek and find Surandanish. What more in the leader’s thoughts had gone unspoken?

  Something of Ilil’s despondent mood touched him and he placed a comforting arm around her shoulders. The touch electrified him and he hastily withdrew his arm. Their camaraderie, up to now, had been gay and carefree. He could not spoil it.

  “Do not fear the Dingir any more,” he said gruffly. “I stand between you and them, or any Tharn that may confront us!”

  A ghost of a smile flickered on her soft, full lips and her dark eyes shone with gratitude and friendship. Did love lurk there, too, in that warm light? He bit his underlip, afraid to interpret further.

  The river Idnal proved unapproachable except through a mist-filled, rankly overgrown swamp lush with tropical growth.

  “The haunt of the lur,” said Ilil, “which the Tharn hunt for its priceless scent, used in perfumes. There should be a lur-boat nearby, hidden by a hunter.”

  Indeed, investigation of a nearby clump of reeds disclosed the needed lur-boat, a coracle, woven of reeds and round as a basket. Jarvis took a pole from the bottom but his effort to propel the craft was ludicrous; it spun in circles. Then it stopped spinning and began to forge ahead. He looked aro
und and grinned. Ilil had taken the other pole and was counteracting the vessel’s tendency to spin while he propelled it.

  The fetid air of the swamp was alive with insects and progress through this dismal world was slow. They had hardly pushed out of sight of land than Jarvis’ alert ears picked up the sound of splashing behind them. He probed quickly with his Mag senses.

  “Two men follow us,” he said crisply. “Push harder on that pole!”

  “Tharn!” breathed Ilil. She pointed a dripping pole at their wake. “We have left a plain enough trail for them to follow.” The tarn-black water behind them bubbled with gas-emission from the mucky bottom stirred by their poles, and bits of torn-up swamp grass littered the surface.

  The mist parted behind them, revealing their pursuers in a coracle smaller than their own and poling furiously.

  “Stop, thieves!” yelled one of the Tharn. “Where do you think you go with the lur-boat of Karpf?”

  Ilil dropped her pole and snatched up her bow. Jarvis stopped her.

  “Save your arrows! The growth is thick and there are only two. You could miss. Let’s argue this out with them.”

  “Argue with a dristl!” snorted Ilil. “The only argument they know is said with steel!”

  The Tharn overtook them quickly, for both were huge men, giants in fact. And they were experts at propelling the coracle. Their blue hides were naked save for loin cloths and both were armed with clubs. But it was neither their size nor their armament that was frightening—it was their faces—the Tharn face, known and dreaded throughout the continent. Hairless, blue-shining scalps surmounted puffed, ridged features like masks of flesh molded in wax. Round, staring eyes, like white saucers with tiny black pupils occupied the entire middle third of the face, practically noseless but with wide, gaping nostrils. From under black, thickly moustached upper lips protruded a pair of glistening tusks that curved like scimitars over the chin, almost to the breast-bone.

  “Lulu! Here are Lulu!” shrieked the foremost Tharn. “Let us take them!”

  From the corner of his eye. Jarvis noticed Ilil calmly drawing her sword, and a feeling of warm pride suffused him. She had no fear now, any more than she had displayed in the face of the ultul.

  Jarvis assumed an easy stance in the coracle, cradling his pole across his body. The Tharn, confident of victory, came on swiftly, yelling insults in language of such filthy derivation it had been no part of Ili’s vocabulary, hence incomprehensible to Jarvis. And still the Earthman stood and waited.

  Nor did he move until the leading Tharn swung his ten-foot pole in a whistling arc, and then he ducked. As he rose, he thrust with his own pole, into the middle of the monster’s belly. The Tharn yelped and toppled backward upon his companion, taken completely by surprise. Then, as the two floundered in the bottom their bobbing coracle, Jarvis hooked his pole under the gunwale of the opposing craft, prying it upward. The sprawling Tharn rolled to the low side and helped the maneuver; Jarvis’ muscles strained, and the coracle flipped over, dumping its occupants into the noisome froth of the swamp.

  Dusk was coming on as they cleared the last of the swamp growth and came out upon the broad, placidly flowing breast of the Idnal. They dared not tarry for fear of pursuit from Tharn alerted by the two Jarvis had so ignominiously dumped but began the crossing at once. Dark came down before they had paddled half way across, but by the time they had reached the opposite shore, the twin moons had risen and they found a place among the rocks to hide until morning, foregoing fire lest it betray their presence.

  In the morning they breakfasted on fruit which Jarvis found growing on the hillside, cast a last backward look at the Idnal flowing lazily below them, and set out through the hills. The call of Surandanish was strong now and Jarvis itched to be there. Having found a clue to some of the secrets of this strange planet, he was anxious to turn up more.

  Descending a narrow draw between low hills, he felt Ilil’s hand suddenly on his arm, tightening a warning grip. He alerted his Mag senses and at the same moment a group of four Tharn stepped from behind a shrubby copse scarcely thirty yards away.

  These were no more beautiful than the pair Jarvis had bested yesterday in the dim swamplight. If anything, the bright light of day made them seem huger and more hideous. Seven feet tall, massively thewed beneath bulging blue hides, they rolled their great white eyes, grimaced with bulging features and shook glittering long swords aloft in gestures of threat and challenge.

  There was no retreat back up the slope and to either side the steep hills enclosing the draw offered little foothold for climbing.

  “Ho, Lulu!” bellowed the foremost of the giants between glistening tusks. “Surrender to the might of the Lugal Zag-ab-Shab of Kullab!”

  “A military patrol,” Ilil murmured. “It is thus they offer challenge.”

  She had already notched an arrow to the string of her bow, but he knew the Tharn would be upon them before she could loose a second arrow. Nor would they, he knew, have mercy upon her sex in a fight.

  He said, “Return up the draw to the cover of those boulders. Your arrows will do more good from there. But if things come to the worst, I can hold them while you run back and find another way to Gipar.”

  Her chin set stubbornly. “Perhaps you are right in the first part,” she agreed, “but you forget I am a princess of Gipar. I can die fighting as well as any man!”

  “Let us not argue the point!” he barked. “Go! The Tharn get ready to attack.”

  He drew his boomerang and held it ready. “Stay, Tharn!” he shouted. “Who steps forward first, dies! Go in peace and let us go our way unmolested!”

  Raucous laughter from the leading Tharn answered him. The fellow took a step forward, and Jarvis feinted as if to throw his club. The Tharn ducked and straightened, jeering with laughter. The powerful muscles of Jarvis’ arm and body responded instantly. The boomerang whirled from his hand, not toward the Tharn’s head, but to where he knew it would be as the creature instinctively ducked. Years of practice forced by hunger had made Jarvis skilled in use of this weapon. He could give it the correct amount of spin to make it hurtle straight for any given number of yards before it flattened on its side to rise and return.

  The Tharn’s first step was his last. The hurtling boomerang flattened in its trajectory at the precise moment the monster ducked and swept with whistling velocity across the middle of the Tharn’s face, the whirling blades shattering flesh, gristle and bone and nearly tearing the head from the body. The giant toppled, his weapons clattering on the rocks.

  Now he could breathe a little, Jarvis thought, while the others considered this. But it seemed as nothing to the Tharn. Their way of life was death; they were still three to his one, for Ilil had retreated up the draw and was now hidden somewhere out of sight among the rocks. They roared with rage and advanced, running.

  At once a killing rage seized the Earthman, a rage of excitement and blood lust. He raced to meet the charging enemy, bounding down the slope, gleaming axe blade arcing in his grip. The blade shot from his hand and cleaved the skull of the second Tharn, and the third dropped an instant later with Jarvis’ knife buried to the hilt in the blue flesh of his throat.

  Engaging swords with the last of the Tharn, Jarvis came to a shocking realization. This was no ignorant brute he fought but a swordsman of skill and intelligence. He had been misled by the brutish appearance of these fellows. At close quarters, they fought coolly and with precision.

  Giant though he was, the Tharn was a trifle clumsier than the Earthman and just a bit slower. But he made up for these faults in the sheer weight of his attack and the skill of his blade. But if the Tharn could not penetrate the cage of steel Jarvis wove about himself with his blade, neither could the Earth-man lay steel to the perspiring flesh of his opponent. They fought in silence save for the stamping of feet and the ring of their blades. Dust stu
ng Jarvis’ nostrils. Trickling sweat half blinded him. He knew he was fighting for his life, and for Ilil’s life, and he knew no discomfort or fatigue. He maneuvered the Tharn to keep the advantage of sun always on his own side.

  As they fought grimly, the sun climbed the sky. The Tharn was visibly tiring. Sweat glistened on distended, blue-skinned muscles and his guard was dropping. Jarvis pressed home the advantage, pursuing every trick of swordsmanship he had ever learned. Suddenly the Tharn leaped backward half a score of feet and cast his weapon at Jarvis’ feet.

  “I yield me!” he roared. “By the Dingir, you are a fighting man, Giparian!”

  Jarvis paused, blade, held ready.

  “Pick up your sword, Tharn. Would you die empty handed?”

  “Better to die than live a Tharn,” growled the other. “Kill me then and be done with it, for I have no stomach for further fight with such a swordsman!”

  Jarvis dropped his point. “Are the Tharn then so hateful,” he marveled, “that they hate even themselves?”

  “This Tharn hates himself and all other Tharn,” retorted the brute, “for I am no Tharn, save on the outside. I have Giparian inwards, warrior, and I must warn you now to look to your woman for I think that while we fought, Skal has taken her!” Jarvis whirled toward the rocks in which Ilil had hidden and called out, but there was no answer. He turned stormy face and lifted blade to the Tharn.

  “What has happened to her? Tell me before I…”

  “Spare me and I am your life-slave,” retorted the Tharn. “Thork can do you no good dead. Alive, I may be able to return your woman.”

  Jarvis hesitated, then slowly dropped his point to the dust.

  “Make good your boast,” he said in tones of cold finality.