It was marvelous shooting. The two guards never knew what hit them. They fell in huddled heaps in front of the door.
“Good shooting,” Jongor said. “But the bow would have been better because it would have been silent. Those shots will certainly attract the Arklans who are hunting us.”
They paused long enough in the entrance to scoop up the blast guns of the guards. Then Nesca opened the door. As they stepped in they saw an Arklan patrol put in an appearance in the street behind them. Bolts of blue radiance flared against the door as it swung shut.
On either side of the door were slits so arranged that defenders inside the fortress could fire at attackers without. Jongor leaped to one of the slits. It commanded a perfect view of the approaches to the door. He could see the Arklans scurrying around outside. They were not trying to attack as yet but were keeping out of sight as much as possible and seemed to be waiting for reinforcements.
“One man with a blast gun can hold this door against an army,” Jongor said.
“Two men with rifles can hold it too,” Schiller spoke up. “Morton and I will guard this door and protect your rear while the rest of you clean out any Arklans that may be inside. I would suggest that your first step would be to get as many of those blast guns as possible. From the temper of those fellows on the outside, I think you’re going to need them.”
Schiller’s suggestion was accepted. Leaving him and Morton on guard at the door, the others hurried into the fortress.
“Will there be guards here?” Jongor questioned.
“I think not,” Nesca answered. “They were not looking for us here. Mozdoc put guards at the entrances, to keep us out, but he will not have them inside the fortress itself.”
HER prophecy was borne out. From a wall bracket, one of the Arklans took a cold-light glow tube, and lighted their way through the place. They did not meet a single one of Mozdoc’s men. The fortress was a labyrinth of twisting, turning passages. Centuries of effort had gone into the cutting of these tunnels out of the solid rock, into the making of this last place of refuge for the Arklan race, should disaster come.
Nesca led them first to a room that seemed to be an armory. It was filled with strange-looking weapons. Great metal boxes along the walls were filled with the blast guns. The Arklans quickly gathered up all the hand guns they could carry. Nesca dispatched them to guard the entrances to the fortresses, except two, which she kept with her as a sort of personal guard of honor.
“What about food and waiter?” Jongor questioned. “If we have to stand a siege.”
“There is stored food, enough to last for months,” the Arklan queen answered. “As for water, an underground river flows through the fortress. It will supply all the water we will ever need. The fortress was built here because of the river. Now, if you will come with me—”
She led them through a short tunnel and into a vast room. At the touch of her hand on some hidden switch, the cold glow lamps began to shine in the darkness.
They revealed a vast, vaulted room that had been hollowed out of solid rock. Overhead was a great domed roof. It was an impressive place, impressive not only because of its size but because of the labor of generations of Arklans that must have gone into hollowing this chamber out of the cliffs. How long they had worked here, and with what loving care! Jongor could not help wondering, as he saw the size of the place.
Only a race of engineers could have designed this room and only a race of artists could have created the ornamental figures that covered the walls.
“This is our temple.” Nesca’s voice was hushed in the dimly-lit chamber. “This is the place we built to worship—” whatever gods may be. There,” she pointed toward the front of the room, “is, I think, our most perfect creation.”
She was pointing at a pedestal of solid stone. On top of the pedestal was a huge ball. One glimpse of it and Jongor knew what this ball represented the world. It was made of some metal that reflected the dull glow of the cold lights. On its surface were plainly visible the continents and seas of earth.
On top of the ball was a figure cast of the same softly glowing metal—a winged Arklan, rearing high, his head lifted toward the stars.
Pegasus quitting earth forever might have looked like, this. Chin high, eyes looking up, wings beating the air, going up, up, somewhere into supernal regions overhead—this was what Nesca had said was the greatest triumph of Arklan artistry.
Jongor heard a soft cry from Ann Hunter. “It—it’s beautiful!” the girl whispered.
“Thank you, my dear,” the Arklan queen whispered. “Yes, it is beautiful, I think, but there is more than beauty in it. It “represents the Arklan dream that long ago we set for ourselves—but somehow failed to reach—”
THERE was sadness in her voice, more sadness than words could ever tell. Standing in front of the Arklan with the sky-reaching wings, she seemed to be sorrowing for something.
Jongor caught the sadness in her voice. It sent a stab of fear through his heart. His cry of protest was harsh in that silent temple.
“Nesca! What is the meaning of this?”
The Arklan queen did not answer. “I wanted you to see this,” she said. “I wanted you to remember me—and to remember the Arklans—like this, a winged dream flying skyward.” She gestured up, toward the statue.
“Nesca!”
She seemed not to hear him. She seemed to be listening to other voices heard from afar.
“We were on earth before the Murtos,” she, said. “When they came, we were already on the downward trail, our race dying out, our vigor fading.
But we were still tough, battle-hardened, fit to survive. A few of us did survive, here. The Murtos came, and grew to greatness. Then their empire sank below the waters of the Pacific, and the few Murtos who survived took the long trail downward. You have seen Orbo and Umber, you know what they are now—beasts, forest-dwellers.” Jongor was cold, cold, cold. Ann and Alan Hunter had drawn close to him as though for protection. The two Arklans, the honor guard of the queen, stood proudly erect. Somehow they looked as if this was their hour of glory.
“Races come, grow old, and perish,” Nesca said. “We came many, many thousands of years ago. Then the Murtos came. I do not doubt that there were others before us. There will be—” her voice caught and she looked at Jongor—“others who will come after us.”
“Nesca, what is the meaning of this?” Jongor demanded.
“It means that now is the end of the Arklans,” she answered.
“But—”
“Now is the hour of our doom. We have had our days of glory. Now we have to make room for another race—your race, Jongor. When I first saw you, in Lost Land so long ago, I knew that you were of the coming race.”
Jongor looked straight at her. “Nesca, this talk of doom is foolishness. We are safe here. We have food, water, the protection of walls of stone. You yourself have said that we are safe.”
“I will die here, Jongor,” Nesca said. “Die?” Jongor’s mind flashed back to the prophecy of the dying Arklan whom Schiller had shot. “Have you been influenced by—”
She shook her head. “I cannot explain how I know, but I, and many of the Arklans, have second sight, the ability dimly to perceive the future. Believe me, Jongor, when I say I shall die here, I know what I am talking about. My end is here, and the end of my people.”
“But—”
Jongor was abruptly silent. Muffled by the intervening corridors, from somewhere in the vast fortress came the sound of a rifle shot. Schiller or Morton, he thought, shooting at an Arklan skulking outside the entrance. He dismissed the shot from his mind.
“When you came to the palace,” Nesca was speaking quicker now, as if she had much to say and little time in which to say it, “I knew that my doom was at hand. And all your efforts to convince me that I should resist did not change my conviction. I knew then, what was to happen.”
“Then why did you resist?” Jongor demanded. “Why didn’t you yield your neck to the ex
ecutioner’s axe? Why didn’t you give up?”
“I fought so you could live, Jongor. You and the girl you love.”
“What?”
“I fought for you, Jongor, not for myself. The executioners would have killed you too, if I had yielded. And I did not want you to die. That was why I allowed you to persuade me to resist.”
Jongor stared in silence at this strange queen. The whole temple was silent.
IN that silence there came the sound of running feet. A man blundered into the room. He blinked at the lights. He saw the little group, made for them. He was holding both hands over his chest. It was Morton.
“What happened?” Jongor said huskily. He sprang forward. You’ve been shot, man.”
“Schiller,” Morton said weakly. “He shot me.”
“Shot you?”
“I wouldn’t let him open the gate,” Morton explained.
“Schiller wanted to open the gate?” Jongor exploded.
“Yes,” Morton whispered. “He said we were on the wrong side, that the Arklans on the outside were the ones who were going to win this fight, and if we helped them, they would reward us. I guess I ought to have told you this sooner, Mr. Jongor, but Schiller and me, when you first found us, we were really trying to get into Lost Land. Schiller somehow had learned that this country existed. He was trying to get here. That was why he volunteered to come with you—because you were coming here.”
Anger grooved Jongor’s face. All along he had suspected Schiller was holding back something. This was it. He was trying to reach Lost Land.
“He said there was gold here, and diamonds,” Morton continued. “I tried to keep him from doing it, Mr. Jongor. You had been good to us—not to mention saving our lives when the Blackfellows had us—and I didn’t want to do anything bad to you, but Schiller—”
Morton coughed a spray of blood. He sagged. Jongor eased him gently to the floor.
“You better look out, Mr. Jongor,” he whispered. “Schiller opened the door and the Arklans are coming.”
His voice faded into silence. A convulsive shudder passed through him.
“Damn Schiller!” Jongor said. “I’ll break his neck.”
Already echoing through the tunnels of the vast fortress, he could hear the hurrying hoofs of the Arklans. He looked at Nesca. “I apologize for doubting you,” he said. “You knew what you were talking about when you said we died here. Well—” the grin of battle was on his face—“they’ll know they’ve been in a fight before they pull us down.”
He notched an arrow on the string of the great bow.
Nesca smiled at him. “You are fit to belong to the race of the future, Jongor. Hard in battle, merciful in victory, just and honorable; yes, I see why your race belongs to the future while the Arklans belong to the past. We were hard enough in battle, but we were never merciful in victory. We were honorable enough, but the code that we honored was wrong—” Abruptly she broke off.
When she spoke again new vigor had flowed into her voice. “It will be an honor to die beside you, Jongor. Come. I know a place where we will be protected on three sides. They can only come at us from one direction. We will pile their dead bodies shoulder high before we go down. Come quickly.”
The ringing call to battle was in her words. At a trot she led them across the temple, under the winged Arklan that looked skyward, under the great ball that was the earth. She paused at the farther wall, pressed an ornament. A section of the wall rolled aside.
“In quickly!” she said.
JONGOR had to duck to enter the J opening. Ann and Alan Hunter were by his side. Boards beneath his feet gave back a hollow echo of his footsteps. Why should there be boards here? The temple was cut out of solid stone. There should be no passage floored with boards. He whirled.
The opening was closing behind him.
Nesca, and the two loyal Arklans who formed her guard of honor, were standing beyond the opening. They had never entered this small alcove.
The opening slammed shut.
“Nesca!” Jongor was pounding on the wall. “What trickery is-this? Have you, too, betrayed me?”
Her voice came faintly back. “I never said that you would die here, Jongor. I said that I, and the Arklan race, would die here but not you.”
Jongor beat frenziedly against the wall. Somewhere in the far distance he could hear the crackling discharge of the blast guns and he knew the Arklans had entered the temple.
Jongor, with Ann and Alan Hunter, were enclosed in total darkness.
“I hear water running,” Ann Hunter whispered.
The soft rustle of water against stones was barely audible. Jongor was too busy feeling of the walls and trying to find a way to escape to pay any attention.
“Hey! We’re moving!” Alan Hunter gasped.
Not until then did Jongor realize that a gentle rocking: motion was perceptible on the floor under their feet. He dropped to his knees, began to feel of the floor. He could see nothing. His fingers told him that the floor was of wood. His ears told him that there was water running very close to them.
Suddenly he grasped the meaning.
“We’re in a boat,” he whispered. “Nesca said there was an underground river flowing through the temple. We’re on this river, in a boat.”
He knew, then, what had happened. Nesca had tricked him into entering a boat, which would, he suspected, carry them safely out of the fortress. It was a method of escape contrived anciently by the Arklans. Meanwhile, Nesca had remained behind, though whether she had remained behind to protect his escape or to fulfill her prophecy that she would die in the temple, Jongor did not know.
TWICE, as they floated along, they heard dim roars in the distance, thuds, as of vast explosions. Jongor wondered if Nesca, fighting in the temple, had set off some hidden store of explosive, thus destroying her attackers, and her with them.
It was a question he would never have answered. The boat bumped gently along, its wooden sides scraping now and then against stone walls. Jongor at last discovered the catch that opened the door.
Outside the boat was darkness. Water gurgled near them. The place was as black as midnight. They could see nothing.
“We’ll just have to wait and see where the boat takes us,” Jongor decided.
Whether they liked it or not, they were passengers in the boat. To attempt to leave it, to plunge into the dark waters which carried it, would be to invite death.
An hour passed.
“There’s light ahead of us!” Jongor hissed.
The boat floated toward the light, into it. He saw where they were.
In Lost Land! Behind them loomed the dark cliffs. In the cliffs was a round opening out of which poured the underground river. With the butt of his spear, Jongor poled the boat toward the shore. It grated on the sand. He leaped out.
“Look!” Ann Hunter called.
Jongor was already looking. A great glow was lighting the sky. Tongues of flame could be seen reaching up into the heavens. Off there in the night, possibly a mile away, a great fire was burning. It was in the direction of the Arklan city.
They hurried toward it. Jongor sensed what the fire meant, but he had the vague hope that somehow, someway, he could save Nesca, queen of the Arklans. Nesca had saved, the lives of all of them. He would help her if he could.
They topped a little hill. The city of the Arklans lay before them. Jongor took one look.
THE cliff behind the city had been blown to fragments. A great gaping hole loomed in the stone ramparts. Some hidden store of explosive had been ignited there. Possibly the stored weapons of the Arklans had been touched off.
Whatever had been the cause of the explosion, the results were obvious. The whole shattered cliff, the last place of refuge of the Arklans, was aflame. Great rivers of fire, like lava flowing from a volcano, were pouring down over the city. The stone buildings of the Arklans were being engulfed.
“Nesca was a true prophet,” Jongor said slowly. “She said the time of the end o
f the Arklans was at hand.”
“Did she set the fortress on fire?” Alan Hunter wondered aloud.
“We will never know,” Jongor answered. “Perhaps she did it, to cover our escape. Perhaps it was accidental. There is no way of knowing.”
“She was a great woman,” Ann Hunter whispered. “Before I knew who she was, I was jealous of her.”
“She was the great queen of a people who should have been great themselves,” Jongor said. There was a touch of sadness in his voice.
The Arklans should have been a great race. They had keen intelligence and wisdom, and other elements of greatness. If something had not been lacking in their makeup, they might have become the dominant race on earth. Certainly they had dreamed of this. Jongor thought of the winged centaur in their temple. Yes, the Arklans had dreamed of greatness, but somehow, in the fight for life, they had been passed by. Other races had gone ahead of them, had forced them to yield ground a little by a little, until, of all the places on earth that had once been home to them, only this tiny comer of a forgotten world remained. Here they had fought to survive. Here they had finally lost the fight.
Looking skyward, Jongor thought he saw for an instant, outlined against the broad face of the moon, a winged centaur flying upward, reaching with beating wings for some world beyond the sky, seeking some final haven in other lands that lie afar. Was the vision fact or fancy? He did not know. He blinked and looked again. The vision was gone.
“Thank you, Nesca,” he said to the night wind. “Thank you, Queen of the Arklans, for our lives.”
They turned, and made their way down into Lost Land. Behind them, little by little as the night progressed, the glow in the sky died down.
[1] See Jongor of Lost Land, in the October, 1940, issue of FANTASTIC ADVENTURES. Jongor was the son of Capt. Robert Gordon, one-time U.S. Naval aviator, who, with his bride, had attempted to fly over that vast expanse of western Australia desert country where Lost Land is located. Here, in a huge valley hidden away behind high mountains, the world of hundreds of thousands of years ago still exists. Here the dinosaurs have survived, as have the pterodactyls, those winged dragon lizards of antiquity, and other savage beasts of the days when the earth was young. Lost Land is surrounded by mountains. The mountains in turn are surrounded by deserts, thus making exploration almost impossible.
Jongor- the Complete Tales Page 17