Tuan watched appraisingly, a slight smile playing about his lips.
“O, brave and braver still is the skulking thief in the night!” he exclaimed tauntingly. “But the courageous silence of the dog Agila will not last very long … soon will he writhe and wriggle on the spit. And then a whimper or a gasp will come … and then, mayhap, some weeping or crying out. It will perhaps be half a kua, mayhap a trifle less, before the screaming will commence. And it will be happy music to the ears of Tuan!”
Half a kua was a measurement of Martian time the equivalent to about ten minutes, Brant knew. He rather agreed with Tuan’s estimate of how long Agila could hold his tongue.
And then it happened.
Tuan glanced up suddenly, in the direction of the hills, and his eyes widened in amazement and disbelief. He uttered a harsh croak, an involuntary cry.
Behind Brant, Will Harbin cried out, “Good God!” in a shaky voice.
And Brant himself looked up.
There came hurtling through the air toward their camp, heading inland from the sea, a Flying Boy.
He was lithe and naked, pale golden, hairless. And he bore in one fist a long, glittering lance.
At first glimpse, it seemed to them all that he was winged. But then, as he flashed down upon them, scattering the outlaws into howling flight, they saw that he was mounted between the flickering, thrumming wings of a gigantic dragonfly.
It was obviously akin to the flying things they had seen in the fungus-forest, one of which Brant had slain with the knife, and Doc had cooked and sampled its meat.
But that one was only as long as Brant’s arm. This fantastic creature was the length of a six-man canoe, and its glittering wings of sheeted opal must have a forty-foot spread.
As his amazing steed flashed by overhead, the golden youth leaned from the saddle—for now Brant had a closer look, he observed that he was strapped into a high saddle woven, it seemed, of wicker. With the flat head of his lance, he caught Agila in the ribs, with a blow just strong enough to push the whole spit-contraption over into the moss beyond the fire.
Agila flopped, wriggled, gasping, rubbing his blistered parts against the cool, damp moss.
Brant got clumsily to his feet, and stood staring skywards. The aerial knight soared by overhead, banked in a sharp turn, and came about for another pass at them. He bent over to peer at them, and Brant noticed only that his eyes were glinting amber, and that he was quite young, long-legged, smoothly built, and so strikingly handsome as almost to be worthy of being called beautiful, although in a boyish way.
Brant nudged Zuarra with his foot.
“Up girl! Run for it. Doc! Suoli—stop your blubbering! On your feet, all of you—make for the grove!”
Zuarra and Will Harbin, at least, instantly understood Brant’s notion. While the outlaw band scattered in witless terror, like jackrabbits startled by a hunting hawk, they could lose themselves in the forest.
With Zuarra loping along at his side, Brant broke into a clumsy staggering run for the edge of the clearing. Then, several things happened so quickly, that ever after it was tough for him to sort them out in sequence.
Suddenly, to his dazed eyes, the sky was filled with naked golden children mounted on enormous dragonflies. There must have been a couple of dozen of them, perhaps twice that number. Uttering shrill, exuberant cries and brandishing their glittering lances, they wheeled in tight formation over the clearing.
Then Will Harbin cried out for help. A coil of braided rope settled about his shoulders, bringing him to a halt; another caught him about the hips. Yelling and kicking, he was dragged off his feet and into the air.
As Brant paused uncertainly on the edge of the clearing, looking back, one of the aerial riders spotted him, gave voice to a shrill halloo, and headed for him quicker than the eye could follow. Brant did not even have time to blink before he, too, was lassoed and hauled into the air.
Zuarra screamed once as her kicking heels left the moss and she was born aloft.
Then, the speed of their flight making their eyes blur with tears, they were carried off on swift, thrumming wings toward the luminous sea.
Brant looked back, squinting his watering eyes against the wind. Zuarra, Harbin, Suoli, Tuan, and all of the outlaws had been captured by the flying boys. All kicked and squirmed and seemed unharmed. He discovered later that one of the flying youths, the first to have discovered them, had returned to rescue Agila from his bondage.
Looking up, he realized that each of the dragonfly-riders was sharing their weight. That is; he had been lassoed almost simultaneously by two of the nude children. It would seem, then, that the dragonflies, no matter how enormous, had to share the weight of captives between them.
The aerial creatures had two sets of wings at either side, sprouting from the same boulderlike bunch of muscles. For all their strength, however, they had to share the extra burden of a captive.
They were gorgeous, the super-dragonflies. Even in this precarious position, he could appreciate their rich coloring. Their long, stiff, tube-shaped bodies varied from the hue of burnished bronze to metallic green like verdigris, and sparkled in the light of the radiant sea beneath them. The droning of their wings in flight was sonorous, and their eye-bunches glistened like clustered wet black gems.
He noticed that the strange glassy lances borne by the pilots were employed in lieu of bit or bridle, for the giant dragonflies wore no reins. Instead, they were guided by these long, flat-bladed spears. It seemed the flying creatures had sensitive nodules on the top of their heads: a tap or a rap on certain of these communicated the commands of their riders. Up, down, right, left, went the message of the tappings.
He had, of course, thought of them as weapons. It seemed, however, that they were not.
As for the riders themselves, all of those who were within the range of his vision were uniformly young. This would seem to make good sense: for all their size, the super-dragonflies had little in the way of lifting-power. The riders most suited to the craft were young boys between the ages of twelve and fourteen, as he later learned.
They flew out over the phosphorescent ocean, the captors and their captives, and descended before very long to an astonishing vessel. It was like unto no ship that Brant had ever seen or heard of. Its shape was that of a crescent, with a high forecastle and an equally tall aft-structure. And it seemed to possess neither sails nor oarbanks.
Even stranger, it was not made out of wood, but woven out of something like bundles of reeds or wicker.
The flyers hovered above the deck midships and—dropped their captive quarry!
They landed upon a springy deck woven, it seemed, of rattan, which gave beneath their weight. All of them were bound and helpless, the party led by Brant with bound wrists, the outlaws tangled in those braided lassoes.
The rattan decks gave beneath their weight. In no time, other excited mariners, young and naked and golden, took them into custody. Whereupon, the mounted dragonflies settled into the mastlike superstructure above the ship.
Brant had noticed these branching masts devoid of sails or cordage, with naught but rope-ladders, but had been too busy to think much about them, so swiftly did the movement of events go forward. Now he saw that the many-branched masts were the roosting-places of the super-dragonflies.
Their mounts tethered to these aerial perches, the naked pilots swarmed with agility down the rope ladders, to engage the other mariners in a babble of excited jabbering. Brant caught Doc Harbin’s eye and called across to him.