For them to challenge the might of victorious Shondakor would be folly and madness. They do not even maintain a standing army, and during the long recent decades during which their trading caravans and merchant fleets were preyed upon by the flying corsairs of Zanadar, they grudgingly paid an annual tribute to assure their immunity from the depredations of the Sky Pirates, rather than raise an army of war.
Bound and gagged and helpless to discuss the situation with my Princess or Ergon, I could only lie, seething with silent rage, while these questions boiled through my turbulent thoughts.
By this time we had ascended to the height of at least half a mile into the air, and were drifting due east on the prevailing winds. Or so I guessed, anyway. It is somewhat difficult to judge one’s direction on Callisto. The inhabitants of the jungle Moon have yet to invent the compass, and as this world is illuminated by a layer of luminous golden vapor in its atmosphere, one never sees the sun and thus cannot with ease or surety judge east from west, which is the easiest thing to do on my own native Earth. But judging the direction of our flight as best I could, we were flying east … east, towards the unknown edge of the world itself, for, as I have said, the far side of Callisto is a realm of unexplored mystery to the natives of this planet. Nothing at all is known of the other hemisphere, save that somewhere therein resides a mysterious people called the Mind Wizards of Kuur, with whom I have already had one encounter.
As related in an earlier volume of these memoirs*, while serving incognito among the warriors of the
Chac Yuul, I discovered that one of the advisors of Arkola, chief of the Black Legion, was a Kuurian named Ool the Uncanny. A little plump, placid Buddha of a man, bald, with slitted eyes and butter-yellow skin, the clever and cunning little priest had been none other than the power behind the throne, so to speak. A shudder ran through me at the memory of that uncanny battle in the Pits, when I had crossed swords with the cunning Ool, in a desperate, last-minute attempt to rescue my beloved Princess from a forced marriage with Prince Vaspian, the son of Arkola the Usurper. Although I am in my own right a master swordsman, Ool proved almost my match, for the little Kuurian possessed the weird power of mental telepathy and thus could read my mind and know my every thought. It is, as I discovered during that desperate duel in the dungeons, almost impossible to conquer a swordsman who can read your mind …
Suddenly I stiffened where I lay, helplessly bound in the basket o f the drifting balloon!
Ool had been a little man, almost a dwarf, yellow-skinned and bald, with slanted eyes, gowned in a priestlike robe of gray …
My gaze flashed across the crowded basket to where the yellow dwarf squatted. His clever and beady black eyes bored into mine, almost knowingly. Almost as if he knew or guessed the direction of my thoughts, a cold and crafty smile hovered about his thin lips―and he nodded.
I tore my gaze from his slanted eyes, and lay stunned in realization.
One of the many mysteries that surrounded our capture was now solved.
For the malignant, gloating little dwarf, with butter-yellow skin was a Mind Wizard of distant and unknown Kuur.
Chapter 3
Prisoners of Tharkol
All the remainder of that long day we flew on, riding the winds far above the Great Plains, on and on into the remote east.
Our captors loosened our bonds, restoring circulation, and made us comfortable enough. They did not, however, remove the gags from our mouths for some reason. We suffered considerably from thirst, therefore.
Time and again I surreptitiously tested my strength against the rawhide thongs that bound my arms behind my back. Had I been bound with ropes, it is just possible that I might have been able to burst free of them, for, raised under the slightly heavier gravitational influence of Earth, my strength is somewhat greater than that of the average Thanatorian. But rawhide is a devilishly difficult thing to free oneself of, for as the untanned leather dries it also shrinks, and, being flexible to a degree, it “gives” ever so slightly to your efforts to free yourself, instead of breaking.
Thus my attempts were in vain; but still I strove to loosen my hands. There was nothing else to be done, and it is not the way of Jandar of Callisto to yield supinely to captivity or to superior force. Far rather would I go down fighting with the last ounce of strength in my body, than to lie helpless without trying, however hopelessly, to win freedom.
Ergon, too, strove to win free of the thongs. The burly, sullen-faced warrior was gagged as were I and Darloona, but his scowling glare was eloquent. Had his mouth been ungagged, he would have made the air sulphurous with ‘oaths. From time to time, I saw his scarlet face congested with effort and the great thews that bulged in shoulder and upper arm tense and stand out in sharp relief like steel bands. But his strength, like my own, was insufficient to break free of bondage.
We were still riding the winds when night fell across the world. Nightfall on Callisto comes without warning and the transition from full daylight to ebon gloom takes only minutes. Thus, when the world darkened suddenly around us and the great moons rose, rich with their many colors, we realized we had been in flight for several hours.
Our flight ended shortly after the coming of the darkness. By the green and red and silvery illumination afforded by three of the many moons of Jupiter, we observed a city on the horizon. It rose from a hilly height amidst the plain and was nowhere near the sea, and therefore we assumed that it was none other than Tharkol.
We could not see very much of it because of our position in the basket, but from what we could observe, it was a large city of stone masonry, ringed about with the mighty bastions of a great wall. From a citadel―crowned and heavily fortified hill in the center of the city, broad paved avenues ran in every direction like spokes from the hub of a wheel. Towards this central citadel the queenly young woman guided our aerial vehicle.
The walls of the citadel drifted past below us. By the green rays of Orovad, or lo, which was then at the zenith, we saw beneath us a broad plaza or forum paved with smooth stone. Over this square, which was the courtyard of the citadel, our captress piloted the balloon.
A second ring of fortifications passed beneath us, and then, as the crimson rays of Ganymede added their illumination to the light of the first moon, we saw that the citadel which crowned the hilly height was built like an enormous ziggurat with many tiers.
Towards the third of these tiers we floated, descending as lightly as a floating leaf. Ranks of guardsmen stood stiffly at attention, the green and red moonlight sparkling from rows of helmets, breastplates, and spear blades. At a curt command they sprang forward, caught the drifting lines and hauled the basket down, tethering it securely to a lengthy mast or spar that struck out at an angle from the lip of the tier and which had obviously been designed for exactly this purpose.
It was the young woman who was the first to step from the basket. As she appeared to their view, the moonlight flashing on the jewels of her coronet, the ranked guards struck their mailed gauntlets to their armored breasts in a crashing salute, and thundered forth a great cry as if from a single throat.
“Hail, Zamara!”
So, at least, we had learned the name of our captress.
The guards bundled us out of the basket and lifted us down to the stone surface of the ziggurat tier, and again I could not help noticing that we were handled without roughness or insult. Zamara turned, made an imperious gesture, flashing in my direction one last triumphant, joyous glance of mockery and amusement from her brilliant eyes. Then we were bundled swiftly away, through a doorway whose lintel was carved with beaked and leering mythological monsters, and through a bewildering maze of corridors and passages into the citadel itself.