The sky was clear and the stars twinkled down, and the larger of the twin moons was faintly visible as a ghostly crescent low on the horizon. Lighting the gloom with torches, he sent his lassomen out to rope the ponderous, slow-moving giants.
Before long they managed to snag two of them and pull them off balance, toppling them to the ground. Then, with five or six men pulling at the other end of the rope, they dragged their captives away from the scene and attempted to tie their arms to their bodies with further ropes or thongs. Some of the men were armed with axes or war hammers, and these strove to smash the Stone Giants as the one atop the walls had been broken asunder when hit by the missile.
The other Stone Giants paid no attention to their captive comrades and patiently continued breaking the ballistae apart into fragments.
Like everyone else in the camp, Ryker and the old Israeli had been aroused from their slumbers by the uproar, and came out of their tent to see what was happening.
But unlike the others, who were too busily engaged in trying to immobilize and break up the stone men to have time for curiosity, Ryker wondered just where the Giants had come from, and how they had gotten out of the City. He knew that Zarouk had posted sentries to keep an eye on the gates of the City, so that his camp would not be taken by surprise in a foray such as this.
The fact that it had been surprised, suggested to Ryker that the Giants had come through the walls by some other entry not as yet discovered.
He imparted this intelligence to the old scientist, who eagerly agreed that it was indeed mysterious. On impulse, the two of them circled the commotion and headed out toward the City, hoping to find out how the Giants had gotten there.
They found the answer to the question with surprising ease, when a portion of the riverbank opened beneath them, quite suddenly, and they fell into a dark, cavernous space.
Ryker staggered to his feet, limping on a lame leg, blood trickling down into his eyes from a cut on his scalp. The leg did not feel like it was broken, and the rest of him, although bruised and shaken up a bit, was not seriously harmed.
Rubbing the blood out of his eyes, he peered around him in the utter blackness, calling Doc’s name in a hoarse voice.
Then he stumbled into something soft and yielding. Dropping to his knees he felt around him with groping hands, encountering the old man’s body.
He lay limp and unmoving, but Ryker could hear him breathing and his searching hands found the flutter of a pulse. He ran his hands gently over the old man’s limbs, finding that when he touched Herzog’s left leg the old man groaned.
A hurt, perhaps broken leg was bad enough. A broken head was worse. And his questing fingers found a lump on the scientist’s head the size of a hen’s egg. But, anyway, Doc was still alive, and that was something to be thankful for.
His eyes were beginning to adjust to the darkness by now, and some faint starlight was filtering through the hole far above his head. By this dim illumination, he searched the pit into which they had fallen, finding a flight of crude stone steps along one wall leading up to the opening above. By this stair, obviously, the Stone Giants had ascended to the mouth of the pit.
Peering up, he could just make out the details. A sort of double trapdoor made of wooden planks and covered with a natural camouflage of soil and moss had protected the secret entry from discovery. He guessed that the trap had been shut but not barred, left sufficiently ajar so that the Giants could pry it open and make their escape by this same route, when their work was accomplished. If it had been barred, the chances were that he and Doc could have walked across it without noticing that it was covering a hollowness in the ground, because from the residue of soil and moss which still clung to the trap, he could see that the camouflage had been nearly two feet thick.
Ryker knelt to gather the old man up in his arms, thinking to ascend by the stair and get his companion back to camp, when he was forced to alter his plans.
The point of a slim rapier was just barely touching the back of Ryker’s neck.
Moving slow and careful, he turned his head to see the smiling features of the slim, languid young lordling who had stood next to Valarda on the parapet, and who had laughed in answer to her jest.
There were five other men with him. And they all wore swords.
And Ryker’s hands were empty.
For a moment he simply looked at them. There was no way that he could fight them, here in the dark, in these narrow confines, and lacking any weapon save his bare hands and the iron strength of his burly body.
But he was sorely tempted.
He was sick of being a captive. And these lordlings of Zhiam looked to him slim, delicate, almost effeminate. Their half-naked bodies were silky-smooth, soft—-not flabby, but with undeveloped musculature. They looked oddly immature, their smooth cheeks and pointed chins innocent of hair, their bodies slim and effete. Like boys playing soldier, he thought sourly to himself.
He did not like their softness, or the gems that twinkled at earlobe and throat and wrist. Instead of the leather tunics and breeches, or long, burnooselike robes usually worn by the warriors of Mars, these dainty princelings went nearly naked—but then, to be fair, in this humid, nigh-tropical climate, there was no need for the heavier raiment common on the Mars he knew.
They wore jewelled girdles of precious metal slung low about their hips, with silken breechclouts of shimmering fabric, the hues of metallic bronze-green, amber, purple or indigo, wound about their slender loins. Bands of gleaming Martium or red-bronze clasped their slim, boyish arms at the biceps and the wrist. Their legs were naked, their feet shod in supple buskins, laced high over the instep.
Their faces were heart shaped as Valarda’s, with wide cheekbones, pointed chins, and large, slightly slanted eyes lustrously golden as were hers. They wore their fur caps longer than was the custom among the People he knew, silky russet hair caught in openwork helms made of curved pieces of gold or silver, some adorned with jewels and others haughty with nodding plumes. A few wore short, knee-length cloaks of scarlet cloth—crinkly, shiny-surfaced stuff, like taffeta—and obviously for court fashion rather than for warmth.
He didn’t like the looks of them—their soft, underdeveloped bodies, their features so pretty as to verge on girlish beauty, their languid postures, too graceful and affected to be manly. But he had to admit they held their swords expertly enough. They looked as if they knew very well how to use them.
There was no sense in getting himself killed—not here, not like this, like a rat trapped in a black hole in the ground. It would do no good to resist, so he surrendered.
The dainty princeling who had attended Valarda on the parapet murmured some peremptory directive to his retinue. Ryker listened closely this time. Now that he realized the language was an antiquated and obsolete variant of the one universal native language, he thought he could almost catch the sense of what was said.
The pronunciation of the words was oddly different from the Tongue he knew, of course. The phrasing of the remark the princeling drawled to his companions was stilted, archaic and formal, the consonants were spoken with more crispness and sharpness than in the dialect of the Tongue familiar to him, the vowels were rounder and more fully enunciated, rather than being slurred and almost elided, as in the modern forms of speech spoken on the desert world, and some of the verbs were unrecognizable.
But he could catch enough of what the aristocratic personage said to his followers to make out its import.