Jandar of Callisto
Lin Carter
1. THE LOST CITY OF MANOR
That the most far-reaching and momentous historical events often spring from minute and seemingly inconsequential accidents is a fact which I can attest from my own experience.
For the past four months now―insofar as I have been able to measure the passage of time―I have dwelt on an alien world, surrounded by a thousand foes, struggling and battling my way through innumerable perils to win a place beside the most beautiful woman in two worlds.
And all of these adventures, these wonders and terrors, sprang from a single cause, and that cause was a crumb of dirt half the size of my thumbnail.
As I sit, painfully and slowly setting down these words with a quill pen and homemade ink on a sheet of rough parchment, I cannot help but wonder at the obscure vanity which prompts me to record the tale of my incredible adventures―a tale which began in a lost city deep in the impenetrable jungles of southeast Asia and which ventures from there across the incredible distance of three hundred and ninety million miles of infinite space to the surface of a weird and alien planet. A tale, furthermore, which I deem it most unlikely any other human eye will ever read.
Yet I write on, driven by some inexplicable urge to set down an account of the marvels and mysteries which I alone of all men ever born on earth have experienced. And when at last this narrative is completed, I will set it within the Gate in the hopes that, being composed entirely of organic matter, paper and ink as well, it may somehow be transported across the immeasurable gulf of interplanetary space to the distant world of my birth, to which I shall never return.
In the night sky, at certain seasons when the Inner Moons are on the other side of our primary and the starry skies are clear, I can (I fancy) see the earth. A remote and insignificant spark of blue fire it seems from this distance; a tiny point of light lost amid the blackness of the infinite void. Can it truly be that I was born and lived my first twenty-four years on that blue spark―or was that life but a dream, and have I spent all of my days upon this weird world of Thanator? It is a question for the philosophers to settle, and I am but a simple warrior.
Yet I can well remember my father. He was a tall man, stern-faced and powerfully built, with scowling brows and thick black locks. His name was Matthew Dark; a Scotsman from Aberdeenshire, an engineer by profession, and a wanderer by inclination, he tramped the world to its far corners searching for the joy of life, its richness, its color, which always eluded him and always seemed to beckon from over the next horizon.
From him I seem to have inherited my inches, for like him I am something over six feet; from him, as well, must come my strength, for among men I am reckoned a strong man of great endurance and stamina. But it was from my mother came the gift of my yellow hair and blue eyes, which have none of the dour, darkling Scot in them. She was a Danish girl from a town whose name I cannot pronounce and she died when I was a small child. All that I can remember of her is a soft warm voice, a sweet smiling face bending over me, the touch of a gentle hand. And I seem to see laughing blue eyes, as calm and deep and sparkling as the lakes of her homeland, and the gleam of pale gold hair woven in thick braids―alas, it is only a shard of memory, a brief glimpse into a past which I can never recapture, never completely recall.
The color of my hair and my eyes, these were the only gifts she ever gave me, besides my life itself. But in an odd way I owe her a double debt: for it was for reason of my yellow hair and blue eyes that my life was spared when I fell into the cruel hands of the savage and inhuman warriors of the Yathoon―but I am getting ahead of my own story.
If I owe my mother the double debt of life given and life saved, I at least owe my father for my name, Jonathan Andrew Dark. He was building a great hydroelectric project in Denmark when he met and loved and wed my laughing, blue-eyed mother. She went with him to South America for his next job, for an engineer must go where his work leads him, and wanderers have no home. And thus it chanced that while my mother was a Dane and my father a Scot, and I am now a naturalized American, I was born in Rio.
Of my early life there is little enough to tell. Or, rather, I run the risk of telling too much―for it has little bearing on the saga of my adventures on the fantastic world that has now become my home. A tropical fever carried off my lovely mother when I was only three; my father I seldom saw, for he was off building a highway in Peru, a dam in Bolivia, a bridge in Yucatan. But when death took her from us I became his constant companion. Prim and proper folk might be scandalized to think of a tender child amid the savage surroundings of a jungle camp, but I thrived on the rough, exciting life, and to this I am sure I owe my love of peril and adventure. For I saw the green, stinking interior of the Matto Grosso before I ever saw the interior of a schoolroom, and was familiar with the dangerous rope bridges that span the airy heights of the high Andes before I ever saw a paved city street.
I became a sort of pet or protege to the engineers of my father's camp. It was that laughing bandit Pedro who taught me to throw a knife before I ever learned my letters, and the big Swede, Swenson, who taught me every trick of rough-and-tumble fighting his brawny, battered body had ever learned. I could bring down a hunting jaguar with one cool steady shot straight between its burning eyes even as it sprang for my throat―long before I had mastered the occult mysteries of long division.
Yes, long division―for my formal schooling had been somewhat neglected while I had learned to brew coffee with water taken from a snake-infested jungle stream and heated over kerosene flames in a battered tin pot, to hunt and fight like a man, to climb like a monkey, and to survive where a city-bred boy would have succumbed to fever ticks, snakebite, or cholera. It happened when I was about thirteen. My father had had enough of the banana republics by now; he yearned for the dry, parched air and gorgeous nights of the desert after years spent in the sweltering sinkhole of marshy jungles; he was thinking of an oil-drilling project in Iraq.
But in the back alleys of a vile little jungle town named Puerto Maldonado he ran into an American geologist named Farley, an old friend of many years standing. Puerto Maldonado is in the back country of Peru, on the shores of a river called Madre de Dios, "Mother of God." God, however, had nothing to do with Farley being in Puerto Maldonado: he was hunting for the place where the Incas had gotten their gold.
He had found nothing but ticks, mosquitoes, and a particularly nasty breed of snake the natives called jararaca. It was a nip in the ankle from the venomous fangs of this particular denizen of the jungles that had laid up Farley in the backroom of the only gin mill in Puerto Maldonado for three weeks. My father and his friend celebrated their chance meeting with copious toasts of bad gin in fly-specked glasses, and somewhere between the second and the third bottle my father conceived the notion that I required schooling. Here was Farley, a distinguished geologist with a string of college degrees after his name, like paper tags in the tail of a kite. And here was I, a tall, rawboned, broad-shouldered and sunburnt boy, able enough to hack through the tangled and snake-infested swamps of the Matto Grosso like a veteran, but a green-eared novice when it came to the mystic doctrines of long division.
In less time than it takes me to describe the event, a decision had been reached. Farley was on his way to the coast when the next mail packet came chugging down the coiling silver length of the Madre de Dios; thence overland to the burgeoning young city of Santo Domingo and a bush pilot named O'Mara who would fly him to civilization. He was on his way back to what he described as "God's Country," but what the geography books call the United States of America, and with all possible haste, for there was a professorship open at Harvard for a seasoned field geologist, and he was hungry for the world of cinema, cocktail lounge, and campus. And, besides, he had been lucky this time to have spent only three weeks sweating jararaca venom out of his guts. He preferred not to give the wriggling little monsters the chance for a second bite.