First he charged like a thunderbolt straight for the pitiful cluster of unarmed slaves. Then, enraged by my weight, he sprang straight up into the air, landing on his hind legs, his body almost vertical to the ground. Somehow or other I managed to cling to his back through even the worst of his contortions. One hand buried in the coarse ruff of his mane, my other sought the hilt of my rapier. If it occurred to him to roll in the sand, I was lost, for he must have weighed a couple of tons. I would surely have been crushed under all that meat and muscle. But his tiny brain was inflamed with red roaring rage, to the detriment of his natural feline cunning, and he continued leaping madly, like some bucking bronco out of a cowboy's worst nightmare.
A horde of other beasts had been penned in the same black pit, and they poured in a howling, hissing, growling flood of savagery over the sill at our heels. The unexpected appearance of myself, riding the largest beast of the herd, must have struck the throng of carnival―Boers dumb with astonishment, for an enormous hushed silence hung over the brilliantly lit scene. What would have happened had I not interrupted the proceedings was that the horde of beasts would have charged the small band of the condemned, overwhelming them in an instant and rending them asunder with fang and claw. But my arrival on the scene changed things considerably. For one thing, my beast was so wildly enraged by the unexpected indignity of having a rider that he ignored the very presence of the condemned, and went racing about the oval arena in wild leaps and bounds seeking a way to dislodge me. As well, his actions unnerved the lesser beasts who had followed us from the pits. They were a collection of oddly shaped creatures―scaled reptilian predators with long snakelike necks, who bounded about on huge hind legs in fantastic leaps like midget tyrannosaurs crossed in some unlikely mating with giant kangaroos. In his fantastic contortions, my enraged steed went blundering among them, knocking them about with resounding buffets from his heavy paws. One got in his path and my brute ripped out his throat with a savage sidewise slash of fanged jaws.
The scent of the blood of one of their own kind drove the remainder of the herd wild. Obviously they had been starved for days or weeks in preparation for this event. Ignoring the huddled men, they fell upon the corpse of their fallen brother and tore him to gobbets.
Then they turned on each other, rending and tearing, long snaky necks writhing, fanged jaws agape, filling the air with hissing cries like steam whistles.
I had my sword out at last and was futilely hacking at my enraged steed. It was vaguely akin to a colossal tiger, but nearly twenty feet long, with a lashing whiplike tail with jagged serrations of horny blades down the length which turned it into a terrible instrument of death. Tigerlike, too, was the snarling, wrinkled mask of its face, the wrinkled snout, the blazing eyes. But there the resemblance ended. For the brute was covered with shaggy scarlet fur and two fantastic curling horns sprouted from its flat, low, wedge-shaped brow. These features, together with the stiff ruff of fur that stood out behind its head for all the world like the starched ruff worn by Elizabethan gentlemen, transformed it into a thing of nightmare. From descriptions I had heard, I knew the beast for a deltagar, one of the most terrible and dreaded predators of the jungle.
My sword ripped and tore at neck and shoulders, inflicting long raw slashing cuts, but the thickness of its fur, and the steely rippling muscles which clothed its bulk, effectively prevented me from dealing it a killing blow. Indeed, these wounds only served to infuriate it more. Foam dripped from its slavering jaws, bedewing its throat fur, and its hissing roars rose to a screaming crescendo of madness.
In its frenzy, the brute sprang at the top of the wall that enclosed the arena on all sides. Claws scraped and scrabbled along the top of the wall as the great scarlet cat clung for an instant. The arena―Boers who had been sitting in these seats for the best view fled screaming, trampling weaker or slower members of the crowd underfoot. Obviously they expected the deltagar to land among them in the next instant. But he fell back with a bone-shaking thump to the packed sands of the arena.
The thronged stands were full of mobs of screaming, people scurrying to every exit. Amid the chaotic uproar, I saw grim-faced guards pelting down the stairs, and some of the braver sort came over the walls on knotted ropes to catch the enraged deltagar in weighted nets manipulated at the end of long claw-tipped poles. I caught a flying glimpse of the royal box. There, his pale, handsome face a picture of mingled astonishment and fury, sat Prince Thuton, throned beneath a canopy blazoned with the royal insignia of Zanadar.
And at his side, staring at me, eyes wide with amazement, Darloona reclined, arrayed in silken robes, jewels twinkling in the crimson splendor of her flowing mane.
But just then I was too busy fighting to notice more.
A lucky stroke of my rapier had at last found the brute's vitals. A straight, sure thrust through the base of the skull, at the place where the spinal cord entered the brain, brought it down.
It crashed to its full length on the trampled arena sands. I sprang clear just in time to avoid being crushed beneath its ponderous weight. Coming to my feet again, I got, for the first time, a good look at the monster I had been riding, and if I had not already a fit of the shakes I might have fainted dead away. The deltagar was enormous―frightful! Imagine three full-grown Bengal tigers rolled into one and armed with fangs the size of machetes, and you will have a fairly good idea of the thing on whose back I had landed in the dark.
The condemned prisoners were hastening across the sands toward me. In their forefront stalked the tall glistening figure of my old friend, Koja. Now I tore off my cloak and tossed him the Yathoon whipsword I had been carrying scabbarded on my back all this while.
He tested the blade, making it whistle through the hot dusty air which reeked with blood and sweat and the musky stench of the deltagar. We had no time just then to exchange words―even if we could have heard one another over the uproar from the stands and the squealing fury of the battling beasts. But he wrung my hand in his own supple-fingered grip in silent thanks.
And then we turned to view an amazing sight.
The prisoners condemned to death with Koja were a motley crowd. There were papery-skinned, black-haired Zanadarians among them, and a few swarthy Chac Yuul bandits with lambent eyes and colorless hair, and even a couple of the hairless, crimson-skinned men of the Bright Empire of Perushtar. They were a dull-eyed, dilapidated, dispirited-looking lot, and from the looks of them they had been starved, beaten, and sorely mistreated in the slave pits. But now they had a fighting chance for freedom, and they were eagerly striving for it!
Taking advantage of the confusion they sprang from behind upon the Zanadarian guards who were fighting to calm or kill the rampaging beasts. In a second three of four guards were down, and half-naked prisoners turned on the others with stolen steel glittering in their hands. I exchanged a delighted glance with Koja, and we wasted no time in joining the unequal battle.
The guards were better fed, better trained, and better armed than the half-starved slaves. But it didn't really matter. The slaves had seen nothing but a grisly death ahead of them, to be crunched and mangled in the jaws of jungle predators in the sands of the arena for the entertainment of the cruel Zanadarians―hence they fought wildly, recklessly, taking insane chances no ordinary warrior would dream of taking.
And there was another factor here. The guards were fighting merely to protect themselves. But the prisoners fought for that one thing that is even more precious than life itself―their freedom. Hence it was a foregone conclusion from the first that they should triumph, and they did. In less time than it would take me to tell of it, half the guards were slain or trampled underfoot or sorely injured and the others, tossing aside sword and helmet in their flight, were running for the knotted ropes which still dangled over the walls of the arena and by which they had descended to our level. Few―very few―made it alive. But the victorious prisoners, now well armed indeed with the guards' cast-aside weapons, went swarming up those ropes themselves. As the arena seats were a turmoil of running, shouting men, they easily mingled with the panic-stricken crowd and I have no doubt that many of them found their way at length to secure havens in the Lower City.