Although the clacking beaks and hoarse, metallic, cawing voices of the bird-warriors made it impossible to make out the words, I gained the distinct impression that Zawk was relating the circumstances of our capture, to which the chief of the bird-men, Skeer, and his decrepit counselor, Kloog, made occasional incredulous comments or queries. Doubtless, the Zarkoon had never before seen men like us, and had never heard of anything like the immense and weightless airships in which we traveled. Zawk waved his long, skinny arms wildly, as if attempting to describe the indescribable, and squawked and shrieked like a mad cockatoo.
The conversation seemed interminable. But, when at last it was terminated, I was left in bewilderment, having no clue as to what decision had been reached concerning our fate. Skeer, the chief, gestured with the greasy bone on which he was gnawing and two warriors sprang into the air from their perches, swooped down to pounce upon us, snatched us up into the air and bore us back to our cages, thrusting us within by bodily force, slamming and locking the gates behind us, and then flapping off into the gloom again, leaving us to our lonely thoughts.
Tomar kept a brave front, but the boy was inwardly worried. Nor could I blame him for this, feeling numerous trepidations myself.
“What of our friends, Prince Jandar?” he asked me a while later. “Will they not come to rescue us?”
“They will certainly try to, anyway,” I said, noncommittally. I tried to keep a bold face on things, but could not make up my mind whether it would be better to pretend to the boy that our situation was merely hazardous and temporary, or to share with him my own fears that we were completely on our own.
“You mean you don’t think they will be able to find us?” he asked.
“I can hardly guess, Tomar,” I temporized. “It all depends on whether there are many such cavern-mouths as the one we entered, or merely the one. If there are many such, they might spend weeks or even months searching for the right one … if, indeed, they succeed in guessing that it was into the cavern we were borne. I suspect it is more likely that they will think the bird-men nest among the peaks, and, searching the peaks without finding nests, they will think we were taken further away, and will spread out and search the surrounding mountains.”
He looked at me, a long, level stare with no fear in it.
“Then you think our chances of being rescued at all are very slight …”
“I think there is at least a chance. How good of a chance, I simply cannot guess,” I said, having decided to level with the boy rather than attempt to sustain his hopes with false assurances. “Surely our friends will not abandon us to an unknown and doubtless grisly fate without making every effort to find us. Of that much we may be certain!”
It wasn’t much, but it was the best I could offer.
He chewed it over in thoughtful silence, saying nothing more.
After a time we slept again.
And when we awoke, things had changed a bit, in an interesting way. For now we had a neighbor. The nearer of the cages which dangled about us was now occupied. Whether our fellow-captive had been there all along, but had been too weary or frightened or disconsolate to attempt conversation with us, or whether she had but recently been thrust into the cage during our last sleep-period I cannot say, but there she was. By now our eyes had adjusted to the dim trace of light and we could see the occupant of the other cage quite clearly.
“Why―it’s a girl!” Tomar shrilled, excitedly.
And so it was.
Chapter 8
Ylana of the Jungle Country
As the light grew stronger, we could see her more clearly. By now it was daylight in the outer world, and shafts of golden radiance streamed through the crater-like hole in the cavern roof. By this light we could see that the occupant of the cage which hung suspended from the rocky roof by a long chain was a young girl of about Tomar’s own age, which was to say sixteen or seventeen, I suppose, although I have never found it easy to estimate the age of the Callistans.
She was a slim, golden-skinned girl with long, untrimmed dark hair and long, bare legs. Her only garment was an abbreviated affair which seemed to be made of the tanned skin of some cat-like beast. This was draped about her rounded hips, stretched taut over her slight, adolescent bosom, leaving her arms and shoulders bare. She seemed to be a girl from some primitive tribe, for about her throat hung a rude necklace of ivory teeth or fangs, and a crude coil of copper wire was clasped about her upper right arm, with another about her left ankle. She wore thong sandals of tanned leather, a strip of leather wound about her brows restrained the rippling tide of her silky, night-black hair, and a rough leathern girdle cinched in her slender waist. From this girdle hung suspended an empty dagger-scabbard of stitched leather.
In the wash of daylight, we eyed each other with frank curiosity. As for the girl, she seemed never to have seen humans dressed as were we, and her great violet eyes widened with amazement at Tomar’s fiery red thatch and at my own straw-yellow hair, which I was by now accustomed to wearing shoulder-length in the fashion of Shondakor.
The girl was remarkably beautiful in an adolescent, tomboyish way. She had a strong jaw, pert tip-tilted nose, and a wide-upped mouth made for kissing as much as for laughter. Her lovely violet eyes were large, clear, fringed with sooty lashes, and her winging dark brows lent her an elfin look of fragility somewhat belied by the smudge on her cheek and the raw bruise on her brow. Her bare limbs were lithe and supple, slender but firmly-muscled, as if she was used to living out of doors in a hard life of struggle and survival in the wild. But how such a lovely young creature could have survived for long in this harsh and barren land of gritty soil and sterile rock eluded my comprehension.
She was the first to break the silence. “Saoma!” she called, in a low, hesitant voice, using the universal word of greeting all of the nations of Callisto employ, which may, I suppose, be translated simply as “hello.”
I returned her greeting. “My name is Jandar, prince of the Golden City of Shondakor,” I said, “and my companion is Tomar, a warrior of the Ku Thad.”
She wrinkled up her nose at these unfamiliar names.
“Never have I heard of Shondakor or of the Ku Thad,” she said dubiously. “I am Ylana, the daughter of Jugrid of the jungle country.”
“Then saoma, Ylana! Our own homeland is very far from here, for we have traveled far and were en route to another land when the bird-warriors attacked us, carrying off my young friend and myself,” I said.
She absorbed this, continuing to eye us with frank curiosity.
“Never have I seen men such as yourselves, with hair and eyes of such peculiar coloration,” she observed. Perhaps I should add in explanation of her words that Tomar has the green eyes commonly borne by members of the Ku Thad race, while my own blue eyes were inherited from my Danish mother. “The country of your tribe must indeed be very far from the Mountains of the Zarkoon.”
“The Zarkoon? What are they?” asked Tomar.
She gave him a look of amused contempt.
“Surely, boy, you know that the Zarkoon are the creatures who hold us imprisoned!”
Tomar indicated that he did not in fact know the name of the weird bird-men who had captured us. The girl uttered a laugh.