The hours of afternoon wore on. Never had time seemed to move with such a dreary, dragging pace. The minutes slid by with a leaden slowness. Finally, just as our nerves were frayed almost to the breaking-point with the suspense of waiting, night fell. The guards opened the gate, shoved in our dinner, and, a while later, escorted us to the banks of a narrow stream used by the tribe as a jakes, and escorted us back, locking us in securely.
Like most primitives, the Jungle People are wont to retire as soon as night has fallen. Stuffy, ill-ventilated caves are badly designed for lamps or torches, and there are few things savages can do in darkness―hence they have the habit of crawling into their sleeping furs when darkness falls. One by one the men of the tribe strolled back to their caves, yawning sleepily. One by one the scampering urchins were summoned to bed by the women. Finally the narrow little valley-like open space between the cave-lined cliffs was empty of people. Even the burly, dog-like othodes went indoors, since by night the Zarkoon fly the skies over the plateau, and have been known to swoop down upon the village, carrying off a stray child or beast.
Only our guards were left, and they were curled up, snoring loudly, before the mouth of our cave.
I gave Lukor the signal and he rose from his furs, went to the front of the cave, and rattled the gate, calling loudly.
“What do you want?” one of the guards grunted sleepily.
“I need to relieve myself,” Lukor informed him with prim, fastidious dignity.
“You had your chance earlier, with the others,” the guard yawned.
“I am an old man, and I cannot wait till dawn,” Lukor said. “Take me down to the stream like a good fellow.”
“Go back to sleep, or do it in the back of the cave.”
“I have no intentions of doing either! Take me down to the stream, will you?”
“Oh, take him down, Brokar, or we’ll never get any sleep,” grumbled the second guard.
“Why don’t you take him, Cadj, if it bothers you so much,” Brokar suggested. “I’m just getting comfortable!”
“All right, I will! C’mon, you, and no tricks now―”
The second guard, whose name seemed to be Cadj, climbed out of his furs, unlatched the gate and let Lukor out. He loomed head and shoulders above the smaller, frailer, silver-haired Ganatolian, and was a burly specimen of primitive manhood. In his eyes, the silver-haired Lukor was a feeble senior citizen on a par with the tottering old grandfathers who made up the seven Elders, and the furthest thing from his mind was doubtless the possibility that the old man might attack him.
Which is exactly what happened!
Just as he unlatched the gate, Lukor and Tomar hurled themselves against it. The wooden gate slammed open, knocking Cadj sprawling. It was so unexpected that, save for one startled squawk of surprise, the guard did not even voice an alarm before Lukor hurled himself upon him, and slit his throat with the stone knife. The other guard uttered a bubbling groan and relaxed even as the first man, curled sleepily in his skins, was struggling to his feet. Tomar and I were upon him in the same instant. The boy kicked him in the stomach as he got halfway to his feet and Brokar fell to his knees gagging and gasping for breath. Before he could do anything I knocked him cold with a karate-chop to the nape of the neck and he fell forward on his face, out cold.
In complete silence we bundled the two in their furs, closed and latched the gate behind us, snatched up their flint-tipped spears, and ran for the edge of the jungle. I suppose we should have knifed Brokar as well as his comrade, but I am too squeamish to kill a man in cold blood and even Lukor, pragmatic old rascal that he is, was too innately chivalrous to do the deed. But with any luck we should be miles deep into the woods before anyone discovered our absence.
One last thing I had taken with me, and that purely through the sudden impulse of the moment. I seized up the bundle of manuscript I had worked on during our imprisonment, to relieve the tedium. I kept it neatly bundled in a scrap of hide, together with my pens and quantity of the black powder from which I manufactured my crude, homemade ink, which was tied in a twist of leather. I don’t know exactly what possessed me to salvage the manuscript from our cave. Perhaps it suddenly occurred to me that it would be unwise to leave behind any clue by which the Mind Wizards might be able to ascertain my identity. Whether or not they knew I had come hither from a distant world I could not be sure, but it seemed unwise to chance it.
We raced through the light of the many moons, out of the narrow vale without discovery, and through the hills. Ahead of us loomed the black-and-scarlet wall that marked the beginning of the jungles. Lukor had passed to me our precious flint-bladed knife: thus it was that I clenched the small weapon Ylana had given to us in my right hand as we covered the last few yards that stretched between the rocky, barren region and the edge of the dense jungles.
And thus it was that in the same instant a gaunt, monstrous figure stepped suddenly from the gloom of the jungle’s verge to block my path I drove the dagger, swift as thought, directly at its breast to pierce its heart
In the same instant Lukor behind me cried out―
“Koja!”
Chapter 15
The Last Farewell
It was indeed Koja who blocked my path, although I recognized the familiar casque-like face and blackly-glittering compound eyes of the faithful fellow a fraction of a second too late to halt or to turn aside my dagger.
Had it been any other than the mighty Yathoon, he would have died in the next few moments, his loyal heart transfixed by my keen-bladed knife. But thank God it was Koja and not one of the human inhabitants of Thanator, for Koja is a Yathoon, and the Yathoon are arthropods-insectoid creatures, whose gaunt bodies are sheathed in crab-like chitin. The slick, horny integument armored his breast as might some cuirass, and thus my blade as it struck his bosom, glanced aside, inflicting no hurt and merely scoring a long scratch on his tough chitin-clad breast.
We halted there in the gloom of the jungle’s edge, Koja solemnly assuring me he had taken no harm from my involuntary blow. I was shaking like a leaf from nervous reaction. Again I thank God it was Ylana’s little knife I had held, and not one of the long spears we had taken from the guards. I can think of few fates more horrible than to be the inadvertent cause of the death of a friend, and Koja had been the first creature on all Callisto to give me his friendship.
“My-dear-old-friend!” Lukor gasped, clapping the giant insectoid in an impulsive embrace, “we―why, we thought you dead, days ago―drowned in the lake―”
“As Jandar would say, `I yet live,’ ” the expressionless Yathoon said in his uninflected metallic voice. It was the nearest thing to a joke I could ever recall the humorless great creature having said, and I regret I was still too shaky from having almost slain him to laugh.
“But what happened to you―how come you here?” Lukor burbled. There were tears in his eyes and he kept touching Koja repeatedly, giving him little taps and affectionate slaps on the back as if to reassure himself the gaunt giant was real and solid and not the Callistan equivalent of a ghost.
“We of the Horde cannot swim,” Koja explained simply, “so after I rose to the surface, I clung to the wreckage of the skiff which of course could not sink, as one pontoon was still filled with gas. It seemed to take forever before we drifted ashore, but eventually the skiff beached itself on the sand, evidently at some considerable distance around the curve of the lake from where you yourselves emerged from the waters. I arrived at the place where you had apparently made a fire after you had already departed down the shore towards the east, and have been tracking you ever since.”