“Thanks to the Lords of Gordrimator,” said Valkar, “the hull compartments were not breached when we slammed into the ice wall. We could have lost our supply of levitating gas and been marooned in the Frozen Land for the rest of our lives had that happened. As it was, we did not even spring one seam.”
“Aye―and thanks to the bravery and cool head of young Tomar, here, our hidden enemy has been flushed from his lair and will trouble us no more,” growled Lukor, tousling the boy’s hair with rough affection.
Tomar was silent, his features pale, his manner withdrawn. He stood with the others on the poop, overlooking the workmen who were splicing together the shorn control cables with new cordage.
“It was a horrible way to die,” the young man said finally.
“Death is always horrible because it is an end from which there can be no beginning again,” observed Koja solemnly. “But in the case of the Zanadarian, the end was fitting. He would have slain us all by secret ways, by hidden treachery, sneaking from his concealed lair in the darkness. But you faced him bravely and fought cleanly and slew him honorably. You have nothing with which to reproach yourself, young Tomar.”
The youth looked up at the impassive features and glittering eyes of the ungainly arthopode, and suddenly he smiled.
“I believe you are right, sir,” he said.
And old Lukor laughed and took the youth by the nape of the neck and shook him lightly. The youth grinned at him.
“Ah, Tomar, you are a boy no longer. You have had your baptism of blood and fire and death younger than most of us, but you have come through it well, and you stand among us now, a man among men. Welcome!”
Valkar smiled, clapping the young man’s shoulder. “I stand with Master Lukor on that, Tomar, but the next time you flush out a traitor from his hidey-hole, and finish him off single-handedly, try to kill him by some other manner than setting him afire. The laminated paper whereof the Jalathadar is constructed is highly flammable, you know, and it has always been Jandar’s opinion that the gas stored under pressure in the double hull is as explosive as a gas called `hydrogen’ on his home world. You could have blown the ship apart, had it caught fire instead of Ulthar―”
He stopped, for Tomar had suddenly gone pale as paper and swayed on weak knees until Koja steadied him with a strong arm.
“Lords of Gordrimator!” gasped Tomar, feebly, “I never thought of that!”
They were still laughing a bit hysterically from the release of tension when grizzled old Haakon came puffing and blowing up to them, his heavy face red from exertion, wiping greasy hands on a bit of waste.
Valkar turned to greet him.
“What’s the good news, Haakon?”
“Good news, indeed, captain!” the older man wheezed. “There’s enough spare cable in the lockers to repair both wings and rudder stays, although they will not bear the full tension we could call on unsevered lines to take. A few days more work and, if we don’t all freeze solid in this accursed land, we’ll be on our way to Zanadar in good fashion―a little more beat up than we had intended to look, but able to fly well enough!”
Valkar yawned hugely and stretched until his joints creaked. “Good news is right, Haakon! Well, it’s your watch. Me for my bed. The night has been long and busy. A few more nights so crowded with excitement, and I will give over adventuring and settle down to quiet days in Shondakor. Gentlemen?”
Lukor smothered a jaw-cracking yawn of his own.
“I’m for bed, too. Old bones tire easily, they say. What about you, friend Koja?”
The chitin-clad arthopode stared broodingly out over the moonlit ice fields. His tones were somber and sorrowful.
” I, too. But I am wondering where Jandar sleeps this night―if indeed he yet lives. And, in all our adventurings to come, if ever we will be able to find him in this world of foes. I had thought to stand beside him when we battled against the warriors of Zanadar, as we have fought many times ere this, he and I. Now, methinks I will fight alone … but I go to my soft bed, wondering where he slumbers tonight, under the many moons ….
It was a question none of them could answer.
Book IV
GLADIATORS OF ZANADAR
Chapter 10
I MAKE A NEW FRIEND
We were taken out of the city of Narouk in the manner which I have already described, and, chained together in a long line, guarded by a dozen Perushtarian soldiers astride war-thaptors, we marched all that day into the hill country that lay northwest of the Bright Empire.
We had not been informed as to the nature of our fate or the place of our destination. If my companions in misfortune were aware of these matters, I, at least, was still ignorant of them. And during the long march I busied my mind with puzzling on the problem. It was as good a method as any for managing to forget the ache of weary muscles and the thirst that the clouds of gray road dust roused in me.
That we were being sent as sacrifices to some mysterious gods I strongly doubted, although I could not of course be certain. While I have learned much of the ways of the various races of Thanator, they still have secrets I have not yet penetrated, and one of these was the nature of their religion.
With the possible exception of the Sky Pirates of Zanadar, whose technological achievements are of such an extraordinary nature that they cannot be considered to stand at the same cultural level as the other natives of Thanator, those of the civilization I have thus far encountered in the course of my wanderings and adventures on this strange and curious world are generally at the level of the Bronze Age.
This is true, for example, of the Golden City of Shondakor, and it is true also of the bandit armies called the Black Legion. As for the Bright Empire of Perushtar, it reminds me most of some of the Semitic civilizations of Earth’s antiquity―perhaps the Philistines or the Phoenicians or the Carthaginians.
As for Koja’s own people, the warriors of the Yathoon Horde, that tremendous clan of nomad warriors who roam and rule the Great Plains of Haratha to the south, they are more akin to the Mongols or the Tartars, the ferocious and hardy men who rode at the heels of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane to whelm the gates of Europe with a flood of gore.
The puzzle came in at this point, for it is a truism of the study of history, that such civilizations, at least on my own native world, have always been dominated by powerful priesthoods. Organized religious hierarchies are found among all such early barbaric cultures, but this, simply, is not true of the races of Thanator.
Which is not to say the Thanatorians do not have their gods; they do, and they call them “the Lords of Gordrimator,” Gordrimator being their name for the planet Jupiter, whose ocher-banded globe fills their night skies with its mighty shield.
But although the Thanatorians swear by these gods, they do not seem to worship them, or, if indeed they do, it is with rites and ceremonies so private that I have gone thus far in total ignorance of their very existence. For, in all my wanderings across the face of Callisto the Jungle Moon, never once have I discovered anything that resembled a temple or synagogue, shrine, or cathedral, and I have yet to encounter the Callistan equivalent of priest, bonze, lama, or rabbi.’
And, while my adventures have so filled my time that I have never found sufficient leisure to explore the native literatures of Thanator as fully as my curiosity might desire, I have neither found nor heard of anything remotely like a sacred scripture or a prophetic book or even a volume of prayers or mantras. In short, the peoples of Thanator are as devoid of a formal religion as it is possible for any civilization to be.