He indicated the heavy grill of thick, bamboolike wood blocking the entrance. The shafts were bound together with heavy strands of rope made of dried and woven grasses. It was so heavy that it customarily took two men to move it.
And before it, squatting on the stone floor just beyond their reach, the burly Fanga crouched, snoring heavily.
“Even if we could manage to get through the gate, what about him?” asked Tomar. “He has a stone axe and a spear, and we have nothing to fight with.”
“That’s not quite so,” smiled Jugrid. “Shortly before your arrival, Xangan was kind enough to present me with the key to our gate, and a weapon wherewith to defend ourselves against even such as Fanga.”
“What key also serves as a weapon?” asked Tomar. Still smiling, Jugrid showed the boy something in his hand.
“But―that’s only a piece of bone!” protested Tomar.
“Quite so,” said Jugrid, smiling. Then, in quick, low tones he explained to the youth how he intended to use the piece of bone that Xangan had tossed at his feet in taunting derision.
Book III
THE HUNTERS AND THE HUNTED
Chapter 11
THE SEARCH BEGINS
THEY roused Xangan at dawn from a drunken stupor with the word that all the captives had somehow managed to escape during the night.
The chieftain, to quiet the qualms occasioned by the arrival of Zhu Kor the Mind Wizard, had partaken heavily of a sort of palm-wine called Bokka which the Cave People brew. The beverage, although potent, was not potent enough. It is one thing to worship your gods―at a safe distance. It is quite another thing to suddenly have one of them, living, breathing, and large as life, plunked down suddenly in your very midst.
Such, at least, was the experience of Xangan.
He blinked bleary eyes up at the guards, sitting up quickly. “What do you mean―escaped? Curse you, Mozar, how could the filthy fomaks have escaped?”
He broke off, groaning. Sitting up so quickly made it seem as if his head, which felt as fragile as an eggshell, was being kicked around by men in heavy jackboots.
“Come and see,” growled the guard, who was beginning to lose his fear of the swaggering bully. A coward himself, it somehow made him feel better to know that Xangan the chief was afraid of the Unseen One.
Xangan went to look. What he saw was to him inexplicable. The massive grill was enormously heavy … certainly much too heavy to have been opened by a slim girl and a scrawny boy.
“They must have sawed through the ropes,” smiled Thadron, who had come to enjoy the sight of Xangan’s discomfiture. He pointed to the unraveled ends of the strands of woven grass, which were stringy and tough, resilient and strong, but also dry.
“Notice how they worked it?” the young warrior pointed out to the belligerent, baffled, scowling Xangan. “They simply cut loose the door itself from the frame. Then they toppled it from its standing position. It fell on Fanga, who must have been asleep, and crushed his skull. Then they took up his weapons, and fled into the jungle, probably. Also, they seem to have picked up a bow and a quiverful of arrows from the front of Tugar’s cave. At least he is missing one, and believes he left it standing outside the mouth of the cave last night…”
“Cut the ropes? Cut them! With what, blast you?” roared Xangan, sick with fury. “They were disarmedthey had nothing to cut the grass ropes with!”
“With this, evidently,” said Thadron, mildly, holding out a long, sharp-edged sliver of bone like an ivory-bladed knife. “Do you recognize it, O Chief? It seems to be a piece broken off from the meat bone that you threw to your former chief last night, as a man might throw a bone to his favorite othode.”
Xangan flushed crimson, and turned a hot, malignant glare on the smiling, smooth-faced young tribesman. Shaking with rage, he leveled one hairy and not particularly clean arm at the lithe warrior.
“Thadron, I have endured your cunning remarks and sly inferences too long,” he growled deep in his chest. “Watch yourself, you girl-faced horeb, or you’ll end up in the sacrifice beside your traitorous friends!”
A horeb is a repulsive rodentlike scavenger of despicable habits. The word is a deadly insult among the Thanatorians, and in a warrior society―especially one as primitive as that of the Cave People―insults are not lightly thrown in the teeth of fighting men raised from the cradle with weapons in their hands. Thadron went white to the lips, and his eyes were hard. They bored coldly into the bleary, bloodshot orbs of Xangan. The bully blustered and swore, but dropped his gaze guiltily.
“I will let that pass,” said Thadron evenly, “my Chief. But I will say this only: if Thadron must die, he can think of no finer company in which to meet his end than that of Jugrid of the Jungle Country.”
Xangan flushed and cursed, waving his arms and mouthing loud oaths. But not one of the many tribesmen who stood in silent witness to the scene failed to notice that their new leader did not dare to meet the cool, contemptuous gaze of the youth, Thadron.
“Enough of this exchanging of words,” hissed a thin voice from behind them. “You waste time―and breath. Hasten, animals, in pursuit of the escaped prisoners. Not one must get away, do you understand?”
It was Zhu Kor. The malignant dwarf flicked his slitted gaze about the group, and men muttered and turned aside rather than meet the expression in those slant eyes, cold and black and deadly, like globules of frozen venom.
“You heard the Mighty One, you othodes,” blustered Xangan, trembling uncontrollably in the icy presence of his god, whom he loathed and feared, detested and yet went in livid terror of. Then a grin of gloating pleasure curved his loose lips.
“To you, O Thadron, I give the leadership of the war party,” he leered.
“I shall do my best to capture them …”
“Capture them? Did you not hear the words of the Lord? Kill them. Kill them all. The girl. Kill her. Not one must escape alive to join the River People and seek safe refuge amongst them. Go now―and do not come back unless success has rewarded your efforts! Or I will see you among the sacrifice, as long as I am chief of the tribe.”
Thadron said nothing. He saluted mechanically, and went to take up his weapons and assemble the warriors. But his heart was heavy within his breast at what he must do.
Zhu Kor gazed after the departing war party, his face a wrinkled, unreadable, saffron mask. But within his heart cold fear coiled and curled like a maggot in a lump of putrid meat.
The girl Ylana and the boy Tomar were the only humans alive, outside of the primitives themselves, who knew to what place he had fled. And even now the warriors of the West might well be scouring the plains for some sign of them, perhaps riding in one of the great galleons of the clouds, whose secrets they had wrested from the Sky Pirates. If either the youth or the girl survived the hunting by Thadron’s troop of savages to meet their Shondakorian friends, the immeasurable strength of the Three Cities would fall upon this jungle plateau that was his hiding place.
He licked his lips, numb with fear.
Like a cornered rat, he had fled to the nearest hole.
And there was no other hole to run to.
WHILE the Jalathadar hovered aloft, Koja and the others led Lukor to the spot from which they believed Ylana and Tomar had been carried off by the ghastozar.
The ground underfoot was a level plain of sterile sand, bestrewn with slabs and fragments of broken rock. In such terrain, even so mighty a hunter as Koja the Yathoon had great difficulty in discerning the spoor of those they had pursued. A pebble or two, dislodged from its bed; a scuffmark in the sand which might, or might not, have been made by a human foot: these alone afforded evidence that the jungle Maid and the youth had been carried away by the flying reptile from this particular spot.