Young Thongor (25 page)

“
Beware…Black Moonlight
,” Thongor read in a grim voice.

“Cap’n, let’s go back to the ship an’ wait for day,” Fulvio whined. “Gods know what that means, but I don’t like the sound of it!”

“Nor I,” admitted Thongor. “But we go forward, nonetheless.”

They shouldered further into the black jungle, leaving the corpse behind. There would be time enough later to lay their dead comrade to rest, if they lived. Gallant, gay young Kanthar Kan would laugh no more: and the mysterious doom that had struck him down in the black jungles of the isle of Zosk lay somewhere ahead of them, brooding in the silence of the night.

3

The Warning on the Monolith

The moon had risen over the edge of the world, the great golden Moon of old Lemuria, flooding the jungle with its silken light. It was easier, now, cutting through the dense foliage with cutlass and scimitar and blunt-tipped Chushan
kunwars
. But they were growing weary by this time, tired of the fetid reek of rotting vegetation, the bite of insects. Tangled vines caught their feet, tripping them; they slipped in slick mud, cursing, grumbling at thorn-edged leaves that raked bare arms and drew blood.

By moonrise they had come as far as they could go. Here the jungle fell away in a stinking marsh of black mud and rotting stumps; snakes thick as a man’s thigh slithered fluidly over fallen tree trunks, and the track of monstrous
poa
were visible on the mud-banks.

Thongor gave the signal for a rest-halt. The men sprawled wearily about, wiping sweaty brows with dirty rags, gulping lukewarm wine from skin bottles, glad of a chance to rest aching legs. But the Valkarthan needed no respite: his iron thews seemed invulnerable to fatigue and he could go forward far more swiftly alone. Leaving scrawny little Fulvio in charge, he moved out to the east, skirting the swamp, searching the thick brush with every sense at the alert.

He found the thing by moonlight. A great shaft of gray, lichen-covered stone, thrusting out of the wet earth at a steep angle. The roots of a giant
lotifer
tree had netted the stone pillar, tilting it awry. The clear gold moonlight lit the mold-encrusted monolith sharply.

Thongor paused. Then men
did
inhabit this strange isle of death and nameless, shadowy horror—or had once dwelt here; for the inscription on the stone was in an antique mode of glyphic writing. With the blade of his dagger, he scraped away the crust of lichens, laying bare the deep-graven hieroglyphs. The language of the inscription was known to him from his travels, for once, years before, in a ruined, deserted city in the desert country of the north, he had seen such glyphs. The young Valkarthan was unschooled, but his adventurous career had carried him into strange corners of the Lemurian continent, and he had acquired shards of odd and curious knowledge along the way.

The inscription sent a chill up his spine as he read it by moonlight.

The stone god walks when the Black Moon shines
.

His hackles stirred; a tingle of preternatural uneasiness prickled at the nape of his neck, as if he sensed the touch of unseen eyes on his back. He half turned, the steel blade of his great sword, Sarkozan, flashing in his hand; then, with a wry grin twisting his lips, he restrained himself. No puling boy, he, to start and pale at a few words cut on a stone pillar! It took more than an ancient warning to strike fear into the heart of Thongor of the
Black Hawk
—Khongrim of the Red Brotherhood, the terror of the Southern Sea!

He went forward again, but this time with greater care than before, and keeping well to the shadows. Some hand, long ages dead, had cut that warning of the Black Moon on the mould-crusted monolith; but something very alive had struck down gay, reckless Kanthar Kan to death. And he, too, had warned of the mysterious peril with his last strength, digging numb fingers in the wet earth to warn his shipmates when they came on his track…

Thongor glided through the underbrush like a stalking
vandar
. What was the curse that haunted this weird isle of treasure and nameless terror? He would learn the answer sooner than even he could dream.

4

The City of Death

The cold wastes of the Northlands had spawned him, but since he had come down across the Mountains of Mommur five years before, the jungle-girt cities of Kovia and Chush and Ptartha had been his home. So the Valkarthan was no stranger to the tropic wilderness through which he moved silently and swiftly, yet with great care. A mere youth, he had joined a pack of bandits in wild Chush, quickly rising to become their chieftain. He and his legion of cutthroats had been the bane of the fat-bellied merchants of Shembis, whose jungle caravans they had raided time and again, until the vengeful prince of that city, Arzang Pome, had hunted them down.

Then he and the survivors of his band had been sold on the block like animals. Arzang Pome had chained the Valkarthan and his bandits to the oars of the slave-galleys of Shembis, and long did they toil under the singing whips in the blazing sun while the hated Dolphin banner floated lazily overhead and the perfumed merchant-captain who was their master sipped cold wine and fondled his wench under striped awnings while they broke their backs at the oars. Then one hot night they rose with naked hands and broken oars to slay and slay in red, roaring rage—stealing the very galley on which they had slaved—and off to the high seas, to join the fierce corsairs of Tarakus the Pirate City, and to learn a new trade. But piracy was close akin to banditry, and thus Thongor and his comrades had risen in the past two years to a high rank amid the corsair fleet.

It was the dying whisper of an old veteran sailor they had rescued from execution in Cadorna that had put them on the track of the fabulous treasure of the isle of Zosk, deep in the uncharted wastes of the sea. Somewhere in those black jungles a fortune in flame pearls lay hid—“in the place of the great stones” the old sailor had said.

And then Thongor came upon it, stark and cold and dead in the flood of the golden Moon.

The young barbarian came to a sudden halt there at the edge of the jungle. He stared ahead, his blood racing with the thrill of discovery. Was
this
the ‘place of the great stones’ the dying sailor had spoken of? A few yards from where he crouched in the thick brush, the jungle dwindled away to a rocky plain. The ground fell away beyond, in an immense, circular valley like a vast bowl cut in the rock. Tumbled stone slabs lay about: broken spires of rock loomed and tilted, for all the world like the shattered pillars of some dead, ruined city of time’s dawn. Here and there, tremendous blocks of stone lay tumbled, as if scattered about by the careless hands of playful giants.

Thongor searched the wilderness of broken, scattered stone with thoughtful eyes. Surely, this must be the place the old sailor had whispered of. But was it a thing of nature, or the work of men? The monolith he had come upon in the jungle had been cut and set by human hands…and the regularity of these stones was haunted by an uncanny suggestion of human purpose and workmanship.

He went down into the valley and prowled the silent avenues of somber desolation. No sign of life alerted his keen senses. If men had ever dwelt here, they were long vanished. No smoke of cooking fires ascended the moonlit sky, no footstep echoed down the empty avenues of tumbled stone, no human rubbish caught his searching gaze, not a shard of broken pottery, a discarded rag, or the ashes of a dead fire. It was like a city of death, this waste of broken rock: like the gaunt bones of a dead metropolis, eerie and silent and empty in the wash of moonlight, and if anything wandered here, they were ghosts of the long-dead past.

Amidst the trackless ruin, he came upon the pool the old sailor had spoken of. A motionless disc of dark waters, impenetrable to the eye, ringed about with a lip of stone. This surely was the work of men, for the pool formed a perfect circle and the stone margin was cut and dressed and smoothed by skill and not by nature.

In the center of the pool, a stone pillar rose against a tropic sky filled with blazing stars. It was like the monolith he had found in the jungle, and yet different, too. For thirty feet the stone pillar loomed up in the moonlight, tall and straight as an obelisk, but rough-hewn and jagged, and it bore no glyphs that he could see. All about the motionless pool stretched a plaza of tumbled, uneven stone slabs. Thongor crossed the plaza with silent tread and knelt by the edge of the pool, dipping one hand within.

The water was cold and foul, scummy and stagnant, but his hand came up filled with dripping pearls. They were slick and moon-like, with a sullen glow of fire in their sheen and rondure. Flame pearls of Cadorna—he knew them at a glance—of superb and perfect water and extraordinary size!

He held a satrap’s ransom in his hand. And the wealth of a dozen emperors slept still beneath the dark waters. A smile lit his somber features. The buccaneer scooped up handful after handful of flame pearls from the black pool, admiring their glistening fire in the cold moonlight. Entranced, he stared down at the wet pearls in his hand. They glowed like little moons.

Then a deep-chested snarl reached his ear—the scrape of callused bare feet on dry stone. He sprang to his feet, thrusting the dripping handful of pearls in the top of his swash sea-boots, and turned.

And then the savages were upon him, a herd of snarling, naked beast-men, broken tusks bared and bloodlust burning in their slitted eyes. The very earth spewed them up: from dark lairs under the tilted slabs of the plaza they came. Troglodytes—cave dwellers! He knew then why he had found no token of human habitation in all these acres of immemorial desolation. And they were upon him, heavy bodies hurled at his back, hard paws clutching his arms, fangs snapping at his very throat.

5

Red Steel!

The young buccaneer shook the hairy-pelted savages from him as the kingly
vandar
of the jungle shakes off a pack of dogs. He drove his booted heel deep in the belly of one snarling foe: the beast-thing grunted, folded and fell.

Then the great broadsword, Sarkozan, was free of its scabbard and singing its cold and eerie song of death as it cut the wind. There were old runes acid-etched down the length of the long, deep blade, and the great gem set in the pommel blazed like an angry eye. The broadsword flashed, a brilliant steel mirror in the Moon, as Thongor whipped it high over his head and brought it whistling down to bite through brain and bone and meat. The clean steel glittered once and when he drew it back, it was washed with red.

For a time he held them, sweeping the great sword in a tireless arc. They feared the cold flash of the edged steel as a witch fears silver. He held them at bay, but they came at him in twos and threes, bounding like jackals, fangs snapping hungrily for his flesh. The Valkarthan at first thought them savages, then beasts, finally men. They went naked like brutes, but walked upright like men. They had hulking, anthropoid bodies, sloping ape-like shoulders, and long arms, knotted with bulging sinews, that hung dangling to their knees. Their heads were bullet-like, sunken deep in massive shoulders, hidden in a tangle of filthy, matted hair through which slitted eyes gleamed redly with mad fires.

But their thick torsos and bowed legs bore but a sparse pelt. The hide that showed bare between patches of stringy fur was the hue of dirty amber and their blazing eyes were aslant, as far as he could judge. The young buccaneer knew but one nation in all Lemuria with tawny amber skin and slanted eyes—the men of ancient Cadorna, westernmost of all the cities of Lemuria. Could these snarling, shambling, loping beast-things be the degenerate remnants of a lost Cadornyana colony, forgotten for ages?

Perhaps. But he had no time to puzzle it out now. He was too busy merely staying alive. They came at him like mad dogs and he cut them down with singing red steel till they heaped the stone margin of the pool with their gore-splashed bodies. Eight, ten, a dozen he slaughtered, but it was only a matter of time until they swarmed over him, battered him down, dragged him to earth under the sheer weight of their numbers.

Now he wished he had not come down alone into the great bowl-like valley, but had gone back to camp as he should have done. O, to have a stout dozen of his brawling buccaneers at his back, with dirk and cutlass and scimitar! But it was too late for recriminations now. He fought on, but now even his iron thews ached with weariness and the breath rasped in his dry throat. He blinked against the red mist that thickened before his gaze.

Then one of the loping beast-things, perhaps less sunk in the red murk of savagery than its fellows, closer to the light of reason and manhood, saw in its cunning that it could not reach the hated man-thing through the wall of red and singing steel. So it squatted on the broken paving, plucked up a heavy shard of rock in one hairy paw, and flung it at Thongor with all the coiled strength of that ape-like arm.

It caught the Valkarthan on the brow—a stunning blow. He lurched, staggered, fighting for consciousness, and the red sword sagged in suddenly nerveless fingers and fell, ringing against the stone pavement of the plaza like a stricken gong.