Human Mice of Kordar by Basil Wells - Chapter 3
1941 Stirring Science, Sword & Sorcery Tale
Stirring Science Stories, June 1941
CHAPTER III
The five leather-armored men and the girl emerged from the lightless depths of the inner walls of Tobe into the pale glow of river-reflected moonlight. The massive wall that held back the flooding waters of the Ulzan loomed high above them; its base, undercut by the persistent gnawing of the river, made a low roof overhead. A dozen feet inward the water-worn cavity extended and the outlaws had cut a narrow channel yet farther beneath the wall. In this narrow berth, three low open boats, their slender masts dropped horizontally along the seats, were moored.
Two outlaws sprang from the craft furthest out and saluted the one-eyed man.
"All is ready, Tolab," they announced.
"Good," grunted the squat outlaw.
"Now drive your swords through the bottoms of the other boats. Smash their oars. Wreck them!"
The two men hurried to the other boats and set to work. The crashing of thin planking and the snapping of breaking oars attested to their relish for such vandal tasks. In a few moments the shattered wrecks sank below the water's surface.
The girl and old Andor Thid had already found seats in the bow below the high, carved figurehead.
"Hurry!" cried Tolab. "I hear the sound of racing feet in the corridors behind us.
Kral Gant and his men must be following. Climb aboard men!"
A hail of javelins slashed out of the gloom behind them and a compact mass of armored fighting-men followed. They were upon the six men in an instant and swords struck sparks of fire from one another. Slim blades flicked in and out and blood reddened many a keen point.
Thom and Tolab fought shoulder to shoulder beside the boat, their swords piercing the vitals of many an enemy. Dunja went down with a sword in his throat, and a hurled javelin had torn the leather helmet from Tholar's old bald head. The two loyal outlaws were down, their bodies pierced with a dozen sword-thrusts.
The three men retreated to the rocky pier's edge. A slim, hawk-nosed fellow, a heavy shirt of gold-inlaid metal strips over his layered leather tunic, engaged Tholar in combat. An instant later the helmetless oldster lunged backward into the water, three inches of steel protruding from his back. The hawk-faced outlaw snatched up another sword from the limp clutch of a dead outlaw.
"Here, Kral Gant," challenged Tolab even as a sword penetrated his guard and spitted his shoulder.
Then Thom was left standing alone to face the attacking outlaws. Well had old Andor Thid instructed him in the use of swords, using heavy sticks a foils, and well now did that training stand the test. Not many of the attackers were on their feet—three or four in all—they advanced half-heartedly led by hawkish Kral Gant.
Thom's sword swept aside the leader's slim blade, flickered inward, and the bold beak of Kral Gant vanished in a welter of spouting blood. "Thom!" cried the clear voice of Lyan, "Jump into the boat!"
Thom darted a quick glance about. Only Tolab yet lived of all his allies. His fingers hooked under the crossed belts of Tolab's trappings and he sprang across a widening stretch of water into the boat.
Andor Thid swung his sword down, slashing the last rope that bound them to the shore. Then they were drifting out from the shadows of the great wall into the weird light of the hurtling triple moons of Kordar's night.
A gentle breeze drifted up the mile-wide reaches of the Ulzan from the distant Sea of Omul. The three of them raised the stout mast and spread the craft's dark, triangular sail. Thom took over the tiller while the others curled up in the boat's bottom to sleep, or, as Tolab did, to curse the pain of his shoulder-wound.
Slowly the little craft drove upstream against the sluggish current. Morning came all too soon. The outer walls of Tobe, grim gray ramparts a thousand feet in height, lay a scant mile behind them when they glided between two huge, water-carved boulders into the narrow watery cove formed by two tree-clad islands.
The men cut bushy limbs from the smaller trees and bushes and laid a leafy roof over the boat. After they had eaten a few cold chunks of meat and some flinty cakes of ground yellow cereal, Lyan insisted that they let her keep watch while they slept.
It was afternoon when Thom came awake with the pressure of Lyan's soft fingers on his lips. He sat up and stretched his cramped limbs. She gestured toward the river.
"Giants," whispered the girl. "Many of them have passed, all of them floating on rafts like that one."
Thom saw a long narrow island of logs, logs twenty or thirty feet in diameter, drifting past the twin islets. Atop the logs, his four massive legs braced against the pitching of the raft, balanced the coarse-haired, shoulderless bulk of a Toban river-man.
A great log, perhaps two hundred feet in length, he gripped in two of his upper double-jointed limbs to ward off any encroaching spit of land. His other two arms gripped the massive tiller of a ponderous rudder at the raft's rear.
Eighty feet tall he was, his peaked hairy skull all but buried in his broad elephantine bulk. He was without covering, save for the several belts and straps that supported huge leather pouches and a wide-bladed hatchet. A gigantic apish monster of nightmare he semed to the two human mice huddled in their fragile toy-boat.
After he had drifted from sight the two young people talked together of everything under the sun of Kordar, and of everything under her triple moons. They said nothing original or of lasting worth; yet when night came and they again shoved off into the Ulzan they were the best of friends.
As they sailed slowly upstream they met more and more tiny boats like their own, fishing craft and traders. Once a boatload of river pirates attacked a fishing boat far off to their right and they heard the clash of weapons and the dying screams of men.
After that for eight nights they journeyed up the broad stream until it narrowed and a great waterfall halted further progress by water. Then old Andor Thid traced out a map on a smooth bit of rock showing the Llol Hills, where they were camped, the northward extension of the Stod Plains just beyond, and the Dron Hills. Beyond the chill rocky ramparts of the Dron Hills stretched the plateau of Narth, and there, less than a day's journey within Narth's borders, loomed the ominous round red bulk of the Scarlet Skull.
They left the river behind and marched northward across the Stod Plains. Through a tangled forest of tall grass, thirty or forty feet in height, they made their way. Bushy upper blades of grass formed a patchwork emerald roof overhead, and a level floor of waist-high grass surrounded them... Strange world, this Kordar, the normal and the gigantic madly intermingled.
Giant stods, vast trampling herds of the white-haired, bison-like beasts, many of them a hundred and twenty feet long and towering sixty feet above the ground on their eight massive legs, ranged the grass-forests. And beneath the concealing shadows. of those same forests moved and fed herds of pygmy stods, none of them more than a tenth as large as their giant brothers.
From the herds of great stods the Tobans obtain their domestic livestock, and likewise, from the pygmy herds do the human beings of Kordar draw their beasts of burden.
Lyan, Tolab, the old priest, and Thom slept on piles of grass beneath a crude lean—to of felled grass trunks. For three days they had followed the sunken game-trails that criss-crossed the grasslands and they were tired. A stinking fire of dry stod chips burned in a carefully cleared spot beside the trail.
The three moons trailed one another swiftly across the western sky in their second circuit of the night. A bat-winged thul drifted silently overhead, and the harsh call of some prowling beast sounded far off to the east.
"Wake up," cried Tolab suddenly, springing to his feet with the words. "Listen! The stods come!"
A faint rhythmic drumming vibrated the soil beneath their feet. The very roots of the towering grass-stems seemed to be trembling with that swelling beat.
"Stampede!" shouted Tolab. "Scatter fire. Dried grass. Fire will stop the charge. Turn them."
In a moment they had flung the embers into the grass about them and a ring of fire raced outward through the accumulated dead grass of other seasons. Quickly they beat out the backward-licking threads of flame and then flung themselves close to the ground where the heat was less oppressive. The flames grew and raged outward, blackening and burning the towering grass-trees with ever-increasing fury.
Lyan Tuga lay between Tolab and Thom, their bodies protecting her from the direct heat of the fire. Her hand found Thom's and clung. He pressed her fingers reassuringly. Nor did he release them until the wall of flame split the black charging mass of giant stods apart.
"Again," whispered Lyan, "has The Flame protected us."
After that for two more days they crossed a dead, burnt-over world of drifting gray ashes and blackened smoking debris that ended abruptly against the sheer rocky cliffs that lined the lower reaches of the Dron Hills.
As they penetrated deeper into the rocky splintered hell of the hills, the air grew chill and the wind never ceased to blow. They circled around barren valleys where smoking volcanic pits opened and the scattered clumps of vegetation were stunted and grotesquely twisted.
"See those openings in the walls of the pits?" Tolab asked Thom.
"Sure," the young man nodded. "Spotted drons live there near the fire from below," the outlaw said. "Huge ten-foot beasts that look like men. Fangs on them a foot long and no nose to speak of. Four arms they have and four legs. They can run on all eight of them faster than a kruka."
"How about the lizard people?" Thom wanted to know.
"They're here in the hills all right," Tolab told him, "only they don't like sunlight. That's why every night we hunt a cave and stay there until morning. They prowl only at night and return to their underground caverns with the coming of dawn."
"Glad of that," said Thom.
Less than an hour later they rounded a sharp turn in a cliff-side trail and came full upon a solitary apish dron. He was as startled as they and before his four apish limbs could reach them Thom and Tolab in the lead, had driven their swords deep into his vitals. The monster flopped backward, tearing convulsively at the spurting wounds in his spotted hide, and toppled from the narrow ledge.
That was but the first of many encounters with the great apes of the uplands. Fortunately, they never encountered more than two or three of the shambling hairy beasts at one time, and their four swords proved to be more than enough to vanquish them. Lyan could wield a sword as skillfully as any man, and the wrinkled priest had been an urrar in his youth.
Battles with hissing, bat-winged thuls and encounters with hairy, skin-clad savages made every day's journey a bloody nightmare. They ate the scorched meat of sluggish lizard creatures that hid in the crevices about the ever-steaming springs, as they huddled about a meager cave-fire at night, and shivered until morning in their tattered rags when the flames died.
At last they came upon a party of traders, bound for Narth with goods from Tobe, as they battled a group of club-armed, hairy natives. Their four swords had turned the tide of battle; the savages were driven off, and the grateful traders invited them to join their party.
