Tarzan and The Martian Legion (eBook)

CHAPTER TWO On the Wings of a Storm

Early the following day, the men of Earth toured John Carter’s Virginia, a craft capable of both interplanetary and trans-dimensional travel. Here, within the Virginia’s hull was technology alien to Earth, and here, too, were the copper-skinned red men of Barsoom along with Tars Tarkas, twelve feet tall, toad green, fiercely tusked, and sporting an impossible-to-ignore extra set of arms.

“He has no like on the worlds I know,” said Carson Napier as the towering green warrior stood nearby, assisting with the loading of cargo. “While the Ten Planets have their share of amazing creatures, none match your jeddak, and our peoples look little different from the men of Earth and Barsoom.”

“Tars Tarkas is in a sullen mood,” said John Carter, sitting later in the day with Tarzan, Paul D’Arnot, and Ed Burroughs upon the ape-man’s shaded verandah. “My great green giant is eager to be home where his beloved dead sea bottoms stretch wide from horizon to horizon. And he cares little for Earth’s greater gravity. He claims that it will in time drive him into the ground like a tent peg. Too late he sees the wisdom of my advice that he avoid Earth’s greater gravity. Yet had he not come, I might never have stepped from the Virginia to greet you. It was Tars Tarkas who deflected the first assassin’s attack, giving me time to slay the second.”

“It’s a pity Tars Tarkas will not see more of Earth,” said Tarzan. “Had we the time, I could acquaint him with the marvels of Africa.”

The junior D’Arnot laughed around the stem of his pipe. “And no doubt Tars Tarkas would be a marvel himself, recalled hereafter from generation to generation around many a village’s hearth fires.”

“For all his size and extra arms, your Thark seems likable enough,” continued Tarzan.

“Tars Tarkas has saved John’s life at least a dozen times,” said Burroughs, glancing up from his ever present note pad.

John Carter smiled. “There’s no finer soul on Mars. And in battle Tars Tarkas has no equal. Yet like your Waziri, the green men are a superstitious lot, wary of novelty and such things as high places. I’m afraid our green man’s heart is already back on Barsoom, with mind and body eager to follow.”

Tarzan nodded understanding. “There have been times when I, too, would have preferred to escape back to the jungles of my youth.”

“And pray, my dear, what times were those?” asked Jane, smiling as she walked onto the verandah, followed by a young Waziri maiden carrying a tray.

Tarzan took his wife’s hand. At forty-nine she, like her husband, looked younger by twenty years. All the beauty that had captivated the youthful ape-man lingered undiminished in her face, her blue eyes, and her cascade of golden hair.

How had Ed Burroughs once described that hair? Tarzan smiled, remembering. “Like a shimmering waterfall turned to burnished metal by a dying sun.”

“We would both know it to be a lie were I to say I never wished to avoid a dinner party or evening at the opera,” admitted Tarzan, “but in every case, your presence turned what might otherwise have been a miserable evening into an event to be cherished.”

Jane Clayton laughed. “Oh, John, you are bending the truth to spare my feelings when you know you needn’t. Too many times I recall you stealing glances at the clock. Each time I understood and forgave. You may take Tarzan of the Apes out of the jungle, but the jungle will always call you back. And I, better than any, know you must heed that call.”

Jane squeezed her husband’s darkly tanned hand more tightly. Then, as the pretty Waziri maiden placed the tray on a table, Lady Greystoke took a chair near her beloved jungle lord.

“I thought you’d want to cool off a bit,” said Jane, indicating glasses of cold lemonade. “You’ve been working so very, very hard, and the noonday heat is fierce.”

“Mad dogs and Englishmen,” laughed D’Arnot. “Even I find myself working through the hottest part of the day. Hardly a French habit, I assure you!”

John Carter mopped sweat from his brow with a bandana he carried tucked in his leather harness. “Being so very much further from the sun, Mars is never as hot as this.”

“Tell me more of this Mars you’ve known these many years,” continued Jane.

John Carter smiled. “Lady Greystoke, Barsoom is a world of sublime beauty and unspeakable terrors, a world where its peoples, if they escape death by accident, war, or assassination, may live a thousand years. Because she is a dying world, life’s passions blaze all the more fiercely, giving vent to expressions of the grandest nobility and the basest evil. And as amazing as are Barsoom’s races, equally astonishing is the planet itself.

“Barsoom’s dry sand seas roll endlessly from horizon to horizon, interrupted now and again by elevated tablelands, cap rocks, hills and mountains. Scattered upon the tablelands one finds the cities of the red men, or the ancient costal ruins of the once proud Orovarian nations. The migratory camps of the green tribes dot the yellow moss-covered seabeds. It is a wondrous thing to see ten thousand green men all a-move in a great migratory wave.

“The green warriors are mounted on eight-legged thoats9 standing thirty or more hands10 high at the shoulder. Their swords and radium rifles are each as much as ten feet long, and these, like their lances, which are three times as long, depend diagonally from thongs attached to their brightly-colored, ornate saddles. Massive three-wheeled trophy and supply chariots, each drawn by a mastodonic zitidar, the primary draft animal of Barsoom, carry all that the green man owns, and likewise provide conveyance for his women and new-hatched children.”

“It seems I recall,” interjected Tarzan, “that the typical green man is fifteen or so feet tall.”

Ed Burroughs coughed, but kept his eyes fixed upon his spiral pad.

“I believe it was Robert Herrick11 who once observed, ‘An author’s explanations are very doubtful things,’” said John Carter.

Burroughs coughed again, then looked up, grinning. “Well, perhaps I did exaggerate just a bit.”

“Yes, nephew, just a bit,” laughed John Carter. “Twelve feet is closer to the mark. Tars Tarkas is about as big as a green man gets. Yet when first I arrived on Barsoom unarmed and unadorned, and saw him galloping toward me with his thirty-foot lances leveled, he indeed looked to be fifteen feet tall if not a good bit more!”

“Please go on, Mr. Carter, please do,” said Jane, radiant and smiling. “I’m eager to hear more, and having read Major Burroughs’ accounts of our own jungle experiences, I assure you that nothing you say will astonish me more.”

Pausing to drain the remainder of the lemonade from his glass, only to have it immediately refilled by the Waziri maiden, John Carter continued. “Barsoom’s few mountains are not as lofty as those on Jasoom, as we Martians call Earth. The red planet’s tablelands—former continents—are laced with canals that stretch for hundreds of miles like slender silver ribbons with verdant littorals. It is along these canals that we grow the fruits, grains, and livestock that sustain us.

“Time, the seasons, weather patterns, even day and night are very different on Barsoom. Our sun is but a feeble sister to that orb that fires Earth’s noonday sky. The Martian day, owing to the planet’s thin atmosphere, ends abruptly, as does the Earth’s equatorial, pitching the world into night without the twilight interval one takes for granted elsewhere. Thuria and Cluros, Barsoom’s twin moons, hurtle through the chill night sky, sometimes alone, often as companions, spilling their wan light across landscapes peopled by long and leaping shadows.

“Lady Greystoke,” continued John Carter, clearly warming to his subject, “Barsoom’s cities would be the wonder of all Earth could you but see them. And her people! Mars has several distinct races, but the most noble and advanced is that of the red men, a race of builders and scientists, although much of their ancient knowledge has been lost through centuries of upheaval and cataclysm.”

“And their women?” asked Jane coyly.

“They are beautiful beyond words,” answered John Carter.

Jane smiled. “But none, I am given to understand, is as beautiful as your own incomparable Dejah Thoris?”

“She has no equal on Barsoom,” came John Carter’s ready admission. He met Lady Greystoke’s gaze with his own steel gray eyes. “But I think perhaps Earth is another matter.”

Jane smiled at these words, and again squeezed her husband’s hand. This stranger from distant Mars indeed bore a remarkable resemblance to her own beloved Tarzan, and in character the two were cast from the same god-like mold. Jane found herself half wondering if Tarzan and John Carter might share common ancestors.

Three days later, the drone of an aircraft returning from the port city of Mombasa brought Jane and Korak’s wife, Meriem, running into the yard. Shading her blue eyes against the sun, Jane caught sight of a 4-AT Ford Tri-motor as...