Tarzan and The Martian Legion (eBook)

CHAPTER TEN Life in the Treehouse

Jane Clayton stepped from the large tent she shared with her fellow captives. Shading her blue eyes with an open hand, she squinted into the fierce sunlight. How like Africa was this land, and yet how very different. The thern camp lay on the edge of a broad savanna with a great forest looming nearby. On the opposite side of the savanna she could see forested hills, snow-capped mountains, and clusters of volcanic cones, the latter in some instances emitting trails of smoke and sulfuric vapor.

The sounds of unfamiliar insects and birds were everywhere, the smells strange, yet fresh and crisply pleasant. From the jungle at Jane’s back came the cries, hoots, and calls of unseen beasts.

This land could not be David Innes’ Pellucidar, not with its days and nights and a sun that by turns became a moon. Just as Klee Tun claimed, they could only be at Barsoom’s core.

Jane saw three great cities in the tilting-to-the-sky hills beyond the savanna. The third city, called Asoth-Naz by the therns, had been founded by Klee Tun’s thern colonists twenty-five thousand years earlier. That much she believed to be true, although the concept of time travel was new to her, as was much that she had experienced in recent days.

Asoth-Naz, a name that meant Skhet’s Splendor, was their destination.

Dejah Thoris rejoined Jane and the other women after a brief but explosive interview with Klee Tun. Frowning, the Martian princess threw herself into a camp chair. Her lack of tact, combined with the Hekkador’s visceral loathing for her husband, had again reduced their discourse to icy stares on the one hand, and near frothing rage on the other.

Jane was summoned next by the Father of Therns.

“You will come with me, lady,” ordered a thern priest, sweating in his red robes.

Jane followed the man through the thern camp. Crates and cartons were piled haphazardly upon the trampled grass, and nearby, three flyers were being assembled, one with a capacity of five men, the two others designed for thirty men and cargo. Jane knew that a fourth flyer, along with not yet offloaded equipment and supplies, had been lost with the Cassidy’s untimely departure.

Guard and captive came to the place where Klee Tun held council under the shade of a teak-like tree. At his back was his tent, large and snow-white, and trimmed in gold as were the Holy Hekkador’s robes. To Klee Tun’s left sat his blonde, green-eyed sister, to his right the typically astringent Commander Kellsar. A tawny sorak lounged sleepily in the Hekkador’s lap.

As Jane stood facing the three, she was struck yet again by the contrasts posed by her clothing and that of her captors. In response to the summer-like heat of this hollow land, the Hekkador had shrugged away the upper portion of his white robe of state. But for his warrior’s harness, and white kilt, he sat naked to the waist, the scars of old wounds livid upon flesh pale as alabaster. Capt. Kellsar, the Centaurian traitor, had likewise removed his red jacket, exposing a yellow, sweat-stained tunic beneath. His uniform had an alien cut, contrasting both with the Barsoomian style and Jane’s simple blue and white checked blouse, tan skirt, and brown leather safari boots.

Klee Tun’s sister, Phaidor, dressed as a Barsoomian princess, was herself a remarkable spectacle, but she reflected no less the Barsoomian way than did Dejah Thoris, Tara, and Llana. Jane’s dress was modest and practical. Phaidor’s, and that of the typical Barsoomian female, was neither. The clothing of maid and matron alike, to the extent that it existed, might best be described as scant yet strategic, concealing with silken weave and supple leather all that must be covered, but hiding little else.

“The proper mode of obeisance has been explained to her,” said a priest of the Eighth Cycle, eying the Earth woman with a cold eye. “This one, like the other, is impertinent.”

“It is best that you kneel,” said Klee Tun gently, ignoring his subordinate’s harsh tone.

Noting Jane’s perplexed frown, Commander Kellsar, who had a passing command of English, provided such interpretation as was required.

“I am a free woman,” replied Jane, looking her captors square in the eye.

The Holy Hekkador nodded. “It would seem so. You are indeed a freeborn woman, and the wife of the one they call both Greystoke and Tarzan?”

“I am,” replied Jane after Kellsar translated.

“You will not see him again,” said Klee Tun. “None of us, it seems, will see anything of our former world.”

Klee Tun’s eyes, shifting to Commander Kellsar, took on an injured look. “We are marooned, you know, each and all of us, marooned twenty-five thousand years before any of us were hatched, marooned in this forsaken land and time. Our ship and time-spanning device, both are gone, lost quite literally forever.”

Feeling humiliated, Commander Kellsar looked to the Hekkador’s sister for support, but received none. Although he had Phaidor’s heart neatly caged, her loyalty to her half-mad brother resisted all distraction.

“I was betrayed,” complained the Centaurian sourly, his thin face looking more sunken than ever and his mustache drooping. “Napier’s men somehow got free, and the Cassidy was filched. Now I am stranded in the past no less than you. Do you think I wanted to lose my ship?”

The Holy Hekkador’s laughter held no mirth. “You speak of a ship lost! Man, I have lost my very destiny! I, who was chosen by Great Skhet to rule all Barsoom, am now doomed to rule instead the backward folk of this oversized geode. Never will I be revenged upon my enemies. They whom I hate now wonder where I am gone, and in time they will forget me.”

“They will not forget you,” soothed Phaidor, touching her brother’s arm reassuringly.

“No, they will not forget you,” repeated Jane Clayton, grasping the meaning of what was said. “They will remember you and they will find you.”

“Oh, would that I could believe you, lady,” answered Klee Tun after Kellsar reluctantly translated. For just a moment the melancholy left the Hekkador’s drawn features.

“Believe, then,” continued Jane. “You are not the first to take me from my home and husband. Before you there was Lieutenant Obergatz,9 and before him Nikolas Rokoff.10 Each time Tarzan came for me. It will happen so again. Then you will be made sorry for what you have done.”

Kellsar hesitated, then translated at Klee Tun’s insistence.

“You do your husband great honor,” smiled the Hekkador, leaning forward as though eager to hear more, even as he mulled his own hopeless plight, “but I fear you credit this Tarzan with more than man can this time deliver.”

“My faith is also with God. What Tarzan cannot do, God may.”

“Which god?” inquired Klee Tun, “Which among the many?”

“There is but one god, and that god is Jehovah,” explained Jane, speaking with absolute conviction.

Interested, her interrogator leaned still further forward, one hand absently stroking the golden sorak which in turn playfully batted at his fingers with its several forepaws.

“I know of no such god.”

“On my world, millions know that Jehovah is God the Father, and that Jesus is his Son, our Savior.”

“Ah, now there are two gods where there was one a moment ago,” said Klee Tun, clapping his hands.

“Jesus and God the Father are two parts of a single whole, along with the Holy Ghost.”

“And now three?” marveled Klee Tun, mildly mocking his prisoner. “And one a Corphal at that!”

Jane was undisturbed. “The Trinity, all one. Perhaps, if you have time, I could explain further.”

“At least you blaspheme interestingly,” said Klee Tun, warming to the subject. “Skhet makes no such claim to duality or trinity. Skhet, for all his greatness, is but a god among other gods. The Elder Things they are sometimes called. Skhet is one of many named in the Necronomicon, that book of prime mysteries.”

“I look to a book also,” said Jane. “It is with me now. It is called the Bible.”

“May I see it?” Klee Tun half rose, his interest intensified.

“You may.”

Jane reached into a pocket of her skirt and drew out a small, black, leather-bound book. When the therns had attacked the plantation, she had hidden Meriem, the children and their nanny under the bungalow floor, covering the trap door with a rug. Then she had rushed to Tarzan’s study, only to remember that the gun case was locked. With children about, the case was always locked. She retrieved the gun case key from its hiding place, but then it was too late. The running thud of feet mingled with the screams of women. It was then that she saw her small travel Bible. It was in her hands, clutched to her breast, when the therns took her, even as she signaled S.O.S. on the Gridley Wave.

“The language is unfamiliar,” mused the Holy Hekkador, turning pages with ardent fingers.

“It is the King James version, written in the...