The Chessmen of Mars (14 page)

But now she had no time to speculate upon so trivial a thing, for
behind her came the sudden clash of arms and she knew that Turan,
the panthan, had crossed swords with the first of their pursuers.
As she glanced back he was still visible beyond a turn in the
stairway, so that she could see the quick swordplay that ensued.
Daughter of a world's greatest swordsman, she knew well the
finest points of the art. She saw the clumsy attack of the
kaldane and the quick, sure return of the panthan. As she looked
down from above upon his almost naked body, trapped only in the
simplest of unadorned harness, and saw the play of the lithe
muscles beneath the red-bronze skin, and witnessed the quick and
delicate play of his sword point, to her sense of obligation was
added a spontaneous admission of admiration that was but the
natural tribute of a woman to skill and bravery and, perchance,
some trifle to manly symmetry and strength.

Three times the panthan's blade changed its position—once to
fend a savage cut; once to feint; and once to thrust. And as he
withdrew it from the last position the kaldane rolled lifeless
from its stumbling rykor and Turan sprang quickly down the steps
to engage the next behind, and then Ghek had drawn Tara upward
and a turn in the stairway shut the battling panthan from her
view; but still she heard the ring of steel on steel, the clank
of accouterments and the shrill whistling of the kaldanes. Her
heart moved her to turn back to the side of her brave defender;
but her judgment told her that she could serve him best by being
ready at the control of the flier at the moment he reached the
enclosure.

Presently Ghek pushed aside a door that opened from the stairway,
and before them Tara saw the moonlight flooding the walled court
where the headless rykors lay beside their feeding-troughs. She
saw the perfect bodies, muscled as the best of her father's
fighting men, and the females whose figures would have been the
envy of many of Helium's most beautiful women. Ah, if she could
but endow these with the power to act! Then indeed might the
safety of the panthan be assured; but they were only poor lumps
of clay, nor had she the power to quicken them to life. Ever must
they lie thus until dominated by the cold, heartless brain of the
kaldane. The girl sighed in pity even as she shuddered in disgust
as she picked her way over and among the sprawled creatures
toward the flier.

Quickly she and Ghek mounted to the deck after the latter had
cast off the moorings. Tara tested the control, raising and
lowering the ship a few feet within the walled space. It
responded perfectly. Then she lowered it to the ground again and
waited. From the open doorway came the sounds of conflict, now
nearing them, now receding. The girl, having witnessed her
champion's skill, had little fear of the outcome. Only a single
antagonist could face him at a time upon the narrow stairway, he
had the advantage of position and of the defensive, and he was a
master of the sword while they were clumsy bunglers by
comparison. Their sole advantage was in their numbers, unless
they might find a way to come upon him from behind.

She paled at the thought. Could she have seen him she might have
been further perturbed, for he took no advantage of many
opportunities to win nearer the enclosure. He fought coolly, but
with a savage persistence that bore little semblance to purely
defensive action. Often he clambered over the body of a fallen
foe to leap against the next behind, and once there lay five dead
kaldanes behind him, so far had he pushed back his antagonists.
They did not know it; these kaldanes that he fought, nor did the
girl awaiting him upon the flier, but Gahan of Gathol was engaged
in a more alluring sport than winning to freedom, for he was
avenging the indignities that had been put upon the woman he
loved; but presently he realized that he might be jeopardizing
her safety uselessly, and so he struck down another before him
and turning leaped quickly up the stairway, while the leading
kaldanes slipped upon the brain-covered floor and stumbled in
pursuit.

Gahan reached the enclosure twenty paces ahead of them and raced
toward the flier. "Rise!" he shouted to the girl. "I will ascend
the cable."

Slowly the small craft rose from the ground as Gahan leaped the
inert bodies of the rykors lying in his path. The first of the
pursuers sprang from the tower just as Gahan seized the trailing
rope.

"Faster!" he shouted to the girl above, "or they will drag us
down!" But the ship seemed scarcely to move, though in reality
she was rising as rapidly as might have been expected of a
one-man flier carrying a load of three. Gahan swung free above
the top of the wall, but the end of the rope still dragged the
ground as the kaldanes reached it. They were pouring in a steady
stream from the tower into the enclosure. The leader seized the
rope.

"Quick!" he cried. "Lay hold and we will drag them down."

It needed but the weight of a few to accomplish his design. The
ship was stopped in its flight and then, to the horror of the
girl, she felt it being dragged steadily downward. Gahan, too,
realized the danger and the necessity for instant action.
Clinging to the rope with his left hand, he had wound a leg about
it, leaving his right hand free for his long-sword which he had
not sheathed. A downward cut clove the soft head of a kaldane,
and another severed the taut rope beneath the panthan's feet. The
girl heard a sudden renewal of the shrill whistling of her foes,
and at the same time she realized that the craft was rising
again. Slowly it drifted upward, out of reach of the enemy, and a
moment later she saw the figure of Turan clamber over the side.
For the first time in many weeks her heart was filled with the
joy of thanksgiving; but her first thought was of another.

"You are not wounded?" she asked.

"No, Tara of Helium," he replied. "They were scarce worth the
effort of my blade, and never were they a menace to me because of
their swords."

"They should have slain you easily," said Ghek. "So great and
highly developed is the power of reason among us that they should
have known before you struck just where, logically, you must seek
to strike, and so they should have been able to parry your every
thrust and easily find an opening to your heart."

"But they did not, Ghek," Gahan reminded him. "Their theory of
development is wrong, for it does not tend toward a perfectly
balanced whole. You have developed the brain and neglected the
body and you can never do with the hands of another what you can
do with your own hands. Mine are trained to the sword—every
muscle responds instantly and accurately, and almost
mechanically, to the need of the instant. I am scarcely
objectively aware that I think when I fight, so quickly does my
point take advantage of every opening, or spring to my defense if
I am threatened that it is almost as though the cold steel had
eyes and brains. You, with your kaldane brain and your rykor
body, never could hope to achieve in the same degree of
perfection those things that I can achieve. Development of the
brain should not be the sum total of human endeavor. The richest
and happiest peoples will be those who attain closest to
well-balanced perfection of both mind and body, and even these
must always be short of perfection. In absolute and general
perfection lies stifling monotony and death. Nature must have
contrasts; she must have shadows as well as highlights; sorrow
with happiness; both wrong and right; and sin as well as virtue."

"Always have I been taught differently," replied Ghek; "but since
I have known this woman and you, of another race, I have come to
believe that there may be other standards fully as high and
desirable as those of the kaldanes. At least I have had a glimpse
of the thing you call happiness and I realize that it may be good
even though I have no means of expressing it. I cannot laugh nor
smile, and yet within me is a sense of contentment when this
woman sings—a sense that seems to open before me wondrous vistas
of beauty and unguessed pleasure that far transcend the cold joys
of a perfectly functioning brain. I would that I had been born of
thy race."

Caught by a gentle current of air the flier was drifting slowly
toward the northeast across the valley of Bantoom. Below them lay
the cultivated fields, and one after another they passed over the
strange towers of Moak and Nolach and the other kings of the
swarms that inhabited this weird and terrible land. Within each
enclosure surrounding the towers grovelled the rykors, repellent,
headless things, beautiful yet hideous.

"A lesson, those," remarked Gahan, indicating the rykors in an
enclosure above which they were drifting at the time, "to that
fortunately small minority of our race which worships the flesh
and makes a god of appetite. You know them, Tara of Helium; they
can tell you exactly what they had at the midday meal two weeks
ago, and how the loin of the thoat should be prepared, and what
drink should be served with the rump of the zitidar."

Tara of Helium laughed. "But not one of them could tell you the
name of the man whose painting took the Jeddak's Award in The
Temple of Beauty this year," she said. "Like the rykors, their
development has not been balanced."

"Fortunate indeed are those in which there is combined a little
good and a little bad, a little knowledge of many things outside
their own callings, a capacity for love and a capacity for hate,
for such as these can look with tolerance upon all, unbiased by
the egotism of him whose head is so heavy on one side that all
his brains run to that point."

As Gahan ceased speaking Ghek made a little noise in his throat
as one does who would attract attention. "You speak as one who
has thought much upon many subjects. Is it, then, possible that
you of the red race have pleasure in thought? Do you know aught
of the joys of introspection? Do reason and logic form any part
of your lives?"

"Most assuredly," replied Gahan, "but not to the extent of
occupying all our time—at least not objectively. You, Ghek, are
an example of the egotism of which I spoke. Because you and your
kind devote your lives to the worship of mind, you believe that
no other created beings think. And possibly we do not in the
sense that you do, who think only of yourselves and your great
brains. We think of many things that concern the welfare of a
world. Had it not been for the red men of Barsoom even the
kaldanes had perished from the planet, for while you may live
without air the things upon which you depend for existence
cannot, and there had been no air in sufficient quantities upon
Barsoom these many ages had not a red man planned and built the
great atmosphere plant which gave new life to a dying world.

"What have all the brains of all the kaldanes that have ever
lived done to compare with that single idea of a single red man?"

Ghek was stumped. Being a kaldane he knew that brains spelled the
sum total of universal achievement, but it had never occurred to
him that they should be put to use in practical and profitable
ways. He turned away and looked down upon the valley of his
ancestors across which he was slowly drifting, into what unknown
world? He should be a veritable god among the underlings, he
knew; but somehow a doubt assailed him. It was evident that these
two from that other world were ready to question his preeminence.
Even through his great egotism was filtering a suspicion that
they patronized him; perhaps even pitied him. Then he began to
wonder what was to become of him. No longer would he have many
rykors to do his bidding. Only this single one and when it died
there could not be another. When it tired, Ghek must lie almost
helpless while it rested. He wished that he had never seen this
red woman. She had brought him only discontent and dishonor and
now exile. Presently Tara of Helium commenced to hum a tune and
Ghek, the kaldane, was content.

Gently they drifted beneath the hurtling moons above the mad
shadows of a Martian night. The roaring of the banths came in
diminishing volume to their ears as their craft passed on beyond
the boundaries of Bantoom, leaving behind the terrors of that
unhappy land. But to what were they being borne? The girl looked
at the man sitting cross-legged upon the deck of the tiny flier,
gazing off into the night ahead, apparently absorbed in thought.

"Where are we?" she asked. "Toward what are we drifting?"

Turan shrugged his broad shoulders. "The stars tell me that we
are drifting toward the northeast," he replied, "but where we
are, or what lies in our path I cannot even guess. A week since I
could have sworn that I knew what lay behind each succeeding
ridge that I approached; but now I admit in all humility that I
have no conception of what lies a mile in any direction. Tara of
Helium, I am lost, and that is all that I can tell you."

He was smiling and the girl smiled back at him. There was a
slightly puzzled expression on her face—there was something
tantalizingly familiar about that smile of his. She had met many
a panthan—they came and went, following the fighting of a
world—but she could not place this one.

"From what country are you, Turan?" she asked suddenly.

"Know you not, Tara of Helium," he countered, "that a panthan has
no country? Today he fights beneath the banner of one master,
tomorrow beneath that of another."

"But you must own allegiance to some country when you are not
fighting," she insisted. "What banner, then, owns you now?"

He rose and stood before her, then, bowing low. "And I am
acceptable," he said, "I serve beneath the banner of the daughter
of The Warlord now—and forever."

She reached forth and touched his arm with a slim brown hand.
"Your services are accepted," she said; "and if ever we reach
Helium I promise that your reward shall be all that your heart
could desire."