Part 14

“The vessel was one of those that had formed the armada of The Cid, and was, as far as they knew, the only one that had survived the storm. Shortly before they had found us they had picked up a boat-load of the survivors of The Cid’s ship, including The Cid himself, and from The Cid we learned that you and the other prisoners had doubtless been lost with his vessel, which he said was in a sinking condition at the time that he abandoned it. To my surprise I learned that The Cid had also abandoned his own daughter to her fate and I believe that this cowardly act weighed heavily upon his mind, for he was always taciturn and moody, avoiding the companionship of even his own officers.”

“She did not die,” said Tanar. “We escaped together, the sole survivors, as far as we knew, of The Cid’s ship, though later we were captured by the members of another boat crew that had also made the island of Amiocap and with them we were brought to Korsar.”

“In my conversation with The Cid and also with the officers and men of the Korsar ship I sought to sound them on their knowledge of the extent of this sea, which is known as the Korsar Az. Among other things I learned that they possess compasses and are conversant with their use and they told me that to the west they had never sailed to the extreme limits of the Korsar Az, which they state reaches on, a vast body of water, for countless leagues beyond the knowledge of man. But to the east they have followed the shore-line from Korsar southward almost to the shore upon which they landed to attack the empire of Pellucidar.

“Now this suggests, in fact almost proves, that Korsar lies upon the same great continent as the empire of Pellucidar and if we can escape from prison, we may be able to make our way by land back to our own country.”

“But there is that ‘if,’” said Ja. “We have eaten and slept many times since they threw us into this dark hole, yet we are no nearer escape now than we were at the moment that they put us here; nor do we even know what fate lies in store for us.”

“These other prisoners tell us,” resumed David, “that the fact that we were not immediately killed, which is the customary fate of prisoners of war among the Korsars, indicates that they are saving us for some purpose; but what that purpose is I cannot conceive.”

“I can,” said Tanar. “In fact I am quite sure that I know.”

“And what is it?” demanded Ja.

“They wish us to teach them how to make firearms and powder such as ours,” replied the Sarian. “But where do you suppose they ever got firearms and powder in the first place?”

“Or the great ships they sail,” added Ja; “ships that are even larger than those which we build? These things were unknown in Pellucidar before David and Perry came to us, yet the Korsars appear to have known of them and used them always.”

“I have an idea,” said David; “yet it is such a mad idea that I have almost hesitated to entertain it, much less to express it.”

“What is it?” asked Tanar.

“It was suggested to me in my conversations with the Korsars themselves,” replied the Emperor. “Without exception they have all assured me that their ancestors came from another world—a world above which the sun did not stand perpetually at zenith, but crossed the heavens regularly, leaving the world in darkness half the time. They say that a part of this world is very cold and that their ancestors, who were seafaring men, became caught with their ships in the frozen waters; that their compasses turned in all directions and became useless to them and that when finally they broke through the ice and sailed away in the direction that they thought was south, they came into Pellucidar, which they found inhabited only by naked savages and wild beasts. And here they set up their city and built new ships, their numbers being augmented from time to time by other seafaring men from this world from which they say they originally came.

“They intermarried with the natives, which in this part of Pellucidar seemed to have been of a very low order.” David paused.

“Well,” asked Tanar, “what does it all mean?”

“It means,” said David, “that if their legend is true, or based upon fact, that their ancestors came from the same outer world from which Perry and I came, but by what avenue?—that is the astounding enigma.”

Many times during their incarceration the three men discussed this subject, but never were they able to arrive at any definite solution of the mystery. Food was brought them many times and several times they slept before Korsar soldiers came and took them from the dungeon.

They were led to the palace of The Cid, the architecture of which but tended to increase the mystery of the origin of this strange race in the mind of David Innes, for the building seemed to show indisputable proof of Moorish influence.

Within the palace they were conducted to a large room, comfortably filled with bewhiskered Korsars decked out in their gaudiest raiment, which far surpassed in brilliancy of coloring and ornamentation the comparatively mean clothes they had worn aboard ship. Upon a dais, at one end of the room, a man was seated upon a large, ornately carved chair. It was The Cid, and as David’s eyes fell upon him his mind suddenly grasped, for the first time, a significant suggestion in the title of the ruler of the Korsars.

Previously the name had been only a name to David. He had not considered it as a title; nor had it by association awakened any particular train of thought, but now, coupled with the Moorish palace and the carved throne, it did.

The Cid! Rodrigo Diaz de Bivar—El Campeandor—a national hero of eleventh century Spain. What did it mean? His thoughts reverted to the ships of the Korsars—their motley crews with harquebuses and cutlasses—and he recalled the thrilling stories he had read as a boy of the pirates of the Spanish Main. Could it be merely coincidence? Could a nation of people have grown up within the inner world, who so closely resembled the buccaneers of the seventeenth century, or had their forebears in truth found their way hither from the outer crust? David Innes did not know. He was frankly puzzled. But now he was being led to the foot of The Cid’s throne and there was no further opportunity for the delightful speculation that had absorbed his mind momentarily.

The cruel, cunning eyes of The Cid looked down upon the three prisoners from out his brutal face. “The Emperor of Pellucidar!” he sneered. “The King of Anoroc! The son of the King of Sari!” and then he laughed uproariously. He extended his hand, his fingers parted and curled in a clutching gesture. “Emperor! King! Prince!” he sneered again, “and yet here you all are in the clutches of The Cid. Emperor—bah! I, The Cid, am the Emperor of all Pellucidar! You and your naked savages!” He turned on David. “Who are you to take the title of Emperor? I could crush you all,” and he closed his fingers in a gesture of rough cruelty. “But I shall not. The Cid is generous and he is grateful, too. You shall have your freedom for a small price that you may easily pay.” He paused as though he expected them to question him, but no one of the three spoke. Suddenly he turned upon David. “Where did you get your firearms and your powder? Who made them for you?”

“We made them ourselves,” replied David.

“Who taught you to make them?” insisted The Cid. “But never mind; it is enough that you know and we would know. You may win your liberty by teaching us.”

David could make gunpowder, but whether he could make any better gunpowder than the Korsars he did not know. He had left that to Perry and his apprentices in The Empire, and he knew perfectly well that he could not reconstruct a modern rifle such as was being turned out in the arsenals at Sari, for he had neither the drawings to make the rifles, nor the machinery, nor the drawings to make the machinery, nor the shops in which to make steel. But nevertheless here was one opportunity for possible freedom that might pave the way to escape and he could not throw it away, either for himself or his companions, by admitting their inability to manufacture modern firearms or improve the powder of the Korsars.

“Well,” demanded The Cid, impatiently, “what is your answer?”

“We cannot make powder and rifles while a man eats,” replied David; “nor can we make them from the air or from conversation. We must have materials; we must have factories; we must have trained men. You will sleep many times before we are able to accomplish all this. Are you willing to wait?”

“How many times shall we sleep before you have taught our people to make these things?” demanded The Cid.

David shrugged. “I do not know,” he said. “In the first place I must find the proper materials.”

“We have all the materials,” said The Cid. “We have iron and we have the ingredients for making powder. All that you have to do is to put them together in a better way than we have been able to.”

“You may have the materials, but it is possible that they are not of sufficiently good quality to make the things that will alone satisfy the subjects of the Emperor of Pellucidar. Perhaps your niter is low grade; there may be impurities in your sulphur; or even the charcoal may not be properly prepared; and there are even more important matters to consider in the selection of material and its manufacture into steel suitable for making the firearms of the Pellucidarians.”

“You shall not be hurried,” said The Cid. He turned to a man standing near him. “See that an officer accompanies these men always,” he said. “Let them go where they please and do what they please in the prosecution of my orders. Furnish them with laborers if they desire them, but do not let them delay and do not let them escape, upon pain of death.” And thus ended their interview with The Cid of Korsar.

As it chanced, the man to be detailed to watch them was Fitt, the fellow whom David had chosen to accompany him and Ja in their pursuit of the Korsar fleet, and Fitt, having become well acquainted with David and Ja and having experienced nothing but considerate treatment from them, was far from unfriendly, though, like the majority of all other Korsars, he was inclined to be savage and cruel.

As they were passing out of the palace they caught a glimpse of a girl in a chamber that opened onto the corridor in which they were. Fitt, big with the importance of his new position and feeling somewhat like a showman revealing and explaining his wonders to the ignorant and uninitiated, had been describing the various objects of interest that they had passed as well as the personages of importance, and now he nodded in the direction of the room in which they had seen the girl, although they had gone along the corridor so far by this time that they could no longer see her. “That,” he said, “is The Cid’s daughter.” Tanar stopped in his tracks and turned to Fitt.

“May I speak to her?” he asked.

“You!” cried Fitt. “You speak to the daughter of The Cid!”

“I know her,” said Tanar. “We two were left alone on the abandoned ship when it was deserted by its officers and crew. Go and ask her if she will speak to me.”

Fitt hesitated. “The Cid might not approve,” he said.

“He gave you no orders other than to accompany us,” said David. “How are we to carry on our work if we are to be prevented from speaking to anyone whom we choose? At least you will be safe in leading us to The Cid’s daughter. If she wishes to speak to Tanar the responsibility will not be yours.”

“Perhaps you are right,” said Fitt. “I will ask her.” He stepped to the doorway of the apartment in which were Stellara and Gura, and now, for the first time, he saw that a man was with them. It was Bulf. The three looked up as he entered.

“There is one here who wishes to speak to The Cid’s daughter,” he said, addressing Stellara.

“Who is he?” demanded Bulf.

“He is Tanar, a prisoner of war from Sari.”

“Tell him,” said Stellara, “that The Cid’s daughter does not recall him and cannot grant him an interview.”

As Fitt turned and quit the chamber, Gura’s ordinarily sad eyes flashed a look of angry surprise at Stellara.

XIV TWO SUNS

David, Ja, and Tanar were quartered in barracks inside the palace wall and immediately set to work to carry out a plan that David had suggested and which included an inspection, not only of the Korsars’ powder factory and the arsenals in which their firearms were manufactured, but also visits to the niter beds, sulphur deposits, charcoal pits and iron mines.

These various excursions for the purpose of inspecting the sources of supply and the methods of obtaining it aroused no suspicion in the mind of the Korsar, though their true purpose was anything other than it appeared to be.

In the first place David had not the slightest intention of teaching the Korsars how to improve their powder, thereby transforming them into a far greater menace to the peace of his empire than they could ever become while handicapped by an inferior grade of gunpowder that failed to explode quite as often as it exploded. These tours of inspection, however, which often took them considerable distances from the city of Korsar, afforded an excuse for delaying the lesson in powder making, while David and his companions sought to concoct some plan of escape that might contain at least the seed of success. Also they gave the three men a better knowledge of the surrounding country, familiarized them with the various trails and acquainted them with the manners and customs of the primitive tribes that carried on the agriculture of Korsar and all of the labor of the mines, niter beds and charcoal burning.

It was not long before they had learned that all the Korsars lived in the city of Korsar and that they numbered about five hundred thousand souls, and, as all labor was performed by slaves, every male Korsar above the age of fifteen was free for military service, while those between ten and fifteen were virtually so since this included the period of their training, during which time they learned all that could be taught them of seamanship and the art of piracy and raiding. David soon came to realize that the ferocity of the Korsars, rather than their number, rendered them a menace to the peace of Pellucidar, but he was positive that with an equal number of ships and men he could overcome them and he was glad that he had taken upon himself this dangerous mission, for the longer the three reconnoitered the environs of Korsar the more convinced they became that escape was possible.

The primitive savages from whom the Korsars had wrested their country and whom they had forced into virtual slavery were of such a low order of intelligence that David felt confident that they could never be successfully utilized as soldiers or fighting men by the Korsars, whom they outnumbered ten to one; their villages, according to his Korsar informant, stretching away into the vast hinterland, to the farthest extremities of which no man had ever penetrated.

The natives themselves spoke of a cold country to the north, in the barren and desolate wastes of which no man could live, and of mountains and forests and plains stretching away into the east and southeast to, as they put it, “the very shores of Molop Az”—the flaming sea of Pellucidarian legend upon which the land of Pellucidar floats.

This belief of the natives of the uninterrupted extent of the land mass to the south and southeast corroborated David’s belief that Korsar lay upon the same continent as Sari, and this belief was further carried out by the distinct sense of perfect orientation which the three men experienced the moment they set foot upon the shores of Korsar; or rather which the born Pellucidarians, Ja and Tanar, experienced, since David did not possess this inborn homing instinct. Had there been an ocean of any considerable extent separating them from the land of their birth, the two Pellucidarians felt confident that they could not have been so certain as to the direction of Sari as they now were.

As their excursions to various points outside the city of Korsar increased in number the watchfulness of Fitt relaxed, so that the three men occasionally found themselves alone together in some remote part of the back country.

Tanar, wounded by the repeated rebuffs of Stellara, sought to convince himself that he did not love her. He tried to make himself believe that she was cruel and hard and unfaithful, but all that he succeeded in accomplishing was to make himself more unhappy, though he hid this from his companions and devoted himself as assiduously as they to planning their escape. It filled his heart with agony to think of going away forever from the vicinity of the woman he loved, even though there was little or no hope that he might see her should he remain, for gossip of the approaching nuptials of Stellara and Bulf was current in the barracks where he was quartered.

The window of the room to which he had been assigned overlooked a portion of the garden of The Cid—a spot of great natural beauty in which trees and flowers and shrubs bordered gravelled pathways and a miniature lake and streamlet sparkled in the sunlight.

Tanar was seldom in his apartment and when he was he ordinarily gave no more than casual attention to the garden beyond the wall, but upon one occasion, after returning from an inspection of an iron mine, he had been left alone with his own sad thoughts, and, seating himself upon the sill of the window, he was gazing down upon the lovely scene below when his attention was attracted by the figure of a girl as she came into view almost directly before him along one of the gravelled paths. She was looking up toward his window and their eyes met simultaneously. It was Gura.

Placing her finger to her lips, cautioning him to silence, she came quickly forward until she reached a point as close to his window as it was possible for her to come.

“There is a gate in the garden wall at the far end of your barracks,” she said in a low whisper attuned to reach his ears. “Come to it at once.”

Tanar stopped to ask no questions. The girl’s tone had been peremptory. Her whole manner bespoke urgency. Descending the stairway to the ground floor Tanar left the building and walked slowly toward its far end. Korsars were all about him, but they had been accustomed to seeing him, and now he held himself to a slow and careless pace that aroused no suspicion. Just beyond the end of the barracks he came to a small, heavily planked door set in the garden wall and as he arrived opposite this, it swung open and he stepped quickly within the garden, Gura instantly closing the gate behind him.

“At last I have succeeded,” cried the girl, “but I thought that I never should. I have tried so hard to see you ever since Fitt took you from The Cid’s palace. I learned from one of the slaves where your quarters were in the barracks and whenever I have been free I have been always beneath your window. Twice before I saw you, but I could not attract your attention and now that I have succeeded, perhaps it is too late.”

“Too late! What do you mean? Too late for what?” demanded Tanar.

“Too late to save Stellara,” said the girl.

“She is in danger?” asked Tanar.

“The preparations for her marriage to Bulf are complete. She cannot delay it much longer.”

“Why should she wish to delay it?” demanded the Sarian. “Is she not content with the man she has chosen?”

“Like all men, you are a fool in matters pertaining to a woman’s heart,” cried Gura.

“I know what she told me,” said Tanar.

“After all that you had been through together; after all that she had been to you, how could you have believed that she loved another?” demanded Gura.

“You mean that she does not love Bulf?” asked Tanar.

“Of course she does not love him. He is a horrid beast.”

“And she still loves me?”

“She has never loved anyone else,” replied the girl.

“Then why did she treat me as she did? Why did she say the things that she said?”

“She was jealous.”

“Jealous! Jealous of whom?”

“Of me,” said Gura, dropping her eyes.

The Sarian stood looking dumbly at the dark-haired Himean girl standing before him. He noted her slim body, her drooping shoulders, her attitude of dejection. “Gura,” he asked, “did I ever speak words of love to you? Did I ever give Stellara or another the right to believe that I loved you?”

She shook her head. “No,” she said, “and I told Stellara that when I found out what she thought. I told her that you did not love me and finally she was convinced and asked me to find you and tell you that she still loves you. But I have another message for you from myself. I know you, Sarian. I know that you are not planning to remain here contentedly a prisoner of the Korsars. I know that you will try to escape and I have come to beg you to take Stellara with you, for she will kill herself before she will become the mate of Bulf.”

“Escape,” mused Tanar. “How may it be accomplished from the heart of The Cid’s palace?”

“That is the man’s work,” said Gura. “It is for you to plan the way.”

“And you?” asked Tanar. “You wish to come away with us?”

“Do not think of me,” said Gura. “If you and Stellara can escape, I do not matter.”

“But you do matter,” said the man, “and I am sure that you do not wish to stay in Korsar.”

“No, I do not wish to remain in Korsar,” replied the girl, “and particularly so now that The Cid seems to have taken a fancy to me.”

“You wish to return to Hime?” asked Tanar.

“After the brief taste of happiness I have had,” replied the girl, “I could not return to the quarrels, the hatred and the constant unhappiness that constitute life within the cave of Scurv and which would be but continued in some other cave were I to take a mate in Hime.”

“Then come with us,” said the Sarian.

“Oh, if I only might!” exclaimed Gura.

“Then that is settled,” exclaimed Tanar. “You shall come with us and if we reach Sari I know that you can find peace and happiness for yourself always.”

“It sounds like a dream,” said the girl, wistfully, “from which I shall awaken in the cave of Scurv.”

“We shall make the dream come true,” said the Sarian, “and now let us plan on how best we can get you and Stellara out of the palace of The Cid.”

“That will not be so easy,” said Gura.

“No, it is the most difficult part of our escape,” agreed the Sarian; “but it must be done and I believe that the bolder the plan the greater its assurance of success.”

“And it must be done at once,” said Gura, “for the wedding arrangements are completed and Bulf is impatient for his mate.”

For a moment Tanar stood in thought, seeking to formulate some plan that might contain at least a semblance of feasibility. “Can you bring Stellara to this gate at once?” he asked Gura.

“If she is alone, yes,” replied the girl.

“Then go and fetch her and wait here with her until I return. My signal will be a low whistle. When you hear it, unlatch the gate.”

“I shall return as quickly as possible,” said Gura, and, as Tanar stepped through the doorway into the barrack yards, he closed and latched the gate behind him.

The Sarian looked about him and was delighted to note that apparently no one had seen him emerge from the garden. Instead of returning along the front of the barracks the way he had come, he turned in the opposite direction and made his way directly to one of the main gates of the palace. And this strategy was prompted also by another motive—he wished to ascertain if he could pass the guard at the main gate without being challenged.

Tanar had not adopted the garments of his captors and was still conspicuous by the scant attire and simple ornaments of a savage warrior and already his comings and goings had made him a familiar figure around the palace yard and in the Korsar streets beyond. But he had never passed through a palace gate alone before; nor without the ever present Fitt.