Part 2
"Back inside," commanded Disbro. "There'll be lots of this kind of weather. We'll have something to eat, then study another way to reach the trees yonder."
"No girl," said Max. "But I saw."
* * * * *
The rain that drove Disbro and Max back into their shelter filtered through layers of leafage, beginning to wash the mud from Planter's clothing. He stared again at his rescuer.
"I seem to have understood what you said," he managed at last.
"Isn't so strange, that?" she flung back, in words somehow run together. "E'en though you're mad enow to sport with yonder muck-worm," and her wide, bright blue eyes flicked toward the danger he had lately avoided, "you'll have the tongue of mankind. Art no man?"
"Man enough, young woman," rejoined Planter, a little nettled. "I suppose it's like the fantasies--we can read each other's minds, or something."
"Something," she echoed, as if humoring a child.
"And I owe you thanks for saving my life."
"Oh, 'twas no great matter." She shouldered the crossbow. "Come, for the Skygors will be about our heels."
She picked her way rapidly among the steam, with the surest and cleverest of feet. Women on Earth were never so graceful or sure, decided Planter, hurrying after. He was aware that he did not step on the muddy surface of Venus, but upon a matted over-floor, of roots, fallen stems, ground-vines, sometimes great sturdy leaves like lily-pads grown to the size of double mattresses. "Wait, young lady," he called, "who are the Skygors, you mentioned and why should they be after us?"
She halted again, swung and studied him with more of that disdainful curiosity. "'Tis a gruel-brained idiot," she decided, as if to herself. "For that they cast him out. Methought 'twas strange that a man should flee, of himself, from sure shelter and victual."
It was raining harder. The great roof of vegetation only partially broke that downpour. It sluiced away the coating of mud from Planter, and soaked his stout garments through. He felt miserable in the dampness, but his girl guide throve, if anything, in the drops that struck and rolled down her bare arms and shoulders.
He saw, too, that she followed something of a trail among the stalks and stems. It was barely wider than his own stalwart shoulders could pass, and wound crazily here and there; but one must stick to it, for to right and left the jungle grew thicker than a basket. He called out again.
"Miss! Young lady!"
She turned, as before. "What now?"
"This path--what is it? Did you make it? Tell me things." He made a gesture of appeal, for she was putting on that look of contempt once more. "You see, I'm no more than an hour old on this planet--"
"Od so! Your brain is younger than that. Leave me, I have no time for idiots."
Abruptly she stiffened, widened her eyes, lifted a finger to her red lips for silence. The two of them stood close together in the misty rain, their ears sharpened. Planter heard what she had heard--a rustling, crunching approach, along some other angle of the jungle path.
The girl wrenched apart two sappy lengths of vine, and with a jerk of her head bade Planter slip through into the great thicket. He did so, and she followed. Turning, her lithe body close against his, she brought her crossbow to the ready.
"Danger?" whispered Planter, and she nodded bleakly.
The approach was coming near. Planter judged that whatever threatened them was two-legged, weighty, and great-lunged--many yards off, it wheezed like a faulty engine. His companion's ears were better than his, or more experienced. She gauged the nearness of the stranger, and the crossbow went to her shoulder like a rifle. Planter saw that it operated on a spring trigger that would trip a latch and release the string. The bow, violently recovering from its bending, would force the missile along a groove in the top of the stock. All parts--stock, bow, and string--were of some massive dark metal, apparently treated with grease to save it from the constant dampness. The missile itself was not an arrow, but seemed the size and shape of a silvery fountain pen. Planter burned to ask questions about it; but the enemy was in sight by now, something of mottled green and black that shouldered upright along the way between the thickets.
Planter felt his companion's body grow tense against his shoulder. Her finger touched the trigger lightly. The metal string twanged, and with a waspy hum the missile leaped toward its target. At the same time, a little burst of flame showed from it, bright yellow. _Chock!_ the shot went home, as that other shot against the thing called a muck-worm.
Down floundered the green-spotted form. At once the girl was out of hiding, and stooping above her quarry.
Planter, following, peered with wonder and caution. He saw a body larger than himself, and grotesquely of the same build. A dumpy torso on massive back-bent legs like a cricket's; wide flapper feet, a round, low head with a monstrous slash of mouth, big eyes now filming with death, no nose at all--the creature was very like a nightmare frog. But this frog wore garments, of linked and plaited metal wire and rubbery-looking fabric. It had a silver belt, with pouches and holsters. These pouches and holsters the girl was now plundering.
"Quick," she snapped at Planter over her rosy shoulder. "Take the spoil. He will have friends, and they must not find us."
* * * * *
Her tone was still reminiscent of Disbro speaking to Max. Planter's ravenous curiosity was at last completely overridden. "Young lady," he said flatly. "I'm not prepared to endure any more--"
She suddenly screamed, not like a warrior but like any girl who is mortally frightened.
Planter had the time to realize that she saw something just beyond him. He pivoted and set himself as another of the froggy beings charged.
"More Skygors!" he heard a cry behind him, and he knew that it was Skygors he faced.
Planter was a boxer of sorts, strong if not brilliant, and his unthinking reflex was to plant his feet, bend his knees, and crouch for attack or defense. That reflex shortened his height by several inches, and saved his life. The Skygors that rushed him had pointed a pistol-form weapon, from which came yellow flame as from the crossbow. A silvery object meant to scatter his brains only sang above his head with millimeters to spare. Before the pistol-like weapon could aim and spit again, Planter had charged in.
It was all he could do, but it was enough. He jabbed viciously with his left fist, followed with his right to the abdomen. The left knuckles slashed soft flesh about the wide mouth, his right hand almost broke on a hard belt-buckle. Both blows were staggering to the wheezing adversary, who dropped its pistol and yelled with a voice like a steam whistle. It made words, each of them almost deafening to Planter. To silence it more than anything else, Planter drove in closer still and lifted an uppercut as though it were a shovelful of gravel.
It found the point where a Terrestrial man would have a chin. Down floundered the clumsy body, and Planter, with no thought of referees or rules, set his heavy boot on the face and bashed it in. He stepped across the subsiding form, in time to encounter another.
This one got great flappy hands upon him. Their grip was knowing, powerful, wicked. The Skygor plucked him close, its mouth grinned into a gape. It had teeth, it was going to bite.
He was held by the shoulders, and doubted if he could break away. Instead of trying, he put his own hands to the thing's elbows, drew his right knee tight to his chest and planted a toe in a metal-clad midriff. Then, even as the open paw sought to seize his face, he threw himself backward. Landing flat on his shoulder blades, he drew down with his hands and hoisted with his feet.
His opponent somersaulted in air, and fell with a heavy squashing thump upon the root-tangled floor of the trail. In a flash, Planter was up. He jumped with both feet. Bones broke under the impact. A second Skygor was down--dead or dying--
"Aside!" the girl was calling, and he obeyed, flattening against a cross-weaving of vine stems. She was risen upon one knee, crossbow to shoulder. It twanged, flashed, and once again its successful charge sounded its _chock_. Planter glanced down the trail in time to see a fourth and last Skygor drop down.
He found that he was gasping for air, and trembling as though the danger were still to come instead of past. The girl rose, came to him, and touched his arm. She smiled, her eyes shone. Gone was the contempt, the superiority. She only admired, completely and frankly.
"Sink me, you're a fighter," she said. "Ecod! I saw only the flight of fists, and a Skygor went down, and another! You saved my life--and we have four Skygors to strip, with none to boom about where we went from here. Your name, friend?"
"Planter," he said. "David Planter."
"David Planter," she repeated. Her "A" was very broad, so that she made the name almost "Dyvid." Again she smiled. "A king's name, is't not? I am called Mara. Come, help me take what is valuable from this carrion."
Planter's heart warmed to her. "Thanks for your kind words," he smiled back. "But I did what any man would do."
"All men are slaves," she surprised him by saying. "You will amaze the other girl-warriors, when I bring you to the Nest."
* * * * *
Disbro, standing on the glass port-pane that was now floor for the control-room, labored and cursed at his keyboard. He pressed one, two, an octave. The nosed-over ship stirred, but did not rise.
"Max!" bawled Disbro to the upper hatch. "Pressure!"
"Giving you all there is," Max informed him timidly.
Disbro turned from his controls, shrugging in disgust.
"Those bow-tubes are jammed or displaced," he cursed. "We can't clear off till we get her up and clean them--and we can't get her up and clean them until they work. Huhh!"
Max's big, diffident face framed itself in the hatchway, registering a small hope.
"We're floating," he volunteered. "Close to those trees and things."
Disbro showed interest. "Then we'll get our feet on solid ground, or nearly solid. That tentacle-thing won't be sloshing around." He beckoned. "Come down."
Max obeyed. From a locker Disbro took a pressure squirt of waterproofing liquid. He sprayed Max's clothes, then his own. "That'll shed rain," he said. "Buckle on a pistol, if you're smart enough to use one. And give me two."
Once more the hammocks in the lower chamber, and the levers in the higher, gave them a ladder-way up. Disbro, emerging first into the damp, warm mist, saw at once that they had visitors.
The ship, as Max said, floated close to the mat of growth that fringed the muddy pool. Here the jungle consisted of meaty stems, straight, thick and close-set, with tangled fermiform foliage. A little above mud-level, gnarled roots wove into a firm footing, and upon it, pressing from the thickets toward the ship, were huge biped creatures in gleaming metal harness.
These had chopped down spongy trunks and branches, on which to venture over the mud-surface as on rafts. Coming near the ship, they had passed cables of grease-clotted metal wire around it, mooring it fast to thicker trunks. As Disbro stared down, several of them began to converse in tones that rang and boomed like great gongs. Half-deafened, Disbro still could perceive that their voices had inflection and sense. Harness, concerted action, tools, a language--here was a master race, comparable to Terrestrial humanity.
One of them turned a bulging black eye upward, and saw Disbro. Its flat face split across, and a mouth like an open Gladstone bag shouted its discovery. One green paw, webbed but prehensile, snatched a weapon from a metal-linked waist belt, and aimed it at the Terrestrial.
But Disbro, too, was quick on the draw. His gang-rule on Earth had necessitated shooting skill as well as leadership. His own automatic sprang into his hand. "No, you don't!" he snapped, and shot the weapon out of the Venusian's flipper.
It screamed in a voice that vibrated the steamy air, and its companions started and shrank back in startled wonder. Disbro drew a second pistol, leveling it at them.
"I'll shoot the first one that moves," he promised, as if they could understand; and understand they did. Up went shaky flipper-hands.
"No! No!" they boomed in thunderous humility. "Don't! Don't!"
He had not the time to wonder that they spoke words he knew. He swung his weapons in swift arcs, covering them all. Max, behind, had sense enough to level the long barrel of a repeating rifle. "Please!" roared a Venusian who seemed to be a leader. "We do naught to you!"
"Better not," cautioned Disbro loftily. "We're more profitable as friends than as enemies."
"Friends!" agreed the leader. "Friends!"
"If you try any funny business--" went on Disbro. "Well, watch!"
He snapped his right-hand gun up and fired. The bullet snipped away a leaf the size of an opened umbrella. As the great green blob drifted down, Disbro fired again and again, until, ripped to rags, the leaf fell limply among the Venusians. They moaned, like awe-struck fog horns.
"Understand?" taunted Disbro. "Savvy? I could kill you all as easy as look at you."
"Friends!" promised the leader again.
"Max," muttered Disbro, "these birds quit very easily without a fight. But keep me covered from up here."
Planter's rope still dangled along the hull. Disbro slid down, coming to his feet on the raft-heap below. The Venusians gave back in wary confusion. Disbro allowed himself to smile upward.
"See what an ape you are, Max?" he chuckled. "You got a look at one of these, and thought it was a girl! You're not much of a picker, Max."
To the Venusian chief he said: "I think I'll muscle in on your territory."
* * * * *
Mara, the crossbow-girl, brought Planter to the place she called the Nest.
It was hollowed out in the thickest part of the towering jungle, as a rabbit's form is hollowed among tall grasses. The floor was of plaited and pressed withes, supported on stumps and roots of many tall growths. Rounding upward and outward from this were walls, also of wooden poles and twigs, woven into the growing tangle. The roof was similarly made, but strengthened and waterproofed with earth, dried and baked by some sort of intense heat.
The space thus blocked off was shaped like the rough inside of a hollow pumpkin, and in size was comparable to the auditorium of a large theater. Within it were set up smaller huts and bowers. There were common cooking-fires, in ovens of stone and mud-brick, and a great common light suspended from the ceiling by a long heavy chain. This was a metal lamp, fed by oily sap from some sort of tree.
Finding the Nest was difficult. Mara had picked a careful way through mazes of thick vegetation, paying special attention to the rearranging of leaves and branches behind them. Sagely she explained that the Skygors, when hunting her kind, were thus completely lost. Even at the very doorstep of the Nest, the tangled vines, branches and leaf-sprays obscured any hint of such a place at hand.
The dwellers in the Nest were all women.
They came cautiously forward, twenty or so, as Mara ushered Planter inside. They were active specimens, dressed scantily and attractively, like Mara. Most of them were young, several comely. All were fair of skin and hair, a logical condition in the cloudy air of Venus. They wore daggers, hatchets, ammunition pouches. Even at home, they all carried crossbows.
"What does this man here?" demanded a lean, harsh-faced woman of middle age. "Is he not content with servitude?"
Mara shook her head. "He's like none we know. He fights more fiercely than we--Ecod, shouldst have seen him! Bare-handed, he o'ercame two Skygors. I slew two more. Look at our trove!"
She opened a parcel of great leaves, and showed dozens of the silver pens that were ammunition for both the Skygor pistols and the human crossbows. Planter also showed what he had brought from the battlefield--several belts, numerous harness fastenings, and two of the guns. These latter made the crossbow-girls nervous.
"We stand by these," Mara said, tapping her crossbow.
Planter fiddled with a pistol. Its mechanism was strange but understandable, and he flattered himself that he could learn to use it. As for the pen-missiles, they seemed to contain a charge that burned violently on exposure to air. The trigger-mechanism, whether of pistol or crossbow, punctured it, set it afire, and the vehemence of combustion not only propelled it but destroyed the target completely.
The older woman, whose name was Mantha, nodded her head over a decision.
"Let the man have the dag," she granted, with an air of authority. "If he fights as Mara says, he may be of aid. Yet he is unlike those we know, in hue and aspect."
True enough, Planter was dark of complexion, with black curls and ruddy tan jaws. He spoke to Mantha, respectfully, for the others called her "Mother" and treated her as a commander.
"I'm not of your people," he said. "I come from another planet. Earth."
"Earth?" she repeated. "You come from there? Why, so do we all."
* * * * *
Down a trail went a patrol of Skygors. Among them, not much under them in size, tramped Max. His broad shoulders bore a great burden of supplies from the ship. At the head of the procession, next to the chief, walked Disbro.
As someone else was saying to Planter at almost the same moment, the chief Skygor boomed to Disbro: "You are not like men we know."
"Naturally not," agreed Disbro. "Your race is more like a bunch of freak reptiles."
"Not my race," demurred the chief Skygor. "Men. Slaves."
Disbro understood only part, and took exception to that. "I'm no slave of yours," he warned.
"No. Equal. We have long needed equal men, to kill off the wild girls."
"You see, Mr. Disbro?" chimed in Max from behind.
* * * * *
David Planter was embarrassed.
Inside the Nest, he sat on a crude chair opposite Mantha, the Mother. The overhead light burned dim, and damp-banishing fires in the ovens mingled red glows. Planter asked questions, but was distracted by the crossbow-girls, who watched him with round eyes, whispering and giggling. Mara, near by, scowled at the noise-makers.
"This Venus world has much that's unknown," Mantha said. "Here in the north can we dwell. Not many days off the steam is thick, the heat horrid, the jungle dreadful. None go there and return."
"Mother, if you are called that, enlighten me," begged Planter. "You say you come from Earth."
"Our fathers came. Lifetimes agone."
Planter's good-looking face showed his amazement. Interworld flight was new, he had thought. But some unknown expedition might have tried it, succeeded, and then never returned to report.
"'Twas for fear of black Cromwell," Mantha enlarged.
"Cromwell!" echoed Planter. "The Puritan leader who fought and wiped out the English Cavaliers?"
Mantha seized on one word. "Cavaliers. Yes. Our lives were forfeit. We flew hither."
It explained everything--human beings in a world never meant for anything but amphibians, their fair complexions, their quaint but understandable speech, the crossbows that would be familiar weapons to Shakespere, Drake or Captain John Smith. Yes, it explained everything, except how pre-machine age Britishers could succeed on a voyage where eight space-ships before Planter's had failed.
"How did you fly?" demanded Planter, amazed.
Mantha shook her graying locks. "Nay, I know not. 'Twas long ago, and all records are held in the Skygor fastness."
"They stole from you?"
"After our fathers made landfall, there was war," Mantha said, her voice bitter. "The Skygors were many, and would have slain all, but thought to hold slaves. And as slaves our fathers dwelt and died, and their children after them."
"But you aren't slaves," protested Planter.
"'Tis Skygor fashion to keep all men, and such women as are hale enow for toil. Others who seem weak they cast forth to die, like us!"
"Who did not die," chimed in Mara, plucking her bowstring. "We found fruits, meat, shelter, and joined. Now we slay Skygors for their metals and shot. Lately they slay weaklings, lest they join us."
Planter whistled. This was a harsh proof of human tenacity. The Skygors discarding unprofitable servants and finding them a menace. "None of you are weaklings," he said.
"Freedom brings health," replied Mantha sententiously. "Yet they are many more than we, well fortified, and have a strange spell to whelm those who attack." She grimaced in distaste. "We but lurk and linger, fighting when we must and fleeing when we may. As the last of us dies--"
Things began to happen.
A tall, robust girl, very handsome, had been hitching her woven chair close to Planter. With a pert boldness she touched his hand.
"I've seen no man since I was driven forth, a child," she informed him. "I like you. I am Sala."
Mara rose from her own seat, swore a rather Elizabethan oath, and slapped Sala's face resoundingly.
Sala, too, sprang up. Larger than Mara, she clutched her assailant's shoulders and tripped her over a neatly extended foot. Mara spun sidewise in falling, broke Sala's hold, came to her feet with a drawn dagger.
This happened silently and swiftly, with none of the screaming and fumbling that marks the rare battles between Terrestrial women. Planter stared, half aghast and half admiring. Another girl whispered behind him: "Let them fight, send them ill days! Look at me, I am not ugly."
Perhaps to flee this new admirer, Planter threw himself between the two fighters. As Mara attempted to stab Sala, Planter caught her weapon wrist and wrenched the knife from her. Meanwhile, Sala snatched up a crossbow. Leaving Mara, Planter struck the thing out of aiming line just in time. The pen-missile tore through the baskety wall of the Nest, and Planter gained possession of the crossbow, not without trouble.
"Are you girls fighting over me?" he demanded.
"Egad, what else?" challenged Mantha, who had also sprung forward. "Art a man of height and presence. For any man these my manless girls would contend."
"Aye, would we," agreed one of the bevy, with frightening candor.
"He's mine," snapped Mara, holding her own crossbow at the ready. "Step forth who will, and I speak true."
"I'm nobody's," exploded Planter. "Anyway, I'm going--I've two friends near here that I've got to find, and soon!"
"More men!" ejaculated Sala, forgetting her anger.
"Fighters, with weapons," said Planter, ignoring her. "They'll help you smoke out these Skygors and set free your kinsmen."
Happy cries greeted his words.
"I'll guide you home, David Planter," offered Mara, and Mantha gestured approval.
Mara and Planter left the Nest by a new jungle trail. Mara explained that these tunnels were made by great floundering beasts, and served as runways for smaller land life. The girl trod the green, fog-filled labyrinths with assurance. Within minutes they reached the pool where Disbro had landed the ship.
At the edge floated the limp, dead thing that Mara had killed to save Planter. Small flutterers, like gross-winged flies but as large as gulls, swarmed to dig out morsels. Mara called the creature a krau, the flying scavengers ghrols. "Skygor words, for ugly beasts," she commented. "Neither is good for food."
Planter picked his way from root to root toward the ship. "Disbro!" he called. "Max!"
There was no answer. He scrambled up and inside, then out again. "Something's happened," he said gravely.
Mara studied the massed logs that made a rough raft. "Skygor work. And eke the rope of wires about your ship."
"They've been captured by Skygors? For slaves?" Planter had climbed down again. His hand sought the Skygor pistol at his belt, his face was tense and pale. "I'll get them back. Where's this swamp-city you mention?"