I ran in the direction of-the sound and discovered the corpse of the Jihadoo which had borne me here. It appeared to have died of its wounds.
I shuddered as I looked at the ghastly half-beast and decided that my best plan was to climb a tree quickly again to see if I could catch sight of Hool Haji.
Up the nearest tree I clambered until I was looking over the tops of the foliage.
I saw a speck in the distance, then another - flying creatures, but so far away that I could not make out whether they were Jihadoo or, indeed, if they carried anyone with them.
With a sinking heart I returned to the ground. Somehow I had to discover the lair of the Jihadoo and set off to rescue my friend, hoping that they world not kill him immediately.
But how?
That was a question my mind refused to answer.
I wondered if the cat-girl who had first helped us would be able to help us again if I managed to contact her. I decided that to seek her out was the best thing I could do, and I set off in the general direction of the Crystal Pit.
Even if I did not find the cat-girl, I might be able to capture a dog-man and get the information I needed from him.
Chapter Ten
THE PEOPLE OF PURHA
I MUST have walked for many shatis - the Martian basic measure of time - crossing the rocky plain where Rokin had crashed to his death, and entering the next stretch of the forest before I heard some sign of life.
It was a crashing noise in the undergrowth.
It was the sound of some large beast moving about.
Deciding to be cautious, I drew my sword and withdrew into the shade of a bole.
Suddenly, from out of the forest, came yet another weird sight - again almost unbelievable, though this time because the creature bore such a peculiar resemblance to an earthly animal.
The animal that I confronted, and whose gleaming eyes had fixed on me in spite of my attempt at seeking cover, was almost identical to an earth vole.
But this vole was large. It was very large.
It was the size of a half-grown elephant.
And it was hungry - and doubtless omnivorous.
It stood hunched up, regarding me with its nose twitching and its eyes glittering, preparing perhaps for a spring.
I was so weary, what with my experiences since Cend-Amrid and the walking I had done to get this far, that I gave myself only a faint chance of having the strength to defeat the giant vole.
Suddenly, with a peculiar shrill scream, the creature rushed at me. I ducked behind the tree and this seemed to confuse it for a moment.
It plainly was not particularly intelligent, which relieved me - a little - though its bulk, I felt, would be more to its advantage in my present state of weariness than my wits would be tome.
For a moment it paused. Then it began to edge round the tree again.
I edged, also, following the trunk of the tree and keeping it between myself and the gigantic creature that was doubtless bent on making a supper from me.
Suddenly it made a movement towards the tree, flinging its huge body at it. The tree groaned and swayed and I was spun backwards, lying helplessly, for a moment, on the ground.
I began to scramble up as the vole came towards me, its relatively small jaws open ready to seize me in a bite that would have severed any part of my body it snapped.
I slashed at the muzzle with my sword, staggering wearily, my vision focusing and unfocusing as I strove to gather what little strength I had left.
The teeth only narrowly missed. I could not run, for the massive creature was faster than I was, and I knew I would not be able to hold it off much longer.
I knew that I was going to die.
Perhaps this knowledge helped me summon my last reserves of strength, and I slashed again at the muzzle, drawing blood. The creature seemed puzzled but it did not retreat, simply holding its ground while it decided how best to attack me.
Again I swayed with utter tiredness, striving with everything I had left to remain on my feet and die fighting.
Then, from above and behind the creature, a rain of slender arrows came pounding into the gigantic vole's body, causing it to scream and convulse in agony. Several arrows whipped into its eyes as it turned towards its new attackers.
I really thought I must be dreaming, that my ill-luck could not have changed so rapidly.
The vole screeched and flailed about. I was knocked flat by its lashing tail as it turned about and began its death throes.
I lay on the springy grass, wide-eyed for a moment, thanking providence for my rescue and praying that I was not to fall into the hands of yet another tribe of barbarians.
As if in the distance, I heard soft voices talking, and had the vision of graceful figures leaping around the dying vole. They gave the impression of cats and, before I finally lost grip on consciousness, I remember reflecting on the paradox of a number of cats attacking a huge mouse!
Then welcome darkness came. Perhaps I had passed out, perhaps not - perhaps I merely slept.
I awoke to the touch of a warm, gentle hand on my head and, opening my eyes, I looked up into the face of the cat-girl who had originally been responsible for my salvation.
"What happened?" I asked somewhat thickly.
"We hunted the rheti and found our prey," she replied softly. "Our prey hunted you - and we were able to slay the rheti and save you at the same time. Where are your friends?"
I shook my head. "One was killed by the First Masters," I replied. "The other was borne off by them, I think. I do not know how he fared."
“You fought the First Masters and lived!” Her eyes shone with admiration - and something else. "This is a great day. All we had hoped for when I brought you the swords was that you would be able to die fighting. You will be a hero among our folk."
"I have no wish to be a hero," I told her. "Merely a live man - and one who, with luck, still has a chance to find his vanished friend."
"Which friend was carried off?" she asked.
"The Blue Giant - Hool Haji, my closest friend."
“There is little hope for him," she said.
"But is there any?"
"Now now - the First Masters would have feasted last night."
"Last night!" I sat up. "How long have I slept?"
"For nearly two days," she said simply. "You were very weary when we brought you here."
"Two days! So long!"
"It is not so long considering what you did."
"But too long," I said, "for I lost my chance to save Hool Haji."
"You would never have reached the place of the First Masters in time, whatever you did," she soothed. "Salute your friend as a valiant hero. Remember how he died and what that means to those who have suffered the tyranny of the First Masters all these centuries."
"I know that I cannot truthfully blame myself for Hool Haji's death," I said, controlling the emotion I felt at my great friend's passing, "but that does not stop me mourning him."
"Mourn him if you will, but honour him also. He slew many of the First Masters. Never was such a battle fought in the Crystal Pit. Even now the corpses of the First Masters pile its floor. Half of them, at least, lie dead. Tell me of the fight."
As briefly as I could, I told her what had happened.
Her eyes began to shine even more brightly and she clasped her hands together.
"What a great story for our poets!" she gasped. "Oh, what is your name, hero - and the names of your friends?"
"My friends were called the Bradhi Hool Haji of Mendishar from across the ocean, and" - I paused, for Rokin had been no real friend to me, though a valiant comrade in arms in our fights - "the Bradhi Rokin the Gold of the Bagarad."
"Bradhis!" she cried. "And you? What are you - a Bradhi of Bradhis? You could be no less."
I smiled at her enthusiasm. "No," I said. "My name is Michael Kane, Bradhinak by marriage to the Royal House of Vamal that lies far to the South, across the sea."
"From the South - fro
m across the sea. I have heard tales of those mythical lands, the countries of the gods. There are no gods here. They have abandoned us. Are they returning to save us from the First Masters?"
"I am no god," I told her, "and we of the South do not believe in gods. We believe in Man."
"But is not Man a kind of god?" she asked innocently.
I smiled again. "So he sometimes thinks. But the men of my land are not supernatural creatures. They are like you, of flesh and blood and brain. You are no different, though your ancestry is not the same as ours."
"That is not what the First Masters told us."
"The First Masters can speak?" I was astonished. "I thought them reasonless beasts."
"They do not speak to us now. But they left their writings and it is these we read and these we used to follow. The folk of Hahg still worship the First Masters, but we do not."
"Why do they worship the First Masters? I should have thought they would have fought such creatures," I said.
“The First Masters created us,” she said simply.
"Created you - but how?"
"We know not how - save for a few scraps of stories that speak of the First Masters as once having served even earlier masters, a race of great magicians who have now passed from Vashu."
I guessed that she spoke of the Sheev or the Yaksha, who had once ruled the whole of Mars - or Vashu, as they called it. Perhaps the winged blue men who had fled from Mendishar in the old days had sought out some remnant of the older race and learned some of their science.
"What do your stories tell you of the First Masters?” I asked.
'They say that the First Masters created our ancestors by putting spells on their brains and shaping their bodies so that they thought and walked like men. For a while our folk -the people of Purha - and the other folk - the people of Hahg - dwelled together in the City of the First Masters, serving them and being sacrificed for their magical purposes."
This sounded like a particularly horrific form of vivisection to me. I interpreted the cat-girl's story in more scientific terms. The First Masters had learned science from an even older race. They had applied it, perhaps by some form of sophisticated surgery, to creating man-like creatures from cats and dogs. Then they had used their creations both as slaves and subjects for their experiments.
"And what happened then?" I asked. "How did the three peoples become separated."
She frowned. "It is hard to understand," she said. "But the minds of the First Masters turned more and more in upon themselves. The magic they had discovered by sacrificing us was applied to their own brains and bodies. They became ... like animals. A madness overcame them. They left their city and flew to their caverns in the mountains far from here. But every five hundred shatis they return to the Crystal Pit - a creation either of their own or of the old ones they served -to feed."
"What is their usual food?" I asked,
"Us," she said bleakly.
I was disgusted. I could partly understand a psychology that allowed the dog-men of Hahg to sacrifice strangers to their strange masters, but I could only loathe the mentaUty that let them hurl their cousins, the cat-folk, into the Crystal Pit.
"They eat the people of Purha!" I shuddered.
"Not just the folk of Purha." She shook her head. "Only when the men of Hahg capture us. When they have no prisoners they select the weakest among themselves to provide the food of the First Masters."
"But what inspires them to commit such dreadful crimes!" I gasped.
Again the girl's answer was simple and, it seemed to me, quite profound.
"Fear," she said.
I nodded, wondering if that deep emotion was not the essential cause of most ills. Were not all political systems, all arts, all human actions channelled towards creating that one valuable sense of security we all, in our own ways, sought - an absence of fear? It was fear that produced madness, fear that produced war. Fear, indeed, that often produced the things we feared most. Was this why the fearless man was lauded - because he did not represent a threat to others? Perhaps, though there were many kinds of fearless people, and a total fearlessness produced a whole man, a man who had no need to display his fearlessness. The true hero, in fact - the often unsung hero.
"But there are more of you in one of your tribes than exist among the First Masters," I said. "Why do you not band together to defeat them?"
"The fear the First Masters exert is not on account of their numbers," she replied. "Nor on account of their physical strangeness, though that may have something to do with it. The fear goes deeper. I cannot explain it."
I thought perhaps I knew what she meant. We call it by a simple term on Earth. We call it fear of the unknown. Sometimes it is a man's fear of a woman whom he feels he cannot understand; sometimes it is a man's fear of strangers - of people of a different racial type, or even from a different part of his own land. Sometimes it is fear of the machines that he manipulates. Whether the lack of understanding is on a personal plane or a more general one, it creates suspicion and fear. It was their fear, I thought, not their antecedents that made the dog-men of Hahg something less than human.
I said some of this to the cat-girl and she nodded intelligently. "I think you are right," she said. "Perhaps that is why we survive and grow and the dog-men revert more and more to becoming like their ancestors."
I was struck by her quick brain. Though I hesitate to make such judgments about animals, it seemed to me that the essential cowardice of the dog and the essential courage of the cat might be reflected in the types which had developed from them. Thus I could not blame the dog-men for their brutality quite so much, though this did not alter my deep loathing for what they had become. For, I thought, just as there could be courageous dogs - on Earth there were many stories about them - so could these people have once found courage.
I am an optimist, and it occurred to me that just as I might eventually find a means of curing the plague infecting Cend-Amrid, I might also help the dog-men by destroying the cause of their fear - for there was certainly no hope for the First Masters. They were evil. Evil is only another word for what we fear. Go to your Bible if you wish to see the fear of women that inspired the old prophets to call them evil -and evil creates evil. Destroy the first source and there is hope for the rest.
Again I mentioned some of this to the cat-girl. She frowned and nodded. "It is hard to sympathize at all with the men of Hahg," she said. "For what they have done to us in the past has been terrible. But I will try to understand you, Michael Kane."
She got up from where she had been sitting cross-legged beside me.
"My name is Fasa," she said. "Come, see where we live."
She led me from the building in which I had been lying in semi-darkness and had been unable to observe clearly, out into a miniature city built among the trees. Not a tree had been cut in the building of the cat-folk's city. It merged with the forest, thus offering a much subtler kind of protection than the more commonplace clearing and fence used by most jungle-dwelling tribes.
The dwellings were only of one or two stories, fashioned from mud, but mud fashioned into beauty. Here were tiny spires and minarets, painted decorations in pale, lovely colours, a blending of pleasing shapes and colours amongst nature's rich creations.
Some of the darkness in my mind was cleared by the vision and Fasa looked up at me, delighted to see how fascinated I was by the beauty of her settlement.
"You like it?"
"I love it," I said enthusiastically. In its own simple way it reminded me of Vamal of the Green Mists more than anything else I had seen on Mars. It had the same air of tranquillity - a vital tranquillity, if you like - which made me feel so much at home and at ease in Vamal.
"You are an artistic people," I said, fingering the sword which I still wore. "I saw that at once when you first brought us these blades."
"We try," she said. "I sometimes think that if the surroundings can be made pleasing they help the soul."
Again I was s
truck by the simple profundities - common sense, if you prefer - coming from this beautiful girl. But what is the deepest wisdom but the soundest kind of common sense, true common sense? Living in isolated conditions, beset by enemies of two kinds, these cat-people seemed to have something more valuable than most nations, even on Mars and certainly on Earth.
"Come," she said, taking my arm. "You must meet my old uncle. Slurra. He will like you, I think, Michael Kane. He already admires you - but admiration does not always produce liking, wouldn't you say?"
"I agree," I said feelingly, and let her lead me towards one of the beautiful buildings.
I had to dude my head to enter and there I saw an old cat-man, sitting relaxed and at ease in a delicately carved chair. He did not rise as I entered, but his expression and his inclination of the head seemed more to respect me than any empty gesture of politeness I might have received on Earth.
"We were not aware of the benefits we would bring to the people of Purha when we sent Fasa to you with the swords," he said.
"Benefits?" I enquired.
"Immeasurable ones," he said, gesturing for me to sit in a chair close to him. "To see the First Masters defeated - and they y/ere defeated in a deeper sense than you may realize -to be shown that they could be killed, was the thing my folk needed most."
"Perhaps," I said, nodding agreement to show that I knew what he meant, "this will help the Hahg, also."
He debated this for a moment before replying. "Yes, it might, if they have not gone too far down the road. It will make them sceptical of the First Masters’ power, just as we became sceptical long years ago, well before my great-grandfather's time, in the age of Mispash the Founder."
"A wise man of your folk?" I enquired.
"The founder of our folk," replied the old cat-man. "He taught us one great truth - he was the wisest of prophets."
"What was that?"
"Never to seek prophets," Slurra smiled. "One should be enough - and he a wise one."
I reflected how true this was and how well Slurra's words applied to the situation on Earth where, because prophets had been found, whole nations now sought new prophets rather than study the teachings of the few whose universal message had always been, know thyself. Not knowing themselves, perhaps even fearing to, these nations allowed artificial prophets - Adolf Hitler was an example who came to mind at once -to cure their ills. All such prophets did was to plunge those who listened to them into a worse situation than any they had been in before.