The Return of Tharn Part 15

"Let us wait a few suns to decide that, Curzad. We have the time; Jotan and his men are not due for half a moon yet. If our real quarry has not revealed himself in, say, seven suns, I shall send you and a detachment of guards out to intercept Jotan."

CHAPTER VII

THE SPIDER MEN

Dylara awakened with a convulsive start as the lofty branch upon which she had been sleeping swayed and bent beneath suddenly added weight.

As she started up, a scream rising to her lips, hands reached out of the night's impenetrable curtain and tore her roughly from where she sat.

Instinctively she attempted to struggle free, only to receive a buffet alongside the head that left her limp and only half conscious.

Her first impression was that one of the great apes, occasionally glimpsed among the more impenetrable reaches of jungle, had seized her; for she could feel coa.r.s.e long hair matting its chest and arms. Even as the thought sent her heart sinking with fear and loathing, she knew she was mistaken, since the creature's body was much too slender, its arms too thin and frail to belong to one of the bulky anthropoids.

That she was in deadly peril Dylara did not doubt, but not to know the form such peril took was inconceivably worse. It was this, fear of the unknown that crystallized her determination to break from this stifling embrace or die in the attempt; and she was gathering her strength for the effort when her captor suddenly whirled about on the narrow branch and, with her across his back, dived headlong into s.p.a.ce!

The shock was too much for human nerves. Dylara voiced a single scream and her senses fled under the lash of pure panic.

She came back to reality to find she was being borne through the trees with incredible speed. Now and then a vine flicked against her s.h.i.+vering body or leaves brushed against her face, and several times the thing carrying her leaped outward through s.p.a.ce that seemed boundless, only to land lightly upon a swaying branch in another tree.

Even Tharn, she realized, could not have matched the creature's amazing agility, for it was using both hand and feet with equal dexterity after the manner of little n.o.bar, the monkey.

Gradually, as the likelihood of being dashed to earth seemed more and more remote, Dylara began to think once more of escape. The time was not now, of course; she could only cling desperately to her captor's thin shoulders and wait for this breathless journey to end. Eventually those wiry muscles must tire and the creature stop--then she would make her bid for freedom.

Abruptly and without slackening its pace the hairy thing uttered a piercing shriek like nothing Dylara had ever heard before. Twice more the awful sound rang out; and then, far ahead, came an answering cry faint and wavering.

Instantly the creature put on an added burst of speed, rocketing through the branches in dizzying bounds that threatened to tear away Dylara's none too certain hold. So swift was the pace now that within a few minutes a wide clearing loomed ahead and her captor began to slip groundward.

Suddenly the hairy creature halted on a wide limb bordering the clearing as a host of shadowy forms rose around him. There was not enough light for Dylara to make use of her eyes but she sensed these were the figures of creatures similar to the one which held her.

They chattered shrilly among themselves in a completely unfamiliar tongue for several moments, then all of them moved ahead a short distance until the clearing itself was reached.

Dylara was expecting the entire party to descend to the ground. But instead they began to climb higher and higher. At last the one carrying her came to a halt well within the embrace of a jungle patriarch; and at that moment Uda, the moon, appeared from behind a cloud and poured her silver rays into the clearing.

For the first time since her capture she was able to see well enough to distinguish objects. She was surrounded by a group of some ten or twelve man-like beings--but beings like nothing she had ever dreamed of!

All were well over six feet in height, but so thin in body they seemed much taller. All were naked except for girdles of gra.s.s about their hips, the rest of their bodies being covered with monkey-like hair.

Their arms and legs were incredibly long and thin, their toes long and prehensile. Each face was hairless and almost perfectly round, containing small beady eyes, a brief blob of nose, a tiny lipless mouth and almost no chin at all. It was more the face of some particularly repellent insect--a comparison that leaped to Dylara's mind at sight of the long hairy limbs, the thin torsos pinched in deeply at the waist and the quick, jerky way in which they moved restlessly about her.

The one holding her let her slide from its back and the others moved closer, reaching out to pluck at her tunic with abnormally long nailless fingers, their voices like the rising skirl of an insect swarm.

Angrily she pushed away the exploring fingers. "Who are you?" she cried, "and what do you want of me?"

One of the things, evidently angered at being repulsed, snaked out a long arm and caught her roughly about the waist, dragging her to him.

Instantly the one that had brought her here leaped upon the intruder, nearly sweeping Dylara from her precarious footing on the branch. For an instant the pair clawed frantically at each other, but their companions pushed between them and broke up the battle.

The incident seemed to touch off a long and heated discussion, during which Dylara was apparently forgotten. They stood in a tight knot among the branches, their ridiculous faces pushed together in almost a solid lump, while their keening voices went on and on with a monotonous kind of intensity.

A slow-moving cloud stole across Uda's s.h.i.+ning face, plunging the scene into heavy darkness. Dylara felt sudden hope leap in her breast. Surely they were too intent with their arguing to notice her if she slipped away! Besides, how could even the keenest eye pierce the blackness of a jungle night?

She took a slow step away from them, balancing herself lightly on the broad bough. Another--and still another. The high-pitched debate went on in full volume.

Cautiously she lowered herself to a branch immediately below, then waited with pounding heart to learn if her move had been detected.

Nothing had changed! She bent again ... and from nowhere a sinuous arm slithered out of the blackness, caught her about the middle and jerked her back and into the group.

The discussion appeared to be ended. One of the creatures swept the cave girl into his embrace and continued to climb toward the stars, leaving his companions where they were.

A solid ma.s.s of foliage loomed suddenly in front of Dylara--and in that moment Uda came into the open sky once more. In the few seconds left for Dylara to drink in the scene she saw a sight she was never to forget.

Suspended among branches of the trees about her were conical huts of twigs and gra.s.ses. Their floors evidently did not rest on the boughs themselves but each separate structure bobbed lightly up and down from the end of a thick gra.s.s rope tied to a branch overhead. In the base of each was an opening only large enough to permit entry on only hands and knees.

Dylara's breath went out of her in a sudden gasp. Now she knew why her first impression of these creatures had likened them to insects. There was a species of spider that built nests above the ground--nests conical in shape and swung from twigs!

The hair-covered arms, legs and bodies, the pinched-in abdomens, the round heads set flush with the shoulders. These were spider men!

A wave of unbearable nausea overwhelmed her, robbing her of all strength. Dazed, she felt herself being thrust through an opening in one of the swaying huts, felt the spider-man follow her in--then once more she was lifted by a pair of long thin arms.

Weakly she lifted her hands to strike out at the loathsome thing holding her--then blackness poured into her brain and she knew no more.

For the better part of two weeks Tharn and Trakor made little progress along the trail taken by those Ammadians who held Dylara. With the patient stoicism of all creatures of the wild he accepted the unavoidable delay in his plans brought on by his acquisition of the untrained Trakor; and as the best way of lightening his burden, set out to school the boy in the lore of the jungle.

Most of that first week was spent in acquiring the knack of using the tree tops as a highway. Trakor, like most Cro-Magnards, was accustomed to climbing in search of fruit and birds' nests. But when it came to hurtling from bough to bough and tree to tree in a dizzying pathway high above ground, he was both hesitant and doubtful.

Patiently Tharn strove to build up the youth's confidence. At first he spent hours in developing within him that sense of balance which is the basis for forest-top travel. Once Trakor could thread his way along a swaying branch a hundred feet in the air without reaching wildly for a hand-hold, Tharn undertook to teach him the grasp, swing and release used in plunging through s.p.a.ce from one jungle giant to the next.

At first the boy fell many times and his body was a ma.s.s of painful bruises. But he endured the pain without complaint, returning to the branches for more with unabated enthusiasm. Hour after hour, day after day he strove for something approaching Tharn's expertness at the craft, and while he knew he would never succeed in reaching the high standards of his teacher, he was gaining confidence that eventually he would near that mark.

Within a week he was bounding about the trees with a sure-footedness and celerity that brought praise from his companion. He took the utmost pleasure in challenging the jungle lord to arboreal races, and while he never won them he came close on several occasions. Soon his confidence pa.s.sed into a c.o.c.ksure att.i.tude and he began to take long chances--leaping twenty feet across a treeless gap to catch some narrow limb waving in a strong breeze, or hurtling through s.p.a.ce at the end of a trailing vine in imminent danger of being dashed to death on the ground below.

Nor did Tharn protest these activities or urge him to greater caution.

The youth must learn from experience what could and could not be done.

He gloried in Trakor's small triumphs and comforted him in his failures, and always he was careful not to say or do anything that would weaken the boy's mounting confidence.

When Tharn was satisfied the boy was reasonably at home among the trees, by night or by day, the second phase of his education was undertaken. He taught him to follow an animal's spoor along the dust of a game trail, he showed him how not only to cla.s.sify each into its proper category but schooled him in such fine distinctions as judging an animal's height, weight and age from imprints left by its feet. Luckily Trakor was endowed with eyes and ears beyond the normal in keenness, and it was not long until he was able to give an excellent account of himself in woodcraft.

And daily his strength was increasing under the unaccustomed tasks imposed on his muscles. Swinging by the hands through mile after mile of branches molded biceps and back muscles into bands of steel and endowed his fingers with a vise-like grip. His body, already deeply tanned, became burned to a dusky hue and he began to fill out into a specimen of perfect manhood.

If Tharn chafed at the delay in his reunion with Dylara he did not display it and he continued the boy's education as though he had a lifetime to put into doing so. But Trakor knew what all this was costing the other, and while he never mentioned it, the determination grew to make it up to the cave lord. There was a bond between them now, based on mutual respect and admiration, plus a hero-wors.h.i.+ping desire on Trakor's part to become exactly like Tharn himself.