The Gods of Mars Revoked (17 page)

'I had reached
the area of eternal ice when my port propeller jammed, and I
dropped to the ground to make repairs. Before I knew it the air was
black with fliers, and a hundred of these First Born devils were
leaping to the ground all about me.

'With drawn
swords they made for me, but before I went down beneath them they
had tasted of the steel of my mother's sword, and I had given such
an account of myself as I know would have pleased my sire had she
lived to witness it.'

'Your mother is
dead?' I asked.

'She died before
the shell broke to let me step out into a world that has been very
good to me. But for the sorrow that I had never the honour to know
my mother, I have been very happy. My only sorrow now is that my
mother must mourn me as he has for ten long years mourned my
mother.'

'Who was your
father?' I asked.

She was about to
reply when the outer door of our prison opened and a burly guard
entered and ordered her to her own quarters for the night, locking
the door after her as she passed through into the further
chamber.

'It is Issus'
wish that you two be confined in the same room,' said the guard
when she had returned to our cell. 'This cowardly slave of a slave
is to serve you well,' she said to me, indicating Xodara with a
wave of her hand. 'If she does not, you are to beat her into
submission. It is Issus' wish that you heap upon her every
indignity and degradation of which you can conceive.'

With these words
she left us.

Xodara still sat
with her face buried in her hands. I walked to her side and placed
my hand upon her shoulder.

'Xodara,' I said,
'you have heard the commands of Issus, but you need not fear that I
shall attempt to put them into execution. You are a brave woman,
Xodara. It is your own affair if you wish to be persecuted and
humiliated; but were I you I should assert my womanhood and defy my
enemies.'

'I have been
thinking very hard, Joan Carter,' she said, 'of all the new ideas
you gave me a few hours since. Little by little I have been piecing
together the things that you said which sounded blasphemous to me
then with the things that I have seen in my past life and dared not
even think about for fear of bringing down upon me the wrath of
Issus.

'I believe now
that he is a fraud; no more divine than you or I. More I am willing
to concede--that the First Born are no holier than the Holy Therns,
nor the Holy Therns more holy than the red women.

'The whole fabric
of our religion is based on superstitious belief in lies that have
been foisted upon us for ages by those directly above us, to whose
personal profit and aggrandizement it was to have us continue to
believe as they wished us to believe.

'I am ready to
cast off the ties that have bound me. I am ready to defy Issus
himself; but what will it avail us? Be the First Born gods or
mortals, they are a powerful race, and we are as fast in their
clutches as though we were already dead. There is no
escape.'

'I have escaped
from bad plights in the past, my friend,' I replied; 'nor while
life is in me shall I despair of escaping from the Isle of Shador
and the Sea of Omean.'

'But we cannot
escape even from the four walls of our prison,' urged Xodara. 'Test
this flint-like surface,' she cried, smiting the solid rock that
confined us. 'And look upon this polished surface; none could cling
to it to reach the top.'

I
smiled.

'That is the
least of our troubles, Xodara,' I replied. 'I will guarantee to
scale the wall and take you with me, if you will help with your
knowledge of the customs here to appoint the best time for the
attempt, and guide me to the shaft that lets from the dome of this
abysmal sea to the light of God's pure air above.'

'Night time is
the best and offers the only slender chance we have, for then women
sleep, and only a dozing watch nods in the tops of the battleships.
No watch is kept upon the cruisers and smaller craft. The watchers
upon the larger vessels see to all about them. It is night
now.'

'But,' I
exclaimed, 'it is not dark! How can it be night, then?'

She
smiled.

'You forget,' she
said, 'that we are far below ground. The light of the sun never
penetrates here. There are no moons and no stars reflected in the
chest of Omean. The phosphorescent light you now see pervading this
great subterranean vault emanates from the rocks that form its
dome; it is always thus upon Omean, just as the billows are always
as you see them--rolling, ever rolling over a windless
sea.

'At the appointed
hour of night upon the world above, the women whose duties hold
them here sleep, but the light is ever the same.'

'It will make
escape more difficult,' I said, and then I shrugged my shoulders;
for what, pray, is the pleasure of doing an easy thing?

'Let us sleep on
it to-night,' said Xodara. 'A plan may come with our
awakening.'

So we threw
ourselves upon the hard stone floor of our prison and slept the
sleep of tired women.

CHAPTER
XI

WHEN HELL BROKE
LOOSE

Early the next
morning Xodara and I commenced work upon our plans for escape.
First I had her sketch upon the stone floor of our cell as accurate
a map of the south polar regions as was possible with the crude
instruments at our disposal--a buckle from my harness, and the
sharp edge of the wondrous gem I had taken from Satora
Throg.

From this I
computed the general direction of Helium and the distance at which
it lay from the opening which led to Omean.

Then I had her
draw a map of Omean, indicating plainly the position of Shador and
of the opening in the dome which led to the outer world.

These I studied
until they were indelibly imprinted in my memory. From Xodara I
learned the duties and customs of the guards who patrolled Shador.
It seemed that during the hours set aside for sleep only one woman
was on duty at a time. She paced a beat that passed around the
prison, at a distance of about a hundred feet from the
building.

The pace of the
sentries, Xodara said, was very slow, requiring nearly ten minutes
to make a single round. This meant that for practically five
minutes at a time each side of the prison was unguarded as the
sentry pursued her snail like pace upon the opposite
side.

'This information
you ask,' said Xodara, 'will be all very valuable AFTER we get out,
but nothing that you have asked has any bearing on that first and
most important consideration.'

'We will get out
all right,' I replied, laughing. 'Leave that to me.'

'When shall we
make the attempt?' she asked.

'The first night
that finds a small craft moored near the shore of Shador,' I
replied.

'But how will you
know that any craft is moored near Shador? The windows are far
beyond our reach.'

'Not so, friend
Xodara; look!'

With a bound I
sprang to the bars of the window opposite us, and took a quick
survey of the scene without.

Several small
craft and two large battleships lay within a hundred yards of
Shador.

'To-night,' I
thought, and was just about to voice my decision to Xodara, when,
without warning, the door of our prison opened and a guard stepped
in.

If the fellow saw
me there our chances of escape might quickly go glimmering, for I
knew that they would put me in irons if they had the slightest
conception of the wonderful agility which my earthly muscles gave
me upon Mars.

The woman had
entered and was standing facing the centre of the room, so that her
back was toward me. Five feet above me was the top of a partition
wall separating our cell from the next.

There was my only
chance to escape detection. If the fellow turned, I was lost; nor
could I have dropped to the floor undetected, since she was no
nearly below me that I would have struck her had I done
so.

'Where is the
white woman?' cried the guard of Xodara. 'Issus commands her
presence.' She started to turn to see if I were in another part of
the cell.

I scrambled up
the iron grating of the window until I could catch a good footing
on the sill with one foot; then I let go my hold and sprang for the
partition top.

'What was that?'
I heard the deep voice of the black bellow as my metal grated
against the stone wall as I slipped over. Then I dropped lightly to
the floor of the cell beyond.

'Where is the
white slave?' again cried the guard.

'I know not,'
replied Xodara. 'She was here even as you entered. I am not her
keeper--go find her.'

The black
grumbled something that I could not understand, and then I heard
her unlocking the door into one of the other cells on the further
side. Listening intently, I caught the sound as the door closed
behind her. Then I sprang once more to the top of the partition and
dropped into my own cell beside the astonished Xodara.

'Do you see now
how we will escape?' I asked her in a whisper.

'I see how you
may,' she replied, 'but I am no wiser than before as to how I am to
pass these walls. Certain it is that I cannot bounce over them as
you do.'

We heard the
guard moving about from cell to cell, and finally, her rounds
completed, she again entered ours. When her eyes fell upon me they
fairly bulged from her head.

'By the shell of
my first ancestor!' she roared. 'Where have you been?'

'I have been in
prison since you put me here yesterday,' I answered. 'I was in this
room when you entered. You had better look to your
eyesight.'

She glared at me
in mingled rage and relief.

'Come,' she said.
'Issus commands your presence.'

She conducted me
outside the prison, leaving Xodara behind. There we found several
other guards, and with them the red Martian youth who occupied
another cell upon Shador.

The journey I had
taken to the Temple of Issus on the preceding day was repeated. The
guards kept the red girl and myself separated, so that we had no
opportunity to continue the conversation that had been interrupted
the previous night.

The youth's face
had haunted me. Where had I seen her before. There was something
strangely familiar in every line of her; in her carriage, her
manner of speaking, her gestures. I could have sworn that I knew
her, and yet I knew too that I had never seen her
before.

When we reached
the gardens of Issus we were led away from the temple instead of
toward it. The way wound through enchanted parks to a mighty wall
that towered a hundred feet in air.

Massive gates
gave egress upon a small plain, surrounded by the same gorgeous
forests that I had seen at the foot of the Golden
Cliffs.

Crowds of blacks
were strolling in the same direction that our guards were leading
us, and with them mingled my old friends the plant women and great
white apes.

The brutal beasts
moved among the crowd as pet dogs might. If they were in the way
the blacks pushed them roughly to one side, or whacked them with
the flat of a sword, and the animals slunk away as in great
fear.

Presently we came
upon our destination, a great amphitheatre situated at the further
edge of the plain, and about half a mile beyond the garden
walls.

Through a massive
arched gateway the blacks poured in to take their seats, while our
guards led us to a smaller entrance near one end of the
structure.

Through this we
passed into an enclosure beneath the seats, where we found a number
of other prisoners herded together under guard. Some of them were
in irons, but for the most part they seemed sufficiently awed by
the presence of their guards to preclude any possibility of
attempted escape.

During the trip
from Shador I had had no opportunity to talk with my
fellow-prisoner, but now that we were safely within the barred
paddock our guards abated their watchfulness, with the result that
I found myself able to approach the red Martian youth for whom I
felt such a strange attraction.

'What is the
object of this assembly?' I asked her. 'Are we to fight for the
edification of the First Born, or is it something worse than
that?'

'It is a part of
the monthly rites of Issus,' she replied, 'in which black women
wash the sins from their souls in the blood of women from the outer
world. If, perchance, the black is killed, it is evidence of her
disloyalty to Issus--the unpardonable sin. If she lives through the
contest she is held acquitted of the charge that forced the
sentence of the rites, as it is called, upon her.

'The forms of
combat vary. A number of us may be pitted together against an equal
number, or twice the number of blacks; or singly we may be sent
forth to face wild beasts, or some famous black
warrior.'

'And if we are
victorious,' I asked, 'what then--freedom?'

She
laughed.