Thuvia, maid of Mars
his strange hypnotic power to be real flesh and blood.
With hoarse battle cries they charged the bowmen of Tario. Barbed
shafts flew thick and fast. Men fell, and the ground was red with gore.
Carthoris and Thuvia had difficulty in reconciling the reality of it
all with their knowledge of the truth. They saw utan after utan march
from the gate in perfect step to reinforce the outnumbered company
which Tario had first sent forth to arrest them.
They saw Jav’s forces grow correspondingly until all about them rolled
a sea of fighting, cursing warriors, and the dead lay in heaps about
the field.
Jav and Tario seemed to have forgotten all else beside the struggling
bowmen that surged to and fro, filling the broad field between the
forest and the city.
The wood loomed close behind Thuvia and Carthoris. The latter cast a
glance toward Jav.
“Come!” he whispered to the girl. “Let them fight out their empty
battle—neither, evidently, has power to harm the other. They are like
two controversialists hurling words at one another. While they are
engaged we may as well be devoting our energies to an attempt to find
the passage through the cliffs to the plain beyond.”
As he spoke, Jav, turning from the battle for an instant, caught his
words. He saw the girl move to accompany the Heliumite. A cunning look
leaped to the Lotharian’s eyes.
The thing that lay beyond that look had been deep in his heart since
first he had laid eyes upon Thuvia of Ptarth. He had not recognized it,
however, until now that she seemed about to pass out of his existence.
He centred his mind upon the Heliumite and the girl for an instant.
Carthoris saw Thuvia of Ptarth step forward with outstretched hand. He
was surprised at this sudden softening toward him, and it was with a
full heart that he let his fingers close upon hers, as together they
turned away from forgotten Lothar, into the woods, and bent their steps
toward the distant mountains.
As the Lotharian had turned toward them, Thuvia had been surprised to
hear Carthoris suddenly voice a new plan.
“Remain here with Jav,” she had heard him say, “while I go to search
for the passage through the cliffs.”
She had dropped back in surprise and disappointment, for she knew that
there was no reason why she should not have accompanied him. Certainly
she should have been safer with him than left here alone with the
Lotharian.
And Jav watched the two and smiled his cunning smile.
When Carthoris had disappeared within the wood, Thuvia seated herself
apathetically upon the scarlet sward to watch the seemingly
interminable struggles of the bowmen.
The long afternoon dragged its weary way toward darkness, and still the
imaginary legions charged and retreated. The sun was about to set when
Tario commenced to withdraw his troops slowly toward the city.
His plan for cessation of hostilities through the night evidently met
with Jav’s entire approval, for he caused his forces to form themselves
in orderly utans and march just within the edge of the wood, where they
were soon busily engaged in preparing their evening meal, and spreading
down their sleeping silks and furs for the night.
Thuvia could scarce repress a smile as she noted the scrupulous care
with which Jav’s imaginary men attended to each tiny detail of
deportment as truly as if they had been real flesh and blood.
Sentries were posted between the camp and the city. Officers clanked
hither and thither issuing commands and seeing to it that they were
properly carried out.
Thuvia turned toward Jav.
“Why is it,” she asked, “that you observe such careful nicety in the
regulation of your creatures when Tario knows quite as well as you that
they are but figments of your brain? Why not permit them simply to
dissolve into thin air until you again require their futile service?”
“You do not understand them,” replied Jav. “While they exist they are
real. I do but call them into being now, and in a way direct their
general actions. But thereafter, until I dissolve them, they are as
actual as you or I. Their officers command them, under my guidance. I
am the general—that is all. And the psychological effect upon the enemy
is far greater than were I to treat them merely as substanceless
vagaries.
“Then, too,” continued the Lotharian, “there is always the hope, which
with us is little short of belief, that some day these materializations
will merge into the real—that they will remain, some of them, after we
have dissolved their fellows, and that thus we shall have discovered a
means for perpetuating our dying race.
“Some there are who claim already to have accomplished the thing. It is
generally supposed that the etherealists have quite a few among their
number who are permanent materializations. It is even said that such is
Tario, but that cannot be, for he existed before we had discovered the
full possibilities of suggestion.
“There are others among us who insist that none of us is real. That we
could not have existed all these ages without material food and water
had we ourselves been material. Although I am a realist, I rather
incline toward this belief myself.
“It seems well and sensibly based upon the belief that our ancient
forbears developed before their extinction such wondrous mentalities
that some of the stronger minds among them lived after the death of
their bodies—that we are but the deathless minds of individuals long
dead.
“It would appear possible, and yet in so far as I am concerned I have
all the attributes of corporeal existence. I eat, I sleep”—he paused,
casting a meaning look upon the girl—“I love!”
Thuvia could not mistake the palpable meaning of his words and
expression. She turned away with a little shrug of disgust that was not
lost upon the Lotharian.
He came close to her and seized her arm.
“Why not Jav?” he cried. “Who more honourable than the second of the
world’s most ancient race? Your Heliumite? He has gone. He has deserted
you to your fate to save himself. Come, be Jav’s!”
Thuvia of Ptarth rose to her full height, her lifted shoulder turned
toward the man, her haughty chin upraised, a scornful twist to her
lips.
“You lie!” she said quietly, “the Heliumite knows less of disloyalty
than he knows of fear, and of fear he is as ignorant as the unhatched
young.”
“Then where is he?” taunted the Lotharian. “I tell you he has fled the
valley. He has left you to your fate. But Jav will see that it is a
pleasant one. To-morrow we shall return into Lothar at the head of my
victorious army, and I shall be jeddak and you shall be my consort.
Come!” And he attempted to crush her to his breast.
The girl struggled to free herself, striking at the man with her metal
armlets. Yet still he drew her toward him, until both were suddenly
startled by a hideous growl that rumbled from the dark wood close
behind them.
CHAPTER X.
KAR KOMAK, THE BOWMAN
As Carthoris moved through the forest toward the distant cliffs with
Thuvia’s hand still tight pressed in his, he wondered a little at the
girl’s continued silence, yet the contact of her cool palm against his
was so pleasant that he feared to break the spell of her new-found
reliance in him by speaking.
Onward through the dim wood they passed until the shadows of the quick
coming Martian night commenced to close down upon them. Then it was
that Carthoris turned to speak to the girl at his side.
They must plan together for the future. It was his idea to pass through
the cliffs at once if they could locate the passage, and he was quite
positive that they were now close to it; but he wanted her assent to
the proposition.
As his eyes rested upon her, he was struck by her strangely ethereal
appearance. She seemed suddenly to have dissolved into the tenuous
substance of a dream, and as he continued to gaze upon her, she faded
slowly from his sight.
For an instant he was dumbfounded, and then the whole truth flashed
suddenly upon him. Jav had caused him to believe that Thuvia was
accompanying him through the wood while, as a matter of fact, he had
detained the girl for himself!
Carthoris was horrified. He cursed himself for his stupidity, and yet
he knew that the fiendish power which the Lotharian had invoked to
confuse him might have deceived any.
Scarce had he realized the truth than he had started to retrace his
steps toward Lothar, but now he moved at a trot, the Earthly thews that
he had inherited from his father carrying him swiftly over the soft
carpet of fallen leaves and rank grass.
_Thuria_’s brilliant light flooded the plain before the walled city of
Lothar as Carthoris broke from the wood opposite the great gate that
had given the fugitives egress from the city earlier in the day.
At first he saw no indication that there was another than himself
anywhere about. The plain was deserted. No myriad bowmen camped now
beneath the overhanging verdure of the giant trees. No gory heaps of
tortured dead defaced the beauty of the scarlet sward. All was silence.
All was peace.
The Heliumite, scarce pausing at the forest’s verge, pushed on across
the plain toward the city, when presently he descried a huddled form in
the grass at his feet.
It was the body of a man, lying prone. Carthoris turned the figure over
upon its back. It was Jav, but torn and mangled almost beyond
recognition.
The prince bent low to note if any spark of life remained, and as he
did so the lids raised and dull, suffering eyes looked up into his.
“The Princess of Ptarth!” cried Carthoris. “Where is she? Answer me,
man, or I complete the work that another has so well begun.”
“Komal,” muttered Jav. “He sprang upon me . . . and would have devoured
me but for the girl. Then they went away together into the wood—the
girl and the great banth . . . her fingers twined in his tawny mane.”
“Which way went they?” asked Carthoris.
“There,” replied Jav faintly, “toward the passage through the cliffs.”
The Prince of Helium waited to hear no more, but springing to his feet,
raced back again into the forest.
It was dawn when he reached the mouth of the dark tunnel that would
lead him to the other world beyond this valley of ghostly memories and
strange hypnotic influences and menaces.
Within the long, dark passages he met with no accident or obstacle,
coming at last into the light of day beyond the mountains, and no great
distance from the southern verge of the domains of the Torquasians, not
more than one hundred and fifty haad at the most.
From the boundary of Torquas to the city of Aaanthor is a distance of
some two hundred haads, so that the Heliumite had before him a journey
of more than one hundred and fifty Earth miles between him and
Aaanthor.
He could at best but hazard a chance guess that toward Aaanthor Thuvia
would take her flight. There lay the nearest water, and there might be
expected some day a rescuing party from her father’s empire; for
Carthoris knew Thuvan Dihn well enough to know that he would leave no
stone unturned until he had tracked down the truth as to his daughter’s
abduction, and learned all that there might be to learn of her
whereabouts.
He realized, of course, that the trick which had laid suspicion upon
him would greatly delay the discovery of the truth, but little did he
guess to what vast proportions had the results of the villainy of Astok
of Dusar already grown.
Even as he emerged from the mouth of the passage to look across the
foothills in the direction of Aaanthor, a Ptarth battle fleet was
winging its majestic way slowly toward the twin cities of Helium, while
from far distant Kaol raced another mighty armada to join forces with
its ally.
He did not know that in the face of the circumstantial evidence against