Renegade of Callisto
- Автор: Картер Лин Спрэг
- Серия: Callisto #8
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: Научная фантастика
Электронная книга - «Renegade of Callisto». Краткое содержание книги:
Far from his adopted home, the Golden City of Shondakor, Koja, self-exiled insectoid of the Yathoon Horde, has blundered into the savage land he had renounced, accompanied only by little Taran, ward of Prince Jandar. Lost in the treacherous scarlet plains, the two are hurled to separate, unnamable fates —Taran forsaken in shackles, along with the lovely Princess Xara, while the renegade Koja is locked on a perilous course of vengeance for the evils done to his clan. All destinies collide at the Great Yathoon Games in the hidden valley of Sargol — the impenetrable citadel girdled by a seething mote of flames.
In the spine-tingling tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Lin Carter again transports us to a strange and sublime landscape pulsating with the flash of swords, secret splendors, and ever-lurking danger.
Every Yathoon warrior knew precisely what his duties and responsibilities were, and fulfilled them to the letter. The chieftains mounted their thaptors and rode in the fore, followed by the hunters and warriors and cadets of their households. The wains, which contained their baggage, their treasure, their weapons, and their slaves, followed the retinue.
The caravan wound slowly across the Great Plains of Haratha, winding ever south. As the territories traditionally under the dominence of this or that Clan or tribe of the Horde are widely set apart, from each other, it did not seem very likely that the Garukhs would encounter one of their rival Yathoon Clans on their southerly migration, but should this occur it was almost inevitable that war would flare up between them.
For this reason, and so as to afford his warriors the greatest possible margin of advantage, the high chief, Fanga, sent outriders before the caravan and to all sides, ranging far afield to scout out any approaching enemy.
All that day they journeyed south, moving with all deliberate speed but in no particular hurry. In fact, the Clan could move no more swiftly than they did, due to the ponderous and lumbering glymphs which dragged the great wains behind them. The huge, oxen1ike beasts were slow-moving and heavy-footed, and they could not be hurried. The Clan must perforce reduce its speed to the pace at which the glymphs could comfortably advance.
That night they made temporary camp on the Great Plains, choosing their location around a waterhole which the Garukhs had noticed months before, when first they had ridden out into these parts. Even though the encampment was to be a temporary one and their stay here was one of only nocturnal duration, the tents were erected and the thaptor pens were set up again just as they had been at the last camp, where they had remained for many weeks.
The Yathoon warriors knew no other way of doing things than the way things were always done amongst them. In this, as in so many other ways, the intelligent arthropods resembled their distant cousins, the social insects of my own native world. Like the ants and bees and termites of Earth, which had evolved a rudimentary social organization aeons in the past, found that it worked well enough, and simply maintained it without ever making experiments or attempting to improve the system, the Yathoon of the Horde did not ever question immemorial tradition or tamper with the customary way of doing things perfected unguessable ages ago by their remotest ancestors.
No more conservative creatures existed than the Yathoon arthropods. And in that very inflexibility of their thinking, in their innate inability to change, to adapt, to grow into new social configurations with the arising of new circumstances, lay the seeds of their eventual doom. For no social order is so flawlessly perfect that it cannot be improved, or so ideally organized that it cannot break down. By now unable to change―unable even to imagine the necessity for change, and probably unable even to recognize change when it is forced upon them―the Yathoon were slowly dying, as their world changed around them.
The spread of manned air flight is one of the ways in which Thanator was changing, for instance. Valkar and the young lieutenant Kadar had searched all that day the region of the grasslands which stretched out to every side from the position in which they had found Fido earlier. They had flown in an ever-widening spiral, using that spot as a starting point, and just after nightfall the path of their circling flight intercepted the route of the southerly migration of the Garukh nomads.
The keen eyes of Kadar had first seen the track of the glymphs, for the heavy-footed and ponderous creatures had beaten a pathway through the wild grasses. But the Yathoon scouts had not seen the little aircraft as it floated far above them, although the sound of its engines was clearly audible to their sense of hearing.
They did not look up because they were not accustomed to looking up, there never having been in the experience of their ancestors much of anything to look up for.* Thus, although they clearly heard the roaring of the scoutcraft’s engines, they had no idea what caused the sound and dismissed it as being of no particular importance. The Yathoon are not a very imaginative race.
Cutting their engines, Prince Valkar and Kadar let their ornithopter drift idly with the breeze, while spying out the Yathoon encampment. It was too dark for them to make out any particular individuals―so dark that they could scarcely tell the arthropods from their human slaves. They were undecided as to what to do.
“Do you think it likely, my Prince, that Koja and the boy were taken captive by the Horde?” murmured Kadar as they floated above the camp.
“It seems very likely to me,” confessed the Prince grimly. “Fido came from somewhere in this area, and if Koja and Taran crashed here, they could easily have been spotted by the Yathoon scouts.” His expression became grimmer, as he added by way of an afterthought: “Of course, they weren’t necessarily captured at all. They could as easily have been slain …”
“What does my Prince suggest we do now?” asked Kadar.
“We wait,” said Valkar. “We can discover little of importance by night, but with day we may be able to ascertain if, indeed, our friends are prisoners of the Horde.”
The wind had died and the air above the Great Plains was all but motionless. Prince Valkar did not dare try to bring the scoutcraft down so as to anchor it to the surface of the meadow, lest Yathoon sentinels should perceive their actions and attack them. So he and Kadar made a makeshift meal of cold meats, refreshed themselves with water from the canteens, shared their stores of provender with the miserable Fido, who was now heartily weary of being airborne, and curled up in the cockpit for the night, wrapping their cloaks about them for warmth.
When day broke in the skies above Thanator in that vast, silent explosion of light that is dawn on the jungle Moon, the two questors awoke to discover that they had floated a mile or two south of the encampment of the Horde, but found it easy enough to find the camp again.
The Garukhs were in the process of breaking camp, loading their gear back in the wains, and entering formation again. Valkar took the little scoutcraft up to far greater altitude than that at which they had flown previously, while searching for some sign of their lost comrades. He did this in order to mitigate their chances of being seen, and also because it was no longer necessary to search for Koja and Taran.
Because they had found them. In the clear golden light of morning both captives had been sighted as they labored in the chains of the Horde.
The caravan rode south, and above them all the way soared the scoutcraft, while aboard two worried Shondakorians strove to figure out a way to rescue Koja and Taran from their captivity.
12 Thundering Hooves
All that day the little scoutcraft followed in the wake of the Yathoon caravan, while the migratory Clan stolidly pursued its southward way.
Since the Shondakorian ornithopter had fortunately thus far eluded discovery by the Yathoon scouts and outriders, Prince Valkar and the young officer took every precaution to make certain that their very existence remained a secret. The advantage of surprise, they reasoned, might yet prove vital to the success of their plans.
But the trouble was, they really had no plans. Once they had found out that Koja and young Taran still lived and were presently the captives of the Yathoon caravan, they bent every thought to the conception of a method by which the two might be rescued from their insectoid captors. As yet, however, no viable scheme for the rescue had occurred to either of them.