Under the Moons of Mars (9 page)
Read Under the Moons of Mars Online
Authors: John Joseph Adams
Tarzan met it with his ancient war cry of
“Kreegahh!”
which, to his great surprise, momentarily stopped the creature in its tracks. Then it came on again, but with a certain air of puzzlement, which allowed the ape-man to sidestep the crushing sweep of its four upper arms, all muscled to shame Bolgani, the gorilla. The white ape wheeled and came at him again, but Tarzan, taking full advantage of his new Martian agility, leapt over its head and came down behind
it, striving for the full-Nelson hold with which he had more than once conquered Numa the lion. He was still having difficulty in learning to land correctly, however, and when he slipped and fell on his back, the ape was at him with a roar, two hands closing on his throat, another pair of arms encircling his chest and squeezing far more powerfully than he himself could have done. Desperately Tarzan struck out wildly with his mighty fists, but his hardest blow seemed to make no impression on the thick, bald hide or the gorilla features. The Martian moonlight was swimming before the ape-man’s eyes, when the creature suddenly eased its grip on his throat, stared into his face, and growled, with a distinct questioning lilt at the end,
“Kreegahh?”
Almost as bewildered as he was grateful to be alive, Tarzan indicated that he wanted to sit up, and the white ape—again to his amazement—released him and moved warily back from him. Struggling for both air and coherence, Tarzan inquired hoarsely in Mangani,
“Speak?”
The white ape shook its head . . . but its reply, while hardly up to the linguistic standards of the tribe of Kerchak, was perfectly comprehensible to Tarzan.
“Speak not now. Lost.”
“You used to speak Mangani,” the ape-man whispered. “Here, on Mars . . . Barsoom. How can that be . . . ?” He repeated the question in the tongue he had first spoken himself, and the white ape blinked blankly, and then made a gesture that was almost a shrug, while pointing indiscriminately at the heavens—to the stars and the two moons—and the Earth, dim on a far corner of the horizon . . .
Tarzan’s own slow nod turned into a bow of wonder. “Why should transmigration only be one-way,” he muttered aloud. “Why should it be limited to humans?” Abruptly, he pointed in turn to the building behind them, and to the other vast marble structures visible in the moonlight. In Mangani,
he asked, forming the words carefully,
“Made these? You?”
The white ape stared back at him for a long moment, and it seemed to Tarzan that he saw the shadow of an immense sorrow in the beast’s black eyes.
“Not us now. Us . . .”
and it made a sort of pushing gesture with both hands, as though rolling away time. Again it said,
“Not us now . . .”
“Your ancestors,” the ape-man said softly. “Your distant ancestors . . . all this was their doing. . . .” He began to smile wryly, thinking back himself. “If Kerchak had been your size, with extra arms . . .”
The white ape stared uncomprehendingly. Tarzan suddenly clapped his hands. “Dum-Dum! Under two moons, with these new cousins of mine? Of course!” Again speaking Mangani with extreme precision, he asked,
“Dum-Dum? Dance Dum-Dum? You?”
It seemed to him that a certain look of vague remembrance flickered in the creature’s eyes.
“Dum-Dum,”
it repeated several times, but nothing further.
“Dum-Dum!”
The ape-man was up now, beginning to shift his weight rhythmically from one bare foot to the other.
“Dum-Dum!”
leaping now in the lighter Martian gravity, coming down hard enough to make a slapping sound in the street.
“Dum-Dum!”
with his head thrown back and his mouth open, as though he were drinking the moonlight.
“Dum-Dum!”
When he looked over at the white ape, it too was on its feet, clumsily mimicking his side-to-side steps, its huge feet creating pounding echoes between the marble buildings.
“Dum-Dum! Dum-Dum!”
Other white figures were emerging from the shadows, joining in the dance of the Mangani . . . their ancestors’ dance.
“Dum-Dum! Dum-Dum!”
In Tarzan’s jungle, there would have been a hollow log to beat out the rhythm on, but here in this street, on a far-distant world, there was no need.
“Dum-Dum! Dum-Dum!”
So intoxicated with the ancient dance to the moon was the ape-man that it took him a moment to focus his eyes on the small, slender figure standing apart, her hands clasped before her, and her own eyes wide with marveling. Then he stopped, on the instant, and went quickly to take the hands of the Princess Dejah Thoris and lead her away from the growing horde of the dancing white apes, so caught up in the Dum-Dum themselves that none noticed his leaving. “You should not be here,” he told her, his voice harsher than he meant it to sound. “I have set something loose among them. I don’t know what it is, or what it will come to, but it could be dangerous. I think it
is
dangerous.”
“All I know, Princess,” the ape-man responded gravely, “is that they are not vermin. In some way they are distantly related to my own people, the great apes of Africa, who raised me as one of their own. For good or ill, I could never raise a hand against them ever again.”
Dejah Thoris stepped closer, peering up at him, as though into the highest branches of a great tree. “You are as tall as my lord,” she mused, “and your eyes are as gray as his. But you are a very strange sort of Earthman, are you not, Tarzan of the Apes?”
“I believe I am an ape in my deepest heart,” Tarzan replied, “nothing more than an ape of Kerchak’s tribe. But when I look at you, Princess Dejah Thoris of Helium, I cannot but remember that I am also a man.”
In the morning, after an excellent breakfast of items that Tarzan was quite happy not to have identified, he helped John Carter, Dejah Thoris, and their several Red Martian servants pack their belongings onto borrowed thoats, and assumed that they would be setting out shortly for distant Helium. He was getting acquainted with his own thoat, practicing mounting and dismounting, when John Carter suddenly said, “Hear you had a tussle with a few maggots last night.” Tarzan blinked in puzzlement. “The white apes,” John Carter explained, “That’s what I call them, because they’re white like maggots, and because there’s not a thing to be done with them except kill them. Until there aren’t any more.” He was toying with a Thark pistol, a cut-down version of one of the rifles Tarzan had learned were powered by radium. “Show me where the struggle took place, Sir House-of-Lords.”
“You won’t find them out in daylight,” Tarzan warned him. “And the Princess is clearly anxious to start home.” In fact, Dejah Thoris had hardly spoken all morning.
“Sir Englishman,” John Carter said without expression, “don’t you ever presume to tell me whether or not my wife is
anxious.
. . .” He broke open his weapon, casually inspected the load, and snapped it shut again. “I told you, I want to see last night’s battlefield. No one’s going anywhere until I do.”
“Absolutely,” John Carter agreed. “Just indulge an old Johnny Reb, if you would.” Dejah Thoris said nothing, but the fear in her eyes angered Tarzan in a way that he had not thought possible. He strode ahead, and John Carter followed close on his heels.
Nearing the deserted building where he had been attacked, Tarzan pointed ahead, saying, “There. One of them ambushed me, but I fought him off and he ran away. There was nothing more to it than that.”
“Really?” John Carter was still toying with his pistol—then, to Tarzan’s alarm, he suddenly lifted it. “Would that be the fellow, do you suppose?”
A moment of whiteness—a flash of a great hunched body trying to pass an empty window without being seen. John Carter’s finger was already squeezing the trigger when Tarzan struck his arm up, so that the strange bullet whined harmlessly off the wall of the building in a flurry of marble chips. And John Carter struck Tarzan in the face with the butt of the revolver, so that the ape-man reeled backward and sat down hard in the Martian street.
“Been wanting to do that from the first sight,” John Carter said flatly. “I don’t like you, Sir House-of-Lords. You’re no better than a damn Yankee—worse, in some ways. And I don’t like the way you look at my wife. Not one whit.”
The ape-man was on his feet now, smiling blood. He said simply, “Thank you for doing that.”
“You’re the challenged party—the choice of weapons is up to you.” John Carter was smiling genially himself. “I’ve got a couple of Thark swords, or we can make it pistols. Up to you.”
Tarzan shook his head. He said nothing, but simply beckoned John Carter in toward him. For the first time, the
Virginian looked slightly uneasy, but he tossed the pistol aside, said, “Come and get it, then,” and contradicted himself by taking a fifteen-foot spring straight at the ape-man, knocking him down again. The battle was on.
As against the white ape, Tarzan realized that he was fighting for his life—and perhaps against a less reasonable opponent. John Carter was a peerlessly brave man, and he came at the ape-man with a fury that had only partly to do with Tarzan himself, and more to do with a lost war in which Tarzan had taken no part. Forced onto the defensive at the start of the combat, the ape-man warded off blow after blow as best he could, enduring as much punishment as he had ever taken in his youth from Bolgani or Kerchak. Momentarily dazed, he kept John Carter’s hands from closing forever on his throat only by butting his head desperately into the Virginian’s face, or doubling his legs to push him away, like Sheeta the leopard eviscerating a foe. He was vaguely aware of a growing crowd of noisy Tharks, as always happy to see someone, anyone, being beaten. He could not see Dejah Thoris anywhere.
Slowly, however, the battle began to turn. John Carter was a splendid fighter under any circumstances, as he had proven on two planets; but most of his victories over Martians had been achieved with the aid of weapons, low gravity, and the fact that Tharks are less muscular than they appear, and far less quick than a reasonably fit human. Strong and fast as he was, nothing in his oddly doubled life had prepared him for an opponent who had taken down lions and gorillas bare-handed, and who could run all the day unwinded across the great African veldt. Against the ape-man his one advantage was familiarity with Martian conditions, and once his measure was taken, that knowledge was not enough. For every blow he struck, he received three, as Tarzan hit him from all
sides and all angles, employing not just his jungle-trained fists, but his elbows and knees, his head, and sweeping kicks that shook the Virginian like thunderbolts. But for all the battering, for all the blood, John Carter would not go down, nor would he surrender, not even when the apeman stood back, letting go of his killer animal instincts, holding up his open hands and whispering “Please . . . please fall, please stop . . .” as the Virginian stumbled blindly toward him. John Carter was still coming on at the end, muttering to himself . . . sinking to one knee . . . rising again . . . surely about to fall face forward at last at Tarzan’s feet . . .
It was then that Dejah Thoris picked up the Martian pistol and hit Tarzan over the head with it.
The ape-man went down without a sound. Dejah Thoris looked at the two fallen men, glanced at the grinning, cheering Tharks with utter contempt—quickly bent and kissed the ape-man’s cheek, and then turned her attention to her fallen husband. She did not look back at Tarzan again.
The Lord of the Jungle smelled Africa before he opened his eyes. He was draped, highly uncomfortably, over the crotch of a tree, like the remains of a leopard’s meal, which was exactly the way he felt. His skull thundered, his lower lip was split, and his entire body felt as bewildered as his head. Yet he was grateful for the pain, because it proved everything that had happened to him real, and he could not have borne to have dreamed Dejah Thoris. He smiled slightly at the memory, then winced as his lip started bleeding again.
Did I vanish there when I awoke here? Am I dead on Mars—Barsoom—and alive on Earth, or is my spirit alive in both worlds? And which, if either, is real? What will happen to my relatives up there, the white apes—can they ever be safe?
. . . Will she ever think of me?