Worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs (4 page)

Among the hideous creatures in Pellucidar, ERB’s world at the earth’s core, are the Sagoths, which the Emperor (David Innes) describes as “barely sapient gorillas.” Leave it to bestseller Mercedes Lackey to come up with a tale of Pellucidar that is narrated by, of all things, a Sagoth—and a Sagoth that possesses all the hopes and emotions of any of its human counterparts. So join her as she relates the story of Mirina, known as The One Who Fell.

—Mike

The Fallen

A Tale of Pellucidar

Mercedes Lackey

I am Mok, son of . . . well, I do not know who my father was. My mother was named Lur, but there are many Lurs among the Sagoth that I grew up among, and I doubt that I could single her out were she to stand before me now.

Oh yes, I am a Sagoth. Surprised? Shocked that such as I, of a race that, as a whole, can barely reckon up the fingers and toes, a race that the Emperor calls “barely sapient gorillas,” should be writing this? I can tell you, not nearly as shocked as the Emperor was when I was brought before him. His friend, Abner Perry, thinks that I am the result of some meddling by the Mahar, and I am not inclined to argue with him. The Mahar were wont to meddle in the breeding of the lesser creatures, trying to make humans fatter and more docile, for instance, so why not meddle to make my kind fit for more than understanding a few orders at best? Abner Perry calls me the Pythagoras of my kind. I think he is greatly mistaken, but then again, compared to my fellows, perhaps I am.

This makes me lonely. I do not find the females of the human kind to be attractive, and it would be a strange human female who would yearn for me, yet the females of my own breed, while drawing me to them with their broad jaws and hairy bosoms, repulse me at the same time with their stupidity. So Loneliness is an old and familiar companion, and perhaps that is why I was fit to play the part that I did—

But I am ahead of myself, and this is not my story. It is the story of Mirina, the One Who Fell. So let me begin the tale at its true beginning.

It was a perfectly ordinary day in the land of Thuria, the Land of Awful Shadow—the only place in all of this world that has anything like darkness, because of the great orb that the Emperor, David Innes, calls a “moon” that hangs between Thuria and the source of our light. My friend Kolk, the son of Goork, who is King of the Thurians, and I were out upon the water with Kolk’s son Dek. This might seem strange, since the waters of this world teem with terrible beasts, but Abner Perry had invented a boat he called a “whaler” and a weapon he called a “harpoon gun,” and we were afire to test it. One day I will tell the story of how I came to be friends with Kolk and saved his son’s life, but that is not today.

Suffice it to say that we were on the water with Perry’s gun, and things were not going well for the great beasts of the waters. We had just dispatched our third, when a flash of light in the sky above us caught our eyes.

It came again, and we could see it was something white . . . winged, like a Mahar or thipdar, but not so big, and the wings were oddly made. It was not flying, it was falling—or rather, falling, then flailing with its wings as if trying to save itself, then falling again. The effect was somehow one of piteousness, helplessness—so much so that I think we were all moved by compassion at the same time. I do not know how that came to be, but I do know that the three of us, as one and without any consultation, turned our vessel toward the place where we thought the thing would fall and made all haste to be there when it landed.

We had not quite reached the spot when the creature—which we could see now looked like a human with wings!—gave a last convulsive attempt to save itself and plunged into the water.

Dek was over the side in a moment. He has long spent as much time with the peoples of the islands as with his own folk and is as much at home in the water as he is on the back of a lidi. We were roped for safety to the boat, of course—something I insisted on, since I swim like a stone—so when he plunged over the side, I made haste to seize his rope and play it out so it did not snag and pull him up short. In no time he had reached the floating figure and was pulling it back through the water. But such commotion was bound to attract unwelcome guests.

And of course it did.

I saw it first, the hump rising above the waves as the thing moved swiftly toward us. I shouted and pointed with my chin, my hands and great strength busy hauling Dek and his burden in as fast as I could. There are many times when it is good to be a Sagoth, and this was one.

Kolk also did not hesitate. He sprang to Perry’s gun, armed it with one of the harpoons that did not have a rope attached to it, and fired into the bulk of the beast before it could submerge and come up beneath his son.

The goal must have been to distract it from its quarry, and if so, the ploy worked.

A nightmare head, all jaws and teeth, broke the surface. Its neck was not long enough to permit it to bite at the iron harpoon impaling its side, so, after a futile attempt, it turned its fury on the boat.

By now Dek was aboard and pulling the fallen creature aboard with him—no easy feat, since the creature’s long wings were impeding his progress. He no longer needed me, so I rushed to the other weapon aboard this little ship—the real cannon, a six-pounder, which I had insisted on being left charged. Not all the natives of the islands are friendly, and not all the beasts of the water could be dispatched with a harpoon.

As jaws twice as long as a human is tall opened to close on the prow of the ship, I turned that cannon into them and touched the match to the powder.

By good luck, my aim was true. I sent the ball crashing into what passed for the monster’s brain, as well as shattering half of its jaw. It gave a terrific screech that deafened us, thrashed its whole body (barely missing the prow again) and sank into the depths.

Now we could turn to help Dek haul the winged stranger aboard.

I expected something like a stunted Mahar, or some other freak like myself. I imagine the others were assuming the same. Picture our shock to discover that it was a winged human, and a girl!

She was slender, scarcely half the height or weight of a typical woman of Sari or Thuria. Her hair was long, and hung down her back in a single tail I was to learn was called a “braid,” and pale as the moonflower. Her wings were not naked and webbed like those of the Mahar and thipdar; instead they were covered with things that appeared to be large feathers, like a bird. Strangest of all, she was wearing not a garment of leather, but one of some other substance, more light and flexible than any leather I have ever seen. In fact, it was like the coverings that David Innes and Abner and the other men of the outer world sometimes wear. David had told me that this stuff was called “cloth.”

We had never seen such a strange creature in all our lives.

I thought at first the fall had killed her, but Dek cried out that she was breathing, and we must get water. I was a little afraid—there was no telling what manner of fair-faced monster this girl might be—but I obeyed. I went to the stern and got one of our waterskins and brought to it to him
just as the girl opened eyes of a color of blue I have never seen before nor since.

She gasped on seeing Dek, and her face went white, then red, then white again. Dek for his part was oblivious to this and merely seized the waterskin from me and urged her to drink.

This she did, as the pulse in her throat fluttered and I heard in my head that which I had never expected to hear from something shaped like a human—the soundless speech of the Mahar!

Do you not know me? How can you not know me?

Her words were addressed to Dek, not to me, but I was the one to answer.
He is Dek, son of Kolk, and we have never seen a thing like you before,
I replied, a little sternly—because if Mahar speech came from this creature, then it must
know
the Mahar, and converse with them. And that meant it might be an enemy, an agent of those awful creatures that feed on human and Sagoth and regard us as we regard insects.

Startled, she turned her head to stare at me. I saw nothing in her face to indicate subterfuge, only bewilderment and fear, and something I could not read, then.
But he has been in my dreams all of my life! How can he not know me? Why does he not speak to me himself?

I softened my tone, though I remained stern. Clearly she did not know my kind, for she showed no surprise that I could speak beyond simple words.
He is a human, and he cannot hear the speech of the Mahar. What are you, and where have you come from, and what do you intend here?

At the mention of the Mahar she turned paler than before, if that was possible. Dek was glancing from her to me and back again, sensing something was going on between us, but not able to hear it himself. “What’s going on, Mok?” he demanded.

“Somehow this girl-creature speaks the speech of the Mahar,” I explained. “I am questioning her.” At that both Dek and his father held their peace.

Faced with my intimidating face and stern voice, the girl trembled, but answered my questions unflinchingly, and I pieced together her story. And if I had not spent the majority of my life in the company of the Emperor and Abner Perry, who found me as a child, I would never have believed it.

“She comes from there,” I said, nodding upwards with my head to that thing that loomed above us, that Innes and Perry called a “moon.” Dek gaped but did not look as if he disbelieved me. Kolk shook his head but did not interrupt. “She says that as we have driven the Mahar from here, it is there that they have fled to. Her people have seen them, streaming to the surface from what she calls ‘the land above’ in a vast migration. There were always
some,
but now there are legions more.”

“But how did she get h—” Dek began, then flushed with embarrassment when he remembered her wings.

“She says she was pursued by a Mahar, and determined to die rather than be taken,” I related. “She had no expectation of reaching here—and did not want to, since her people regard the
land above
with terror, as the place from which the Mahar are coming. She knew that the higher she flew, the colder she would become, and she expected to die from it. But instead, at some point, she reached a place where the land no longer called to her from below, and our land called to her from above . . .” I rubbed my head at this point, because the girl’s thoughts were as confused as to this point as mine, and were mostly full of how cold it had been. “Then she began to fall, but toward us, not toward her home. As she grew warmer, she tried to fly again, but succeeded only in checking her fall. The rest you know.”

I said nothing of what she had said of Dek. Instead, I turned back to her.
Can you hear the sounds we make when our mouths move?
I asked.

She answered in the affirmative, but her hands fluttered at her throat.
We do not make such noises, my people.
So she was mute but not deaf.

You had best learn how to understand the noises then,
I told her,
for I am the only one who can speak to you in this way—or at least, the only one who is not a beast that would probably kill you.
“She cannot speak aloud,” I added. “So I suppose I will have to stay with her for now.”

Dek’s face showed his relief. “Well, good. I cannot imagine anyone I trust more with such a task.”

Kolk finally spoke. “It is good that the Emperor and Perry are here,” he said. “Surely they will know what to do with her.”

And so it was decided. We would take her to the Emperor. And at some point as we sailed the whale-boat back to shore, it was also decided that we would call her Mirina.

David Innes was intrigued, and delayed his departure by some sleeps in order to study the girl—once she recovered, that is. She had taken a terrible fall, after an even more terrible journey from her world to ours, and she was some time in growing better.

In some ways, she did not grow better at all. I understood this, and so, I think, did Innes. We have both grown used to being the only ones of our kind among strangers. I could see the loneliness growing in Mirina’s eyes, and a desperation as she came to understand that Dek really had no notion she had ever dreamed of him once, much less many thousands of times.

Yes, thousands, for it seems that they sleep up there in the sky, much more often than we do. And not just when they grow weary, but are asleep as much as they are awake. Innes says this is because they have something called
time,
because their world turns so that half of it is always in darkness and half in light, and that life is like that on the Outer World where he is from. This has always seemed so strange as to make my thoughts spin, but I can look at the
moon
above us and see it turning, so I know this to be true. Our
timelessness
troubled the girl, though not as much as her loneliness, and another thing of which I will tell you.

When she finally grew well enough, she made the attempt to fly, only to find she could not even raise herself a little bit above the ground. Her wings beat gallantly against the air, yet nothing happened.