Quest of the Golden Ape by Paul W. Fairman and Stephen Marlowe (e novels to read .txt) 📗
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The sympathy of Bram Forest went out instinctively to the fair one but the dark, sinister swordsman held his attention. There was something naggingly familiar about the dark one's cruel face. A tantalizing familiarity that bemused Bram Forest even as the singing swords thrust and parried with that of the dark warrior always on the offensive and the other fighter striving more for self-preservation than for aggressiveness.
Where, Bram Forest wondered, had he seen the dark one before? Nowhere, of course. Any previous contact was impossible. Or was it? Dared he, Bram Forest, call anything impossible after what had already occurred?
Bram Forest glanced down and realized he had been removing the disc from his left wrist and placing it on his right. He had committed the act instinctively, in the same manner he breathed and moved and his mind went back momentarily to the two tubes he had found in his ears when he awoke in the cavern back on Earth.
Back on Earth? How did he know he was not still on that planet? I've got to stop questioning these things I possess knowledge of but know not why. I must take them at face value and without wonder. Otherwise I shall spend all my years in conflict with my own mind.
At that moment, the dark warrior's whip-sword whined in a skillful arc and entered the body of the fair one. A moan of sympathy arose from the waiting group as the defeated warrior sank to the ground, his face strained in agony and fast becoming a death-mask.
The dark warrior stepped back, a cruel sneer of satisfaction gleaming in his eyes. Bram Forest, sickened by the unequal contest rose up from where he lay and moved forward. This drew the attention of both the group and the victorious warrior and the effect was electric.
The huddled observers reacted with a mixture of consternation, awe, and fear that would have been comic under less tense circumstances. They dropped as one to their knees. They placed their foreheads upon the ground. A concerted moan escaped them that far transcended in depth and feeling the one with which they had reacted to the death of the fair warrior.
In a language Bram Forest was completely familiar with, their voices sounded a chant of fear and awe. "The white god has come! The white god has come! The white god has come!"
Bram Forest scarcely considered them. He was advancing upon the dark warrior with the clean, stalking movements of a tiger, his great shoulders low, his magnificent legs tense for the death spring.
The dark one was frozen from surprise. From whence had this naked white creature erupted? He stood stiff from sudden fear and uncertainty a moment too long and the hands of the avenger were upon him. The fingers of those hands were like steel talons driving deep into his throat and in his panicked mind he looked upon the face of death and found it horrible. He was being driven down to the ground, lower and lower in abject submission by this strange and terrible manifestation the brown-skinned ones had called a white god.
The dark warrior's mind raced and in his terrorized desperation a native cunning sprang to his aid. Using every ounce of his remaining strength, he forced words up from his tortured throat. "Would you kill an unarmed man?"
The words touched a responsive chord in Bram Forest's mind. The craven spoke aptly. By killing him thus, was not Bram Forest doing the same thing for which he had condemned the other?
Bram Forest straightened and hurled the cringing figure from him. "Then defend yourself, swine!" he cried and seized up the dead warrior's shining whip sword.
The dark one sought means of escape but he feared turning from this avenger as much as facing him. He could only play for time.
Rising, he retrieved his own sword and faced the other with his expression of fear not one whit abated. The man of the steel hands whipped the sword experimentally and the dark one was struck by a ray of hope. The other's actions with the blade were as clumsy as had been those of Jlomec the Nadian. Perhaps all was not lost.
The dark one gripped his blade and moved forward in the customary crouch of the Tarthan fighting man. Then elation welled up within him as the answering posture of the other revealed him as knowing nothing whatever of the whip-sword's use. The dark one's smile returned. God or not, the skill of this one with the ancient weapon of Tarth was even less than that of the pathetic Jlomec.
The dark warrior parried a clumsy thrust with ease and whipped his blade around to harass the other's exposed back. "You are a fool!" he said, "whatever else you may be. As you die, give thought to the fact that you join a large company. Those who have faced the greatest swordsman of Tarth and fallen ignobly before his blade."
With that the dark one whipped his blade home and spun his adversary expertly in order to discover the exact point of entrance of the blade. His aim was true.
It was just a trifle low but the other fell heavily and the dark warrior withdrew his blade and wiped it uneasily. His nervousness sprang from fear. If one of these so-called gods had appeared, why not two, or four, or a dozen? The Tarthan swordsman, well up on the principles of discretion, felt a sudden urge to be quit of this locality.
It was indeed a disconcerting place. Brown folk, the identity and origin of which he knew not. A white creature with steel hands appearing from nowhere. What would the next manifestation be?
The dark warrior moved swiftly toward his waiting stad. He mounted and rode away and not until the figures about the well were tiny spots almost beyond range of his vision, did he again breathe easily.
CHAPTER VIII The Brown Virginram Forest moved from unconscious into a dark half-world of pain and frustration. He felt his flame-seared body to be hanging upon the edge of a black abyss into which he could neither fall nor draw away from.
At times, it seemed, gentle hands reached out to explore but were without the strength to draw him back from the perilous precipice upon which he hung.
There was an endless time of balance in this dark half-world and then the thick blackness faded to a gray, the precipice seemed to draw away of its own volition, and the pain within him lessened.
He opened his eyes.
He was lying on a bed of soft, cool moss in a semi-dark cavern with the sound of tinkling water in the distance. He lay staring at the ceiling for a long time, wondering into what manner of place he had come and how. Then his keen ears caught the sound of breathing other than his own; a soft breathing that fell gently upon his senses and calmed rather than alerted him.
He turned his head and saw a beautiful, naked brown-skinned girl kneeling nearby but beyond his reach. He was struck first by the beauty of her face and form and then by the fact that she was not as completely brown as his first impression had given him to believe. Her breasts and loins were of pure white and droplets of shining water ran down her body.
She was in the act of replacing a sort of leather harness upon her person and Bram Forest realized she had just returned from bathing at whatever place the unseen water gurgled and laughed and that she was now dressing herself.
He held his peace until the act was completed, not wishing to embarrass her by making his consciousness known while she was nude.
After a few moments, the harness was in place and she rose to stand erect and shake out her dark shining hair. Bram Forest chose this time to speak. "I do not know who you are, but I am obviously in your debt. My gratitude."
The girl reacted like a startled fawn and drew back several paces. "You have regained consciousness?"
"It seems so. Where is this place and how came I here?"
"We brought you."
Bram Forest's brow furrowed in thought. "Oh, yes. Now I remember. There were a group of people such as you at the place I tried to fight the dark swordsman with his own weapons." Bram Forest chuckled ruefully. "It seems I did not fare so well."
"When we discovered you were not our god, the others wanted to leave you there to die but I resisted this as being inhuman and made them bring you here."
"Where are the rest?"
"They have returned."
"Returned whence?"
The girl lowered her beautiful head sadly. "That I cannot tell you."
Bram Forest smiled. "Be not so sad. The fact that you prefer to keep the information to yourself is no reason for near-tears."
"I am not sad for that reason, sire."
"Then why?"
"Because you asked the question and are even more surely therefore, not our god."
Bram Forest was deeply curious and half-amused at the trend of this conversation. "Tell me this, then. Why does my asking the question eliminate all possibility of my being your god?"
"Because if you were the god we seek and yearn for, you would not have to ask where my people went. You would know."
"Instead of clarifying the situation," Bram Forest mused, "each question sends me deeper and deeper into a mental labyrinth."
"We risked our lives in going to the place you found us. It was forbidden to credit the ancient legend of our people. Therefore—"
"What legend?"
"That upon this day and at that place our god would appear to deliver us."
Bram Forest, now desperately seeking a question that would clarify rather than further befuddle, held up his hand. "Wait. If you expected a god to appear and I arrived on schedule, how can you be so sure that I am not he?"
"We thought so when you advanced upon the hideous Abarian and took his throat in your great hands. But when you not only allowed him to live but also suffered him to take up his whip-sword and come within an eyelash of killing you, we knew you were not our god."
Bram Forest nodded with understanding. "I can see now how stupid that act was. Certainly not a manner in which a genuine god would conduct himself." He glanced at the girl and smiled. "Please come closer that I may see you better."
She moved her head in the negative, reluctantly, Bram Forest thought, and replied, "If you were our god I would gladly place myself in your power to do with me as you would, but as you are mortal, I must remain away from you."
Bram Forest frowned. "Again things get murky."
"I am a virgin," the beautiful girl explained simply and with no self-consciousness whatever. "I must remain so until my time is ordained. If I lost my virginity, even through violation that I resist, I would immediately be delivered into the Golden Ape."
Bram Forest came upright, causing the girl to retreat a step further in alarm. "The Golden Ape, did you say?"
"Yes."
"And you are a virgin—"
This last was a statement rather than a question as Bram Forest sank back, his eyes misty with thought. "An ape, a boar, a stallion—" he pondered. "A virgin's feast—"
The girl eyed him with concern. "Are you sure that your wound has not caused—"
"It is not that," he said, switching his mind back to things of the moment. "I'm just wondering—might you tell me your name without breaking any rules of reticence?"
"I am Ylia," she said with a childlike solemnity that touched Bram Forest.
"And does Ylia never smile?"
It seemed to him she made an effort to do this but was so unfamiliar with the expression that she could not manage it.
He extended a hand, not disconcerted that she did not come close and take it. He said, "Ylia, I would not again ask a question you did not wish to answer before. But I am mightily puzzled about the life you must have led—about that manner of males you have had contact with. They are certainly a miserable lot if a female of their race must look to her virtue every waking moment.
"As for me, Ylia—and please believe—I would no more touch you in desire than I would knowingly injure a child. You are safe in my presence as in the most guarded room of a nunnery."
If he expected
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