Almuric - Robert E. Howard (trending books to read TXT) 📗

and among the rocking towers that spilled down showers of stone blocks

I raced, until I stood before the rearing horror. Blind and brainless

though it was, yet it possessed some form of sensibility, because

instantly, as I hurled a heavy stone at it, its movements ceased to be

erratic. It charged straight for me, casting splintered masonry right

and left, as foam is thrown by the rush of an ox through a stream.

I ran fleetly from it, leading it away from the screaming masses of

humanity that struggled and fled along the rim of the cliff, and

suddenly found myself on a battlement on the edge of the cliff, with a

sheer drop of five hundred feet beneath me to the river Yogh. Behind

me came the monster. As I turned desperately, it reared up and plunged

at me. In the middle of its gigantic slug-like body I saw a dark spot

as big as my hand pulsing. I knew that this must be the center of the

being’s life, and I sprang at it like a wounded tiger, plunging my

sword into that dark spot.

Whether I reached it or not, I did not know. Even as I leaped, the

whole universe exploded in one burst of blinding white flame and

thunder, followed instantly by the blackness of oblivion.

They say that at the instant my sword sank into the body of the

fire-monster, both it and I were enveloped in a blinding blue flame.

There was a deafening report, like a thunderclap, that tore the

creature asunder, and hurled its mangled form, with my body, far out

over the cliff, to fall five hundred feet into the deep blue waters of

Yogh.

It was Thab who saved me from drowning, leaping into the river

despite his crippled condition, to dive until he found and dragged my

senseless body from the water.

You will say, perhaps, that it is impossible for a man to fall five

hundred feet into water and live. My only reply is that I did it, and

I live; though I doubt if there is any man on Earth who could do it.

For a long time I was senseless and for longer I lay in delirium;

for longer again, I lay completely paralyzed, my disrupted and numbed

nerves slowly coming back into life again.

I came to myself on a couch in Koth. I knew nothing of the long trek

back through the forests and across the plains from the doomed city of

Yugga. Of the nine thousand men who marched to Yagg, only five

thousand returned, wounded, weary, bloodstained, but triumphant. With

them came fifty thousand women, the freed slaves of the vanquished

Yagas. Those who were neither Kothan nor Khoran were escorted to their

own cities—a thing unique in the history of Almuric. The little

yellow and red women were given the freedom of either city, and

allowed to dwell there in full freedom.

As for me, I have Altha—and she has me. The glamor of her, akin to

glory, dazzled me with its brilliance, when first I saw her bending

over my couch after my return from Yagg. Her features seemed to

glimmer and float above me; then they coalesced into a vision of

transcendent loveliness, yet strangely familiar to me. Our love will

last forever, for it has been annealed in the white-hot fires of a

mutual experience—of a savage ordeal and a great suffering.

Now, for the first time, there is peace between the cities of Khor

and Koth, which have sworn eternal friendship to each other; and the

only warfare is the unremitting struggle waged against the ferocious

wild beasts and weird forms of animal life that abound in much of the

planet. And we two—I an Earthman born, and Altha, a daughter of

Almuric who possesses the gentler instincts of an Earthwoman—we hope

to instill some of the culture of my native planet into this erstwhile

savage people before we die and become as the dust of my adopted

planet, Almuric.

THE END