The Gods of Mars, Edgar Rice Burroughs [good ebook reader TXT] 📗

it before when on the cruiser’s deck you saw me slay three of your comrades.”

“I would that you had dispatched me at the same time,” he said.

“Come, come!” I cried. “There is hope yet. Neither of us is dead. We are great fighters. Why not win to freedom?”

He looked at me in amazement.

“You know not of what you speak,” he replied. “Issus is omnipotent. Issus is omniscient. She hears now the words you speak. She knows the thoughts you think. It is sacrilege even to dream of breaking her commands.”

“Rot, Xodar,” I ejaculated impatiently.

He sprang to his feet in horror.

“The curse of Issus will fall upon you,” he cried. “In another instant you will be smitten down, writhing to your death in horrible agony.”

“Do you believe that, Xodar?” I asked.

“Of course; who would dare doubt?”

“I doubt; yes, and further, I deny,” I said. “Why, Xodar, you tell me that she even knows my thoughts. The red men have all had that power for ages. And another wonderful power. They can shut their minds so that none may read their thoughts. I learned the first secret years ago; the other I never had to learn, since upon all Barsoom is none who can read what passes in the secret chambers of my brain.

“Your goddess cannot read my thoughts; nor can she read yours when you are out of sight, unless you will it. Had she been able to read mine, I am afraid that her pride would have suffered a rather severe shock when I turned at her command to ‘gaze upon the holy vision of her radiant face.’ ”

“What do you mean?” he whispered in an affrighted voice, so low that I could scarcely hear him.

“I mean that I thought her the most repulsive and vilely hideous creature my eyes ever had rested upon.”

For a moment he eyed me in horror-stricken amazement, and then with a cry of “Blasphemer” he sprang upon me.

I did not wish to strike him again, nor was it necessary, since he was unarmed and therefore quite harmless to me.

As he came I grasped his left wrist with my left hand, and, swinging my right arm about his left shoulder, caught him beneath the chin with my elbow and bore him backward across my thigh.

There he hung helpless for a moment, glaring up at me in impotent rage.

“Xodar,” I said, “let us be friends. For a year, possibly, we may be forced to live together in the narrow confines of this tiny room. I am sorry to have offended you, but I could not dream that one who had suffered from the cruel injustice of Issus still could believe her divine.

“I will say a few more words, Xodar, with no intent to wound your feelings further, but rather that you may give thought to the fact that while we live we are still more the arbiters of our own fate than is any god.

“Issus, you see, has not struck me dead, nor is she rescuing her faithful Xodar from the clutches of the unbeliever who defamed her fair beauty. No, Xodar, your Issus is a mortal old woman. Once out of her clutches and she cannot harm you.

“With your knowledge of this strange land, and my knowledge of the outer world, two such fighting-men as you and I should be able to win our way to freedom. Even though we died in the attempt, would not our memories be fairer than as though we remained in servile fear to be butchered by a cruel and unjust tyrant⁠—call her goddess or mortal, as you will.”

As I finished I raised Xodar to his feet and released him. He did not renew the attack upon me, nor did he speak. Instead, he walked toward the bench, and, sinking down upon it, remained lost in deep thought for hours.

A long time afterward I heard a soft sound at the doorway leading to one of the other apartments, and, looking up, beheld the red Martian youth gazing intently at us.

“Kaor,” I cried, after the red Martian manner of greeting.

“Kaor,” he replied. “What do you here?”

“I await my death, I presume,” I replied with a wry smile.

He too smiled, a brave and winning smile.

“I also,” he said. “Mine will come soon. I looked upon the radiant beauty of Issus nearly a year since. It has always been a source of keen wonder to me that I did not drop dead at the first sight of that hideous countenance. And her belly! By my first ancestor, but never was there so grotesque a figure in all the universe. That they should call such a one Goddess of Life Eternal, Goddess of Death, Mother of the Nearer Moon, and fifty other equally impossible titles, is quite beyond me.”

“How came you here?” I asked.

“It is very simple. I was flying a one-man air scout far to the south when the brilliant idea occurred to me that I should like to search for the Lost Sea of Korus which tradition places near to the south pole. I must have inherited from my father a wild lust for adventure, as well as a hollow where my bump of reverence should be.

“I had reached the area of eternal ice when my port propeller jammed, and I dropped to the ground to make repairs. Before I knew it the air was black with fliers, and a hundred of these First Born devils were leaping to the ground all about me.

“With drawn swords they made for me, but before I went down beneath them they had tasted of the steel of my father’s sword, and I had given such an account of myself as I know would have pleased my sire had he lived to witness it.”

“Your father is dead?” I asked.

“He died before the shell broke to let me step out into a world that has been very good to me. But for the sorrow that I had never the honour to know my father, I