Worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs Read Online Free PDF Page B

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