Tarzan: Battle for Pellucidar by Win Scott Eckert & Mike Wolfer

Author:Win Scott Eckert & Mike Wolfer [Eckert, Win Scott & Wolfer, Mike]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Fantasy
ISBN: 9781945462269
Google: tkiZzQEACAAJ
Goodreads: 55931085
Publisher: Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.
Published: 2020-10-27T04:00:00+00:00

15

Bear-people of Pellucidar

The lord of the jungle strained at his bonds, but even his powerful muscles, sculpted and honed to Apollonian perfection by years of contending with the beasts and men of the wilderness, of traversing daily the middle and upper terraces of the great rain forests, of facing the trials of nature with only his wits and his brawn, and his bow and spear and knife and grass rope…even these mighty thews could not stretch and break the thongs of tanned and cured dinotherium hide that securely bound his wrists and ankles.

A terrible storm lashed at the village of the Ben-go-utor, the bear-people who called themselves the Shong. Tarzan and Drechsler were hunkered down in the thatched hut in which they had been imprisoned, as were indeed all the tribe of villagers safely ensconced in their own abodes, small but warming fires crackling reassuringly in the center of each circular dwelling. Tarzan was impressed at the solid construction of the huts, which appeared to be built of tough bamboo poles lashed together and driven deep into the ground. He wondered that, being bears, these people didn’t reside in caves, but then checked himself. Humans didn’t live in trees—though he himself had spent many a dark jungle night safe in the high branches of a tree, far above the crying nocturnal predators—and it wasn’t reasonable to assume that sentient beings descended from bears should automatically live in caves.

The two human captives, though bound, were also afforded a central warming fire, attended to sporadically by a Shong guard who otherwise sat on all fours in the hut’s small doorway, protected from the downpour, though still at least partially subject to punishing winds and whipping debris in the form of flying branches and pebbles. The guard bore his burden with stoicism.

They were safe within their prison, if not completely dry, for some of the driving rain inevitably showered in through the opening in the thatched roof designed for exhausting the smoke of the small fire. When the guard entered to stoke the flames, Tarzan attempted to communicate with him.

The bear-man stood upon his two hind legs and appeared surprised, if Tarzan was reading his expression correctly. But the guard refused to reply to the ape-man, strictly observing his duties, after which he left to once again squat in the doorway as the storm outside raged on.

Tarzan, with a natural affinity for languages, had recalled enough of the Shong tongue to pique the interest of the bear-man named Kublahn, which had had the effect of at least temporarily delaying their execution; he hoped further communication with his captors might revoke the death sentence altogether. Tarzan rapidly dredged up more Shong words and phrases from the depths of his memory, taught to him by the bear-man Rahb so many years ago in Africa, aided by the fact that the language of the bear-people appeared to share some morphemes with the common language of Pellucidarian gilaks and other natives of the inner world, which Tarzan had first learned from Thoar of Zoram, brother to Jana, the Red Flower.

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