Thongor at the End of Time by Lin Carter

Author:Lin Carter [Carter, Lin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-11-20T06:00:00+00:00

The cut was shallow and would heal cleanly and quickly. Charn Thovis spent the day in his bunk resting, but was soon up and around. Almost at once he noticed a remarkable change in the attitude of the pirates towards himself and Prince Thar. They were aloof no longer. He had won their friendship.

For all their bloody-handed trade, they proved a kindly lot. Lonely men living a rough life with death and danger at every hand, they were fiercely loyal to their captain and eager to show their regard for the stranger who had saved him from a traitor’s knife in the back.

While Charn Thovis rested and felt his wound heal swiftly in the open air and salt tang of the sea-wind and the burning sun, old Durgan and fat Blay and the other pirates adopted Thar and vied with each other to teach the eager boy to clamber about in the rigging and balance on the spars.

Thangmar had been their friend from the moment he dove in the blue waters of the Gulf and bore Charn Thovis’ head up out of the waves. Now the grinning, good-natured blond giant from the Red Forests of Kodanga taught Thar how to steer the great ship and handle the broad rudder that thrust into their foaming wake behind the curve of the galley’s keel.

One by one the other men became friendly. Roegir, the Blue Nomad, was generally a silent, grim-faced loner who shunned the companionship of the others and seemed apart from them—perhaps due to his race, for he was the only Hordesman from the farthest East among the pirates of the Scimitar. But Thar had learned a few words of the Nomad dialect from Shangoth and Chundja and the other Jegga warriors who had served in Thongor’s private guard. And soon the laughing boy won even the unspeaking Roegir for a friend and Charn Thovis watched as the indigo-skinned nine-foot colossus rode the boy around on his shoulders.

Even the glum, bad-tempered mate, a thickset, black-whiskered little man named Angar Zend, was won over by Charn Thovis’ act and Thar’s boyish merriment. He bent a benign eye on the little prince and permitted the men to teach him how to handle himself aloft. Soon the brighteyed boy was clambering up rope ladders and treading the perilous, narrow ways aloft among the rigging as fearless and sure-footed as a monkey.

Thar was very young and youth is adaptable. The boy made friends among the pirates, to whom he became a sort of pet. They competed with one another to teach him how to splice a rope or mend a sail, taught him to handle a seaman’s cutlass and to read the winds and the currents and to calculate the direction of the ship’s course from the stars. Thar, who had never been on a sea-going ship in his life, loved every minute of it. And even Charn Thovis began to relax and enjoy himself; surely he could have found no better hiding-place from the scrutiny of Dalendus Vool than here among the pirates of the Southern Sea.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.