Free 3 - Barbarians of Mars by Edward P. Bradbury Page B

must stay to guard the treasures still in the ship."
                   "You mean the machines?" Hool Haji
said.
                   "The machines," Rokin agreed.
                   "We could guard them," I said,
"with the aid of some of your men."
                   Rokin laughed aloud. "Barbarian I may be,
my friend, but fool I am not. No, you come with us.
I'll leave some of my men to guard the ship."
                   And so we set off along the shore. It was a
wide, smooth beach, with an occasional rock standing out from the sand and. far
away, its foliage waving gently in the mild, warm breeze, was semi-tropical
forest.
                  It seemed a peaceful enough place.
                   But I was wrong.
                   By mid-afternoon the shore had narrowed and we
were walking much closer to the forest than before. The sky was overcast and
the air had become colder. Hool Haji and myself had no
cloaks and we shivered slightly in the still, chill air.
                   When they came, they came suddenly.
                   They came in a howling pack, bursting from the
trees and running down the beach towards us. Grotesque
parodies of human beings, waving clubs and crudely-hammered swords, covered in
hair and completely naked.
                   I could not at first believe my eyes as I drew
my own sword without thinking and prepared to face them.
                   Though they walked upright, they had the
half-human faces of dogs - bloodhounds were the nearest species I could think
of.
                   What was more, the noises they made were
indistinguishable from the baying of hounds.
                   So bizarre was their appearance, so sudden
their assault, that I was almost off my guard when the
first club-brandishing dog-man came in to the attack.
                   I blocked the blow with my blade And sheered off the creature's fingers, finishing him
cleanly with a thrust at his heart.
                   Another took his place, and more besides. I
saw that we were completely surrounded by the pack. Apart from Hool Haji, Rokin
and myself, there were only two other barbarians in our party and there were
probably some fifty of the dog-men.
                   I swung my sword in an arc and it bit deep
into the necks of two of the dog-men, causing them to fall.
                   The hounds' faces were slobbering and the
large eyes held a maniacal hatred which I had only previously seen in the eyes
of mad dogs. I had the impression that if they bit me I would be infected with
rabies.
                   Three more fell before my blade as all the old
teaching of M. Clarchet, my French fencing master since childhood, came back to
me.
                   Once again I became cool.
                   Once again I became nothing more than a
fighting machine, concentrating entirely on defending myself against this mad
attack.
                   We held them off far longer than I had
expected we could, until the press became so intense I could no longer move my
sword.
                   The fighting then became a thing of fists and
feet, and I went down with at least a dozen of the dog-men on top of me.
                   I felt my arms grasped, and still I tried to
fight them off. But at length they had bound me.
                   Once again I had become a prisoner.
                   Would I survive to save Cend-Amrid?
                   I had now begun to doubt it. Ill-luck was
riding me, I was sure, and I felt that I would meet my death on that mysterious
Western continent.
                   The dog-men carried us into the forest,
conversing in a sharp, barking form of the common Martian tongue. I found it
hard to understand them.
                   Once I