Princess of Amathar Read online

  Princess of Amathar

  By

  Wesley M. Allison

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to actual people, living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2007 by Wesley M. Allison

  All rights reserved.

  Cover art: © Luca Oleastri | Dreamstime.com

  Second ebook Edition

  Printed in the United States

  To Victoria Allison and Edgar Rice Burroughs

  Princess of Amathar

  Chapter One: Transported to Ecos

  I don't expect you to believe this story, but it is the truth. My name is Alexander Ashton. I was born in the heart of the American west. I have often been known to say that I was born either a hundred years too late, or perhaps a hundred years too early. It always seemed to me that I had the misfortune to live in the single most unexciting period of time the panorama of history had to offer. I don't say that I longed to be transported to another time or to another world, for never in my wildest dreams did I believe this to be possible. I was destined to be surprised.

  I was born in a small city. I played as a child in a park that was once a dusty street where outlaws of the old west fought famous gunfights. When I was seven, my parents were killed in a motor vehicle accident. I really remember little of them. I was put in a state run children’s home where I lived until I was eighteen, passed by time after time by prospective adoptive parents, primarily because I was too old. I hold no ill feelings about it now. If there is one thing I learned while I was a ward of the state, it is that no matter how bad off one may be, there is always some one worse off than you are. After graduating high school and being set on my own by the state, I entered college at the local university. I became a voracious reader and excelled in athletics, but did poorly in my required studies. After two semesters of academic probation I was asked to leave. I walked down the street to the Army Recruiter's office and enlisted. There wasn't much to the army, since there was no war on at the time. While I was there, I did learn to shoot, and fight with a saber, and to keep in good physical condition, but otherwise I left the service just as I had gone in.

  After finding a new apartment in my old home town, I happened to run into a fellow whom I knew from college. He was running a small grocery store, and doing quite well, since no large grocery chain was interested in such a small market area. He offered me a job, I took it, and we became pretty close friends.

  My friend, the grocery store owner, was engaged to a nice girl, and they decided in time to get married. I was chosen to be the best man. The wedding was nice, and the reception was even better. I have never been much of a drinking man, but that night I made a name for myself in that capacity. I don't know why I drank so much. Maybe I was feeling sorry for myself and my lot in life, I don't know. I do know that in short order, I had worked myself into a staggering, slobbering, half-conscious stupor. How, when, and where I became unconscious, I cannot say, but at some point I did. And this is where my story truly begins.

  I awoke with a chill in my bones. I was lying down in a small stream bed with icy water running over my feet. I tried to rise, but couldn't. My body was stiff and weak and its only response was to shiver uncontrollably. Around me was a thick forest, and I could see dark shapes moving around in the trees. I sensed then, on some deeper level, that I was in a place I had never been before. Then I heard a deep growling as I passed once again into unconsciousness.

  When next I awoke I looked around to find myself in a small shack. I was lying on a cot made of animal furs, and I was bathed in a cold sweat. The walls of the small shelter were made from cut logs and a roughly fashioned wooden chair was the room's only furnishing. When the door of the shack opened, I truly believed for the first time in my life that there were life forms other than those I was familiar with on Earth.

  The creature that stepped inside the door, and closed it after him, was most ugly. That he was intelligent was demonstrated not only by the fact that he had opened and then closed the door, but also by the fact that he wore clothing--ugly clothing yes, but clothing nonetheless. He was about five feet tall and stood in a kind of perpetual crouch. His body was covered with coarse brown hair, two to three inches long, from his head to his feet, which reminded me of the feet of a dog or a wolf, although larger. He was somewhat wolf-like in every aspect, such as his protruding snout, but he also seemed somewhat baboon-like in his expressive eyes. I am comparing him to earthly animals, but this is really inadequate, as the similarities were actually quite superficial, and he was totally unearthly in appearance. I remember most looking at his hands. He had four fingers not too different from my own, but his abbreviated thumb possessed a great, long, curving claw.

  The creature, stepping slowly over to me, reached out a hand and gave me a piece of dried fruit. I was quite hungry and the fruit was quite good. As I began to eat, the creature began to bark and growl at me. At first I thought he was angry, but then I realized that he was trying to communicate in his language. I was too tired to respond and fruit still in hand, passed back into sleep. The next time I woke the creature was sitting in the chair looking at me with his head cocked to one side. I pushed myself up on one elbow and he spoke to me again, this time in a more human sort of language. It seemed almost like French, but having learned a few phrases of that language in the army, I knew it was not. This language was so much less nasal. He pointed to his chest and said "Malagor" then he pointed to me. I said "Alexander". He smiled wide exposing a magnificent row of long, sharp teeth. My language lessons had begun.

  It took a long time for me to recover from my illness. It seemed to me that I was nursed by the creature for at least a month. I slept many times, but each time I awoke I found light streaming in the window. Not once did I wake to find darkness, or even the pale light of the moon, outside the window. During this long period of time, my host provided me with food and water, took care of my sanitary needs and of course, taught me to speak his language. One of the first things that I learned was that "Malagor" was not the name of my companion, but was instead his race or species. He told me his real name, which seemed to be a growl with a cough thrown in for good measure. I decided that I would call him

  "Malagor", and he didn't seem to mind.

  As soon as I was physically able, Malagor helped me to the door. I was understandably anxious to see the world outside because the presence of Malagor, and an indescribable gut feeling, both told me that the world beyond that wooden threshold was not the world into which I had been born. I stepped outside with my shoulder supported by the alien. For a moment I was blinded by the brightness of the sun, but after my eyes adjusted to the increase in light, I looked around. At first glance the scene before me was no different than a thousand other views found in many scenic valleys on Earth. The small crude log cabin sat at the edge of a large beautiful golden plain near a lovely green forest. The horizon was formed in the distance by a line of low rolling hills. But as I let my eye roam toward the sky above those hazy hills, I found that there was something different and unsettling about the sky. It was as if the edge of the world blurred up into the sky. It was as if I was standing in a great bowl, with the edges rising up all around me. In reality I could discern little more than a greenish brown band above the horizon, but I felt as if I could, concentrating hard enough, make out more hills, more meadows, and plains and forests and the shore of a mighty sea, pasted on the edge of the firmament. The world, instead of disappearing over the horizon, rose up into the sky, actually becoming a part of the sky. And above it all, high above, stood the noon day sun. I felt weak. Malagor steadied me and helped me back inside the cabin. He sat me down in the chair and gave me a drink of water from a wooden cup that he had ap
parently carved especially for me. Then he sat down on the floor.

  "Tell me about this world,” I said when I had finished my water.

  "You are not from this world," he stated, matter-of-factly. "I thought this when I found you in the forest."

  "No I am not. I am from a very different world," I replied, "but tell me of this one."

  "The world is Ecos. That is the name. It is a great sphere. We are in the inside surface. What is outside, no one knows. The sun is in the middle of the world. It shines on all."

  "If the sun is always above you," I asked, "how do you know when it is night time?"

  "I do not know night time. What is night?"

  "How do you know when to sleep?"

  "One sleeps when one is sleepy." He gave me such a strange look that I had to laugh out loud.

  "Your people live in Ecos?"

  For a moment he turned away. Then he looked back at me. "Many different species live in Ecos. Many of these species are intelligent beings. I myself have seen many of these."

  "But we are speaking the language of your people?"

  Malagor opened his mouth wide and his tongue fell out the side. I had learned that this was his way of smiling. He replied.

  "When I first found you I spoke to you in the language of the Malagor, but nature was unkind to you and gave you too small a mouth. So instead I taught you the language of Amathar which we now speak. I knew that you could speak it because you look somewhat like an Amatharian."

  "How do they look like me?"

  He smiled again. "They have funny little ears, no fur, flat faces, puny noses, and long feet." I laughed. "How are they different from me then?"

  "They are better groomed," he said.

  I felt my face with its scraggly beard, and my dirty, sweaty, almost matted hair. I was indeed most poorly groomed. My clothing, the remains of a rented tuxedo, was in equally bad shape.

  "If you take me back to the stream where you found me so that I can take a bath, and loan me a sharp knife, and help me with some decent clothing,” I said, "I shall see if I cannot become more presentable." Malagor agreed to help me, but it was several days before I was well enough for even the short walk to the nearby stream. I had taken a long time to recover from what I now believe to be the effects of my transportation from Earth to Ecos. I never found out what bizarre method that transportation was, and I suppose that I never will. When I had finally recovered, I went to the stream with my new companion, I made an interesting discovery. The gravity of Ecos felt different from that of Earth. I found that I was stronger here. I wasn't a superman, but it was a noticeable difference. I could now jump almost twice as far and twice as high as I could before. Then I tried lifting some fallen trees in the woods, and found that I could lift almost twice as much as the equivalent on my planet of origin. I impressed Malagor, who said he had never seen one as strong as me, and I must admit that I impressed myself as well. After bathing in the stream, I used Malagor's knife, which was nearly razor sharp, to shave off my whiskers. I tried to trim my hair with it as well, but had less success in this endeavor. I did manage to get my hair reasonably clean. I washed my tuxedo too, but it was so poorly made that it practically fell apart in my hands. It was then that Malagor presented me with a set of clothing that he had made for me. The suit consisted of a hard leather shirt and a pair of pants made from the softer hide of several small animals, held up by a broad leather belt. There was also an excellently fashioned pair of boots with hard leather souls. He had dyed the entire suit by hand with berries and roots. The poor creature had terrible taste in colors, and the outfit could have blasted the eyes out of an onlooker with its contrasts of bright greens and purples and oranges, if only there had been an onlooker there to see it. It was a gift though, and one sorely needed, and I appreciated it. I felt as though Malagor were truly a friend--a friend such as I had never had before.

  Later, Malagor and I sat on the grass in front of his cabin, beneath the perpetual noon day sun, and ate our dinner of dried fruit and a small roasted animal that he had provided.

  "You must know that this world is not natural. Planets do not form like this. Who created Ecos?" I wondered.

  "I know no such thing,” replied the beast. "If you had not appeared claiming to be from another world, I would never have given it a second thought."

  I knew that he was baiting me, because I had described the Earth in great detail to him before, and he had accepted it, and I knew that he believed that I was not a native of Ecos.

  "I do know how Ecos came to be though," he continued. "Many years ago the universe was empty. The only thing that existed was the great Goddess Bitch. She lived in the void for a long, long time. Then she became tired of the darkness and ate up all of the black and let the day come. She shed her fur and it became a ring around her and hardened into Ecos. She gave birth to pups and they became Malagor. She left her feces and it became the other races of Ecos. Then she curled up and went to sleep and became the sun."

  "Do you believe this?" I asked.

  He cocked his head to one side and looked at me for a moment. Then he smiled. "This is what my mother told me when I was a pup."

  I smiled too. We sat in silence for a moment. Then I spoke again.

  "Have you always lived here, in this cabin?"

  "This has been my base camp while I have explored the nearby land,” he explained. "I was making ready to leave this place and move on when I found you. Again I am thinking that I should move on now."

  "If you don’t mind,” I said. "I would like to accompany you."

  "I would like that," he replied, and then he said for the first time, "Alexander." Chapter Two: The Hidden Artifacts

  After getting a good long sleep, Malagor and I began to pack our meager belongings for an extended journey. Our belongings truly were meager. My dog-like friend had only a few furs and some weapons and tools to his name, and I had almost nothing to mine. I was interested to observe Malagor's weapons. With the exception of his knife, which was obviously well-manufactured, they all seemed to be hand-made, and consisted of a spear, a bow, and a quiver of arrows. As soon as we had grouped the possessions into two bundles, we each took one and started on our way. There seemed to be no north, south, east, or west in Ecos, so we went in the direction that Malagor said he had previously been traveling. After we had walked across the plain quite a long ways, I looked back at the cabin. It was inching its way up toward the sky. It seemed a lonely place now. As we got farther and farther away, it would move up the endless horizon, though of course it would disappear from view before it got very high. I wondered though if, when we reached where ever it was we were going, it would be looking down at us from some point high up in the heavens.

  While we walked along, I asked Malagor many questions about the world of Ecos, the fauna and flora, and the intelligent inhabitants.

  "How big is Ecos?" I asked. I had thought that had Ecos been just a hollow planet, I would have been able to see far more of the horizon as it stretched up into the sky and that much more clearly than I could. It seemed to me that it was far larger.

  "Two hundred twenty six thousand hokents,” he replied.

  This of course, led to my lesson in the measurement of distances in Ecos, which was common to the Malagor and the Amatharians, and a few other intelligent races. The kentan was the basic unit of measurement, and had apparently been derived from the size of an insect lair, as strange as this may have seemed at the time. Then again, I recalled that honey bees made cells in their hive that were completely uniform in size, no matter where you happened to find the hive, or what the bees were using as a source of pollen. I marveled that the kentan had come from a zoological observation such as this. As nearly as I could calculate, the kentan was about five and one-quarter inches. A kentar was ten kentans, or about fifty two and a half inches. A kent was ten kentars, one hundred kentans, or about forty three feet nine inches. A kentad was one hundred kents, or some eight tenths of a mile. And a hokent was one thou
sand kentads, one hundred thousand kents, or eight hundred twenty eight miles. So when Malagor said that Ecos was two hundred twenty six thousand hokents in diameter, he was telling me that it was about one hundred eighty seven million miles in diameter. With a little mental calculation on my part, I realized that with a sun just under one million miles in diameter, this would put the surface of Ecos about ninety three million miles from the surface of the sun--about the same distance that Earth is from the surface of its sun. If my calculations held correct, then Ecos would have a surface area of over three billion planet Earths. It was quite an astounding concept. For a while I thought about the fact that the great plain we walked across, might well be larger than the surface area of my home planet, and yet be only a tiny fraction of Ecos. But after a while these types of musings can only give one a headache, so I turned my head to other thoughts. Looking around across the plain, I observed a marvelous collection of plains animals. I could identify the ecological niches of most of the beasts, by observing their similarities to Earth animals, and yet some of these denizens of the great prairie were completely unearthly. There was a herd of beautiful antelope-like creatures, with long spiral horns and stripes across their backs and six legs. There were beautiful flying things that looked like butterflies two yards wide. Whether they were birds or insects or something entirely different than either, I could not say. There was a large caterpillar creature thirty feet long, with a huge maw in front, that ate everything it came across, plant or animal, and there was a beast that preyed upon it that stood twenty feet tall and looked like a cross between an ostrich and a praying mantis. Some of these animals we hunted for food, some of them we gave a wide berth, and some of them we stopped and stared at in amazement, because not even Malagor had seen the likes of them.

  We walked, and we hunted as we walked, and at last I was sure we must have been traveling for a week. It is very eerie to do anything for a long period of time, and then to look up and see the sun in the exact position that it was in when you started whatever it was that you were doing. That's how it was for me. At last however, Malagor decided it was time to stop and sleep, so we cleared the grass from an area and made a fire. Malagor and I then took turns watching for beasts and sleeping. We each slept once, ate, then slept again, and then we started on our way once more. We followed this procedure many, many times over. We continued to hunt for food animals along our way, and at every small stream, we stopped to fill our water skins. I must confess that I never did know how long a journey our trip was, but it seems to me that it must have been close to a year. At one time I asked my friend how long he though that we had been walking. His only reply was, "What does it matter." At long last we reached the edge of the great plain. Before us stood a line of small hills which looked to be easily passable. On the lower slope of the hills grew many small bushes, profusely covered with tiny blue berries. Malagor picked one, smelled it, tasted it, and pronounced it good.