To the Venusian chief he said: “I think I’ll muscle in on your territory.”
Mara, the crossbow-girl, brought Planter to the place she called the Nest.
It was hollowed out in the thickest part of the towering jungle, as a rabbit’s form is hollowed among tall grasses. The floor was of plaited and pressed withes, supported on stumps and roots of many tall growths. Rounding upward and outward from this were walls, also of wooden poles and twigs, woven into the growing tangle. The roof was similarly made, but strengthened and waterproofed with earth, dried and baked by some sort of intense heat.
The space thus blocked off was shaped like the rough inside of a hollow pumpkin, and in size was comparable to the auditorium of a large theater. Within it were set up smaller huts and bowers. There were common cooking-fires, in ovens of stone and mud-brick, and a great common light suspended from the ceiling by a long heavy chain. This was a metal lamp, fed by oily sap from some sort of tree.
Finding the Nest was difficult. Mara had picked a careful way through mazes of thick vegetation, paying special attention to the rearranging of leaves and branches behind them. Sagely she explained that the Skygors, when hunting her kind, were thus completely lost. Even at the very doorstep of the Nest, the tangled vines, branches and leaf-sprays obscured any hint of such a place at hand.
The dwellers in the Nest were all women.
They came cautiously forward, twenty or so, as Mara ushered Planter inside. They were active specimens, dressed scantily and attractively, like Mara. Most of them were young, several comely. All were fair of skin and hair, a logical condition in the cloudy air of Venus. They wore daggers, hatchets, ammunition pouches. Even at home, they all carried crossbows.
“What does this man here?” demanded a lean, harsh-faced woman of middle age. “Is he not content with servitude?”
Mara shook her head. “He’s like none we know. He fights more fiercely than we—Ecod, shouldst have seen him! Barehanded, he o’ercame two Skygors. I slew two more. Look at our trove!”
She opened a parcel of great leaves, and showed dozens of the silver pens that were ammunition for both the Skygor pistols and the human crossbows. Planter also showed what he had brought from the battlefield—several belts, numerous harness fastenings, and two of the guns. These latter made the crossbow-girls nervous.
“We stand by these,” Mara said, tapping her crossbow.
Planter fiddled with a pistol. Its mechanism was strange but understandable, and he flattered himself that he could learn to use it. As for the pen-missiles, they seemed to contain a charge that burned violently on exposure to air. The trigger-mechanism, whether of pistol or crossbow, punctured it, set it afire, and the vehemence of combustion not only propelled it but destroyed the target completely.
The older woman, whose name was Mantha, nodded her head over a decision.
“Let the man have the dag,” she granted, with an air of authority. “If he fights as Mara says, he may be of aid. Yet he is unlike those we know, in hue and aspect.”
True enough, Planter was dark of complexion, with black curls and ruddy tan jaws. He spoke to Mantha, respectfully, for the others called her “Mother” and treated her as a commander.
“I’m not of your people,” he said. “I come from another planet. Earth.”
“Earth?” she repeated. “You come from there? Why, so do we all.”
Down a trail went a patrol of Skygors. Among them, not much under them in size, tramped Max. His broad shoulders bore a great burden of supplies from the ship. At the head of the procession, next to the chief, walked Disbro.
As someone else was saying to Planter at almost the same moment, the chief Skygor boomed to Disbro: “You are not like men we know.”
“Naturally not,” agreed Disbro. “Your race is more like a bunch of freak reptiles.”
“Not my race,” demurred the chief Skygor. “Men. Slaves.”
Disbro understood only part, and took exception to that. “I’m no slave of yours,” he warned.
“No. Equal. We have long needed equal men, to kill off the wild girls.”
“You see, Mr. Disbro?” chimed in Max from behind.
David Planter was embarrassed.
Inside the Nest, he sat on a crude chair opposite Mantha, the Mother. The overhead light burned dim, and damp-banishing fires in the ovens mingled red glows. Planter asked questions, but was distracted by the crossbow-girls, who watched him with round eyes, whispering and giggling. Mara, near by, scowled at the noisemakers.
“This Venus world has much that’s unknown,” Mantha said. “Here in the north can we dwell. Not many days off the steam is thick, the heat horrid, the jungle dreadful. None go there and return.”
“Mother, if you are called that, enlighten me,” begged Planter. “You say you come from Earth.”
“Our fathers came. Lifetimes agone.”
Planter’s good-looking face showed his amazement. Interworld flight was new, he had thought. But some unknown expedition might have tried it, succeeded, and then never returned to report.
“ ’Twas for fear of black Cromwell,” Mantha enlarged.
“Cromwell!” echoed Planter. “The Puritan leader who fought and wiped out the English Cavaliers?”
Mantha seized on one word. “Cavaliers. Yes. Our lives were forfeit. We flew hither.”
It explained everything—human beings in a world never meant for anything but amphibians, their fair complexions, their quaint but understandable speech, the crossbows that would be familiar weapons to Shakespeare, Drake or Captain John Smith. Yes, it explained everything, except how pre-machine age Britishers could succeed on a voyage where eight spaceships before Planter’s had failed.
“How did you fly?” demanded Planter, amazed.
Mantha shook her graying locks. “Nay, I know not. ’Twas long ago, and all records are held in the Skygor fastness.”
“They stole from you?”
“After our fathers made landfall, there was war,” Mantha said, her voice bitter. “The Skygors were many, and would have slain all, but thought to hold slaves. And as slaves our fathers dwelt and died, and their children after them.”
“But you aren’t slaves,” protested Planter.
“ ’Tis Skygor fashion to keep all men, and such women
