Page:Weird Tales volume 36 number 02.djvu/23

 had promised a doctor that he would say aloud, "Thar isn't real—I, Khal Kan, am not real."

Khal Kan laughed. The idea of saying such a thing, of asserting that Thar and Jotan and everything else was not real, seemed idiotic.

"That timid little man I am in the dream each night—he thinks I would mouth such folly as that!" Khal Kan chuckled.

Golden Wings had awakened. Her slumbrous black eyes regarded him questioningly.

"It's my own private joke, sweet," he told her. And he went on to tell her of the nightly dream he had had since childhood, of a queer world, called Earth in which he was another man. "It's the maddest world you can imagine, my pet—that dream-world. Men don't even wear swords, they don't know how to ride or fight like men, and they spend their lives plotting in stuffy rooms for a thing they call 'money'—bits of paper and metal.

"And the cream of the joke," Khal Kan laughed, "is that in my dream, I even doubt whether Thar is real. The dream-me believes that maybe this is the dream, that Jotan and Brusul and Zoor and even you are but phantom visions of my sleeping brain."

E ROSE to his feet. "Enough of dreams and visions. Today we ride to meet Egir and the Bunts. That is no dream!"

Ten thousand strong massed the fighting-men of Jotan later that morning, outside the walls of the city. Under the red sun their bronzed faces were sternly confident and eager for battle.

Kan Abul rode out through their ranks, with his captains behind him in full armor. Khal Kan was among them, and beside him rode Golden Wings. The desert princess had fiercely refused to be left behind.

Their helmets flashed in die red sunlight, and the cheers of the troops were deafening as Kan Abul spoke to his captains.

"Egir's main force is already ten leagues north of Galoon," he told them. "There's talk of some new weapon which the Bunts have, with which they claim to be invincible. So we're going to take them by surprise.

"I'll lead our main force of eight thousand archers and spearmen south along the coast road," the king continued. "My son, you will take our two thousand horsemen and ride over the first ridge of the Dragals, then ride south ten leagues. We'll join battle with the Bunts down on the coastal plain, and you can come down from the Dragals and strike their flank. And the gods will be against us if we don't roll them up and destroy them as our forefathers did, generations ago."

Kan Abul led the troops down the coast road, and as they marched along they roared out the old fighting-song of Jotan.

Hours later, Khal Kan sat his horse amid a thin screen of brush high in the red easternmost ridge of the Dragals, leagues south of Jotan. Golden Wings sat her pony beside him, and their two thousand horsemen waited below the concealment of the ridge.

Down there below them, the red slopes dropped into a narrow plain between the mountains and the blue Zambrian. Far southward, a pall of black smoke marked the site of sacked Galoon. And from there, something like a glittering snake was crawling north along the coast.

"My Uncle Egir and his green devils," muttered Khal Kan. "Now where are father and our footmen?"

"See—they come!" Golden Wings cried, pointing northward eagerly.