Vena Remontar is Noriandara’s cousin. As a character, she had to be everything that Noriandara wasn’t. In a word– nice. I also had to make her stand out a bit from the other Amatharian knights. Therefore her shorter hair and lighter skin.
Noriandara Remontar is the title character in Princess of Amathar. She is the sister of Norar Remontar, is strikingly beautiful, and Alexander Ashton falls in love with her at first sight, leading to the main plot of the story as he has to rescue her from the Zoasians. I wanted Noriandara to be typical of pulp adventure heroines– beautiful and in danger, but she had to be something more. She turns out to be something more when she and Alexander finally meet.
I stepped onto the ledge which looked as though it must have been a landing pad for some type of small air-going vessel. It was about sixty five feet square, and hung down about one hundred feet below the rest of the city. Standing at the edge were the metallic being who was now helping me onto the level surface of the deck, and Noriandara Remontar who was watching warily.
“I started to pull you up,” she explained, “but this thing took the rope from me and did it for me.”
“It looks like an automaton,” I said, using the closest word in the Amatharian vocabulary to robot. The creature stacked the rope neatly near the precipice, and began rolling around on wheeled feet, picking up debris here and there which had blown on to the deck. “It looks like a maintenance man.”
“That is not a man,” she sneered. “It is grotesque.”
“I thought Amatharians were more tolerant of other species. It is probably designed to look something like the Meznarks.”
“Oh it is,” she said. “The Meznarks had three eyes and four arms, just as this thing does. They have legs though and not wheels. It is not the Meznarks that I find so grotesque. It is this artificial representation of them.”
“They probably made their machines look as much like them as possible so that they could feel more comfortable around them.” I suggested.
“They should not be comfortable around them,” replied the Princess. “It is one thing to have a machine as a tool, to enhance one’s abilities. It is another thing entirely to have a machine as a replacement for a person, whether that replaced person is a companion, a coworker, a slave, or a master. It disgusts me.”
I nodded. I had known people who chose to make machines their masters, and it was disgusting, whether the machine was a robot, a computer terminal, or a time clock.
“Perhaps,” I changed the subject, “if there are machines still working here, then there may well be living Meznarks as well.”
“Hmm,” she said, still irked about the robot.
I began looking around for a way to the upper levels from the deck, and was rewarded with a platform on the side opposite where I had been lifted up. This platform was open on all sides but had a small raised control panel in the center of it, and another just beside the platform on the main deck.
“Looks like a down-going room,” I said, using the Amatharian term for elevator.
“Down-going room,” muttered the Princess.
One of my favorite features of Amathar is the subway.
Just as the station was atypical of what I would expect of public transportation, so too was the train car. It was furnished more like a living room, or a comfortable den, than a public transportation system. There was a piece of furniture very much like a sofa, a small table in front of it, and a several very comfortable chairs. The sofa and chairs were covered with material that was patterned after animal skins, though it appeared to be man-made. Most surprising of all, there was a large bookcase against the back wall, filled with books. I stepped over to the small library once the subway had started into motion, and pulled one of the books from its place.
The book was very much like the book of Amath’s teachings which Norar Remontar had previously shown me. It was a bound volume with a spine, and it had a cover made of leather. The pages were made of a material something like plastic. They were thin and they could bend like paper, but they had a strength far beyond any paper product. The entire book was written in Amatharian, which of course I was unable to read, but the lines and letters seemed to be laid out in a familiar fashion. As I had noticed, the characters resembling simple line drawings of stylized animals and other almost familiar images. After staring at it for a moment, I almost thought that I could see tiny predators ready to pounce upon their prey.
“Is this a private transport car?” I asked, replacing the book.
“This shuttle train belongs to the air clan,” Norar Remontar replied, “though they make it available to anyone who needs transportation.”
“I am surprised that it doesn’t become damaged, or that the books and other furnishing aren’t stolen,” I said, noticing several small art objects atop the table, and hanging on the walls.
“Why would some one take something that wasn’t his?” the Amatharian wondered. “Of course there is a great deal of wear because of the number of people who travel on the train. That is why we must all take extra care, to see that this property of others is not needlessly damaged.”
I looked, but couldn’t find any more wear and tear than one would find in the average living room.
“Alexander Ashton, are you conscious?” I opened my eyes to see the face of the Princess looking down at me. “I thought you might be in a coma.”
“What happened?”
“Look and see, kinsman.”
I tried to sit up, but found it difficult, since both my hands and feet were bound with heavy wire. I managed to look around me, and saw that we were on the floor of a large room. It looked familiar, but for a moment I didn’t know how. I realized that this was a Zoasian land vehicle of the same general type which I had so recently driven, just as one of the aforementioned snake-men entered the compartment and pointed a large ray gun at me.
“Go ahead and shoot me, you cold-blooded bastard!” I shouted at the reptile. He just hissed at me uncomprehendingly, and then sat down nearby to guard us.
“It seems your thanks for the rescue were premature,” I told my companion.
“I resigned myself to my own death when I was first captured by the Zoasians,” said Noriandara Remontar. “The situation is no worse now. If anything, we can be happy that we have caused them so much trouble.”
“I can’t believe that they found us in the middle of that sand storm,” I said, rubbing the painful knot just behind my temple.
“The Zoasians have an extra eyelid which they can close to protect from the elements, and still be able to see,” she explained. “My aunt has made an extensive study of their culture and their physiology, though I dare say, I will be able to write quite a book on the subject myself, if I ever get back to Amathar.”
The city of Amathar is huge– roughly the size of the continental United States or say, Australia. It is round and has a great wall around it. I have always been fascinated by city planning, especially when done long in advance of need. You can see analogs of Alexander laying out Alexandria in several of my stories.
I looked through the forward view port and felt my stomach drop away. Since coming to Ecos, I had come to expect things on a grand scale– seemingly endless plains, forests so dark and thick they seemed to block the sun, vast seas and broad rivers, huge flying battleships– but nothing had prepared me for the city of Amathar. Ahead of us was a wall that stretched to the left and right as far as the eye could see. Seemingly held within this wall was a city, straining to be free of its confines. It was a city of tremendously high buildings, tall towers, and massive constructions of bizarre shape and ungodly dimension, painted with a rainbow of pastel colors from red to blue with bits of silver and gold. The city seemingly went on forever into the distance, rising up into the horizon until it became a part of the sky.
“Just how large is Amathar?” I asked.
“The city wall is a circle two thousand five hundred kentads in diameter.”
That information took several moments to compute, and at least that long to comprehend. According to my admittedly incomplete knowledge of Amatharian measurement, twenty five hundred kentads was the equivalent of two thousand miles. This seemed beyond belief, and I questioned it, but the three Amatharians confirmed my figures. Here was a single city that would, had it been located on my home planet, have almost completely covered North America.
Tular Maximinos is a relatively minor character from Princess of Amathar. He is a friend of Norar Remontar and the betrothed of Vena Remontar. He also turns out to be something of a rival to Alexander.
They all laughed again. I instinctively liked both these men– Bentar Hissendar was a friendly and happy fellow, and Tular Maximinos had an engaging wit, and a way of delivering a funny line with a straight face. I wondered for a moment if he could do the reverse, and deliver a sad line while smiling.
“It was very lucky for you that you came out of that tunnel when you did,” said Tular Maximinos. “We were just getting ready to leave the area.”
“Yes,” confirmed Bentar Hissendar. “We have been making surveys for the Hissendar Trading Group. They have been looking for new sources of edible plants and mineral resources, but the area where we found you turned out to have little promise.”
Noriandara Remontar, Princess of the Sun Clan, looked at me with what seemed to be a mixture of disgust and incomprehension. Even so, she was remarkably beautiful, with the same sharp features and dark blue skin that her cousin Vena Remontar possessed.
“Your friend the Zoasian will probably lay in wait to attack us somewhere along the trail,” she said.
“Perhaps,” I replied, “but I will not kill a defenseless enemy, and leaving him tied up out here would be just the same as running him through.”
“Well, let’s be on our way,” she said, then pointed in the general direction from which I had come. “My soul calls me from this direction. I have to retrieve my sword.”
“Of course,” I replied. “Is it at the site of the wreck?”
“Possibly. The Zoasians were not quite sure what to do with our swords. They recognized the connection between the Amatharian and the soul, but were unsure how to deal with it.”
“How many of you were taken captive?”
“Three knights, sixteen swordsmen, and eighty two warriors,” she replied. “I wonder how many of us survived.”
“I am afraid not many.”
As we started climbing the rock barrier, I told her of the assault, and the many horrors which I had witnessed in the mountain installation of Zonamis, of the pursuit of herself in the gigantic truck, and the victims at the site of the wreck. By the time we had reached the ground on the other side of the rocks, I had finished my tale.
“Well,” said Noriandara Remontar thoughtfully, “at least we can report them to their families.”
We walked through the desert, which was still relatively cool and pleasant. We didn’t follow the exact path that I had taken to find the Princess, following instead the mental message sent by her sword. Nevertheless, after walking for some while, we came to the small streamlet, where I had napped before. We stopped to take a drink, fill my canteen, and rest for a moment.
By this time, the throbbing in my arm was so painful that I thought perhaps I would be unable to bear it. I also suspected that I had an infection, because I felt as though I had a fever. Then I remembered that I had a small packet of medicine in a belt compartment. It was a package of two capsules. I was hopeful that they would bring me some relief, though I didn’t expect too much, as I suspected they were the Amatharian equivalent of aspirin. I popped the pills in my mouth, and swallowed them with a drought from the stream.
“Let’s be on our way,” said Noriandara Remontar. “We can rest after we find my sword.”
We climbed out of the stream bed and continued on our way. As I had suspected, the mental connection between knight and sword led the Princess to the wreck of the Zoasian transport. When the vehicle came within our line of sight, we could see several large figures moving around. They proved to be, when we were close enough to see them clearly, predatory animals, feasting on the remains of the dead.
There were four of the animals, picking clean the bones of Amatharian and Zoasian alike. They were about four feet tall, standing on two legs. Though they looked quite bird-like, and had beaked mouths, they were covered not in feathers, but with a wrinkled, leathery hide. They had forearms were only about a foot long, appearing quite useless, but had vestigial leather wings.
“We should be able to scare them off, don’t you think?” I asked, now starting to feel much better, but not feeling like a prolonged fight with probably vicious animals.
“First, take a picture,” the Princess advised. “I may well be the first Amatharian to see these beasts”
“We may be the first Amatharians to see these beasts,” I corrected.
“That remains to be seen.”
I pulled out my camera and snapped a quick image of the desert predators. Then I traded it for my pistol, which I had almost forgotten I still carried. Firing four quick shots, I killed three of the animals, and sent the fourth running for its life. Walking over to the wrecked Zoasian vehicle and sitting down in its shade, I closed my eyes and dozed off.
When I woke up, of course it was still noon as it always was in Ecos, but some clouds had obscured the sun, and the wind was beginning to whip up. Nearby was the body of a Zoasian, with half a dozen large spiders, just like I had seen at the stream bed, feasting upon it. I just sat for a moment watching them. Then Noriandara Remontar stepped up beside me.
“You have been asleep a long time,” she said. “I roasted a piece of one of the animals you shot, but it is not very good.”
“I see that you recovered your sword,” I said.
The two Zoasian vehicles rushed across the sandy expanse of the Ecosian desert. At times, I was sure that I was gaining on the other transport, but then at other times there seemed to be a widening of the space between us. One thing was for sure. The Zoasian in control of the first craft was a far better driver than I was. I was continually flying out of my seat as I bumped over some obstacle, and I am sure that my Amatharian passengers were similarly troubled.
At that moment a missile fired from some section of my vehicle below me. Evidently Terril Jennofar had found a gunner, or was manning a missile station himself. The projectile impacted just to the left of the fleeing vehicle. Seconds later a second missile shot forth, and this one was better aimed than the first. It hit the right rear wheel of the fleeing vehicle. For a moment it looked as though there would be a great crash, but the Zoasian driver regained control of the now smoking, crippled truck and continued on, albeit at a slower pace. I was sure now that we would be able to catch it.
Just then a massive explosion from below racked my own vehicle. I was lifted completely out of the driver’s seat, and hurled across the compartment, as the car turned first left and then right, and then began to flip over wildly. The cabin spun around and around, and my head was dashed against some piece of equipment, sending me into the darkness of unconsciousness.
When I came too, I was lying in the sand beside the great mass of bent metal that had once been the great Zoasian vehicle. A good half pound of sand was glued to the side of my face by a mass of dried blood, and my left arm was bent backwards at the wrist, obviously broken.
I pulled my tabard off and using my knife and my one good arm, cut several strips from it. I wiped the mess from my face as best I could with the rest, and then discarded it, keeping only the tiny ornament that Nona Montendro had given me to wear. I straightened out my arm with a great deal of pain and effort, and finding a straight piece of metal from the wreck and the cloth strips, splinted it. I then determined to set the break. I grabbed hold of a bar on the main part of the wreck with my left hand and leaned my body back as hard as I could. As blinding pain shot from my arm to my brain, I once again lost consciousness.
I don’t think that I was unconscious very long. When I woke up, I was dismayed to find that my arm was still not set. I set about trying the same procedure again. I was rewarded with two barely audible snaps, as my bones found their proper locations. Though I didn’t lose consciousness this second time, I was forced to lie back on the sand for several minutes trying to inhale and recover my wits.
Once my arm was stabilized, I began to look around for any other survivors of the wreck. I found two of my companions lying in the sand and another partially buried in the wreckage. All were dead. Near the rear of the mess was the body of Terril Jennofar. He was mangled almost beyond recognition, and yet when I approached, he opened his eyes and looked at me.
“I am sorry,” he said. “It is my fault. I accidentally ignited the missile, as I was attempting to load it.”
“It’s not your fault,” I said. “I will report you well.”
“Rescue her…” Then he was dead.
Bentar Hissendar is one of Norar Remontar’s friends and he becomes a friend of Alexander Ashton, the hero of our story as well. Bentar Hissendar is a happy-go-lucky jockular fellow and I didn’t get to use him as much in the story as I had originally intended, but hopefully I can rectify that if I ever finish the sequel.
City of Amathar 