"Your father is dead?" I asked.

"He died before the shell broke to let me step out into a world that
has been very good to me. But for the sorrow that I had never the
honour to know my father, I have been very happy. My only sorrow now
is that my mother must mourn me as she has for ten long years mourned
my father."

"Who was your father?" I asked.

He was about to reply when the outer door of our prison opened and a
burly guard entered and ordered him to his own quarters for the night,
locking the door after him as he passed through into the further
chamber.

"It is Issus' wish that you two be confined in the same room," said the
guard when he had returned to our cell. "This cowardly slave of a
slave is to serve you well," he said to me, indicating Xodar with a
wave of his hand. "If he does not, you are to beat him into
submission. It is Issus' wish that you heap upon him every indignity
and degradation of which you can conceive."

With these words he left us.

Xodar still sat with his face buried in his hands. I walked to his
side and placed my hand upon his shoulder.

"Xodar," I said, "you have heard the commands of Issus, but you need
not fear that I shall attempt to put them into execution. You are a
brave man, Xodar. It is your own affair if you wish to be persecuted
and humiliated; but were I you I should assert my manhood and defy my
enemies."

"I have been thinking very hard, John Carter," he said, "of all the new
ideas you gave me a few hours since. Little by little I have been
piecing together the things that you said which sounded blasphemous to
me then with the things that I have seen in my past life and dared not
even think about for fear of bringing down upon me the wrath of Issus.

"I believe now that she is a fraud; no more divine than you or I. More
I am willing to concede--that the First Born are no holier than the
Holy Therns, nor the Holy Therns more holy than the red men.

"The whole fabric of our religion is based on superstitious belief in
lies that have been foisted upon us for ages by those directly above
us, to whose personal profit and aggrandizement it was to have us
continue to believe as they wished us to believe.

"I am ready to cast off the ties that have bound me. I am ready to
defy Issus herself; but what will it avail us? Be the First Born gods
or mortals, they are a powerful race, and we are as fast in their
clutches as though we were already dead. The