After determining that the four klangan were dead, Duare, the remaining angan, and I started down the river toward the ocean. On the way Duare told me what had occurred on board the Sofal the preceding night, and I discovered that it had been almost precisely as Gamfor had pictured it.
“What was their object in taking you with them?” I asked.
“Vilor wanted me,” she replied.
“And Moosko merely wished to escape?”
“Yes. He thought that he would be killed when the ship reached Vepaja.”
“How did they expect to survive in a wild country like this?” I asked. “Did they know where they were?”
“They said that they thought that the country was Noobol,” she replied, “but they were not positive. The Thorans have agents in Noobol who are fomenting discord in an attempt to overthrow the government. There are several of these in a city on the coast, and it was Moosko’s intention to search for this city, where he was certain that he would find friends who would be able to arrange transportation for himself, Vilor, and me to Thora.”
We walked on in silence for some time. I was just ahead of Duare, and the angan brought up the rear. He was crestfallen and dejected. His head and tail feathers drooped. The klangan are ordinarily so vociferous that this preternatural silence attracted my attention, and, thinking that he might have been injured in the fight, I questioned him.
“I was not wounded, my captain,” he replied.
“Then what is the matter with you? Are you sad because of the deaths of your comrades?”
“It is not that,” he replied; “there are plenty more where they came from. It is because of my own death that I am sad.”
“But you are not dead!”
“I shall be soon,” he averred.
“What makes you think so?” I demanded.
“When I return to the ship, they will kill me for what I did last night. If I do not return, I shall be killed here. No one could live alone for long in such a country as this.”
“If you serve me well and obey me, you will not be killed if we succeed in the reaching the Sofal again,” I assured him.
At that he brightened perceptibly. “I shall serve you well and obey you, my captain,” he promised, and presently he was smiling and singing again as though he had not a single care in the world and there was no such thing as death.
On several occasions, when I had glanced back at my companions, I had discovered Duare’s eyes upon me, and in each instance she had turned them away quickly, as though I had surprised and embarrassed her in some questionable act. I had spoken to her only when necessary, for I had determined to atone for my previous conduct by maintaining a purely official attitude toward her that would reassure her and give her no cause for apprehension as to my intentions.
This was a difficult role for me to play while I yearned to take her into my arms and tell her again of the great love that was consuming me; but I had succeeded so far in controlling myself and saw no reason to believe that I should not be able to continue to do so, at least as long as Duare continued to give me no encouragement. The very idea that she might give me encouragement caused me to smile in spite of myself.
Presently, much to my surprise, she said, “You are very quiet. What is the matter?”
It was the first time that Duare had ever opened a conversation with me or given me any reason to believe that I existed for her as a personality; I might have been a clod of earth or a piece of furniture, for all the interest she had seemed to take in me since those two occasions upon which I had surprised her as she watched me from the concealing foliage of her garden.
“There is nothing the matter with me,” I assured her. “I am only concerned with your welfare and the necessity for getting you back to the Sofal as quickly as possible.”
“You do not talk any more,” she complained. “Formerly, when I saw you, you used to talk a great deal.”
“Probably altogether too much,” I admitted, “but you see, now I am trying not to annoy you.”
Her eyes fell to the ground. “It would not annoy me,” she said almost inaudibly, but now that I was invited to do the very thing that I had been longing to do, I became dumb; I could think of nothing to say. “You see,” she continued in her normal voice, “conditions are very different now from any that I have ever before encountered. The rules and restrictions under which I have lived among my own people cannot, I now realize, be expected to apply to situations so unusual or to people and places so foreign to those whose lives they were intended to govern.
“I have been thinking a great deal about many things—and you. I commenced to think these strange thoughts after I saw you the first time in the garden at Kooaad. I have thought that perhaps it might be nice to talk to other men than those I am permitted to see in the house of my father, the jong. I became tired of talking to these same men and to my women, but custom had made a slave and a coward of me. I did not dare do the things I most wished to do. I always wanted to talk to you, and now for the brief time before we shall be again aboard the Sofal, where I must again be governed by the laws of Vepaja, I am going to be free; I am going to do what I
