I could offer no suggestion, and I didn't try. The boat had reached the beach by the time the women and the blue man had been brought to the edge of the water, and now they were thrust in. Part of the Zollarians crowded aboard, and the boat shoved off, leaving the rest of the band to await its return. Croft and I followed, as propelled by the straining muscles of well-nigh naked rowers, it moved across the waves. With a sense of the bizarreness, the weirdness, of it all, I found myself perching upon a gunwale, while Croft actually took his place at Naia's side. It was an odd sensation to realize myself a part of that strange archaic scene; wherein a beautiful woman had been abducted, and her captors, bronzed men dressed more in the fashion of the soldiery of forgotten empires than anything else, drove their boat across a moonlight silvered tide. I found myself wondering how they would have acted could they have seen us seated there among them. But they did not, and the steady sweep of the oars brought us presently close to the side of the galley, up which the Zollarians swarmed on down-flung ladders to reach the deck. Naia and Maia followed, climbing a ladder with surprising ease until I recalled what Croft had told me of the wiry strength in Naia's supple figure in the past, and I considered the bodily freedom allowed by the Tamarizian fashion in dress. Last of all to leave the boat, before it returned to the beach, came Bathos, whom, being blue, the Zollarians had termed a slave, as were all of his race born of captive parents, in the nation to the north. I glanced about me, recognizing the craft as similar in the main details at least to those Jason had found in common use on the Tamarizian rivers and the Central Sea, when he had reached Palos first. There was a high deck forward, a lower deck in the waist, where the oarsmen sat on benches, close to a series of ports in the skin of the vessel, through which were thrust the butts of the heavy oars. Aft again was a second higher deck, covered by an awning beneath which were placed padded divans and several quaintly shaped and ornamented chairs. Indeed, the vessel was nothing less than regal, as I perceived. Green was the awning and the sail on the gilded mast running up between the banks of rowers' benches. Gilded too were the railings of the twin stairs that led up to the after-deck on either side, from the lower level of the waist. And the sheathing of the decks seemed to be made of closely fitted strips of the wine-red wood, customarily used for the fashioning of couches and divans and chairs. * * * * * Plainly, then, we had come aboard the craft of someone of more than ordinary station, I thought, and gave my attention to a man standing on guard beside a door in the facing of the space between the level of the after-deck and the waist, where, as I judged, whatever private cabins there might be on the vessel would be placed.