Jadgor moved. He left his seat, found wax-coated tablets and a stylus,
and returned. For a moment or two he wrote rapidly, cutting his
official mandate to the captain of the galley into the virgin surface.
Then, rising, once more he handed it to Croft.
"Go," he said, "and Zitu go with you. You will keep us informed in this
matter?"
"Aye, as it progresses." Croft accepted the tablet. "Zitu keep you,
Jadgor." He turned to leave.
"Jason," Lakkon quavered.
Jason paused.
"Depart not from me in anger. I sought not truly to give you fresh
offense. And--and carry my blessing to my daughter when next you meet
her in the spirit, as she has told me thou canst."
For a barely perceptible interval Croft appeared to hesitate, and then
he caught a heavy breath.
"Against the father of Naia of Aphur it were hard indeed for anger to
find a place in my heart. Zitu be with you, Lakkon, also," he said, and
left.
Outside the room he made his way, outside the palace of Jadgor, once
more to a seat in the motur, and in it toward the city walls and the
foot of a mounting flight of stairs.
A sentry stood with sword and spear before them. Croft addressed him.
He saluted and permitted him to pass. Jason, Mouthpiece of Zitu,
climbed up in the silvery moonlight, his shadow a purple blot beside
him, to reach the top at last. And there strangely in all that archaic
scene he paused before the door of a hut, above which towered the
spidery outline of a wireless mast. For an instant he turned his eyes
outward over the expanse of the Central Sea, and then he passed inside.
A man seated at a table, with the key of the wireless before him,
started to his feet.
"A message to Robur, Governor of Aphur in Himyra, and quickly," Croft
said.
The operator regained his seat and produced his headdress, clamping
it against his ears. Croft gave the message. There came the hissing
crash of the spark. Strange, I found myself thinking as I watched--an
anachronism surely that this youth of Palos, clad in plain tunic and
sandals and leg-casings of leather, above which showed the sinewy
flesh of his lower thighs and knees, should be sitting here on top of
the ramparts of a walled city, hurling forth across the ocean beyond
him the potential Hertzian waves. And yet it was no more strange than
that I should know it--than that the grim-visaged man in the metal
harness of a Tamarizian noble was the one through whose genius it was
inspired.
And then the thing was done. The crashing of the spark was silenced.
Croft tossed a coin on the table and passed outside and down the
stairs. And when next the motur paused he gave the driver another
coin and dismissed him. He stood before a galley, moored close to the
semi-circular quays of Zitra's inner harbor, stretching like a pool
of liquid silver beyond him to the mighty sea-doors that closed the
entrance to it in the overarching walls.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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