Part 3 (2/2)
As I stood there agaze at the strangeness and wonder of her, a voice at my shoulder made me whirl in surprise. A soft, silky familiar voice:
”Do you find the dead G.o.ddess so fascinating, stranger from the world of men?”
It was the girl of the forest, no longer in hunting garb, but dressed in Turkish trousers, vest and slippers with upturned toes. Jewels glittered about her waist and neck and arms, her wrists jangled with heavy bangles, in her ears two great pendants swayed--her eyelids were darkened and her lips reddened. She was a ravis.h.i.+ng houri of the harem, and I gasped a little at the change.
”Have you put on such clothes for my benefit?” I asked, for I really thought perhaps she had.
She frowned and stamped her foot in sudden anger.
”I come here to save you from what has happened to your friends, and you insult me. Don't you want to live? Do you want to become what they are going to become?” She pointed to the bodies of Jake and Noldi and Polter.
I turned where she pointed, to see a thing that very nearly made me scream out in revulsion.
I shuddered, shrank back; for several creatures were bending over the three, lifting them, bearing them away.
It was the strange, revolting difference from men in them that caused my fear. Once they may have been men, their far-off ancestors, perhaps--or in some other more recent way their bodies had been transformed, made over into creatures not human, not beast, not ghoul. What they were was not thinkable or acceptable by me. I turned my face away, shuddering.
They were men such as the wall-paintings pictured, something that had been made from the main stock of mankind, changed unthinkably into a creature who bore his tools of his trade in his own bone and flesh.
Mole-men, men with short heavy arms and wide-clawed hands, made for digging through hard earth. They bore my friends away on their hairy-naked shoulders, and I stood too shocked to say a word. Three mole-men, accompanied by three tall, pale-white figures, figures inexpressibly alien--even through the heavy white robes--that moved with an odd hopping step that no human limb could manage, turned their paper-white, long, expressionless faces toward me for an instant, then were gone, on the trail of the mole-man. Beneath those robes must have been a body as attenuated as a skeleton, as different as an insect's from man's. Within those odd egg-shaped heads must have been a mind as alien to mine as an ant's mind.
”Why do your people take my companions?” I managed, when I had regained my composure.
”They are not my people; they are of the enemies of the Dead G.o.ddess.”
The girl gestured to the figure in the crystal pillar. ”My people have no time for them, but neither have we power over them. They go their way, and we go ours. Once, long ago, it was different, but time has made us a people divided.”
”What will become of the three men?”
”They will become workmen of one kind or another. Everyone works, in _their_ life-way. But it is not _our_ way! They guard our land from such intruders; we let them. It is an ancient pact we have with them.”
”Why did they not seize me, I am an intruder as much as the others?”
”Because I signed to them to let you stay. You did not see, whatever-your-name-is....”
”Call me Carlin Keele, Carl for short. What is your name, and what is your race, and why are you so different from people as I know them?”
”My name is Nokomee, as I told you before. You are still confused from the magic that led you here. I have saved you once, and _now we are even_; my debt to you is paid. You will never see your friends again, and if you do, you will be sorry that you saw them, for they will have become beasts of burden. Now go, before it is too late. This is not your kind of country.”
Something in her eyes, something in the sharp peremptory tone she used, told me the truth.
”You don't really want me to go, Nokomee. I don't want to go. Many things make me want to stay--your beauty is not the least attraction. I could learn so much that my people do not know, that yours seem to know.”
”I would not want my beauty to lead you to your death.” Nokomee did not smile, she only looked at me, and I saw there a deep loneliness, a tender need for companions.h.i.+p and sympathy that had never been filled in her life. She looked at me, and her lower lip trembled a little, her eyes suddenly averted from mine.
”Nokomee, there is so much we would have to tell each other, you of your life, and I of the great country of which you have never heard. Would you not like to see the great cities of my country?”
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