"You wish my friend and myself to depart?"
Emphatic nod.
"I'm sure we will withdraw as soon as he is rested. But right now he's still very weak and must be fattened up and strengthened for the journey. Red meat and lots of it!"
She tried a winning smile and it was poorly received.
"Don't you make obscene gestures at me, Porith Molecatcher! You're a priest, you said. Well, this is gods’ work. You're mentioned in the prophecy, the Filoby Testament, and Holy Visek is god of prophecy. So the gods know you and what you're doing, and they expect you to give succor to the Liberator. The seeress said so!"
Glare.
"Breakfast, if you please?"
Eleal rose and walked away with as much dignity as her limp allowed. Ambria Impresario would have been proud of her.
She found D'ward sitting outside the cave. He smiled weakly at her and said, “Eleal!"
"Godsbless, D'ward! Have you remembered how to speak yet?"
He looked at her blankly. His eyes were intensely blue, although his hair was as black as any she had ever seen. She would not call him handsome, she decided. He was plain. He was bony. On the other hand he was certainly not ugly.
It was hardly fair to judge him now. His features were pale and drawn, his arms and legs a mess of scrapes and bruises. Caked blood disfigured his bandage and his mouth was swollen where he had bitten his lips. All in all, though, he was alert and probably on the mend. He seemed older than he had in the night. Lots of men shaved their faces, especially Thargians. Golfren and K'linpor did because they played juvenile roles sometimes and could add a false beard when they needed one. Boys like Klip Trumpeter did, because their whiskers were still patchy.
"Drink?” she said. She mimed drinking and pointed to the stream. “Water?"
He nodded. “Drink."
She took a gourd down and brought it back full. She taught him I drink and you drink.
"I drink,” he said, and drank. His hands trembled. Smile, gibberish.
"Thank you."
"Thank you?"
She nodded.
He tapped his bandage and said, “Thank you,” again. He had a very winning smile.
Eleal made herself comfortable and began lessons: man, woman, boy, girl, tree, sky, fingers, happy, sad, angry...
Edward was one big ache. Every muscle was bruised from the cramps, and he had battered all his bones repeatedly against stone paving. The spasms had stopped, though, and his head was clearing. He felt giddy if he tried to stand, but he would be all right in a day or so.
Nextdoor was surprisingly Earthlike—gravity and temperature, sky and clouds and sun all much the same. The plants looked like vegetation he had seen in the south of France, and the day was going to be hot accordingly. Nevertheless, this was not Earth. The moon had been very wrong. The beetles had eight legs.
Ridiculous! His mind rejected the evidence. He would wake up soon and find himself back in Albert Memorial. And when he did, he would refuse any more drugs!
He could recall seeing metal swords in the night, but not firearms. That put the culture somewhere between the Stone Age and the Renaissance, quite a gap. Both Eleal and he were dressed in very simple garments like overgrown undervests, leaving arms and shoulders and lower legs exposed. Natives in Kenya could get by in such costumes, or even less, but he would be arrested if he tried to walk along an English beach like this. The homespun material had never seen the looms of Manchester. That did not mean that there was no advanced civilization around somewhere. Earth had its Nyagathas as well as its Londons. A world was a big place and he must not judge this one by a hole in the woods.
The accommodation left a lot to be desired. He did not remember arriving at the cave. The girl could not have carried him by herself, so she had friends around somewhere. And probably enemies also, else why was she hiding him here? Her obvious intent to teach him the language suggested that she was not expecting any English-speaking collaborators to arrive in the near future. He'd learned German by spending a summer in Heidelberg with the Schweitzes, but Frau Schweitz had been proficient in English. It would be tougher without an interpreter to clear up misunderstandings, even if he did have a knack for languages.
Eleal was a pretty thing, with curly hair and a snub nose. He guessed she was eleven or twelve, no more. She had a deformed leg. She was certainly Caucasian, and could even have been English as far as looks went. And she was a sharp little dolly. Once they had gone through everything she could point to, she fetched a fur rug and spread it out on a flat rock. It was full of fine brown sand and she used this as a drawing board. Then the conversation began to grow interesting.
Four moons? Trumb, Ysh, Eltiana, Kirb'l. Two men, two women—meaning gods and goddesses, of course. The sun was Wyseth and both, which seemed odd. Well, now he was starting to get a feel for the genders. All languages except English had gender problems, and even in English ships and whales were feminine.
Eleal, Ysh, Eltiana. That was why the girl laughed when he tried to correct her pronunciation of his name—it must sound feminine to her. She was as fussy as a Frenchman about pronunciation. He tried his surname, Exeter, and she grinned again. “Kisster?"
He decided he would rather be D'ward than Kisster.
He sketched the ruined temple, and learned its name, or the word for temple. Or the word for ruin? She began to tell him the story with gestures and illustrations. She had gone there by herself, apparently—he wondered why. Creighton had appeared and her word, “Foop!” sounded much like the “Plop!” he might have used. She knew Creighton's name! Then two men had run in, separately, T'lin and Gover. She looked inquiringly; he shook his head to show that the names meant nothing to him.
He tried “Service” and “Chamber,” but those meant as little to her. Nor did “Olympus,” which Creighton had mentioned as if it were the Service's headquarters. But all those words were obviously codes, club talk that members of the Service used among themselves. The inhabitants of this world would not call it Nextdoor, nor yet the equivalent of that expression. They would just call it the World. Olympus might be a private house in some city as far from here as London was from Stonehenge.
A whole world to explore? Even Columbus had not blundered into anything quite so unthinkable.
Columbus had not wanted to rush home and enlist in the army, either, but Edward did. The only way he could do that was to locate the Service, and that meant he must learn to talk. He hauled his mind back to work.
Then he recalled two words he already knew in this unnamed language.
"Vurogty Migafilo?"
The girl started and clapped her hands in delight. She pointed southeast. “Magafilo!"
Migo, Creighton had said, meant a village in the genitive case, so maga must be nominative or dative. The language was inflected, like Latin.
At that moment a third person joined the group. Edward had not heard the apparition approach and his start of surprise gave him a shocking spasm of cramp in his back.
Robinson Crusoe, or the Wild Man of the Woods? No it was Ben Gunn, straight out of Treasure Island. Emaciated and weather-beaten, with untamed white hair and beard, this near-naked scarecrow could pass as an Indian fakir. Obviously he was the owner of the cave and Edward had slept in his bed. The glint in his crazy eyes was distinctly unfriendly, implying that hermits did not appreciate uninvited guests. He had brought a bag of berries and some dirty tubers. He dropped them and spun on his leathery heel to leave.
Edward said the words that seemed to mean, “Thank you."