The girl spouted a long, angry speech. The hermit turned back and fixed his glittery, Ancient Mariner gaze on Edward. He could not possibly be as deranged as he looked, could he?
Edward pointed to the cave and said, “Thank you,” again.
The hermit showed his teeth in a sneer and stalked away without a word. Unfriendly chappie!
"Porith,” Eleal said, pointing at the scrawny back vanishing upstream. She stuck her tongue out and cut it off with a finger.
Edward thought Good God! and confirmed his understanding with more gestures. Why would anyone cut out a man's tongue? Perjury? Sedition? Blasphemy, perhaps?
He tried to convey the question but either did not succeed or did not understand the answer.
One look at Porith's offering made him nauseous. He explained that with more gestures and pushed it all to the girl. She ate while continuing her story of the night's events. Eleal was quite a storyteller. Even understanding less than a tenth of her words, Edward could appreciate her dramatic performance. She rolled her eyes and waved her hands until he was hard put to keep a straight face.
She began using berries and roots to denote the characters on stage. The roots were the baddies. She explained them by cutting imaginary corn with a sickle. He nodded, recalling Creighton's warning of reapers. Soon, though, his head ached with the effort of trying to memorize so many words at one sitting. He would forget most of them. It was like playing charades with no one to tell you if you had guessed right. What did she mean by reapers, the sun, a crescent, and kneeling?
The reapers sounded very much like the dreaded thugs of India, the murderous worshipers of Kali. The British had struggled for years to wipe out thuggee.
They went back to the temple story and Eleal dropped a hint of advanced technology. Possibly she was fantasizing or had made a mistake, but it sounded as if Creighton had killed one of the reapers with a loud noise—a gun, obviously!
The picture was becoming clearer. Eleal had gone to spy, by herself. Creighton had crossed over, arriving dazed and shocked. The next two arrivals, T'lin and Gover ... how did Eleal know their names? Those words might not be names at all but visible categories like “policeman” or “Chinaman.” Whoever or whatever they were, the “t'lin” and the “gover” had welcomed Creighton, so they were almost certainly Service. They must have brought a gun for him, because then the first reaper had attacked and Creighton had shot him dead.
The girl's observations might be more reliable than her beliefs. She thought the reapers came from the god of death. Of course! Earthquakes came from Poseidon and thunder from Thor, yes? The reapers belonged to, or were agents of, the Chamber. But who were the Chamber? Who were the Service?
The T'lin man had escaped. He was Edward's road to sanity and assistance. He was the lead to the Service and Home and duty.
"T'lin! Er, want? T'lin!” he said.
Eleal scowled and said something about T'lin and gods and bad.
Nextdoor certainly seemed to have gods in both abundance and variety.
"No religion is wholly bad,” the guv'nor had told him often enough. “Without gods of some sort, life seems to have no meaning, so mortals need gods. But no religion is wholly good, either. Every religion at some time or another has persecuted strangers, stoned prophets, burned heretics, or extorted wealth from the poor."
Edward did not believe in gods. He believed in progress and love and tolerance and ethics. He did not think Nextdoor was going to change his mind.
Eleal tired of the word game. Teaching D'ward to speak good Joalian was going to take much longer than she had expected. His accent was worse than a Niolian's and he kept forgetting things she had told him. Just when she thought she was making progress, he would come out with absolute nonsense like, “Onions sings bluer gentle?"
The day was hot and still. All her nights seemed to be full of wild adventures now, and her days needed for sleep. He was yawning too. She sent him off to the cave to rest, and he went without argument, moving as stiffly as a very old man. It would be cooler in there for him. She climbed up the bank and stretched out on a mattress of ferns under a tree.
For a while her mind kept racing. Obviously Porith Molecatcher wanted her to leave and take her Liberator with her, and he could probably starve her into obedience. Somewhere farther from the Sacrarium would be much safer. Perhaps tomorrow D'ward would be strong enough to go.
Go where?
Go to Tion, of course! Her god was a just and benevolent god. He had saved her from Eltiana's jail and Zath's reapers. The Maiden had helped by sending Sister Ahn to kill Dolm Actor, but Irepit's convent was many vales away, in Nosokland, wherever that was. Here in Sussland the Maiden's grove had been destroyed. So that left Tion, and now it was safe for Eleal to rejoin the troupe, because Dolm was dead. So she would deliver the Liberator safely to Tion's temple in Suss, and Tion would reward her.
Reward her how?
Paa, the god of healing, was another avatar of Tion. Tion, therefore, was god of healing as well as god of art and beauty. Tion could cure sicknesses—and deformities! Eleal drifted off to sleep, thinking about the reward she would like best of all.
Porith shook her awake. The crazy old man was so excited he was hooting like a goose and drooling all over his beard. He made beckoning gestures, he tugged her hand. Grumpily she rubbed her eyes and stood up.
Come! he said in sign language. Come quickly!
She followed on dragging feet. The afternoon was half-gone, the air as hot as fresh milk. Porith kept running ahead and having to wait for her.
Soon she realized that he was following a faint trail. Many branches hung across it, so it was never visible for more than a few feet, but it was an easier way through the forest than any she had found. It must be a path of his own making, for no one else would come here. It led past the Sacrarium on the side away from the cliff. Just beyond there, Molecatcher plunged through some bushes and made more wild whooping sounds.
She followed, and found him capering alongside a tent. It was a small tent, of good linen, colored a very inconspicuous green, and well concealed in the undergrowth.
"Oh, wonderful!” she cried, suddenly as excited as he. “I heard Gover Envoy invite T'lin to his tent! So whoever stole the bodies didn't know about this! And the man who owned it is dead, so we can have it!"
Apparently that was all the reassurance the old man needed. He knelt to fumble with the ties. Then he plunged inside on hands and knees with Eleal at his heels. The interior was a cavern of riches, straight out of The Fall of Tarkor. There were six or seven bales and packs there, leaving barely room for a man to lie down. Some spare clothes and a couple of straw hats lay on top of them, and a pair of good-looking boots, also. Eleal's fingers itched to start exploring this wealth, but she knew she must wait until it had been transported back to Molecatcher's cave. Gover Envoy just might have friends who knew where his camp was. He had mentioned a courier on a fast moa.
They needed two trips to transfer all their treasure, and by the time they brought in the last of it, D'ward was awake and sitting beside the first load. Eleal was relieved to see he had not opened anything, because she thought she deserved that pleasure. It would be like a birthday feast, with presents. He seemed strangely interested in the packs themselves, studying the fastenings and the stitching. In some ways D'ward Liberator was very odd!
She began with the lumpiest pack, because that seemed likely to be the most interesting. Most of the others smelled like food—bacon and onions and dried fish. Right at the top she found a bronze mirror and a razor. The Thargian had been clean-shaven, so these confirmed that the tent had belonged to him and not a reaper who might come in search of it. D'ward's blue eyes had lit up at the sight of them, so she gave them to him as a gift. The soap she kept, but she would let him share.