CHAPTER XII
ON THE WINGS OF AZIL
The end of the month following the election found Croft beginning to carry out his material plans. Robur coming to Zitra for the inauguration of Jadgor, bringing Gaya and Naia with him—the latter at Lakkon's request—found time to insist that Jason return to Himyra at once, and institute the work they had before discussed.
Nor to tell the truth was Croft in any way loath. Indeed work was what he craved, rather than a life such as for the past two weeks he had found himself compelled to live in the Zitran pyramid. In addition he felt that the atmosphere of Zitra would be subtly changed once Jadgor was upon the ground, while in Aphur with Robur, his friend and collaborator in his endeavors, the course of his plans would be cleared. Then, too, he was thrilled by the thought of contriving a material meeting with Naia, even more than by anything else. That thought it was which set him to work on the development of electric power first.
Before that, however, he took Zud and journeyed to Scira in a galley, its hull gilded, its sails of azure-blue, with a blue canopy above its after deck, driven by a motor, rather than the oars which had formerly projected from its waist. And at Scira he interviewed Koryphu, the head of the university, regarding the establishment of schools. It was arranged that he should induce Mutlos to take the matter up with Jadgor, and Croft and the high priest sailed south to the mouth of the Na and up its yellow flood.
Then once more Himyra's forges flared as they had flared for the greater part of that strange year before. Robur, democratic despite his royal birth, went with Croft to the shops. In them was posted a notice printed from Jason's original alphabetical blocks, announcing that past the command of the Mouthpiece of Zitu there was no further word. In all things pertaining to the development of the things he had planned Croft found himself supreme. He directed and designed, while at the same time he cultivated the friendship of his superintending captains and their men.
One of his first steps was to set about developing the vein of coal he had discovered. He organized a band of miners and a motor transport train. It was a strange sight when the latter for the first time rolled forth. Robur and he went with it, and saw to the starting of the work. Save for his faith in Jason the new governor of Aphur would have doubted. Laughing, Croft gave him and the staring bands of miners and captains a demonstration, and allayed their doubts. On the second day, after the strippers were uncovering the vein and others of the men were erecting cabins to house the workers, Robur and he drove back.
Copper wire and rubber, or a substitute, were what he next required. The first was easily gained. For generations the Tamarizians had worked in metal, as shown by their couches, their molded doors, their carriages and chariots and their tempered swords and spears. Croft set hundreds of the workers to the task of making wire. The second requirement was far less readily gained. But he did not despair. Aphur's climate was tropical in the main. He believed he might find some vegetable product such as he needed for the insulation of his wires and set about an extensive questioning of the city's learned men. So in the end he learned of a tree which exuded a milk-like sap, in the forests south along the Na. Thither he and Robur went straightway in a motor-driven galley, and the thing was done in theory at least, depending for its practical working out on the efforts of an army of local natives, whom the two set to gathering sap.
Back again in Himyra, save at night, Croft gave himself little rest. And even at night since, on Robur's insistence, he had taken up residence at the palace rather than in the Himyran pyramid, Robur and he discussed their plans, unless the governor was called by his duties somewhere else. Occasionally when this happened, Croft talked with Gaya instead.
In this way he succeeded in winning her sympathetic understanding of his position, even as concerning his love for Naia he had won it once before. And Gaya, whose nature was characterized by a sweet simplicity, questioned him frankly concerning the episode of Naia's attempted suicide in the pool:
"Robur swore by Zitu, he believed you present, in the same guise in which you have told me, you move when your body sleeps."
"Yes, Robur was right," Croft told her and described step by step what had occurred.
The princess nodded. "Now that Lakkon remains with Jadgor at Zitra, the maid grows lonely," she declared. "She has asked me to visit her. May I speak with her concerning these things if she mentions to me her dreams?"
Croft smiled. On Palos, or on earth, woman he thought was the same. And Gaya, happy beyond question in the arms of the man of her choice, stood ready to lead or drive Naia, a sister-woman to a mating if she could. And, smiling, he nodded assent, but added a caution. "Yet speak not of it save as of a dream—wife of my true friend. For the growth of the soul must be as the growth of a flower, which the light of truth expands."
His wire being made, his rubber gathered, Croft turned next to the harnessing of the mountain stream. He chose copper for his penstocks instead of wood, furnishing specifications to the molders for the sections of the pipe and designing the model of the turbines to be mounted in the pits.
In all things Robur rendered him such assistance as he could, while he never ceased to marvel at the very things he planned. "Mouthpiece of Zitu you are indeed!" he exclaimed again and again, with flashing eyes as some new detail was unfolded to his mind. "Let Jadgor be president at his leisure. Thou and I, my Jason, shall take Tamarizia yet and make it a new world."
And with such a lieutenant Croft found his work advance. Wire was being made in miles, rubber was being delivered in enormous chunks from the commercial galleys down the Na, loaded onto trucks along the quays, drawn by the dog-like creatures harnessed to them through the merchandise tunnels beneath the streets and stored in the huge warehouses against future use. Indeed all Himyra, all Aphur hummed at the end of the month, and the founders were beginning to turn out the sections of the giant penstock pipes.
Thereupon Croft collected another train of motors and, organizing a party of road-builders and masons, made his way into the hills to select the site of his power station on the mountain stream.
At the camp he established beside the mountain torrent he lost no time. Long since he had cast aside Zud's choice of temple dress, for the metal leg-cases, the short-skirted tunic of a military captain, falling half-way down the thighs, and belted at the waist—a costume affording the utmost freedom of movement while he directed the beginning of each task. Habited thus he sat one day on the hillside, watching his laborers digging trenches for the mighty penstocks, preparing the pits for the turbines when, with a crash, through some near-by bushes was thrust a huge animal face.
Open it was, gaping, with a lolling red tongue, and yellow fang-like teeth. For a moment it stared at him panting and then with a bound the whole lithe creature advanced, and flung itself against him as he scrambled to his feet.
"Hai, Hupor!" he cried, recognizing the huge houndlike beast which had fawned upon him once before in Lakkon's mountain house, and excited Naia's comment by the act.
Then as the creature dropped down beside him and turned its eyes, he followed their direction with his own, and found his heart begin a gladdened leaping. A trifle further up the hillside, Naia of Aphur stood between two trees.
Soft climbing sandals of gnuppa hide were on her feet and embraced her tapering calves to just below the knees. Brown was her garment above them, embroidered simply in green. And on her golden hair was a band of brown, supporting a shimmering drape against the heat of the afternoon, and a curling plume green as the leaves above it. In that first glance it seemed to Croft that seen so, she was more beautiful than she had ever been.
He went toward her, his pulses hammering in his ears, the giant beast trailing at his heels.
"Greeting, maid of Aphur!" he said when he stood before her, and bowed deeply from the hips, in formal fashion.
"Hail, Mouthpiece of Zitu!" Naia inclined her head. "Did Hupor break upon your meditations or distract your attention from the work in hand?"
"Hupor and I," said Croft with a glance at the beast, "are friends. Nor is my work a thing requiring such haste, that I may not spare time to admire the fairest work of Zitu's hands."
A swift color mounted into Naia's cheeks. Her glance shifted. "I walk frequently with Hupor," she began a somewhat confused explanation. "The temptation came upon me to inspect the work which I have watched from my father's home for the past three suns, since it began. Hupor, I think, was more surprised to see you than was I."
"You expected to find me?" Croft caught her words up quickly.
"Why not?" she rejoined with an upward flash of her eyes. "Is not the work of Zitu's Mouthpiece under his direction?" Her manner changed, became charged with covert meaning. "And more I dreamed."
"Dreamed?" Croft repeated, striving to still a rising tumult in his breast, at what seemed a challenging of his spirit by hers.
"Nay, I know not," she said almost faintly, while her white lids quivered above each purple iris. "But it was as though one told me this stream was to be used to bring new light to Himyra—that such was a part of your plans."
"Yes," he said, "it is—to Himyra, and to Lakkon, thy father's house, if so you desire, and to all of Aphur, all of Tamarizia in time. If so you saw it, it would appear as a vision rather than a dream, maid of Aphur. Come and I will show you its beginning and explain."
For an hour after that she wandered with him, and watching her now and then, Croft surprised a puzzled expression on her face. Yet he said no definite word, since he knew that the leaven of his past acts was working in her, was slowly rising up until at last it should wake her fully to the truth.
"It were hardly fitting, were Lakkon's daughter not to offer to Zitu's mouthpiece the freedom of Lakkon's house," she said at the last, when Croft had escorted her back to the mountain valley wherein the palace was placed. And her tone was vaguely wistful—there was something in her eyes that cried out to him, wholly unlike that blue fire of scorn they had held, when she flung the betrothal seal of Azil against his breast.
"Jason, the Mouthpiece, shall do himself the honor of Lakkon's house, when Lakkon is within it," he replied with meaning, as he bowed and turned and left her, and heard her catch her breath.
Yet he took with him a song in his heart because of the invitation which had faltered from her lips; because as he knew now the cry of spirit to spirit was beginning to actuate the flesh. And he walked more as a god indeed than a man as he made his way back to his workmen, threading his way on springing feet, glorying in the strength of his free-limbed stride on the wooded slopes, holding in his heart the knowledge that it was because she had felt he would be present—because of an urge to be near him, to speak with him as man and woman, that she had come to view the new work.
But he did not attempt to approach her again in the astral condition during the week longer that he remained at the site of the power-plant. Nor did Naia venture to it any more. And so soon as he was satisfied that his subordinates understood the exact scope of their duties, he returned to set about the actual construction of the dynamo that, water driven, should light Himyra with a myriad of glowing lamps.
But that night, after he had received Robur's report of progress, and they had talked over the dynamo plans, he sought his own apartment and stretched himself upon his couch. And then he went seeking the two women who in all his life he had known the best, because he thought that it would be on this first night, with Gaya, that Naia would unburden herself.
Failing to find them in the palace, he sought and found them in the garden, seated on a carved bench of stone, inside the vine-grown walls of the pool. Naia's eyes were fixed upon its surface, silvered by the light of Palos's moons. Very wide and dark they seemed beneath the shadow of her hair. Her lips moved.
"Whether these be dreams, induced by those things of which you told me, or whether too much thinking has tired my mind until it makes of vain imaginings the seeming of other thought, I know not," she said in a musing voice. "Yet even as you said, he had told my cousin Robur that he left his body, so has it seemed to me that I left my flesh, when he called me to him—that hand in hand we wandered forth together, to Himyra—over the mountains, and once that we leaped all space, as he says his spirit leaped from earth to Palos and stood upon the larger of the moons up yonder, whose light sparkles here on the pool."
"Zitu!" Gaya's tones were a trifle unsteady—filled with a certain awe, as Croft waited her answer. "But—Naia, sweet maid, may not dreams embody truth?"
"If dreams they be, I think it may be so," her companion rejoined. "For on that time we went to Himyra as it seemed, I saw my father asleep, and he whispered my name, and the next time he came to me he spoke to me about it; said that he saw me standing beside him and had called me.
"And,"—abruptly her soft voice took on the speaking semblance of a child—"Gaya—the night was the same—on which I had my dream. And again on an afternoon when it seemed he called me, and we wandered over hill and valley, where flowers bloomed, and up to the everlasting snows, it seemed also that on returning Maia thought that I had died, and he bade me back into my body, promising to come to me again. And when I woke, Maia and Mitlos stood beside me, in tears and terror, thinking my spirit flown. Gaya—how explain such things as these?"
"I may not tell you," Gaya faltered. "In these days since Zitu's mouthpiece came among us, Aphur and all Tamarizia have witnessed wondrous sights, have dreamed of undreamed truths."
"Mouthpiece of Zitu," Naia repeated, turning to face her companion. "I like not the name. Jason, he calls himself to me in my dreams, and as Jason I prefer to think of him—as Jason, a man, and—and—my lover. Ah, Gaya, should I blush for such a thought?"
"Nay—thou art a woman, ripe for loving," Gaya reassured her quickly. "And to women, be they fit, I think that Ga herself sends dreams."
"Dreams!" Abruptly Naia clenched a fist and struck the tapered outline of her thigh. "Dreams—aye, dreams they must be, Gaya—for to me he came no more again. Only when I thought not of his coming did it happen, and since, when I have called him, sought once more to sleep and find him, it is vain. Yet if I be shameless, let me speak the same. Greater happiness have I never known since I tore the seal of Azil from my girdle, than when in my sleep he called me to him, and I answered and saw him standing before me in my chamber, fair as Azil himself, with his form shot through by the soft light of the moon. Or, when I slept and Maia fanned me, and he came and led me into the outer world, where we wandered in far places, he and I alone."
"You saw him while he was in the mountains?" Gaya asked as her companion paused, causing Croft to smile as he saw her intent to learn what he himself had not told.
"Yes—what am I saying? Gaya, I forget myself, even as that day I forgot myself and bade him to my father's house." Suddenly she broke off to throw her arms about Gaya's neck and bury her face, gone white in the silver moonlight, against her breast.
"And—" the arms of the older woman crept about her.
"He replied he would enter it when Lakkon was within it," Naia told her in a smothered voice.
"As he would were he careful of your honor." Gaya held her close. "Child, when my visit is ended, you must return with me to Himyra, nor longer spend your time in dreams and thoughts."
"But—" Naia sat up abruptly. Her question came with a sweetly feminine inconsistency. "Would he not think I sought his presence, were I to accompany you to the palace?"
"Are you not Robur's cousin?" Gaya answered. "Can he expect you to remain forever in your father's house?"
Croft's smile was very tender as he turned away. Time and those "dreams" of hers were fighting his battle for him in Naia's soul. And had he need of other assistance in winning the one woman he desired in a million worlds or years, Gaya was his lieutenant. He blessed her as he returned to Himyra, for that propinquity of Naia and himself in the future, that feminine endeavor at match-making, for which he now knew that she schemed.