IV
Moonlight silvered white the inner crater when they reached the Aarth city. The gates were closed and Kern Rensom said they would not be opened until the dawn. He guided them to a hunting estate owned by his older brother, a well-to-do Aarthman farmer, that was not far from the upper sea's rim and there they left him.
That night they slept in a soft mound of hastily gathered Wetland moss, the thick wetness of the upper sea closing about them like a warm blanket. And for long Hardan lay awake, his blood singing with the knowledge that Ylda's love was his.
Their escape from the penned-in monster, the Drylanders' fabled Thog Molog, had broken through the barriers of her false pride and she had confessed that she loved him. And she had explained to him that she was really the daughter of a noble landowner who had been courted by the aging Serid Jern against her parents' wishes. She had disguised herself as a sarif girl and joined the priestesses as a novice to reach Lake Gron and her husband-to-be.
"But I am glad I met you, Hardan," she had whispered, "before I mated with him. I could not have really loved him; only the glamour of his wild frontier kingdom attracted me.
"Nor will my father object to my marrying a sarif. He holds that the man himself is of more importance than his rank."
Hardan smiled, before he went to sleep, at the reversal in his position. Now he was the sarif, rather than Ylda. Nor did he intend to tell her of his equal rank until they stood together before her father....
With morning they left the upper sea and with the Aarthman made their way to the city. Here the diminutive men and women made much of them, feting and dining them, and learning all they could of the Wetland civilization they had never before contacted.
Kern Rensom showed them the buildings where the corroded tools of their ancestors were stored so carefully, and he took them inside the twisted wreckage of the space ship on the slope above the city. Most of all was Hardan interested in the metallic-leaved books and stacks of circular containers of record tape. Here was the secret of the Aarthmen if they but had the key of written words to unlock it.