“I grudge no man his funeral.”
She painfully hoisted the body on her narrow shoulders, and they stepped out into the sunlight. The heat struck them like a blow on the head. Maskull moved aside, to allow her to precede him, but no compassion entered his heart. He brooded over the wrongs the woman had done him.
The way went along the south side of the great pyramid, near its base. It was a rough road, clogged with boulders and crossed by cracks and water gullies; they could see the water, but could not get at it. There was no shade. Blisters formed on their skin, while all the water in their blood seemed to dry up.
Maskull forgot his own tortures in his devil’s delight at Tydomin’s. “Sing me a song!” he called out presently. “A characteristic one.”
She turned her head and gave him a long, peculiar look; then, without any sort of expostulation, started singing. Her voice was low and weird. The song was so extraordinary that he had to rub his eyes to ascertain whether he was awake or dreaming. The slow surprises of the grotesque melody began to agitate him in a horrible fashion; the words were pure nonsense—or else their significance was too deep for him.
“Where, in the name of all unholy things, did you acquire that stuff, woman?”
Tydomin shed a sickly smile, while the corpse swayed about with ghastly jerks over her left shoulder. She held it in position with her two left arms. “It’s a pity we could not have met as friends, Maskull. I could have shown you a side of Tormance which now perhaps you will never see. The wild, mad side. But now it’s too late, and it doesn’t matter.”
They turned the angle of the mountain, and started to traverse the western base.
“Which is the quickest way out of this miserable land?” asked Maskull.
“It is easiest to go to Sant.”