The captain rubbed a chin peppered with beard. “A clerical I could use fair enough, one that could cast accounts.” He looked around. “Most of you Amorosians, though—”
Rodvard said joyously; “I am not of Mancherei, but Dossolan, educated there, and can cast up an account as easily—”
“There’d be no pay in it. The voyage merely,” said the man quickly.
“We will do it for that,” said Rodvard, and touched Captain ’Zenog’s hand in acceptance. The squat man turned. “Ohé!” he shouted. “Hinze, take these two to the port office and get them cleared for a voyage with us.”
22
THE LAW OF LOVE
(For a moment after the man had spoken, Rodvard felt as though he were falling.) He looked at Lalette (and saw the same black fear was in her also), but the step was taken, they could only hope to carry matters through at the port office. Hinze was a thin man in a sailor’s jacket, who looked over his shoulder back at the captain as he led them down the cobbles to a brick building that Lalette remembered all too well. “You will find it a good voyage. The ship is tight as an egg, but the food not too good,” said he.
There was a doorman in his coop, who directed Hinze down a hall, whereupon the girl clutched Rodvard’s arm and said; “I do not like this. I—”
(A silly remark, he thought.) “We cannot run away now,” he said. “It is the only chance”; and Hinze was back to say that the protostylarion would entertain them at once, there could be only a moment of waiting. They looked at each other apprehensively; Lalette leaned against a wall and closed her eyes, and a man came down the hall to call them in.
Rodvard led the way into a room where a little man sat behind a desk with lines of disobligingness set round his mouth. He said; “You wish to leave the dominion of Mancherei for the barbarous Green Islands?”
“It is because of a family matter,” said Rodvard. “My wife and I—”