Directly across the arena a group of some forty or fifty warriors rose in a body and started toward the nearest exit.
"Come," Jotan said, motioning to the balance of those in his party. "We start at once for Ammad."
Dylara stood up, casting one last look toward the closed doorway through which Tharn had passed not long before. He had been her last tie with the old life. Now she was about to leave all that behind, to go into a new world at the side of a man she greatly admired. Why was her heart so heavy? Was it because she would never again see the caves of her people—the face of her father? Or was it because Tharn was lost to her, forever? Even should he come through the Games alive, she would be gone—separated from him by the vast distance between Sephar and the country Jotan called home.
Jotan had told her something of the long stretches of untracked jungles and waterless plains between Sephar and Ammad. From others of the visitors she had heard stories of savage beasts and wild tribes of men that haunted the mountain trails and forest-cloaked ravines to the south. And beyond the mountains began a level monotony of grasslands that reached to still more mountains forming the boundary to Ammad itself.
The street before the building allocated to the visitors swarmed with hurrying figures bearing a wide assortment of articles to be bound into individual packs for easy handling.
Jotan took active charge. Quickly the line of march began to take form. Broad-shouldered men swung compact bundles to their backs; well-armed warriors took up their positions; and last of all, strongly made litters of animal skins stretched between long poles, arrived for use of the two female members of the party.
Dylara, following the example set by Alurna, seated herself in the exact center of the sheet of skins as it lay in the street. Two brawny attendants stepped forward, bent, one at either end of the wooden poles, and in perfect unison swung the rods to their shoulders.
From his position at the column's forefront, Jotan looked back and waved a greeting to the two girls. Satisfied that all were in place, he shouted a command and the safari got under way.
Across the city they marched, through wide-flung gates in the great walls, and on across the cleared space beyond. Before them rose the majestic trees and thick matted foliage of the forbidding jungle; and here, leading directly southward through a tangled maze, was the beginnings of a well-beaten trail, the first of many such roadways the little cortege must follow before far-off Ammad could be reached.
Just before the marchers entered the forest, Dylara turned to look back at Sephar's walls, grim and impressive under the sun's flaming rays. Still behind those sullen piles of rock was the man she could not forget. Something deep within her whispered that she had found love only to lose it; that happiness for her lay in forgetting, forever, the stalwart young giant who had snatched her from a peaceful, uneventful life.