As for the other matter which speeded his preparations, it had nothing whatever to do with love—was the exact antithesis of it, dealt wholly with human passion, human strife.
It was now over five weeks since the relief expedition had sailed to Bithur from Himyra, and no word had come from Zitra since.
Mentally, Croft had allowed at least two weeks for the galleys to reach Bithra, the capital of the northeastern state, and unload their moturs and men. Another week, he figured, should bring them well into contact with the Mazzerian forces, if Jadgor moved as quickly as he felt assured he would. And drunk as he was with love, busy as he was with his own endeavors, Croft forgot not entirely affairs of state.
As a result he chose a night some weeks after he felt sure the Bithurian army and its reinforcements should have reached the Bithurian borders, and willed himself to Jadgor's tent.
A strange sight met his eyes. He swam above what at first appeared to him as an enormous grassy plain; and beyond it was a forest, dark in its own shadows beneath the moonlight, and beyond that again was a flare of fires. Toward these he propelled himself without knowing whither exactly he was going, yet arriving to find them the flaring remains of burning houses, spread out on yet another open space beside a river, a mere village, such as the peasant classes were accustomed to inhabit, rather than one of the larger walled towns.
And around it, through it, their bodies picked out by the moonlight and the leaping of the flames, were hundreds—not of Bithur's soldiers, but of leaping, howling, spear-shaking, blood and lust gloated Mazzerian men. And beyond it as he saw now, overcoming his first surprise, lay one of the armored moturs, ringed with intermingled Bithurian and Mazzerian corpses and tipped upon its side.
Disaster! For the first time Croft suspected a Bithurian route. In a flash he returned to his original purpose and once more demanded that Jadgor's position be revealed.
And now a walled town appeared before him, not so large as Himyra, but decidedly greater than Zitra, to judge from the circuit of its walls inside which countless fire-urns flared. And within those walls, as he sped above them, Croft beheld a beaten army's wrack—two of the moturs, parked close inside a gate: weary men showing the marks of conflict, stretched out beside them in a sodden bivouac.
Then into a palace, built of what seemed a brown sandstone, with a huge inner court paved in green, where fire-urns flared and guardsmen stood before a door through which men in armor, with stern, drawn faces passed in and out. Croft followed the progress of the latter and so came at last to the presence of the man he desired.
Jadgor, of Tamarizia—Jadgor, of Aphur—president of a nation, once a haughty king. Jadgor, of Aphur, wounded slightly, with a binding bandage wound about his grizzled head, with his armor dust-stained and smeared with the grime of conflict, Jadgor scowling like some savage creature overborne, driven into a corner, with the sinewy hand of a muscular arm fingering in nervous fashion at his sword.