The Mouthpiece of Zitu

by J. U. Giesy

And in the end he followed it—followed his own body when it was borne outside the limits of the encampment and cast into a thicket of bushes, where its disposition was watched by Maia, who accompanied the now openly amorous guard and lingered beside the thicket with him after the other soldiers had cast down their burden and gone.

"Let us remove its clothing," she suggested. "To waste it were a loss."

The guard assented.

Five minutes later, more than a little aghast, Croft found his material tenement stretched stark upon the ground. Maia and her lover were moving off. In her arms the girl bore his suit of soft, brown leather.

In a way now Croft became more and more disturbed. Vague fancies filled his mind. At the first he had trusted her wholly, but this last move he did not understand. He recalled the story Parthys had told of the blue servants rising against their employers during the present trouble, and he marked the manner in which she accepted the blue man's advances.

After all, she was a Mazzerian herself, he thought, and there was no reason save her possible affection for Naia to insure her worthiness of trust. Still—she had shown him the tiny cross from the apron about her waist, and she had told him to die, as Naia had advised he should. After all, she might have some definite reason beyond his present knowledge for divesting his body of clothes. And he could do nothing until nightfall. That being the case, and the night being several hours removed, there was nothing to do but wait. Dead it might be in seeming, yet Croft knew that lying thus in the open his body needed protection. In the middle of the thicket he settled down beside it. It was rather odd, he found himself thinking, to be sitting there keeping an invisible watch of his own form.

Now and then, as the afternoon passed, he stole a glance at the camp. There was bustle there, a moving and shifting of men. It came to him that Bandhor, after his council, was preparing for another attack of Atla, urged thereto by Maia's report concerning the approaching reinforcements of weapons and men. Well, let them attack, he thought with a grim satisfaction. Jadgor would hold out through yet one more attack surely, and by then Bandhor would have lost his chance, once Robur and his forces had arrived.

Night came at last. Purposely Croft waited until late before making his venture at escape. And while he waited, there stole into the thicket a dim shape, which approached his body and sank beside it on the ground.

It was Maia. More than a little surprised, Croft watched her. She carried a bundle. She undid it. She moved higher beside his body and raised his head, supporting it on her thighs. Then swiftly she began to shave it, turning it to reach the back, and working rapidly on the sides. That done, while comprehension flashed into Croft's mind, and with it renewed confidence in this girl, as he recalled his words to Naia concerning some such thing as this, she took a small box from her bundle and began rubbing the scalp-lock she had left upon his poll with a substance it contained. After that she lifted a flask and removed a stopper. Working rapidly, she began smearing the body with some dark fluid, spreading it thinly upon the skin, rubbing it to as even a coating as she might with rapid hands. And as she worked Croft's body lost its ivory whiteness and became a dark-hued thing like her own. At the end she took a small cloth from the articles she had brought with her and twisted it deftly about his loins.

And as she finished and straightened herself from her labors, Croft, sensing it time for his reviving, opened the eyes of the body over which she had worked and spoke.