The Mouthpiece of Zitu

by J. U. Giesy

He saw Naia sink. He knew the meaning of her words, her act. Her cry to Zilla, the Angel of Death, showed him clearly that she saw in the water the way of death for herself—read a new meaning into her words to Gaya, that here in the pool she would find rest. He saw the water close about her, saw her well-loved form sink down, down, cradled in the limpid water; down, down, a slender figure, as beautiful as a Tanagra statuette in its green robe, as it sank. He knew that indeed Zilla hovered close above her—knew she was drowning—that the element in which her figure was engulfed would, like the figurative lips of Zilla, soon suffocate her breath.

And he was powerless, impotent, to do anything save watch what went on before his eyes. He could see, and know, and understand. He could suffer the most terrible agony of conscious comprehension, and—in his astral presence he could do nothing else. In his soul he writhed, cried out in a torment in which, like the despairing mind of the girl, he would have welcomed dissolution as a relief. But aside from that he was chained to a passive watching, was unable to make one single move toward the rescue of her expiring flesh.

Not so Gaya, however. Nor did Robur's wife lose her head. Her comprehension of her companion's act was instant, and she cried aloud to the Mazzerian girl, who now appeared in answer to the summons of the gong. Then, without waiting for even the servant to reach her side, Gaya flung her own form into the pool in a cleanly executed dive. Bela followed her mistress a moment later, her blue figure cutting the liquid surface with hardly a splash. Both women were entirely at home in the water, and by the time Gaya had reached and seized Naia, who began instantly to struggle, Bela was at her side.

The fight below the surface was brief. Croft saw Naia open her mouth. Her bosom expanded as though she gasped. And then she relaxed, and Robur's wife and the Mazzerian maid bore her quickly upward, supporting her head between them, and swimming with her toward a submerged flight of steps by which the pool was customarily entered. Reaching it, they lifted the limp body in its trailing robe, which clung to trunk and rounded limb more like a shroud of vegetation, a crinkled kelp born of the water itself, than a garment, and staggered with it from the pool to lay it on the pavement of the court.

"Quickly!" Gaya cried as she knelt beside it. "Seek out Jadgor's physician and command his presence." Unmindful of her own soaked condition, she seized Naia's form and rolled her upon her face. Placing her hands on either side of the body close to where the ribs joined the spine, she threw her weight forward on extended arms, held so for the space of a long breath, and lifted herself once more upon her own flexed thighs.

It was a form of artificial respiration she was practising, and Croft uttered a prayer for her success in his heart. And then—he forgot temporarily her continued efforts in the wonder of something else.

Naia of Aphur was about to die. Croft knew it as certainly as he had ever known anything in his life. Because he saw her soul come forth as he had seen Zud's astral body after he had bidden it leave its fleshy habitation on the day he awakened from his sleep. Slowly, as Gaya lifted herself and sat back, it emerged from the figure on the ground. And as wonderful as was the form of Naia, so wonderful was its astral counterpart. Like an image of her beauty in every detail, it swam and hovered above her, still chained for the span of a breath by an almost invisible bond that wavered and tensed and threatened to break.

And that breaking—the snapping of that soul cord—the counterpart of the union between the maternal substance and the body of the child in physical birth—spelled physical death. With its severance, as Croft knew, Naia would pass from the mortal plane to a wholly astral life. But more than that he knew that now it was within his province to take definite steps to preserve once more the woman he so wholly loved—that now at last he could act.

Toward the lovely floating shape he compelled his own astral form until he floated with it face to face. "Naia—Naia—thou other part of me," he thought rather than cried to her; "Naia—my beloved—hold. Return again to thy body. Go back."

And he knew that she received the potent vibration his own soul gave out. For slowly the head of the floating figure, the dream shape which swung and glowed like an iridescent mist in the sunlight, turned its head toward him—seemed to regard him strangely with wide open, startled eyes.