“As you say. It would take a particularly unpleasant type to think of chaining a live girl to a dead man for the vultures to play with while he sat and looked on from the upper storey.” He spat into the fireplace. “Gives one a bad taste in one’s mouth, doesn’t it? I shall look forward to meeting the chief Shaman.”
Forsyth was silent, and I could see that he was pondering over something. At last he spoke.
“Whatever these people are, they aren’t Greeks for all that Aryenis and her father and some of their friends speak Greek. But the other men’s speech is a totally different language, although there were some Greek words in it, or what sounded like them. They look more like Scandinavians, somewhat sunburnt.”
“Yes, that’s the way they struck me,” I replied, “You remember Kyrlos talked of Greeks coming into the country as though they were quite a different race.”
“Well, we shall have every opportunity of studying them now. I must get hold of their real speech and see if I can place it.” Forsyth turned into his blankets. “I wonder what kind of a show the war will be.”
“Middle Ages for a cert,” said Wrexham. “I wonder if the Shamans’ front door is anything like their back one? If so, I wish I had a few bags of blasting-powder or a box or two of guncotton or ammonal. Otherwise, I rather visualize Kyrlos’s troops sitting down in front of it with wooden towers, and wet hides, and all the usual accessories one reads of in Virgil, and not getting very much farther.”
“That means to say that it’s merely a question of starving them out, then.”
“Yes, or else some kind of treachery, or a Trojan wooden horse stunt. I wonder if there’s any nitre in the country?” He was turning over the pages of a sort of compendium book he had made up while we were fitting out in Calcutta, and which never left his valise. It contained, I think, every known recipe for the manufacture of what Wrexham comprehensively but vaguely referred to as “engineer stores.” “Also phosphorus?”
“What’s the phosphorus wanted for?” I asked.
“Matches, dear man, matches. We’ve not many left, and the Sakae flint and steel doesn’t attract my cultured taste.”