And together they left on the expedition which was to remove their last lingual difficulty. They had no other kind.
Ramey Winters, too, was finding the soft, moonbright nights of Chitrakuta conducive to thoughts far removed from the grim ones of hatred, war and death that had governed his life until his translation into this elder world.
In Sheila Aiken he had found a woman who, after all these years of avowed misanthropy, had the power of arousing within him strange sensations. New sensations to Ramey Winters, perhaps, but sensations which any wise men could have told him were as old as humankind.
There was about her a something—a peace, a quietude, a gentleness—which filled a vital need in his makeup, which calmed and complemented the flamelike restlessness of his own nature. With propinquity came greater admiration for Sheila Aiken. And as the days and nights, especially the nights, threw them into ever increasingly intimate contact, admiration deepened into something Ramey thought, believed, feared he could name—but dared not.
Vainly he reminded himself that he was a fighting man, a soldier. That all this madness was a strange interlude out of which sooner or later he must return to take his ordained place in the world he had left. That he must neither pledge himself nor demand pledges of one whose world was so far removed from his own.
But these decisions were more easily made than kept. And if, strolling at her side in the moonlight, Ramey never actually swept Sheila into his arms as he wished and knew he could, if he never actually spoke the words that with increasing frequency trembled on his lips, perhaps it was not necessary after all. For Sheila Aiken, though she had spent her twenty years living with men in wild, mannish places, was still inherently a woman. And she understood these things, and gloried in them.
And the days and the nights were sweet, and Chitrakuta was an Eden. But even Eden had its serpent....
Rakshasi had almost slipped from Ramey's memory. A week or more had passed since he had met her in the council hall of Sugriva when late one night there came to him a Videlian warrior bearing the message that the Lady Rakshasi awaited him in her apartment. He was urged to come, pleaded the messenger. A matter of grave importance.