He had signaled to the Orgs, and two of them had shuffled forward and taken Ama from me.
"Jus' good time," Tahg said ironically. "Org gods pleased tonight to have Earthmen—"
Earthmen! The plural! I had little opportunity to ponder it. Roughly I was shoved onward through the forest, back to where it thinned into a stretch of metal desert—and beyond that into a new terrain of stunted, gnarled trees and rope vines on a rocky ground. To me it was an exhausting march. Ama, with Tahg beside her, usually was behind me. Once we stopped and food and water were given me. When we started again, I saw that, at Tahg's direction, one of the savages had hoisted Ama to his back, carrying her in a rope-vine sling. Occasionally other small bands of Orgs joined us, until there were fifty or more of them, triumphantly returning to their village. Their torches were burning now, and a little ahead of us a pack of the huge green-grey mimes were leaping.
Then Tahg came toward me. "Good-bye," he said. "You look more good to me when I see you next time. The gods prepare you now."
He turned and was lost in the darkness. My ankles had been fettered with a two-foot length of rope; my wrists were crossed and lashed behind me. No one was with me now but my two captors who urged me forward, impatient at my little jerky steps. The village and its jabbering turmoil and lights was in a moment hidden by a rise of the rocky ground. Then I saw before me a fairly large, square building of stone, flat-roofed, with a cone-shaped stone-pile on top like a crude church spire.
An Org temple. It was windowless; some twenty feet high from ground to its roof. A narrow, rectangular slit of doorway was in front, where two huge torches, like braziers one on either side, were burning. An Org stood between them, with the torchlight painting him—an aged savage in a long, white skin drape which was fantastically ornamented. He was thin and bent, his round brown skull almost hairless, his body shriveled, parched with age. His skinny arms were upraised, outstretched to welcome me.
But my startled gaze turned from him, for on the ground just at the edge of the swaying torchlight, I saw that two figures were lying. Two men, roped and tied into inert bundles.
They were Jan and Torrence!