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For a hundred heart-beats they clung to each other, breast to breast and lip to lip. Below, the clangour was increasing, the great trunk swinging harder and faster upon the metal gates. Now Lakla gently loosed the arms of the O'Keefe, and for another instant those two looked into each other's souls. The handmaiden smiled tremulously.
And Lakla, like a girl of the Vikings, like one of those warrior maids who stood and fought for dun and babes at the side of those old heroes of Larry's own green isle; translucent ivory lambent through the rents of her torn draperies, and in the wide, golden eyes flaming wrath, indeed not the diabolic flames of the priestess but the righteous wrath of some soul that looking out of paradise sees vile wrong in the doing.
We could hold the lot and in the meantime you and Goodwin could go after Lakla for help." "Lugur knows the secret of the Portal if he dare use it," answered the captain, with a curious indirection. "And now that they have challenged the Silent Ones I think he will dare. Also, he will find our tracks and it may be that he knows this hidden way." "Well, for God's sake!"
God knows I never was afraid when I was fighting up there and many a better man than me has gone West with shell and bullet for the same idea; but these things aren't shell and bullet but I hadn't Lakla then and it's the damned doubt I have behind it all." He turned to the Three and did I in their poise sense a rigidity, an anxiety that sat upon them as alienly as would divinity upon men?
We looked down upon him; nor did Lakla, nor Larry, nor I try to hide our tears. And as we stood the Akka brought to us that other mighty fighter, Rador; but in him there was life, and we attended to him there as best we could. Then Lakla spoke. "We will bear him into the castle where we may give him greater care," she said.
Mentioning it to Lakla, she gave a little cry of vexation, a command to her attendant; and not long that faithful if unusual lady had returned with a tray of the glasses. Raising mine, I saw the lines furthest away leap into sudden activity. Spurred warrior after warrior leaped upon the barricade and over it.
She understood our plight, if not his words; gave a soft little cry of mingled pity and self-reproach; forced us back upon the cushions. "Oh, but I'm sorry!" mourned Lakla, leaning over us. "I had forgotten for those new to it the way is a weary one, indeed " She ran to the doorway, whistled a clear high note down the passage. Through the hangings came two of the frog-men.
Yet before oblivion rushed down upon me I seemed to see upon the grey-screened wall nearest the Irishman an oval of rosy light begin to glow; watched, as my falling lids inexorably fell, a flame-tipped shadow waver on it; thicken; condense and there looking down upon Larry, her eyes great golden stars in which intensest curiosity and shy tenderness struggled, sweet mouth half smiling, was the girl of the Moon Pool's Chamber, the girl whom the green dwarf had named Lakla: the vision Larry had invoked before that sleep which I could no longer deny had claimed him
And Lakla and Larry and I were, I saw, like shadow shapes upon a smooth breast of stone twenty feet or more above the surface of this place a surface spangled with tiny white blossoms gleaming wanly through creeping veils of phosphorescence like smoke of moon fire.
Selective breeding this, with a vengeance, I thought; an ancient experiment in heredity which of course would in time result in the stamping out of the tendency to depart from type that lies in all organisms; resulting, obviously, at last, in three fixed forms of black-haired, ruddy-haired, and silver-haired but this, with a shock of realization it came to me, was also an accurate description of the dark-polled ladala, their fair-haired rulers and of the golden-brown tressed Lakla!
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