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There was silence for a minute. "Why don't you answer your mistress, Sature?" said the boy on the couch, in a calm, treble voice. The man addressed did not alter his expression, but replied in a strangled tone, "I am getting on very well, Oceaxe. There are already buds on my feet. Tomorrow I hope to take root." Maskull felt a rising storm inside him.
Maskull put his hands behind his back. "I repeat, I am not my own master." "Then who is your master?" "Yesterday I saw Surtur, and from today I am serving him." "Did you speak with him?" she asked curiously. "I did." "Tell me what he said." "No, I can't I won't. But whatever he said, his beauty was more tormenting than yours, Oceaxe, and that's why I can look at you in cold blood."
"Do you really imagine that I carry your image with me wherever I go?" "If someone were to murder your lover here, what would you do?" "Lying hypocrite!" Oceaxe spat out. "You never were in love with Crimtyphon.
He came away from the corpse and regarded her still red, and still breathing hard. "It's no joking matter. You especially ought to keep quiet." "Why?" "Because he was your husband." "You think I ought to show grief when I feel none?" "Don't pretend, woman!" Oceaxe smiled. "From your manner one would think you were accusing me of some crime." Maskull literally snorted at her words.
Without question, and feeling it the right thing to do, he walked away out of earshot. Tydomin approached Oceaxe. "Perhaps because my beauty fades and I'm no longer young, I needed him all the more." Oceaxe gave a kind of snarl. "Well, he's dead, and that's the end of it. What are you going to do now, Tydomin?" The other woman smiled faintly and rather pathetically.
Whether it was due to the strange quality of the food, or to his long abstention, he did not know, but the meal tasted nauseous, and even cannibalistic. He ate little, and the moment he got up he felt defiled. "Let me bury this drude, where I can find it some other time," said Oceaxe. "On the next occasion, though, I shall have no Maskull with me, to shock.... Now we have to take to the river."
Apart from this wish to play a personal part in what was going on around and beneath him, the scenery had no significance for him. So preoccupied was he, that his arm partly released its clasp. Oceaxe turned around to gaze at him. Whether or not she was satisfied with what she saw, she uttered a low laugh, like a peculiar chord. "Cold again so quickly, Maskull?"
He was short and muscular, his face was broad, bearded, and rather commonplace, but there was something terrible about his appearance. The features were distorted by a deep-seated look of pain, despair, and horror. Oceaxe, without pausing, strolled lightly and lazily up to the outermost shadows of the tree, some distance from the couch.
Oceaxe remained unmoved. "Why, life here must be absolutely impossible," he went on, when he had somewhat recovered himself. "A man would need nerves of steel.... Is there no means at all of foreseeing a catastrophe like this?" "Oh, I suppose we wouldn't be alive if there weren't," replied Oceaxe, with composure. "We are more or less clever at it but that doesn't prevent our often getting caught."
A single tall tree, shooting up in the middle of the peninsula, dwarfed everything else; it was wide and shady with sea-green leaves. "I wonder if Crimtyphon is there," remarked Oceaxe. "Can I see two figures, or am I mistaken?" "I also see something," said Maskull. In twenty minutes they were directly above the peninsula, at a height of about fifty feet.
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