hand on my back!” she cried out. “Please! Do it! Do it!”
I placed my palm against the small of her back and slid it slowly up over her shirt, following her spine to the nape of her neck.
She collapsed forward, until her head was resting on her knees, and began to sob. I put my arms around her.
“How? How? How?” she whimpered.
“I can’t explain it,” I said. “Your eyes—are they repaired, too?”
“No—even the small amount of light that penetrates the blindfold and my eyelids is uncomfortable.”
“Don’t worry about that, dear thing,” came a voice. “We’ll have you sorted out with a new pair of goggles in no time at all. Humph! What!”
I looked up and saw Colonel Spearjab standing over us.
“It’s all change at Yatsillat!” he declared. “Look at that!” He pointed ahead, in the direction the Ptall’kor was travelling.
“Who is speaking, Aiden?” Clarissa asked.
“I say! Forgive me, Miss Stark!” Spearjab said. “Most rude! Most rude! I am Colonel Momentous Spearjab, formerly known as Yazziz Yozkulu. What! I’m very pleased to make your acquaintance!”
“Yazziz? That’s you? Speaking English?”
“Colonel, my dear. Colonel. But yes, absolutely it’s me, and I’m perfectly thrilled to see that you’ve made a full recovery. You appear to be as fit as the proverbial fiddle, whatever that may be. Ha ha! Harrumph!”
I tore my eyes away from the scene ahead of us and said, “Clarissa, there’s a low mountain range on the horizon. I see excavations of some sort. What is it, Colonel?”
“We are once again approaching the jolly old Mountains That Gaze Upon Phenadoor, Mr. Fleischer,” Spearjab answered enthusiastically, “but the other end of the range, what! And those excavations are quarries. Quarries, I say! We’re mining rocks and minerals, you see, to make bricks and iron and glass and whatnot. By the time we reach our destination, our artisans will have manufactured a pair of dark lenses for Miss Stark. Humph! Now, if you’ll please excuse me, I must rally the troops, so to speak. I smell Quee-tan! Ah, yes! What! Ha ha! So we’ll stop for a hunt soon. Have you ever tasted Quee-tan meat, Mr. Fleischer? Ah, no, probably not! The confounded beasts once infested all the trees in this region but have become extremely rare. Almost extinct. It’s a crying shame, for they taste absolutely delicious! Delicious, I say! Oh well. What! What! Tally-ho!”
He scuttled away.
“You taught them our language?” Clarissa asked.
“No. I have no idea how they learned it. One minute they were all speaking Koluwaian; the next, English!”
“Puzzle after puzzle!” my friend exclaimed. “Help me up, would you?”
I stood, reached down, gripped her hands, and assisted her to her feet.
She cried out, “There’s no pain! No pain at all! I feel—I feel wonderful!”
“And you look it. You’re nearly as tall as I am!”
Her fingers clenched around mine, and in that pressure there was a wealth of inexpressible emotion.
We stood together and I resumed my descriptions of the passing landscape. The Ptall’kor was now sliding across fields of lilac-coloured heather toward a broad band of tangled jungle, beyond which I could see cultivated pastures laid out like a patchwork quilt, stretching all the way to the distant horizon.
Eventually, our conveyance came to rest at the edge of the trees. Colonel Spearjab disembarked with his fellows—including the three newly made Aristocrats, but excluding Clarissa, despite that she’d apparently joined their ranks—and they plunged into the undergrowth with spears poised.
While we awaited their return, I continued to examine the terrain, telling my companion about everything I saw. “There’s something strange about the sky to the left of the mountain range,” I noted. “It’s darker. There’s a sort of dirty smudge in the air.”
“Perhaps it marks the position of Yatsillat,” Clarissa responded. “If they’re manufacturing glass and iron and so forth, they must have foundries and factories.”
“I don’t know whether I fear our destination or look forward to it,” I replied. “This journey has been interminable but at least I’ve become somewhat accustomed to it. With travelling everything is transitory—whatever you can’t accept is soon left behind. When we reach the city or town or whatever it is, then we have to face up to the challenge of living there, perhaps for a long time.”
“Or permanently.”
I didn’t answer, not wanting to contemplate such a circumstance, though it also occurred to me that, in fact, I had nothing on Earth to go back to.
For some considerable time, Clarissa continued to ask questions about our environment, which I answered as best I could. Then she suddenly