Paul heard the drums from within the room that was his and Dorothy's—merely a section of the thatched lean-to inside the fortress wall, but Dorothy had given it the reality of a living place. There were no chairs: one sat on a rug which was a cured uskaran pelt, a gift from Abro Brodaa, whose people had hunted down the tigerish beast after it raided her village. The bed was only a clumsy framework with an asonis hide stretched across it. But the shelter had become dear with use, and Dorothy had hung a few of Paul's paintings on the walls—a portrait of Mijok, one of Christopher Wright which had caught something of the old man's brooding alertness. The red jungle flowers were too cloyingly rich to be kept here, but Dorothy had found a blue meadow shrub, and a white bloom that hid in shady ground and recalled the scent of jonquils....
It was too dark to see her plainly; Paul knew her eyes were open on him. Barely audible against his shoulder, she said, "I thought I'd be insatiable. I only want to be near and not think." Nevertheless thought goaded her. "Ten thousand—ten thousand—What can youdo?"
All he could say was rehearsed, mechanical, and she had heard it before. "Frontal attack first, because the pygmies couldn't be led into anything else. But I shall turn it into an ordered retreat—to the island. Drive south, skirt the southern end of the hills, then straight for the coast. We'll be at the island in—oh, soon—"
"But the range—the coastal mountains opposite the island—you can't cross them—they rise so sheer—"
"Remember the river that flows almost due west from these little hills? It comes to the sea north of the range. We'll make rafts to get down that, I think. There aren'tany falls. At the coast we'll contrive something—dugouts with outriggers. I've already shown old Rak how to make one; he may be working on it now."
Dorothy pressed a hand over his mouth. She stammered, "Make this moment last." But even during the fine sharp agony there were words: "I shall keep—a bonfire on that beach—night and day ..." and when his hand was slack in her hair and she seemed to be hardly breathing, Paul heard the drums.
They were far off and everywhere. Only the remembering brain insisted they were on the lake. They were not sound at all, at first. A pressure pain in the back of the skull, a rasping of nerve endings. Nothing but drums. Hollow logs with a hide membrane, rubbed and pounded by tiny painted savages. "You must go tonight after all." Dorothy could not speak. He put Helen in her fumbling arms; he hurried out to the open space, saw the eye of the lifeboat returning. The drums took on a rhythm, a throbbing in 5/8 time, rapid, venomous. But far away. Still not quite sound—Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah,ah-ah-ah-ah-ah—growing no nearer, no louder, but gaining in vicious urgency, relentless as a waterfall, a runaway machine.Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah....
Paul hoped that Wright and Sears might be sleeping. It would be an hour yet before Pakriaa could return with the other leaders, if indeed she ever did. Elis and Abara were on sentry duty. The three giant children still at the camp—would they be sleepless, keyed up to vivid fantasies of the island, like Charin children before a great journey?
Kamon sat alone by the gate. A small figure drooped at the other end of the enclosure. Since there was no immediate task for her, Paul had told Abroshin Nisana to rest, but he knew her little bald head turned to follow him. "Kamon—I'm going to have the third flight made tonight. There would be room for you too in the boat. Will you go?"
Black lips and ancient white face smiled up at him. "If you wish."
"I do. Stay close to Dorothy. That will leave four of you giant women here. I wish they could all go. Tejron's sober and wise—she'll keep them together. You're more needed on the island. Don't let Dorothy be much alone."
The old woman mused: "This Charin love is a strange thing. It isn't our natures for two persons to come so close. But I see something good in it, I think...." Paul struggled to hear her over the almost subsonic yammer of the drums.Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah—it seemed not to trouble Kamon much, though she would be hearing it even more plainly. "I will stay with her, Paul," she said, and watched the long glide as Spearman brought the boat in.
On the drawbridge Spearman cocked his head at the drums. "That's it." He read Paul's thought: "The rest tonight, huh? Better, I'd think."
"Yes. Get something to eat, why don't you? Kamon is going too."
Spearman nodded, unsurprised. "Not hungry.... Wonder how long they keep it up...."
Wright came from his room with sleepless eyes. "Till they attack, probably. All night, maybe all tomorrow. To soften us up. Damn them...."
Somehow Paul was walking to the boat, carrying the baby for Dorothy. He climbed in with her, adjusted the straps. Helen waked and was fretful till she found the breast "You bore her alone—without any—"
"Alone!" Dorothy was astonished. "I had you. Doc's a fine medical man, whatever he says. Don't you remember how Mijok held out his arm for me to grab when it got tough? He said, 'I am a tree.'" Now she was holding his look with an indestructible smile until the rest came and Paul had to back out of the cramped cabin to give them room; then had to stand aside while the bright relic of twenty-first-century man spat its green flame and hot gases at the lake and leaped to soaring and slid into moonless darkness above the hills. The drums wept, raved, obscenely whispered.
Paul did not know Sears Oliphant was with him till he heard the voice: "I think, Paul—the drums defeat their purpose. They make me sore instead of scared. I think you won't need to worry about me, Paul."
"I never have." He glanced at the fat man's holstered automatic, remembered the cleanness of the rifle hanging in Sears' room. "My father used to say most men are good watchdogs, who know they're scared but stand guard in spite of it; only a few are rabbits and possums." Paulturned his back on the hills. Nothing was there to see, nothing at all. "I wish you'd known my father. He was a tall man. Nuts about animals—always brought 'em into the talk—illustration, example. Couldn't stand to see even a wasp beating against the glass; you never knew when a deer mouse would climb out of his pocket and run down his pants leg." Paul laughed. The drums fretted in 5/8, passionate, soft, cruel.
Sears watched blue fireflies over a lake so peacefully still that the sapphire reflections were as real as their cause. "A teacher, wasn't he?"
"For a while, till he settled in New Hampshire. They wouldn't let him teach nineteenth and twentieth-century history as he saw it. He saw it in terms of ethical conflict, the man versus the state, self-reliance versus the various dreary socialisms, enlightened altruism versus don't-stick-your-neck-out, and he didn't give a good god-damn whether the first atomic submersible was built in 1952 or '53. Doc would have loved him too: he knew what was meant by a government of laws. He made his students search out not only theory but the actual dismal consequences of the doctrine that the end justifies the means—Alexander, Augustus, Napoleon, Lenin, Hitler. That was regarded as 'wilfully minimizing the significance of technological advance.' He didn't minimize it; he just recognized that other matters were vastly more important, and he didn't care to see the machine built up into one more mumbo jumbo. So he sent me through college by breeding children's riding ponies and selling hatching eggs. Not a bad life, or so he said.... Jocko, will Pakriaa come back?"
"I believe so.... Ah, Chris—nice evening for the month of Charin."
Wright was a paleness in the dark; stern, weary, tall, watching the lake, talking to himself: "The month we named for ourselves—end of Year One—oh, I do call that a pardonable vanity.... Paul, I was wholly selfish in choosing you. I've given you a burden no one should have to carry."
"We're all carrying it."
"Thank you, son." Wright moved away to stand alone atthe rim of the lake, listening to the crawling thunder of the drums. Twice, Paul heard him speak, with an intensity beyond pain: "No one is expendable. No one is expendable...."
Sears exclaimed, "Look!" There were five white cloud-like shapes at the edge of the woods. "Oh, they've never done this before. Susie! What's the matter? There now, girl, come tell the old man—"
Paul followed him. "It's the drums—don't you think?"
The five had been complaining softly, but that ceased as Sears moved among them, patting their legs, soothing them. "But Paul—their grounds are mostly north of here—there now, Mister Smith, you old bastard—so why didn't they travel away from the sound? Take it easy, Millie, Miss Ponsonby—"
"The wild ones probably did. But these had to come to you."
"Oh ... That detachment of Lantis—the one in the northeast—"
"Don't think so, Jocko. Pakriaa's spies are all around up there—we'll have warning. Elis is posted half a mile north of us—he'd know—smell 'em if he didn't hear 'em. However, I'll go talk with him...."
The depth of forest muted the drums—a little; they were still a cumulative torture of anger in the inner darkness of the mind. Paul saved the fading power of his Earth-made radion flashlight by following his sense of the trail. He had learned to move as softly in the jungle as any Charin could hope to do—more softly than Spearman, softly enough to steal within spear range of the asonis. There was not much danger here, unless it might be from the uskaran, a beast Paul had glimpsed alive only once and then dimly, a striped thing slipping snakily out of his vision in a sun-striped afternoon; the rug in his and Dorothy's room could almost have been a tiger pelt. The black reptiles were lovers of hot sun and shallow water, never going inland. The squeak and rustle of a kaksma horde, it was said, could be heard far off except during the rains, when all noises were smothered in the long rush and whispering of waters. For all his silence, black Elis was aware of him before Paul knew he had reached thesentry post. "Paul—isn't it?" The night vision of the giants was better than the Charins' but not like a cat's; they hunted at night only if the moon was strong.
"Yes. Everything quiet?"
"Quieter than my heart."
Paul still could not see him. "Saving my flashlight. Where are you?" Elis chuckled and slipped an invisible hand around Paul's. "The olifants came to the meadow. We wondered what disturbed them."
"Drums. Nothing in the northeast yet. But a great many of the pygmies are moving from the upper villages. I heard, and smelled the red flowers." The people of Lantis, Pakriaa said, never wore those flowers, and it would not be the nature of Elis to exaggerate his powers of smell and hearing.
"I think the animals wanted Sears. Could that be, Elis?"
"Alojna—" Elis murmured the old word for them: it meant "white cloud." "Two things nobody knows—the thoughts of Alojna and the journeys of the red moon and the white moon when we cannot see them. So we used to say. You give us a hint of knowledge of both things, and more than a hint of much greater mysteries." Elis had always been tireless in questioning Wright; more than Mijok, he was haunted by a need to grope after intangibles, push outward the uneasy border between known and unknown. "So there's never an end of mystery?"
"Never." The hand was warm. "What is the nature of courage?"
The giant's breathing was too quiet to be heard. "To go out, away from a world, in a little shell—that must have needed courage."
"Perhaps only a response to a drive of uncomprehended forces. But I think courage is a known thing, Elis, an achievement of flesh and blood—to hear the drums in the dark and stay at the post as you are doing, as I hope I can do myself. I must go back. Lisson will come and relieve you soon...."
Pakriaa had returned, with her five equals. Wright had lit one of the clay lamps. It burned pleasantly with an oil from the carcasses of the same reptile that had once nearly destroyed Mijok, a thing which pleased Mijok, for he liked to think that a creeping danger could also bea source of light; and the use of this oil had been taught them by the pygmies, who made almost monthly expeditions to marshy regions and butchered the beasts by the dozens for the oil alone.
Pakriaa was almost meek. Her smile for Paul could have been a Charin smile; there was a tremor in her hands, and once they flew up to cover her ears. The drums, he thought, might be a worse pain for her than for his own breed. There was unconscious pathos in the precision of her English: "I did not make clear that I will obey you. I may have been angry; for that I am sorry—it is past. My sisters have agreed."
Squat Abro Samiraa; lame, thin Abro Kamisiaa; sober Abro Brodaa—these three Paul had met before. Abro Duriaa and Abro Tamisraa were from the farthest villages, and shy; Duriaa was fat, with a foolish giggle; Tamisraa had a feral furtiveness—the painted bones of her necklace looked like human vertebrae. In Abro Samiraa Paul saw competence as well as smoldering violence: the green of her eyes was dark jade; she was a flat pillar of muscle from shoulder to hip. Paul guessed her to be a devil of bravery, good in the front line and intelligent. Lame Kamisiaa's bravery would be shrewd, vicious, and careful. In fat Duriaa he thought he saw a politician, not a fighter; in Abro Brodaa—there might be a thinker, even a dreamer, in Abro Brodaa.
The princesses had brought news. A scout from Brodaa's village had succeeded in locating the northeastern detachment of Lantis' army; it was camped twelve miles to the northeast, on the far side of a deep but narrow stream. The scout had shown the kind of nerve the pygmies took for granted: she had crossed the creek to listen in the reeds and had drifted downstream the entire length of the encampment. The Vestoians were careless, overconfident, their dialect enough like her own so that she could grasp the essentials; their unit was six hundred strong, with no bowmen. The scout had heard discontented soldiers' talk: the spearwomen missed their subject males, who were camp followers as well as second-line fighters. Returning, the scout had located and stalked a Vestoian sentry, stunned and gagged her, and brought her to Brodaa's camp, where she was made to talk. Brodaa had beenabout to describe this when Pakriaa glanced at Sears and interrupted: "They plan to cross the stream before daylight, move straight west, and try to push us down into the open ground, where the rest of the army will roll over us."
The sentry is probably dead. I don't want to know, not now....The machine in Paul took charge of the council of war, rejecting compassion, rejecting everything beyond immediate need. "Abro Samiraa—take the soldiers of your village and of Abro Duriaa's. Abro Duriaa, you will be in command of your own people, but accept Abro Samiraa's orders as if they were mine." Pakriaa intervened to translate for the fat woman, who showed no hostility but rather relief, and placed her hands formally under the spread fingers of Abro Samiraa in token of subordination. "Abro Samiraa, take those three hundred and the bowmen to the stream as quickly as you can with silence, and attack. The important thing is to scatter them before they are ready to move. If they retreat, follow them only enough to confuse them and then return here at once. If you can take prisoners, bring them here, unharmed. But do not be drawn into any long pursuit. There are still eleven hours of darkness. I hope to see you return long before sunrise."
"Good!" Pakriaa exclaimed, and Samiraa grunted with pleasure. Brodaa said, "Take my scout, sister. I have given her the purple skirt; she is Abroshin now, and my friend." Duriaa waddled behind, and Paul sent Abroshin Nisana to relieve Abara from sentry duty. Nisana was glad to go, for Pakriaa still sent her sour glances, remembering the election.
Sears was fretting: "My pets. Damn it, Paul, I dunno—they're huddled out there in the meadow—just get in the way, get hurt."
"Would they follow Abara?"
"I think so...." Abara slipped in and puffed with pride when he learned what was wanted. "Certainly they will follow Mister Johnson, and Mister Johnson will follow me."
Pakriaa laughed. She caught him by a prominent ear and hugged him to her leanness, grinning at Brodaa over his head. "So ugly!" Pakriaa nibbled his neck. "And he leads olifants! Don't be afraid, little husband—I was never angrywith you. Look at him!" She spun him around for the lewd admiration of the other royalty. "I couldn't do without him. When the war is over I'll have him back in my bed. But now he leads olifants. Hurry, Abara—and don't hurt yourself." And she sent him off with a pinch.
"Keep them in the woods," Paul told him. "And stay with them."
"Good." Pakriaa sobered. "He could do nothing. He never learned the bow.... Ah, look!" The red dot of the lifeboat had caught her eye. "Look, Abro Tamisraa—you never saw it fly at night." It moved with apparent slowness, like a mad star, not toward them but toward the lake, perhaps ten miles away; it was still high when the searchlight beam stabbed down, probing from northeast to southwest, and vanished. "It's all right," Paul said, "I suggested he scout the lake on the way back...." The red eye silently tumbled; Wright gasped. "Still all right," said Paul. "A dive. He can make it talk." But the moment dragged out into an ugliness of waiting.
Then orange fury glared against the underside of clouds and the clamor of drums abruptly ceased. Paul said loudly, mechanically, "I think he gave 'em the jet—set a few boats afire. I didn't order it, Doc. And wouldn't try it myself...." Now the red dot was shooting upward, disappearing as the boat circled once, then growing larger. Briefly the searchlight illuminated the meadow, and Spearman came in, overshooting slightly, driving almost to the moat before he checked. He swaggered in, satisfied. "See it?"
"Uh-huh. What did you learn?"
"Those were drum boats. Why, my God, they opened out like little orange flowers...! Well—the main fleet is 'way behind them, say thirty miles down the lake, coming slow. Couldn't spot the land army—no campfires."
"All right. Sit in on this, Ed...." And the plan was drawn up, so far as there could be a plan when the odds were ten to one in a world that never asked for them.
Paul, with Mijok and Pakriaa, would lead three hundred spearwomen and a hundred bowmen south before daylight, in the hope of disorganizing the advance with surprise and gunfire, but unless the Vestoians were demoralized beyond expectation, this could be only a skirmish.They would fall back, try to avoid losses. The remainder of the army would stay at the edge of the woods until Lantis was in sight: Wright at the fortress with the giant women, now only four, who could handle rifles; Abro Kamisiaa and Abro Brodaa in the center; Sears and Abro Tamisraa on the right flank in the west, with Elis and Surok. Spearman in the lifeboat would follow the advance party at first-light. Paul said nothing of the second drive, to the southeast, the retreat that would seem like attack. When the time came for that, he must have in one unit all that remained after the first wrath had spent itself—and even then the pygmies would have to believe that they were attacking single-heartedly, or they could not reach the southern end of the range, but would probably be driven into the trap of the kaksma hills.
The drums began again. They began after the council was ended and Sears had gone to take charge of his command on the right flank, with Elis and Surok and shifty Tamisraa. The other small red sovereigns had gone too, and Wright had stalked into his room—to sleep, he said—and Paul had followed Spearman out to the boat, where Spearman would sleep until it was time to go. Spearman tapped his elbow. "You're surprising me, boy. Better than I could have done, I think. We'll knock 'em over." And the drums began.
Spearman stared off at the lake; after a while he grinned, and the lamp burning in the fortress caught the grimace. "Yeah," he sighed, "well, I knew I only singed 'em." He climbed into the boat and glanced down with a half salute, which Paul answered mechanically. But as Paul walked away the thought stirred:That was like goodbye....
Paul went along the path at the edge of the woods. It was wide and easy, broadened during the Year One by much travel between the camp and Pakriaa's village. There were occasional small-voiced greetings from the woods: these were Kamisiaa's and Brodaa's people, who knew him. Brodaa cherished a painting he had made of the singing waterfall above her village in return for that uskaran pelt. Many of these soldiers would be chosen by Pakriaa to bring up the number of the advance party to four hundred.
There was no red moon tonight. The white moon was half the size of the planet Earth, so far away that its glow was scarcely more than that of a star, but Paul knew that by what light it gave the pygmies could see him smile in response to their greetings. They would be studying him, trying to weigh the tone of his answer.One of them might save my life tomorrow; certainly I shall have to see some of them die. They are people.
There were two visible planets to follow the wandering of the no longer alien star that was the sun. One was hidden tonight; the other, red like Mars, hung over the eastern jungle in tranquillity. A little shape detached itself from the trees to meet him. Abro Pakriaa. "Will you not sleep tonight, Paul, before we go?" It was a human question, sweetly spoken and meant kindly.
"Later, I think." He stood by her awhile; in the blackness from which she had come there was a steady mumbling, and Paul knew what it was: the witches also had their part to play in these heavy hours, although long before battle was joined they would be cowering in the villages. Somewhere in the tree shadows they were squatting, muttering the antique prayers. He wondered whether to go on and visit with Sears awhile.No: Elis is a rock, better company than I would be at the moment....There was much, he thought, that would be good to talk about with Pakriaa tonight; there ought to be words that would reach her. Perhaps on this night a glimpse of Wright's vision would meet with something better than amusement and distrust. But in the end he only said, "We'll always be good friends, you and I."
He thought she might take hold of his hand in the Charin gesture. She did not—undignified perhaps. But she said, "Tocwright says we are all one flesh." She said it thoughtfully, without contempt.
"Yes. We are all one flesh." And lest he become a true Charin and spoil a moment of truth with unnecessary words, Paul turned back to the camp, seeing that she remained there in the open, looking south, the grumbling witches behind her, before her the long night of drums and no red moon.
Mijok was not asleep. He sat cross-legged by the lamp. "I wanted to thank you. Doc's gone to sleep at last, andbefore I could find the words I wanted. It will be difficult to talk in the morning."
Paul sat by him, puzzled. "To thank me?"
"Because I've learned so much. And had so much pleasure in the learning." Mijok yawned amiably, stretching his arms. "To thank you for that, in case you or I should be dead tomorrow."
It would have been easy to say: "Oh, we'll be all right—" Something like that. Paul buried the words unspoken, knowing their triviality would be a discourtesy, a dismissal of the insight and patience which made it possible for Mijok to speak so casually. Mijok loved to be alive; there was no moment of day or night that he did not relish, if only for its newness and from his sense that every gift of time is a true gift. "I thank you for being with us." Mijok accepted the words without embarrassment or second thought.
"Why, you know," he said, "in the old days I never even knew that plants were alive. But look at this—" He lifted one of Dorothy's white flowers from his knee. "It was in your room, Paul. She put it beside that painting you made of me, before she left." He peered into the white mouth of the flower, touched the fat stamens, and stroked the slim stalk. "Everything it needs. Like ourselves. But I never knew that. We are all one flesh."
Paul glanced over his shoulder. The red planet like Mars was still high over the jungle. He thought:When that is hidden, it will be time to go.
All night Paul heard the distant barbarous thunder of the drums. In the hour before first-light his advance company formed; a furious serpent, it stole two miles south through grassland following the pallor of the beach. Near first-light, Paul knew, they would see a thread of new moon. In this present darkness the Vestoians might be slipping north on the lake; there would be no betraying sound above the passion of the drums. As for the land army, that could be miles to the south or over the next rise of ground.
His mind fought a pressure of alternatives. Better to have kept the army in one unit? To wait in the forest for news of Abro Samiraa's thrust in the northeast?Never mind: no time now.At least his body was meeting the challenge without rebellion. His wiry legs carried him in silence; his senses were whetted to fineness. Rifle, pistol, field glasses, hunting knife made a light load. Ahead of him Mijok loomed against a division of two shadows, sky and earth. Not first-light: only a sign that five thousand miles away on the eastern shore of this continent there might be the shining of a star now called the sun. Mijok carried a shield of doubled asonis hide; his only weapon was a seven-foot club, since his smallest finger was too large to pass the trigger guard of a rifle. Though keeping watch with Paul, Mijok had spoken little during the night—brooding perhaps, trying (Paul imagined) to see a new world in the matrix of the old. But there was no guessing a giant's thoughts. Lacking the stale burden of human guilt and compromise, they had the strength as well as the weakness of innocence; the country of their minds must wait on the explorations of centuries.
Abro Pakriaa, close to Paul's right, moved like a breezein the grass. She and her small soldiers despised the use of shields, despised the arrows of their own bowmen as fit only for timid males. They never threw their spears but kept them for close quarters; their only other weapon was a white-stone dagger.... The army groped through the meadow in three ranks, widely spaced at Paul's order; beyond the right flank the archers were concentrated. Four hundred fighters altogether—against six thousand.
A wooded knoll grew into silhouette fifty yards from the beach, ten feet above the level of the meadow. "We meet them here," Paul said. By prearrangement Pakriaa halted a hundred of her spearwomen between the knoll and the beach, the other two hundred on the west side, the hundred bowmen out beyond. Paul and Mijok penetrated the blackness of the knoll, pushing through to its southern side, where Pakriaa joined them. Even in that short passage the heaviness of dark had altered with a promise. There were few clouds. The day (if it ever came) would be hot, windless, and beautiful. No more blue fireflies were wandering. The planet Lucifer had become three gray enigmas of lake and meadow and sky, but in this blind hush when morning was still the supposition of a dream, the shapes of the trees were attaining a separate reality; in the west Paul could find a hint of the low hills standing between him and the West Atlantic.
Seventy or eighty miles over yonder Dorothy's brown eyes would be watching for first-light on the sea, watching for it not on the great sea, he knew, but on the channel that shut her away from the mainland, from himself. With his child at her breast, another unknown life in the womb. Ann Bryan too, her troubled secret mind still full of protest at the contradictions and unfulfilled promises which made up the climate of life on Lucifer as well as elsewhere; and the ancient giantess Kamon, and Rak and Muson, Samis, Arek, and those giant children perennially puzzling and lovable....No time.Mijok was peering out on the west side of the knoll. "Nicely hidden. Your soldiers are very good, Abro Pakriaa," said the giant, whose knowledge of war was almost as dim a product of theory as his knowledge of the planet Earth, where his Charin friends had been born.
The pygmy princess did not answer. Paul thought with held-in anger:Can't she understand even now that Mijok is one of us, the best of us...?But Pakriaa was staring south; she might not have heard. She pointed.
Thus, after a year of waiting, wonder, rumor; a year when Lantis of Vestoia, Queen of the World, had been a half-mythical terror, symbol of tyranny and danger but not a person; a year that Ed Spearman spoke of as "lost to the piddlings of philosophy"—Paul saw them at last.
Saw rather a waving of the grass, a cluster of dots shifting, bobbing, advancing. Pakriaa's tree-frog voice was calm: "They come fast. They want to reach our forest before the light makes the omasha fly. Your plan is good, Paul: we hold them in the open, the omasha have good meat."
A man could dourly accept it, somehow. Bred to gentleness, undestructive labor, study, contemplation, Paul could tell himself that a certain spot (even as it bloomed like a nodding flower in the telescopic sights) was not flesh and blood and nerve, only a target.Would it be so if I were fighting only for myself...?He held the spot in focus; he said, "Your soldiers are prepared for the fire stick? They know they must not charge till they have the order from you?"
Her voice had warmth: "And they know you are my commander."
Paul squeezed the trigger.
Too soon—and too damned quiet.The clever makers of twenty-first-century firearms on Earth had cut down the shout of a .30 caliber to a trivial snap. The savage eyes out there might not even have caught the flash at the muzzle. There ought to have been the glare and circumstance of a rocket. How could they be panicked by a silly pop and a spark? Even though—well, one of the dots had vanished, true enough. Maybe he had killed his first human being.
He glanced westward, wondering how soon the gray must change to saffron and crimson. The new red moon—there it was. A bloody sliver of a sword above the far shore of the lake.
And he saw the boats.
They were half a mile out. No others were visible north of them, but that meant nothing: these might or might notbe the lead canoes of the fleet. The noise of drum boats in the south was constant: those would stay anchored in hiding, letting their wrath appear to come from all parts of the world.
The leading boat jumped to clarity in the sights. Forward the bark roofing reached the gunwale; aft, the sides were open to leave space for two paddlers. Paul saw the tight mouth of the one on the port side: she could have been Pakriaa's blood sister. Now it was necessary to think of Abro Pakriaa's ambassador torn in quarters, head and arms sent back as a message from the Queen of the World—until the mind of the student of Christopher Wright rebelled:Vengeance was one of the ape's first discoveries.It became more necessary to think:Make it a good head shot—she won't feel it....
It was not a very good shot. The scream came weakly across the water. The paddler tumbled, an arm dangling. The starboard paddler seemed not to understand and labored stupidly, making the canoe lurch to port. The prow of a following boat rammed it, tore away the matting, revealed the huddled soldiers who became splashing legs and arms in a sudden foam. While the land army came on....
Dots that were bald red heads, white specks that were spear blades. A simple arithmetic: less than a hundred rounds for the rifle; four hundred soldiers; a heart divided but angry, and the devotion of an eight-foot giant with a big stick. Against six thousand in the land army alone. "Pakriaa, it's a single column—the fools! Send your bowmen out west, catch them on the flank." Pakriaa ran down the knoll.
Paul shot twice at the head of the column. A flurry. No halt. Some of the boats were no longer sliding north, but driving down on the beach, forty or fifty, like hornets from a torn nest.Another mistake—no, not if it diverts them from the camp.Pakriaa's hundred on this side of the knoll were holding firm for an order. Paul's wave was enough: they spread out in the grass at the edge of the beach, quivering like waiting cats. The light was changing their bodies from vagueness to familiar copper, black skirts, white body paint.... Mijok tore a half-buried rock from the ground and hurled it out to splinter the nearest boat. Butthe soldiers would merely swim ashore. "Mijok! Stay with me!"
The head of that column was less than two hundred yards away. Paul fired mechanically, seeing life tumble backward and lie still. "Let them see us now, Pakriaa, Mijok——"
They strode down the south slope of the knoll in plain sight under the beginning of morning as the bowmen in the meadow released a harsh flight. The beach on the left became a seething of yells, snarling, trampling, clash of white stone.First-light—first-light—and where in damnation is Ed Spearman with the lifeboat...?
The column was confused by the many pressing up from behind. A few dozen spearwomen streamed out toward Pakriaa's archers; a second and third flight downed most of them—the little men had skill. No Vestoian bowmen had appeared. "Now, Pakriaa——"
Her one cry brought the spearwomen out of the grass west of the knoll, skimming forward like red bullets, spears low in the left hand until they crashed into the column; then weapons rose and plunged and rose.
The Vestoians wore no white paint. Their leaders had caps of green. Their grass skirts were mere fringes. They died easily. They killed easily.
Some distance down the column—for it was still a column, still a rolling machine that could not halt—a tall structure was swaying, hard to assess in this tortured twilight. A litter? Lantis of Vestoia, the Queen of the World herself? Paul checked his own running advance to send two shots at it. Then he and Mijok were surrounded by a writhing of arms, white-stone, and blood, Mijok raging but bewildered. Paul saw Pakriaa's spear drive down below naked ribs and withdraw from what sprawled on the ground. She was untouched. Her lean little body dripped with sweat, her teeth gleamed in a devil's grin. Two purple-skirted captains joined her; the three smashed into a cluster of shrieking souls who only began to understand what was happening.
Arithmetic still ruled. This column might be only one of many pushing up between lake and hills, bent on reaching Pakriaa's forest before the omasha soared in from those hills to feed on living and dead.
Mijok brushed through the fighters with his shield and down the line till he was clear of Pakriaa's white-painted demons. His stick swung, destroying everything in a half circle before him. He was not confused now, not even shouting, but saving breath. He worked stolidly, like a man beating at a swarm of rats.... Pakriaa jumped on a fallen thing to point at that clumsy framework down the line. "Lantis! That is Lantis——"
The litter wobbled toward the center of confusion on the shoulders of six women. Paul fired twice again at it. He had a glimpse of a scrawny figure with a high green headdress leaping down, snatching a spear, vanishing in an improvised protective phalanx. He shot into that, dropping one of the outer soldiers. Mijok saw; he changed the course of his attack, a bulldozer aiming at a new clump of brush. Pakriaa screamed in frenzy, without meaning. Her spear was still a part of her. She was bleeding from a thigh wound; her bright blue skirt had been torn away; she glittered with sweat and paint and blood, a dancing devil mindlessly happy. Then she was down once more in the press, squirming toward the phalanx, and Paul could not shoot.
But it was the toiling giant, Paul thought, who made Lantis break. Again he saw the snarling face of the Queen of the World and heard her squeal an order. Before Mijok could cut his way to her the phalanx was running, sheltered by the mere mass of soldiers. It was necessary to call Mijok back.
The whole Vestoian army was running. "Pakriaa!" Paul plunged after her, caught her shoulder. "No pursuit!" Her eyes glazed in mad rejection; he thought she would bite his wrist. "Turn your soldiers! Bring them down on the Vestoians from the boats—the boats!"
She could understand that. Her order was the shriek of a rusty nail on glass, and it turned them. It brought them howling down to the beach to aid what was left of the first hundred. The water was a jumble of abandoned boats—even the paddlers had struggled ashore to kill and die.
Mijok ploughed in a second time.... That ended it. Some of the Vestoians might have glimpsed what he did to the land soldiers. A few forgot all custom and threw their spears, which Mijok's shield carelessly turned; then theystared with sickness at their empty hands and waited for the club. Meanwhile the strengthened crowd of pygmies worked on till the sand was redder than the sky and there was no more to be done. "Back!"
Pakriaa screamed "No!" and pointed south. Paul stumbled on something slippery. He stooped to her, yelling,"Omasha!The sky will be full of them. Let them fight Lantis. We've lost a hundred already——"
Her face became sane and blank in agony. "My people—my people——"
"Yes! And other boats are still going north. Your soldiers must pick up the hurt and run for it."
There were not many living wounded in this sudden quiet. A spear has scant mercy. And the lifeboat had not come.... Mijok was holding out his shield on both arms; he had tossed his stick aside. "Put them on this. I can carry six—seven." When the shield could hold no more he lifted it, his face contorted and changed. "Paul—I told myself I was back in the old life, when we always killed them if we could. But the new laws—oh, Paul,the laws——"
"War perverts all laws. But the laws are true. It is—climbing a mountain, Mijok: we slip, fall back, try again. Nothing good in war, only necessity, choice of evils. Now make the best speed you can, friend—don't wait for us." Mijok ran with his vast strides, holding the shield out in front so that the motion of his body would not jounce it.
Pakriaa would not move till the last of the survivors had stumbled past her. They were disciplined. Already some of the soft bowmen had taken out arrows of the whining, glittering type that sometimes frightened off the omasha. They were ready. Paul tried to count, gave it up. Less than three hundred. The archers had not suffered much. Paul said, "Your leg is hurt, Abro Pakriaa. I'll carry you."
She was indifferent. "I thank you." He slung his rifle and caught her up, naked and slippery with blood and acrid-smelling paint. Her weight was less than forty pounds. Her head lolled back; she whispered to the sky, "No one should call me Abro. I am Pakriaa the child, weak as a male, a fool. I could have followed. I could have brought her to the ground. I let her go. I am a red worm. I blame you for it, Paul-Mason. You and your friends. All of you—except Sears, who is a god with a window on another world."
"Hush! The world Sears shows you in the microscope is this world, Pakriaa. He tells you so himself. And I tell you there'll be a new way——"
She was not listening. Still he saw no threat of brown wings, and no lifeboat. But time was a deception; dawn on Lucifer was abrupt on cloudless mornings. The battle which had seemed long as heart-break had been a skirmish, a brush of advance parties lasting perhaps ten minutes from his first shot to the retreat. Pakriaa's head twitched from side to side; her eyes were dry. "I have betrayed Ismar, Creator-and-Destroyer-Who-Speaks-Thunder-in-the-Rains——"
"Pakriaa——"
"My people are to burn me in the pit for the kaksmas with lamp oil. I will order it. I would have been Queen of the World." Making no effort to escape from his arms, she burst into rage at him; a rage pitiable, not dangerous: "Why have you come, you sky people, you speakers of new words? We had our life, no need of you. We were brave—you weaken us with words, with words. Your friendship is the green-flower weed that kills the self. You make children of us. You break our beautiful image of the god and tell us she never lived. You say that now?" She slashed her fingers down her side, drawing blood.
Firing? Firing at the camp?
She clung to him, wailing: "And now you carry me. I cannot even hate you. You steal our strength. The priests were right—the priests——Ismar, help me!Ismar!"
Paul forced himself into a run. It was firing, rapid and sharp, pistols and rifles. The ammunition would melt fast at that rate. He could hear yelling. Catching up with the running soldiers, leaving them behind, he could see Mijok, far ahead, swerve to the left.
And the lifeboat was in action.
It curved grandly from near the surface of the lake, which was dim with smoke. It circled over jungle, descended in another swoop at the canoes. Red bodies tumbled overside; the silver nose tilted as if in disdain; the jet spoke for one second, blasting the near canoes into nothing, sending up the further ones in yellow fire, driving the lifeboatinto its seeming-careless leap. But there was still firing from the gray stone fortress, a human tangle on the beach before it, a high long screaming.
Forward detachments of the lake fleet must have passed in the dark. Paul ran on, only his arms remembering Pakriaa. She slipped down, grabbed a spear as her soldiers caught up with her, and ran straight for the beach.
That part of the agony was almost done. No more boats were coming in—Ed Spearman's sky weapon had seen to that. There were more canoes, many more, but they were holding off, grouping clumsily at a distance. Paul waited for the lifeboat to slip over him and waved to the south. Spearman altered the course of the glide, dropping after one more group of panicked boats but heading south. A longer burst of the jet, and Spearman's weapon lifted, straightened, shot out of sight across the meadow.
Paul could picture the big man's intent and mirthless grin, the cold gray eye alert on the fuel gauge. And when this fuel was gone—no more. It might stand for a while, somewhere, a decaying artifact....
Those left alive on the beach were bringing in casualties. The boats were still withdrawing. Christopher Wright was in the fortress with the wounded, his narrow face tight in the misery of a doctor who can do almost nothing. "Doc—how many have we lost here?"
"You! I had almost—Oh, Mijok, what've you got there...? Paul, they jumped us at first-light. No time even to remind Ed to go after you——"
"No, he did right. More needed here. We've stalled the land army, but they'll come on. They have to." In the sky the brown dots had appeared at last, pouring from their foul rock ledges in the hills. All of them were flying south. "Pakriaa, look! Lantis has two wars now."
She stood naked and stiff, watching, her underlip thrust out, despair giving way to a glare of satisfaction at the far-off wings, the beasts who ate everything, feared nothing. The southwestern sky was heavy with them. Paul had been right; he sickened at his own cleverness. "How many, Doc?"
"Forty or worse. This defense on the beach was by Kamisiaa's people and our giant girls—who can shoot." Paul saw the golden-furred girl Lisson smile uneasily athim; there was a sober stare from brown Tejron. The other two giant women, old Karison and young Elron, seemed more deeply disturbed, Elron studying her rifle as if it were a living thing. Wright said, "With Abro Brodaa's help I made the others stay in the woods where you posted 'em. Surok ran over from the right flank—I had him run back and tell Sears and the rest to sit tight.... Pakriaa"—Wright strode out to her—"let me bind that up—you're bleeding." She permitted it....
The boats were clustering a quarter mile away. Paul fumbled for his field glasses; they were lost. Little Abroshin Nisana, whom he had ordered to remain at the fortress, spoke beside him, slowly and carefully because her English was not good: "Commander, Abro Samiraa is return. The plan—good. She crossed the stream, catch them in blackness. A few escape. We lose twenty. One was Abro Duriaa—I am not know how she is killed." She scuffed her little seven-toed foot in the dust; there was nothing alien in her smile. "Those who return Tocwright is send west." She was puzzled, not disapproving. "Why are we most strong in the west? The Vestoians follow lake shore."
He said, not quite honestly, "Their straightest approach to Abro Pakriaa's village—your village—is in the west. Were there prisoners?"
"Abro Samiraa is not like to take prisoners. We took not any on the beach. Wrong?"
He smothered a sigh of exhaustion. "It may not matter." With Mijok, the stout giantess Tejron was moving among the wounded. Paul noticed a heap of torn cloth, all that remained of Earth-made shorts and jackets and overalls, ripped for bandages. Wright's idea, no doubt, and good: the pygmies' pounded-bark fabric was a poor second best.After the war we can go naked—fair enough....He saw a pygmy woman shrink from Tejron's approach; she might be from one of the northern villages, her stoicism unequal to accepting the touch of the huge beings she would always have regarded as wild animals. Paul knelt, hoping to reassure her, as Tejron eased a bandage around a pierced abdomen. There would be internal bleeding. "You are from the north?"
She looked hurt that he did not know her face. "I am of Abro Brodaa's village." Then in spite of her shrinkingher question was directed at Tejron: "Abro Brodaa has say to us—we are all one flesh. That—that——"
Tejron was able to say, "That is true." And while Paul searched for other words that might affirm, comfort, explain, the soldier died.
The only omasha now visible were soaring stragglers. The swarm would have found the army of Lantis—which must and would continue to advance. There was a limit to the gorging of the bat-winged beasts; they too could die on the spears. Meantime the lifeboat was gone, the boats were landing, in a moment of darkly sweet quiet which was the eye of the storm.
Paul checked the giant girl Lisson from firing at the landing party. "Save ammunition." He indicated a tall blue-flowered shrub a hundred yards out in the meadow. "We wait at the edge of the woods until they pass that bush, then charge them. If they break us down here, everyone is to fight west, away from the lake—west. Now run down the line, pass on these two orders." Lisson sped away, her golden fur bright and unstained. "Doc—get the wounded together, have the other women and Mijok take them west, beyond Sears' group, well back in the woods. Try to find out where Abara's got to with the olifants but send a runner back (if there's time)—don't come back yourself. And keep Mijok with you. I don't want him to do any more fighting if we can help it—it's tearing him up inside."
"I——" Wright checked himself, nodded, hurried back into the fortress.
"Pakriaa, Abro Kamisiaa, get your soldiers at the edge of the woods."
They vanished. The meadow was empty of life; the many open eyes on the beach would not see what was to come. Wright's party left the enclosure, Mijok carrying the shield. Wright could not look back nor wave, for his own arms were full, his head bent in some consoling speech. Paul was striding for the woods when Pakriaa met him and murmured in contempt, "We hide too, Commander?"
He answered out of a moment of black indifference. (Probably we all die and everything I have done is a mistake.) "Pakriaa, they may break easier if they don't see ustill we charge." She shrugged, following him into the obscurity, pointedly ignoring Nisana, who came to his other side, perhaps still hating the little captain for her independence of yesterday, when Paul was chosen commander of this grotesque army.
The Vestoians from the boats were rising out of the grass and coming forward. Steadily now, with no more apparent haste than the first breakers leading a destroying wave. It was possible to think with amazing leisure of the high meadows and wooded roads of New Hampshire. Paul's brother had always been a little too fat and fond of ice cream. There was a bookstore in Brattleboro. And the waves of the South China Sea were moving mountains with snowcaps of foam as they came in on Lingayen. Why, there was a war there once, more than a hundred years ago, when the Republic of Oceania was hardly even a thought. Yes: they called it a Second World War....
The Vestoians passed the blue shrub. The breaker was red, with a foam of white-tipped spears.
Paul was swept into the open, not only by the howling drive of his own pygmy army, but by the machine within, relentless again, briefly free from the compromise of thought. He was firing with precision in the scant time available before the white-painted bodies crashed into the unpainted and churned up a froth of battle.
He had time to wonder why Nisana was here with him a few yards back of the hand-to-hand frenzy. She was not afraid; her spear was balanced. A break in the line of fighters let through a Vestoian soldier, dark mouth squared in a yell. Nisana's spear widened the mouth to a death mask and withdrew. Paul stepped into the breach and sent a few shots toward a trio of green-capped leaders. Something slapped and gouged at his chest—nothing serious. But his own fighters to the left of him were going down, outnumbered. He shouted at a brief gleam of Pakriaa's face, "West! Fightwest!"
Golden Lisson was running back from her errand, her rifle waving, her lips straining in wild laughter. She passed him, trying to bring her rifle into use as she ran; it did not fire. A Vestoian was forcing Nisana away from Paul and beating down her spear. "Why, damn you!" The Vestoianface dissolved in pulp and strangeness under his rifle butt, and Paul reeled back, believing for an unbounded second that ghosts from a place only a few light-years away had swirled across this stinking battlefield to shriek at him: "Yes! Your people always fought that way—the ape picked up a stone...." But Nisana was alive; Nisana was unhurt and alive. He could look up again and see the girl Lisson also using her rifle as a flail.
She was between him and the beach. Three pygmies had caught the butt, and now she swung them absurdly high; she had almost shaken them off when a spear pierced her arm and hung there. The rifle dropped. She was down, under the leaping spears and red bodies. She did not even cry out again; the golden fur was reddened and defiled. Paul beat his way toward her, scarcely seeing what his swinging rifle hit, knowing it was too late, forgetting his own order to drive west. Aware too of another tawny shape flashing toward him.
Surok, who had loved Lisson, who would have been her playmate in the next Red-Moon-before-the Rains. Paul tried to stop him—but if any sound came out of his own throat it would have been lost against Surok's mindless crying. The giant tore into the press around Lisson's body and fell almost at once, crushing a few as he rolled....
"West!Stay behind my rifle, Nisana—-"
It had become a methodical insanity like Mijok's, a cutting of red hay that spouted blood. He noticed blood on his right hand too—nothing: front sights of the rifle gouging him. The Vestoians in this direction were thinning out and giving way. He caught up with a white-splashed back and bandaged thigh—Pakriaa, ploughing her way west. Abro Samiraa drove across his path in the wrong direction, chasing an isolated group of three; squat and heavy-faced, she looked happy and more than life-size in the moment of her death, as she took a spear thrust over her heart and lay down with the enemy to grin at the sky and cease hating.
A rifle barked ahead of him. That could only be Sears Oliphant: Wright would surely follow orders and keep Mijok and the giant women with him to protect the wounded.... Abro Brodaa was fighting through to aid Pakriaa, not yelling, not excited, keeping somehow an airof dreamy contemplation, as if the arms driving her spear and dagger were not quite hers. Nisana cried out, "They are not following! They go back——"
It was true. Partly true. Here in this patch of bloody meadow there was not much left to fight. The defenders had functioned like a single organism, forming a new semicircular line. Behind it was a quiet, where Pakriaa was gasping, pounding her foot into a body that felt nothing.
And this dear monster, this fat naked grotesque, panting and smeared with red—this must be Sears Oliphant, late of John Hopkins University. The monster smiled in a black beard. "Few got by, oh my, yes. Tamisraa's girls fixed 'em—had to club m' rifle—dirty cave man—no fear, Paul—no fear!Muscle man with an empty head. They had—couple bowmen with 'em—no harm done." No harm? Was he unaware of the broken arrow shaft below his ribs, deeply bedded, with dark blood oozing around the wood? "They quit, Paul?"
"They haven't quit." He looked south, seeing why they wouldn't quit.
"Tamisraa got a bad one—throat." Sears coughed painfully. "I sent her to Doc—he's just back of those trees. And my pets, Paul, my olifants, why, they're standing fast, boy. With Abara, bless him—'bout half mile north. You can't beat 'em. We must figure some way to ferry 'em over to the island—must—they're people, those olifants——"
"You go to Doc yourself, Jocko, and fast. That——"
"Oh, that, that. Mere prac'l dem'stration nobody loves fat man——"
The Vestoians would not quit because of what was coming half a mile away in the south under a cloud of brown wings, coming fast. The horde would be ignoring the omasha, striking them aside, spearing them when there was time, granting them the necessary toll for passage, and coming fast. Oh, they would be less than six thousand now—somewhat less. Meanwhile the remnant from the boats was waiting, regrouping, drawing breath, readying itself for the climax of massacre, maybe deliberately postponing it until Lantis of Vestoia, Queen of the World, could arrive to enjoy it. Paul tried again to count his people in the sturdy half circle. Black Elis was stridingamong them, a great stick in each hand, rumbling comfort and encouragement, and none of them shrank away from him.
It looked like less than seven hundred. A hundred lost at the knoll; forty, Wright said, in the first skirmish at the camp; twenty in Samiraa's night expedition. Perhaps three hundred in this last wave of the battle. And Samiraa herself; Duriaa; Tamisraa wounded, Pakriaa insane with grief; Lisson and Surok dead. Lame Kamisiaa—Paul could not find her. Abro Brodaa—still calm, unhurt, competent. Very well—seven hundred against somewhat less than six thousand of the land army, somewhat less than four thousand from the boats.
How I dreamed!There would be no southward drive to the island. The omasha alone made it an absurdity. He had been idiotic to imagine it.
Pakriaa broke her spear across her knee. She walked out into the meadow toward the advancing swarm. She looked back stupidly at Paul's shout, and Nisana ran to her, crying out in the old language. Pakriaa, with no change of expression, lunged at the captain, striking flat-handed across her face, forcing her back until Paul reached them to interfere and Sears caught Pakriaa's wrist, mumbling, "Come now—come with me, princess."
"I am no princess."
"I call you so," Sears said clearly, and speaking with sternness for possibly the first time in his life. "Now come with me."
Paul stammered, "Have Doc get that damned arrow out of you. Then he's to start north with the wounded—at once."
"North." Sears nodded.
"There are no gods," said Pakriaa.
"Yes, north. We'll catch up with you."
"I thought of you as a god."
"Think of me as a friend who loves you. It is better." She went with him, stumbling as Paul had never seen her do, and when the leaves closed behind them it seemed to Paul that there was surely the cloud of another world. She might have been a small girl going for a walk in the woods with her grandfather....
There was no lifeboat above that rolling swarm. EdSpearman must have——No time to think about it.
But he had to, a little. Spearman was forced down by lack of fuel and killed. Or forced down, isolated somewhere, miles away. Or he had kept good watch of the fuel gauge until there was just enough for another trip to the island and had gone—right, reasonable, what he ought to have done, what Paul would have ordered him to do if he could have.... Paul turned to Brodaa. "Your sister Kamisiaa—I don't see her——"
"My lame sister is dead." Her eyes were shrewd, counting. "We have more than seven hundred. Two hundred of them bowmen."
"Bring them all to the woods. Spread the bowmen at the edge: they will meet the first charge with arrows, nothing else, and then join our retreat. Send a hundred spearwomen to guard and help Tocwright's group: they will go straight north. Send another hundred through the villages to save what they can—the children, the old—and take them west and north to join the others. All the rest will stay with you and me and Elis to fight in the rear—delay and confuse—fighting retreat, Brodaa. I see nothing else."
"Nothing else," she said evenly. "As you say...."
Elis was with him, waiting under the trees, and Nisana, who said, "No gods? There must be other gods. Not Ismar...."
Elis watched the meadow over the crouching bowmen. "Within you, Captain. The god within you made you save the life of my friend. I saw that. I even think I begin to understand. But that might be vanity."
A sorry day moved into evening, and when evening became an approach to moonless dark, this day of retreat was in Paul's mind a passage of distorted images, true or false.
True that he was now limping through forest stillness between Nisana and a skinny ghost who was Christopher Wright and Wright carried Pakriaa, who moaned at times like a child with a nightmare, and up ahead were five white drifting mountains, one of them ridden by a man who was silent in pain, Sears Oliphant. It might or might not be true that at some time during the day Paul had thrashed on the ground with a broken head in front of some squalling danger until black arms swept him up away from—whatever it was.
Tejron and the two other giant women Karison and Elron, and Mijok, still lived. Elis was walking behind Paul, unhurt; therefore the mind of Elis would still be probing at the borderland of known and unknown, searching and incorruptible. All true. Apparently true that the gash in Paul's side had stiffened, his right leg was knotting itself in some unimportant distress, and his bandaged forehead no longer throbbed.
The first contact with the Vestoian land army had been a swift skirmish and ordered withdrawal. Abro Brodaa's archers had crumpled the first enemy charge. After that the Vestoians had crashed into the woods with no caution, driven by the horror of brown wings that still pursued them. Paul had had a final glimpse of the green headdress of Lantis, Queen of the World; his two shots before the rifle jammed had not touched her. Once, under cover of the trees, the Vestoians had paused to reorganize, giving Paul'sretreating force a little time and distance and the help of forest obscurity.
The spearwomen sent ahead to clear the villages had poured through Pakriaa's settlement and Brodaa's, rounding up old people, children, and the chattering pack of male witches, sending them west to join Wright's group of wounded—if they could find it. But at the third village upstream—it had been Abro Samiraa's—there was delay. Perhaps the people had refused to go where there were giants. Paul's rear guard had halted south of the village to protect the evacuation; here the Vestoians caught up with them.
They had fought it out for two hours in the misery of bush and brier and purple vine outside the village ditch, while the jungle world steamed in the growth of mid-morning. Paul's horizon had narrowed to the knot of fighters who stayed with him—Nisana, Brodaa, Elis, an unknown black-skirted soldier who fell at his feet with a bleeding mouth. Somewhere in that hell he had lost his rifle. It was Brodaa (this must be true, for it was Elis who told him of it)—Brodaa who had guided them out of the trap, regrouped the remnant of the rear guard north of Samiraa's village while the Vestoians paused to set that village afire and rejoice over its dying.
Paul could remember that regrouping: black Elis had set him on his feet, supporting him till he could walk. There were many twittering, mad-eyed bowmen among the survivors. Brodaa had sent runners to give the other three villages a final warning; she herself decided against trying to reach them with this fragment of an army numbering less than three hundred. The only way to save anything at all was to flee north, join Wright's group, hope that the remaining villages would delay the conquerors and that at least some of their non-combatants could scatter before Lantis, Queen of the World, took them for slaves, meat, and sacrifice.
The rest of the day had been a running, a harsh drive into country unknown even to Elis. There had been, for Paul and Elis at least, a breath of second wind when they found the tracks of the olifants. They had caught up with Wright's refugees in the early afternoon, but there could be no pause, even though it was quiet here at the edge offorest and western meadow and the sound of screaming in the villages was an hour behind them....
Paul noticed that he was naked except for ammunition belt and an empty holster. Perhaps his present clarity of mind was the true madness, the earlier fog of pain and anger the mind's more natural climate. But one might as well reason and take stock. He remembered the map. Was it saved? No matter: a copy had been flown to the island with Dorothy and the baby.
I have a woman who loves me; I have a daughter. I have my life.
On his left, just visible in twilight beyond a meadow turning brilliant with blue fireflies, there were the low western hills, the hills rotten with the burrows of kaksmas, and they were nearer, much nearer than he had ever seen them except from the lifeboat. (But Ed Spearman went there; he walked in the hills alone and found iron ore, and now he is——Never mind where he is. If the charlesite was giving out he did right to fly to the island and abandon us. What else could he do?) Well, it was right too that the hills should be nearer: the edge of the forest slanted northwest, narrowing the meadow. And this far north the hills were smaller, more broken up. Yet it would not do to approach them closely: even the least of the hills (so pygmy and giant tradition said) could be the dwelling place of day-blind ratlike killers numerous enough to destroy this entire party and still be hungry. The retreat must struggle north until the hills were well behind, shut away by level jungle—where the kaksmas still might come, to be sure, but only to the distance of half a night's journey from their burrows. "Doc—can you estimate what distance we've made since we caught up with you?"
"Maybe twenty miles," the old man said. "In more time thanArgoonce needed to travel twenty million miles. What is man?"
"Man? A mathematical absurdity.... Aren't you tired? I could carry Pakriaa a while."
"No, I'm not tired, son. I like to have her...."
Rifles—in the beginning there had been only five, and one shotgun. The shotgun had been taken to the island. Dorothy and Ann had their pistols there, too. Paul's rifle was lost. Lisson's had been lost when she died. Thatshould leave three. Wright had one slung at his back. Peering up ahead, Paul saw another in the red-brown hand of the young giantess Elron. Sears must have lost his. So two at least remained. And one automatic—Wright's. "Those two new recruits Mijok brought——I'm in a fog—I only just remembered——"
"Lost," said Wright, staring ahead. "The boy didn't understand. He ran into the mess on the beach like a horse running into a fire. That was before you got back from the south. The other had more sense. Saw the pygmies spilling out of the boats and ran for the woods. Naturally we didn't try to hold him. Perhaps he's reached his home territory. I hope so."
Behind him Elis spoke softly: "It was not very far, Doc. When we reach the island and start the new settlement——"
"Oh, Elis——"
"When that has been done I'll come back and find him, give him the words—him and many others. I promise you that. Let me believe it."
"Believe it, Elis. But the boy Danik is dead. He was bright, curious. He should have lived 150 years."
"We overtake mystery," Elis said, "and leave it behind."
"Men have never overtaken the mystery of untimely death."
"There is chaos," said Elis. "Chance. Mystery is great jungle around a small clearing. I accept that. We make a wider clearing."
Paul felt Nisana's finger hook over his. Pakriaa groaned, perhaps in sleep. The darkness had blotted away the hills; even the small shape of Nisana was growing too dim. Elis said, "You're limping, Paul. Abroshin Nisana is tired. There are still three of the animals without riders. You and Doc——"
"Yes," Wright said. "We might make better time." Nisana trilled an order to Abara, who rode the colossal bulk of Mister Johnson at the head of the line. The animals halted without sound. "We must go on all night, Paul—right? What became of your—prisoner?"
"My——" the mental clarity must be a fraud, Paul thought, if new memories could flash into it so abruptly. At some time—it must have been after Elis had carriedhim clear of the nightmare at Samiraa's village—he had stumbled on a Vestoian soldier unconscious from a head wound and loss of blood but not dead. He had still been carrying her when they caught up with Wright. With this, the memory of that reunion became whole—the wordless suffering on the shield that Mijok carried, the improvised stretchers, the bewilderment and exhaustion in the red faces, the very smell of defeat—with this also a picture of the horribly fat witch from Pakriaa's village carried on a litter by two spearwomen, and one other witch, a lank skeleton with white and purple lines emphasizing the prominence of his ribs, striding beside his colleague and shooting glances of wrath from left to right and back. Someone had gently taken the unconscious soldier. "She's safe, Doc. Tejron took her—still has her, I'm sure."
"Good." Wright added with a harshness canceling humor: "Now if only friend Lantis will initial a copy of the Geneva Convention...." He was fumbling in the twilight before one of the white beasts, uncertain what to do.
The old cow olifant Susie, carrying Sears, fretted at the delay, sampling the air and rumbling. Paul petted her trunk to soothe her; Sears' voice came down to him: "Paul? Take this, will you?" He was reaching down the case that held his microscope, safe somehow out of the inferno of the day. "My grip's not too good, got nothing to tie it to—bare's a baby's bottom, like you. We look like the last days of a Turkish bath, hey?"
"How d'you feel?" Nisana tore shreds from what remained of her purple skirt; she looped them about the case, fastened it to Paul's ammunition belt.
"Feel good," Sears said. Each word was a thick struggle for normal speech. "Arrowhead came off; Chris got it out. Manicure scissors for forceps; you may slice me cross-ways and call me ham and eggs if it ain't so. Right, Chris? You there?"
"I'm here, Jocko," Wright said, and under his breath to Paul: "Medical kit lost. I don't think the spleen is injured, but——" Aloud he said, "Of course, with your gut what I needed was a hook and line. Paul, how do you make one of these ten-foot roller coasters kneel down?"
"Let me—that's Miss Ponsonby—she knows me." At Paul's order, tons of gentleness knelt on the earth; Paulheld Pakriaa while Wright struggled into the hollow between hump and head, and Pakriaa was either asleep or not caring.... "Abro Brodaa?"