"Hush, dear," Spearman said. "We got out, didn't we?"
Now, where was the trail? A madness of groping, blundering, where there was no path, no guidance, and even their little thread of light a mockery and confusion.
Abruptly, ahead of them, there were other lights, then voices—Mijok's soft rumbling, Wright's clear outcry: "There they are! All three, Mijok—"
Paul ran to him. "The others—Dorothy? Sears?"
"Right as rain, son," Wright mumbled. "Except Dot's been frantic about you since we heard the shot. We left Sears practically sitting on her—well, figuratively. Women are odd, you know: they don't like shots in the night when the best boy friend is out on the tiles."
"Had a little trouble. They may come after us—don't know ..."
Ann was quiet. Paul saw her white hands starfished on the gray of Mijok's chest. She said, "Mijok, I'm tired and sick. Will you carry me?"
Spearman groaned: "Ann, what—Use your head...."
But Mijok knelt at once to make a cradle of his arms, and Christopher Wright said, "Why not? Why shouldn't we need each other?" Mijok went ahead with her on the blind trail.
Paul heard Spearman choke: "I would have carried her." It was not meant to be heard. Paul looked away, hearing also the deep precision of the giant's voice exploring the mystery of words: "You are my people. I will not ever be much time far from you."
"This island is Eden." Sears Oliphant spoke drowsily. Toy bat wings flickered from the woods crowning the hillside, hovered over a pond:illuama. In a scant year of Lucifer time (seventeen months of the calendar of Earth) native names had become natural, mostly Mijok's names.
Two red-moon changes ago, in the final jading month of the rains, the pygmy word "kaksma" had been only a symbol. Now it woke the image of a village desolate, bones scraped and scarred. The mind's eye winced in pity—a sentry careless, a bridge left in place after dark; thousands of ratty bodies rustling down from the wet hills, over open ground, swimming swollen streams, finding the bridge before oil on the rain water in the ditch could be ignited. Small bodies, not swift, leaping or humping along like furry worms, sniffing, squeaking, their stabbing teeth dark with the blood of any flesh that moved. The northernmost of the villages allied with Pakriaa's had already returned to jungle.
But here, ten miles offshore from the coastal range, no kaksmas lived; Sears and Paul, in two days of study on this second visit, had established that. No wide wings lurked in the sky. The hilly island had no large meadows where omasha could hunt. Three giants had been flown to the island a month ago—the girl Arek, her mother Muson, and old Rak. They said it was a place of calm. Their soft talk could be heard up the slope, where a log building was growing. Paul stretched, lean and comfortable, on the grass, glad to be alone for a while with this least demanding of his friends.
Sears was fatter, but hardened, a round block of man, with a coarse black beard, kindness of brown eyes unaltered. Christopher Wright, waiting at the "fortress" byLake Argo and no doubt frantic for word of this exploration, had let his beard grow too, sandy gray. Spearman and Paul had stayed clean-shaven, with soap made from fat and wood ashes. "The others must come here, Paul. I suppose Chris won't consent till Pakriaa agrees—damn, you'd think she could see it. She knows her enemies fear the ocean as she does. Lantis' two-by-four army would never chase after us in their lake boats."
"Wait a minute, Jocko. Lantis is no two-by-four proposition."
"Damn pint-size Napoleon with four teats and a grass skirt."
"Lookee: that settlement south of Lake Argo is thirty miles long. Equivalent of two hundred villages, to Pakriaa's six. Say twenty thousand warriors who got their pride hurt a year ago when the crash ofArgoswamped their fleet and scared the pants off 'em. They'll have replaced the fleet. They'll come overland too. Lantis, Queen of the World."
"If they do"—Sears' heavy voice had the tremor that he himself hated—"the firearms should be at least one ace in the hole."
"Ye—es. Ed's pistol helped in our one bad scrape with Pakriaa herself. But it was his smashing the idol that stalled 'em, not the gun."
"Poor little Abro Pakriaa!" Sears spoke with tenderness. "If ever a lady was pulled seven ways from Sunday! Wants our way of life, doesn't want it. Wants to grasp Chris' ethics, doesn't want to. Afraid of Ed's strength and aggressiveness, admires 'em too, oh my, yes. Tries to believe the god Ismar died or never lived—but can't, quite."
"And can't understand why our women are gentle—Dorothy anyway——"
"Nan's toughening up is conscious effort, Paul. Superficial. She's made herself hunt, shoot well, act hard, because her brain tells her she should. If we could only find something to restring her violin! I think she's given up hope of it: nothing I've found so far has been any good. She doesn't see that Dorothy does more for us by remaining the person she always was.... You know, when I go alone to Pak's village, I just set. Even the witches have got used to me, not that they wouldn't gut me if they could."
"Jocko"—Paul looked away—"you told me once you were scared all the time. When you go there alone—or when you tame the olifants for that matter—are you sort of grasping the nettle? And does it work?"
"Don't ask me, friend. Because I don't exactly know. I was never a brave man." Brown eyes misted in what was partly laughter. "Oy, the witches! There's the big enemy in the battle for Pakriaa's mind. Chris may claim they aren't real witch doctors, just advisers, low-grade magicians. I'm not so sure. Priests of Ismar, and when Ed clobbered the idol Pakriaa did consider having 'em all burned alive. Point is, she didn't do it. They gnaw away in the dark at all we try to teach her. That proposed bonfire, by the way, is gossip passed on to me in confidence by Abara."
"There's a dear little man."
"Ain't he though?" Smiling into late sky, Paul envisaged the wizened red midget riding the white monsters that Sears had tamed and insisted on naming olifants-with-an-f. A painting might grow out of that, he thought, squat coppery lump astride of massive white—it might, if the desire to paint should ever wake again and be as strong as it once was onArgo, when his mind's eye could remember Earth without distortion. Abara, popeyed and potbellied, a favorite in Pakriaa's harem, had been commissioned by her as a student and go-between at the lakeside camp; Sears had not only adopted him as an olifant trainer, but suspected him of furtively possessing a sense of humor. "Well—the giants. Lantis will always have thought of them as wild animals——"
"Sears"—Paul rolled over and pressed his face in the grass—"can we ask or even permit the giants to tangle in a pygmy war?"
"Ah ... It's tormenting Chris too, ever since Lantis sent that ultimatum." He snarled in his beard, "Thirty fat meat slaves every two months! There's politics for you. Dirtiest way she could answer Pak's challenge to personal combat, and the automatic refusal makes an excuse to come and clean up. Sounds like home.... Mijok wants to help fight—says he does."
"It's still our responsibility." Paul sat up. His eyes kept returning to the towering courage of the trees. Brave as any cathedral spire, scarcely one was free from the clutchof the purple-leaf vine. "As for moving here to the island, Pak sees it, but the idea's too new. You just don't pull up stakes, venture on the Big Water, crossing forbidden kaksma country."
Sears chewed a grass blade. "Anyway we've got to bring Dorothy and the baby here, and Ann. Dorothy won't fuss, will she, son?"
"Since thereisHelen—no, she won't. I still dream sometimes, as I did during her first pregnancy. Things, shapes, trying to pull her away—or she's where I can't find her, can't push through the leaves."
"She told me. It's something else that's made you blue lately."
"No."
Sears watched him. "Yes.... Want to start back tomorrow?"
"Might as well. We've learned all we need."
"Mm ... Second thoughts about the daddy of Dorothy's second——"
"No no. We settled that. She's proud to be carrying it."
"Good genetics could be damn bad psychology."
"No, Jocko. Don't think that. She's close to me as ever."
Sears waited and spoke softly: "New York late on a rainy night, a few car lights moving, street-lamp reflections like golden fish——"
"Orange paintbrush in New Hampshire meadows——We'd better stop."
"We better. I want boat whistles—floating city coming out of the fog. Call it a slow-healing wound.... And look across the channel."
Paul saw it presently: a cliff formation in the coastal range made a brow, nose, and chin. Below this, rounded rock could be a shoulder straining in heroic effort; then, tumbled reality of mountain-fancy must supply whatever held the figure in bondage. "Yes. He looks west. Past us, at the sun."
"Why, no, Paul. I think he looks west of the sun...."
A red-furred girl wandered down from the woods. "I got tired." Arek had lived twenty-two years; she was seven feet tall, not yet adolescent but near it. In the next Red-Moon-before-the-Rains, ten months away, she might take adult part in the frenzy of love if her body demanded it:if not, she would go apart with the other children, whose play also became innocently erotic at that time, and help care for the youngest. Sears grinned as she sat down with them. "Tired or lazy?"
"Both. You Charins are never lazy enough." The name Charin, Paul thought, was almost natural now, a pygmy word for "halfway," intended by Pakriaa merely to convey that Wright and his breed were halfway in size between her people and the giants, but Wright took sardonic satisfaction in it as a generic name. "Work and loafing are both good. Why can Ed Spearman never sit still in the sun? Or maybe I like to talk too much."
"Never," Sears chuckled. "Well—his best pleasure is in action. Maybe it's the technician in him—he must always be doing something."
"Like always waking, never sleeping." She sprawled in comfort; her broad hands plucked grass, scattered it over the furry softness of her four breasts. "Green rain.... I want to stay on this island. Will they come?"
"We hope so. Mijok will as soon as Doc does."
She sighed. "Mijok is a beautiful male. I think I'll take him for my first when I'm ready.... And soon the pretty boat will be no more good. It's sad we can't make another. Tell me again about Captain Jensen. He was as tall as me? He had hair on his head, red like my fur. He spoke——"
"Like storm wind," said Paul, supplying the wanted note in a favorite fairy tale, remembering a brother on Earth who was—perhaps—not dead.
"Hear the ocean," Arek whispered. Paul could hardly separate the sound from the mutter of the pond's outlet. This ridge of high ground ended short of the island's northern limit. A white beach, where the lifeboat was shaded from late sun, faced the mainland. West of the beach a red stone cliff ran to the tip of the island, shouldering away the sea. Wind out of the west allowed no soil to gather on it. Now and then a rainbow flashed and died above the rock, when a wave of uncommon grandeur spent itself in a tower of foam. "Hear what it says? 'I—will—try—aga-a-ain....' Why must the others wait to come here?"
"Pakriaa's people are not ready."
"Oh, Sears!" Arek laughed unhappily and sat up. "I think of how my mother taught me the three terrors. She took me to the hills, beat two stones before a burrow till one blundered out maddened, afraid of nothing but the light. She crushed it, made me smell it. I was sick; then we fled. I think of how she flung anasoniscarcass into meadow grass, so the omasha came. She wounded one with a stone, made me watch while the others tore it apart. Later still, when I could run fast—ah, through night to a village of the Red Bald——"
"Please, dear—pygmies. That's a name they accept."
"I'm sorry, Sears.... Yes, we hid in the dark, waited until a sentry moved—careless.... It was wrong. You've shown us how such things are wrong. And memory's someone talking behind you, out of the big dark."
"The laws we've agreed on——"
"I do honor them," she said gently. "The law against murder was my first writing lesson. But—what if Pakriaa's tribe—"
"They're slower," Sears said in distress, and the distress would be as much a message to Arek as any words. There was no hiding the heart from these people: green eyes and black ears missed no smallest nuance.
"When will they know they must not dig pits, with poisoned stakes—"
"But Pakriaa's tribe don't do that now. Do they?"
Arek admitted: "I suppose not. But the six other villages——"
"Five, dear. The kaksmas. And only two months ago, Arek."
She stared at Paul with shock. "Ihadalmost forgotten. But they do still hate us. The day before you flew us here, Paul, I met Pakriaa and two of her soldiers in the woods. I gave them the good-day greeting. Oh, if one of you had been there she would have answered it.... Wouldn't the island be better without them? Some ofyoudon't like them. Even Dorothy only tries to like them. Since the baby was born, Paul, she—shrinks when they come to the fortress. They don't know it, but I do."
Dimly, Paul had known it, known also that it was a thing Dorothy would consciously reject. "Time, Arek.You'll live a hundred and fifty years or better—more than three pygmy lifetimes. You'll see them change."
Speaking almost like a Charin, Arek said, "They'd better."
They strolled up the hill; the other giants' labor had ceased. The building was a sturdy oblong, intended as storehouse and temporary communal dwelling for them all, including (Wright hoped) some of Pakriaa's people. Rafters were not yet in place. For that, Rak needed the strength of another like himself: chubby Muson tired easily. Someday a road would climb from the beach, traversing the ridge which was the backbone of the northern half of the island. Here, where spring water filled the pond and rushed on down to carve a small harbor below the beach, would be Jensen City, and the three races of Lucifer would learn to live there in good will and pleasure under a government of laws. So Wright said—peering at photographs, teasing his gray beard, tapping thin fingers on the map drawn on the paper of Earth, on the new maps of whitebark. Paul could see it too—sometimes; glimpse the houses, gardens, open places. South of the pond, a wheat field, for on Lucifer the wheat of Earth grew to four feet and bore richly. Near the field, perhaps the house for Dorothy and himself, with no doorway lower than ten feet.
At other times he could see only defeat—the arrogance and blind drive of genusCharin, speciesSemisapiensbeating against the indifference of nature, the resentment of other life. He could see his people destroyed, by accident or anger, the giant friends adrift with only hints of the new life and spoiled for the old. Then he would stop trying to foresee and would make his mind's ear listen to Wright insisting: "Give protoplasm a chance. Patience is the well-spring...."
The walls were eleven feet in height. Rak and Muson rested on the coolness of bare ground within; Rak pointed at the top of the walls where rafters would rest. "Slow," he said, "and good." Rak could not be sure how old he was. When Mijok had first persuaded him to the camp ten months ago, Rak had won his English with the grave precision of a mason selecting fieldstone. His language had none of the flexibility and scope that Mijok and others hadachieved, but it served him. After absorbing basic arithmetic, Rak had deliberated on the problem of his age—squatting at the gate of the stone fortress by Lake Argo, spreading out rows of colored pebbles to indicate years, rainy seasons, episodes of hunting or fear or passion too keen to forget. At last he had come up with the figure of 130 years. "But," he said, "there are two times. In here"—he patted an ancient scar on his belly—"and there." He pointed at the red crescent moon.
"I'll cook supper," Arek said. Muson bubbled and shadowboxed with her daughter. Muson would laugh at anything—the flutter of a leaf, a breath of breeze on her red-brown fur. Paul followed to help Arek trim the carcass of an asonis killed the night before. Hornless, short-legged, fat, the bovine animal was abundant on the island; its one enemy here was what Arek calledusran, a catlike carnivore the size of a lynx, which could tackle only the young asonis or feeble stragglers. Rak hunted in the old way. Bow, club, spear, even rifle, had been explained to him, but the stalk, the single rush and leap, the grasp of a muzzle and backward jerk that snapped the neck before the prey could even struggle—these were Rak's way still. In the old life, Rak's age would have led him eventually to a few dim years with a band of women, who would have fed him until he chose to wander into deep jungle, preventing any from following. When far away, he would have sat in the shadows to wait—for starvation or the black marsh reptiles or a great mainland cat,uskaran, which never attacked a giant in the prime of strength. Rak would have taken no harm from the young men in this weakness: his own territory would have been inviolate, and he would have joined the women, in a taciturn farewell to life, only when teeth and arms had failed. ("We're gentle people," Mijok said, puzzled at it himself. "In the Red-Moon-before-the-Rains we only play at fighting. It's not like what we see the other creatures do at that time. How could one 'possess' a woman? Do I possess the wind because I like to run against the touch of it...?")
The meat hung from a makeshift tripod; Arek jumped back, startled, as a furry thing scampered down. It was like a kinkajou except for the hump on the back (a truehindbrain in the spine: Sears had long ago verified that guess of Wright's). "Little rascal," Paul said. "Let's tame it."
"What?" Arek was bewildered. "Do what?"
"Do these live on the mainland?"
"I never saw one till I came here. Too small to eat. Tame it?"
"Watch." Paul tossed a bit of meat. The visitor's chatter changed to a whistling whine; it elongated itself, grabbed, sat back on stubby hind legs to eat in clever paws; it washed itself with a squirrel's pertness. Arek chuckled, examining the idea, and went on with her work; she had become a hypercritical cook, under Dorothy's guidance. "Jocko, biologist, stand by: I propose to name an animile. GenusKink, speciesquasikinkajou." Genus Kink did not retreat at Sears' quiet approach, but wriggled a black nose.
Rak asked in solemn curiosity, "For what is it good?"
"To make us laugh," Paul said, "so long as we're kind to it."
"Ah?" Rak moved his fingers to aid the patient mill of his mind.
"Dance-Nose," said Muson, who already understood. She shook all over. "Come, Funny-Nose." It would not—yet, but Muson could be patient too.
Sears whispered in his beard, "Less homesick?"
"Yes...."
After the meal Arek wanted Paul to come out on the cliffs. Though there seemed no danger from the omasha, she carried a long stick and Paul took his pistol. The slope leveled out to the bare rock of the headland; the ocean voice was the humming of a thousand giants. The way was easy, with no crevasses, no peril while the wind was mild. Arek had often been out here alone. Yesterday Paul had seen her standing for an hour, watching the west where unbroken water met a sun-reddened horizon. In her earlier years there might have been dim mention of the sea by her almost wordless people, but no true knowledge: the mainland coast was steaming vine-choked jungle, or tidal marsh, and shut away by the kaksma hills. Paul wondered what member of his race could stand for an hour in contemplationlike a thinking tree, not shifting a foot nor raising an arm...?
"Paul, why did you leave Earth?" Arek patted the rock beside her.
Below the troubled water laughed, endlessly defeated and returning. Cloud fantasies gathered below a lucid green, and the wind was a friend. "I have doubted sometimes whether we ought to have done so."
"That wasn't my meaning. We love you. Didn't you know? But I've wondered what sent you away from such a place. Ann says it was beautiful."
"A—drive of restlessness. We took boundaries as a challenge. I used to think that a great virtue. Now I call it neither good nor evil."
"I think it is good."
"Everywhere, we carry goodandevil."
"What you do here is good. You teach us. You do kind things."
"We can be bad. But for Doc Wright and his dreams that Ed Spearman finds so impractical, we'd have done you harm." Helpless at her innocence, Paul saw she did not believe him. "On Earth, we fought each other. We hunted for lies to make ourselves feel big. We created great institutions built on vanity—tickling lies: imperialism, communism—most of the isms you find so puzzling when we talk of Earth history. The anger of Charins rarely focused itself on the actual causes of unhappiness or injustice. Instead we hunted for scapegoats, easy solutions. We wouldn't study ourselves. Always we itched for something external to take the blame for our own follies and crimes."
"I don't understand."
"As if you stumbled on a root, Arek, and then banged your fist on the tree that grew it, to blame it for your own clumsiness."
"But Paul—only a very small child would act like that."
"Darling, let's watch the sunset." She felt his pain, touched his knee, and was silent until he said, "A poor naughty child...."
"There was a thing Ed Spearman said to me—what I wanted to talk to you about. I've never gone to Pakriaa'svillage. You know, even Mijok won't go there except with one of you. I asked Ed if Pakriaa still kept that stockade for drugging and fattening prisoners—in spite of her agreeing to the laws. He said yes, she did. I said it was not right. I said we made a law against slavery too. He said, 'Forget it, baby—one thing at a time.' I am not a baby. How can the laws govern us unless all obey them?"
"Ed—meant no harm, Arek. He only meant it does take time. The pygmies have more to unlearn. You—started clean. And—well—with the army of Lantis likely to come back at any time—we can't afford—"
Yet it seemed natural that this giant child, who had herself done murder in the old days, should answer his troubled evasions not only with reproach but with command: "If the laws are to govern us they must be respected by everyone. I wish I had gone to that village and torn down the stockade with my hands."
"And they would have killed you with a hundred spears and Pakriaa's people would hate us forever, learning nothing but more hatred."
Arek cried a little, rubbing at the unfamiliar wetness. "Maybe I begin to see, how difficult.... The sun's going." But they sat quietly in the warm and undemanding wind until the first sapphire glint of fireflies dotted the slope where Jensen City might one day shine. Arek stood, reaching down an affectionate hand.
Paul glanced down at sunrise-tinted snow on the highest peak of the coastal range, thirteen thousand feet above the sea. Prairie spread for thirty miles east of its base; then came a region of forest and small lakes fed by the outlet of Lake Argo, which was the core of the empire of Lantis, Queen of the World.
Pakriaa's information on Lantis was a murky blend of truth and fantasy. Lantis claimed birth from Ismar-Creator-and-Destroyer. Pakriaa had different theories. Originally ruler of a single village, Lantis consolidated by conquest. Instead of annihilating defeated villages she took their populations captive, sorting out three categories: potential followers, slave laborers, and meat. Many in the first class became fanatically converted; those in the second provided a year or so of work before dying of whippings and other abuse; captives of the third class were forced to eat the green-flowered weed that numbed the brain and were bled out at the right stage of fatness. In fifteen years one riverside village had swollen to a city of sixty thousand, fed by expeditions far to the east, and Lantis named her city Vestoia—Country of Freedom and Joy. "Got anything new in the 'scope?"
Sears groaned: "Therearemore boats above the falls."
The boats, they knew, were broad canoes roofed like sampans against the omasha, but with no sail. "Not moving, are they?"
"No—anchored maybe." Sears mopped his round face.
Without the telescope, Paul could see brownness on the water of Lake Argo's southern end, near the spot where the outlet tumbled over a high falls to a smaller lake. It meant that hundreds more must have been portaged pastthe falls from Vestoia during his two days on the island....
The fifty red-green flowing miles became a pain of delay. Sears too would be aching for the gray square of their "fortress" to claim the eye in the north, touched by early sunlight, a brave structure twelve feet high, fifty square, built of split stone by the labor of giant friends. Outside it ran a moat twenty feet wide, ten deep, with a drawbridge of logs, bark matting, grass-fiber ropes, the bottom flooded with lake water. There was room within for living quarters, a supply of smoked meat, dried vegetables.
Lantis understood scaling ladders, Pakriaa said. Lantis had patience for a siege. There was no defense, Pakriaa said, in these measures. The only defense was to attack, to retreat, and attack again. It had always been so in the old wars. It was still so with this Lantis and her Big-Village-Vestoia, this bastard begotten of a red worm and Inkar, goddess of kaksmas. It would always be so—at least, until.... Paul remembered Dorothy, cherishing Helen at her brown breast, asking neutrally, "Until what, Abro Pakriaa?"
Pakriaa had studied the giants' walls with contempt. "Until I shame this worm spawn Lantis into meeting me alone. She must respect custom. Her first answer is a—what word?—rejection, because she has fear. I have sent a second challenge. She will meet me, or her own people will condemn her. I will pin her belly to the ground. Her government will be mine." There had been no mistaking it: for the first time in the year since the idol of Ismar fell and was not restored, Pakriaa was making vast decisions wholly her own, with only perfunctory interest in what the Charins might think. In her wrath against the mighty soldier ruler in the south there was natural grief at the outrages of past years, but something else too. Her red face glaring southward said:She has what I desire; she is doing what I would do. Pakriaa had finished her answer quietly: "It isIwho will be Queen of the World."
Three days ago. It could have been a mistake to leave the camp at all. Now—a streak of sunshine on gray at the end of familiar meadow. With fuel for only a few more flights, Paul knew he had never made a better landing.The drawbridge was down. Dorothy ran to meet him. Sears was shouting, "Chris! It's perfect—no kaksmas—everything Paul said it was—"
Paul stammered, "You look like a million dollars."
"Dollars. What're those?"
"I forget. What's news?"
"Your funny mouth is tickling my ear."
"That isn't news, Dope. Helen—"
"Full of the best gurgles. Come and see." He thought:How do I tell her of the boats, the thirty-mile hive of savage hatreds—but Sears was already talking of it. Wright had no smile for Paul, only a warm gray-eyed stare and pressure of the hand. Paul asked, "Where's Ed? Mijok and the boys?"
Ann looked up from cutting a square of hide. She had not come to meet them. Ann's way nowadays; one's mind insisted:It doesn't mean anything. "Ed's hunting. Should have been back last night."
Dorothy added: "Mijok's off missionarying, with Elis and Surok. They took Blondie—Lisson, I mean: moral support."
Wright was hag-ridden. "Sears, if it were only Pakriaa's tribe—but—not fuel enough to fly all the giants over. We cannot abandonthem."
"Then let's get the women there and the rest of us go overland."
Ann said, "I'm going overland."
Wright muttered, "Damn it, Nancy—"
Sears patted her shoulder and ignored her speech as she ignored the touch. "Chris, I've labored, myself, over that damn knotty little brain of Pakriaa's. She can't see things our way. We need a hundred years."
The conference lengthened into the morning. Sometimes it seemed to Paul that his teacher's stubbornness degenerated into the obsession of a man who won't leave a blazing house until the rugs are saved. Wright longed for the island, which he had seen only in photographs. There had always been some compelling reason why he must stay by the fortress, if only to hoe voracious weeds out of the gardens. Yet to Wright it was unthinkable that the island community should start without the pygmies: he returnedto it with haggard insistence. "I know—I can't actually like Pakriaa—she's got a mind like a greased eel; but we've made a beginning. They speak our tongue—well. A people intelligent as they are—"
Paul thought:It's not Lucifer that's aged him—it's us. We are not big enough. Aloud he suggested: "Doc, can't we make a start without them and just keep the door open? Bring them in when we're stronger ourselves?"
"Oh, son, if we desert Pak now, she's finished. Over-confidence. Lantis will go over her like a tide. We might just turn that tide. If not, wemustbe ready to help her escape with—whatever's left.... Well, at least we agree on this: Helen and the women must go to the island, at once."
"Tomorrow." Dorothy choked. "If the boats haven't started yet—"
"All right, dear. Tomorrow. And one man should go with them."
"You," Paul said. "You."
Wright said inexorably, "No." His stare groped at Sears Oliphant.
Sears was nakedly desperate. "Chris, I beg of you—you must not ask me to go away from this battle." He was sweating, white. "I am—in a sense—a religious man. The—Armageddon within, your own phrase—please understand without my saying any more. Don't ask me to go."
"Ed won't go.... Paul?"
Leave him, with Sears' inner torments and Ed's arrogance?"No, Doc."
Ann Bryan said, "I'm staying for the show."
Dorothy lowered her cheek to the brown fuzz of Helen's head; the baby's absurd square of palm found Paul's finger. Helen was almost eight months old—Lucifer months. The new life in Dorothy had been conceived in the last month of the rains. Dorothy said, "I'm going, Nancy, with Helen. As a valuable brood mare, I can't afford heroism. Neither can you."
The giant women crossed the bridge; they had lingered outside, knowing the Charins needed to talk alone. Ann said, "I've heard the argument. I'm not pregnant yet. I've learned to shoot damn' well."
Wright asked, "Will you abide by a vote when Ed gets back?"
Ann pushed her fingers into black hair, cut short as a man's. "I suppose I must.... If no men get to the island, how do two women and a girl child increase and multiply, or shouldn't I ask?"
Wright mumbled inadequately, "We'll reach the island."
Ann said, "Then you already see it as a retreat?"
Wright was silent. He tried to smile with confidence at the giant women and children, who were sober with reflected unhappiness—all but nine-year-old Dunin, who trotted to Paul and hugged him with her large arms and announced: "I learned six words while you were gone. Hi, listen! 'Brain': that's here and here. 'Me-di-tation': that happens in the brain when it's quiet. Mm-mm ... 'Breast': that's these. And 'breath': that's ooph, like that. 'Breeze': that's a breath with nobody blowing it.... I forgotten six."
Dorothy murmured. "Tem—tem—"
Dunin hopped up and down. "'Tempest!' Bigbigbreeze—"
"That's perfect," said Paul. "Perfect...."
Before the five-month rainy season had made travel on the sodden, gasping ground too miserable, Mijok had explored a half circle of territory forty miles in radius east of the hills, for others who might be willing to learn new ways. It was slow work, often discouraging. He had located two bands of free-wandering women and children—twenty in all—and stirred their curiosity and friendliness. But he had been able to recruit only three other males. There was Rak. Blackfurred Elis and tawny Surok were in vigorous middle years, hard to convince but quick to learn once the barrier was down.
Kamon was accepted leader of the women. White with age, gaunt, flat-breasted, stooped but quick on her feet, Kamon rarely smiled, but her good nature was profound. "Ann," she said, "you ought to go. We—if we cannot fight off these southern pygmies, we can escape. But you? One of us would have to carry you. And as Mashana Dorothy says, your womb is needed." (Mashana—sweetheart, mother, hunting companion, friend.)
Wright said, "You, Dorothy, Helen, and the giant children."
That brought murmuring. Kamon checked it: "Only four children still need milk. You, Samis, your breasts are big: you will go." Kamon turned with gentle deference to one authority she felt to be stronger than her own under the laws: "Doc?" Paul found it comfortable, no longer even amusing, that Wright should be known to the giants by his inevitable nickname. The pygmies disliked the short sound, and initialDalways bothered them. To them he was Tocwright, or more often Tocwright-Who-Plays-with Gray-Fur-at-His-Throat.
"Yes, Kamon. Samis too. Paul, how many trips will that take?"
"Three—leaving fuel for about three more of the same length."
Wright nodded. "Ed has a notion of using the lifeboat for a weapon. Hedgehop, scare 'em to hell. But with fuel so low—"
There was shadow at the drawbridge. Ed Spearman flung aside the carcass he had brought. Ann's white face was still, though she clung to him briefly when he kissed her. It had occurred to Paul that Ann's image of love would not be given reality anywhere in the galaxies: she wished moments to be eternities and a human self to be a mirror of desire.But Dorothy and I—somehow we've learned to let each other live...."More news," Spearman said. "I stopped at the village. A spy of Pakriaa's came home last night—must be a sharp article: did the sixty-odd miles up the lake shore in nothing flat, with facts and figures."
"Lantis is moving." Wright dropped his hands to his bony knees.
"No, Doc, but will in a day or so." Spearman sat down, holding Ann's fingers till she pulled them away. He nodded to Sears and Paul. "Good trip?" He had grown even more rugged in a year of Lucifer. He wore only shorts and Earth-made shoes; months of handling a heavy bow had made his upper arms almost as thick as the narrow part of Mijok's forearm. His face had deepened its lines; he had never smiled easily.
"Very good," Sears said. "The island is—" He was silent.
Spearman grunted. "You're sold too? Well, here's the news. One: you remember Pakriaa's second challenge, sent by two warriors, correct and formal—trust Pak for that. One of those messengers is returning. The spy ran on ahead—with part of the body of the other ambassador." He studied the sickened faces. "Two: the spy says Lantis plans to send four thousand on the lake boats, another six thousand overland. Pakriaa—who is in a state of mind I don't know how to describe, not jitters exactly—Pakriaa thinks we may feel the lake-boat drums tomorrow. She doesn't know what they are, by the way—invention of Lantis, I guess. From her description they must be drums, maybe hollow logs mounted on boats. She heard them last year in the war we interrupted. You feel them before you hear them, she says: she thinks it was a lake devil consulting with the Queen of the World. Three: the spy wasn't sure, but thinks Lantis has already sent six hundred east of the lake to make a big circle, come down on the settlement from the northeast."
"Smart," Paul said. "To drive us into the kaksma hills?"
"The kaksma hills." Spearman's gray eyes squinted in a sort of laughter. "They're not so bad. The critters may be all they say, after dark, but—I'd better own up: I've gone that way on my last three solo trips. Safe enough in daylight, when they're half blind. I killed a few today."
Sears asked quickly, "Bring back specimens?"
Spearman teased the fat man with waiting and chuckled and nodded at the asonis carcass. "Tied to one of the hoofs. Don't look so worried, Doc—I waded plenty of streams on the way back." He rose with heavy grace and strolled out on the bridge. "Come a minute, some of you." Paul joined him; Wright stayed as he was; Sears was examining the kaksma's gray, thick-tailed body, holding back its pinkish lip. Paul caught a repellent glimpse of the jutting upper canines; the molars were shearing tools like a cat's. He saw the spade claws of the forefeet. The jet eyes were like a mole's. "Look," Spearman said, "the hills. Notice that hogback at the southern end—it's five miles long. Riddled with burrows. They must live on small game on the meadow below and hunt the other side of the hills too, where it's jungle." His fingers dug at Paul'sshoulder. He spoke loudly enough to be heard by all: "Listen: the earth at the burrows is red ocher. Understand? Hematite."
Wright let out his breath sharply. "So—"
"Yeah. Just a five-mile mountain of iron ore. Merely what I've been looking for ever since we crashed. For a start. From iron to steel to—ah.... And just when we'vegotit—God! with organized pygmy labor—" He strode back into the fortress, glancing obliquely at the silent giant women. "The pygmies do understand work, you know. Well, never mind it now. Of course we must get the baby and the women to your island right away. As a temporary refuge, we must use it." He watched Wright with unqualified sadness. "Apart from that, you know what I think of your Island of Lotos-Eaters—"
"That's not just, Ed."
"Adelphi then. Well, the women and Helen—"
"And the giant children, with Samis to nurse the youngest."
Spearman asked evenly, "Paul, how's the charlesite?"
"After the trips Doc mentioned, enough for three more."
Ann's keen ears caught a far-off sound. "Mijok's coming back."
The music grew slowly manifest: Mijok, in an Earth song more than two hundred years old. Long-flowing chanteys and slower spirituals suited him. He had teased Ann to teach him all she knew, even after she lost interest. Swift melodies and rapid syllables were beyond him—the depth of his tone rendered them grotesque. More than a mile away, he was wallowing in "Shenandoah"—Mijok, to whom the ocean was only a word and a river steamboat the cloudiest of legends. Other voices, true on pitch, followed his solo:
"Away—we're bound away...."
Paul asked, "How many, Nan?"
Ann shut her eyes. "Four, besides Mijok and—yes, Lisson's singing. At least two new recruits. Ah—they can sing before they talk." She hurried into that thatched house-within-a-house which was her comer of privacy on Lucifer. The giant women were smiling, though Kamon's eyes followed Ann with trouble and pity. They hummed inthree-part counterpoint. Their voices had the range of a Charin baritone; Paul missed Muson, who could approach the tenor. Sears' bass moved in, a well-behaved trombone teasing a crowd of bassoons. Dorothy's alto added a warm thread of sound....
The tall children and women poured out over the bridge when Mijok and his companions were still distant. Musical thunder in the woods pulsed along the ground. Spearman smiled indulgently. "Just like a bunch of kids."
"Yes," Wright said. "The pygmies are more serious. They have wars."
Sears stopped humming and mumbled, "Don't, Chris...."
Mijok brought in his triumph, beaming and warm. "And my smallest woman?" Dorothy placed the naked morsel that was Helen in his waiting hands. Mijok was bemused. "How can anything be so small?"
Dorothy claimed: "Seven pounds at birth—that ain't hay, Mijok."
"Growing too," Elis said. The golden-furred girl Lisson tickled Helen's chest with the tip of a forefinger, and Mijok introduced the newcomers. One was timid. "Just a boy," Mijok explained. "Knows some words already, though. Danik?"
The giant boy whispered, "Good day." The other was older, black like Elis, trying to display stern indifference, but Surok eased him into relaxation with a few words in the old language.
For Mijok, speech had still the brilliance of newness but was wholly flexible; he reveled in colloquialisms, acquired mainly from Sears and Dorothy. "While the boys and I were out having a hell of a time, what's with local industries? The island, gentlemen?"
"Good," Sears said. "Better than I dared dream."
"And those tough babies in the south—anything new?"
Sears winced. "That part ain't good."
Mijok fondled the fat man's arm with a hand mild as silk. "Now, Jock, now. We'll give 'em hell, that's what we'll do. Hey, Paul?"
Abara trotted between Sears and Paul in the forest aisle, a silent ugly man with popeyes, bulging underlip, jutting ears; thirty inches tall. He was twenty-six. His potbellied softness had the beginning sag of middle age. There was politics, Paul guessed, in his presence at the camp—it was not because the queen had tired of him that he was temporarily detached from the harem. His body was agile for all its pokiness, his mind even more nimble; his English, when he stooped to use it, was good. After the noon meal Abara had appeared, crossing the drawbridge like a wisp of red smoke, ignoring the giants, reminding Sears obliquely that it was three days since he had visited the clearing near the camp, where the white olifants had learned to come.
Sears' love for the great leaf eaters had deepened with familiarity. He had easily persuaded the others to guarantee their permanent protection in the laws. He had taught the pygmies to call them olifants, a shrewd stroke, conveying to the Neolithic mind that the animals were of Sears' totem. Even during the long ordeal of the rains he had gone alone for whole days and nights, following olifant trails, sitting in patience where a broad-leaf tree they enjoyed was abundant. Deep forest was no place for a man who moved slowly and shrank from discomfort and danger, yet Sears held to this undertaking as stubbornly as Wright to his dreams of a community of good will under a government of laws. And before all except Paul and Wright, Sears was able to preserve a manner like the face of Lake Argo on a still morning. That calm gave him, in the eyes of the pygmies, more puzzling divinity than they found in the others. Abara worshiped from behind a mask of cynical blankness. Pakriaa seemedalmost to love him openly. She was not arrogant with him; when he spoke she listened. She assigned soldiers to collect the insects, fish, small animals he wanted for study; she brought him gifts—an earthenware vessel with ritual painting, odd flowers, ornaments of wood and bone and clay. She liked to sit by him when he was at the microscope and peek, mystified, into the country of the lens.
Sears had let the olifants grow used to him. He talked to them. He learned they like to be rubbed above the tip of the trunk and on the vast flat tops of their heads—for this luxury they would kneel, rumbling and sighing. Eventually he dared climb into the natural saddle between hump and skull: they allowed it. They were never excited nor in a hurry. The kaksmas they probably avoided by keen scent and flight in times of danger; they kept clear of the omasha by going into open ground only at night.
The clearing was silent except for muted trilling of illuama. The ground was trodden; purple-leaf vines hung dead and brown, ripped out by trunks and tusks. Sears said that once, with no notion of conveying the idea, he had tugged peevishly at a vine under the nose of his favorite cow. "So, she came and fetched it loose—tired of watching me act like a damn fool."
Abara said, "I will whistle, me...." Two came, spectrally calm. "Susie!" Sears called. "Been a good girl, hey?" The old cow let down her many tons to have her head scratched. Another arrived on fog-silent feet; then two bulls together, munching leaves. The five were placid, enjoying the hot stillness and Sears' purring talk. The largest bull stood ten feet at the shoulder, Paul estimated, as Abara's two-feet-six approached him, seized a lowered ear, and climbed up. Abara piped: "We walk now, Mister Johnson."
Mister Johnson's pale eyes noted Paul's bulging jacket; the boneless finger of his trunk groped suggestively till Paul produced a melon-like fruit. "Hoo-hee!" Abara crowed. "We thank you." They vanished in the shadows.
"Susie, want to dig some vines?" But Sears halted in the act of climbing her neck. Spearman had joined them, with a good hunter's quiet.
"You really have something there." Spearman was cordialand flushed. "Pygmies still make the best wine. Ours is no damn good, yet."
"Meant to ask how the last turned out."
"Needs ripening, like everything else."
"In fact," said Paul, "you're slightly plastered."
"But slightly." Ed grinned. "How if I climb on one of those?"
Sears was doubtful. "Have to get acquainted first. Mister Smith over there—he shook me off the first time. Not rough—just wasn't ready."
"They pull vines at command? You can steer 'em?"
"Sure. If they like you. Knee pressure."
"Abara's good?"
"They prefer him to me. Arek is better still. I miss her."
"Mijok rides, doesn't he?"
"Mijok and Elis. Surok's a bit skittish. I guess Pak thinks it's undignified—or else the damned witches disapprove."
"Hm ... We have, maybe, three days before Lantis hits us—"
"Lantis—I'd succeeded in forgetting her for three minutes." Sears drooped his head against the column of Mister Smith's foreleg; eyes closed, he cursed without humor. He dredged up almost forgotten words from the old years of Earth, from bars, docks, dissecting rooms, at least four major religions. He cursed Lantis root and branch, ancestry and posterity, heart, body, and brain. Regaining a trace of mirth, he outlined a program of correction that would have kept hell under forced draft for a thousand years. Still with closed eyes, he asked, "What's the point, Ed? What's the damned point?"
"How many of these critters have you tamed?"
"Five. There's another smelling around, not ready yet."
"And five riders—you ride 'em, don't you, Paul?" Paul nodded.
Abara and Mister Johnson returned in silence, under the trees behind Spearman, who was unaware of them. Sears said, "Paul's good. Good balance."
"So you have a rider for each mount.... Well, I talked it over with Doc—he says it's your department. What if a bunch of those animals, with armed riders—"
"No," said Sears. "Quite impractical."
"Why?"
"Well ... They won't go in the open—omasha."
"They will at night, you told me."
"They are not fighters."
"If they go where you order 'em—"
Sears said, "No. If Paul and I and the two strongest giants were trying that, what's left? You, Doc, Surok, and the giant women."
Spearman snapped: "Then use only three—Abara, Mijok, Elis."
"Mijok will fight beside Chris. You know that. So will I."
Spearman turned away, noticing Abara and Mister Johnson for the first time and ignoring them. Popeyes watched him from a mountain of white flesh. "All right. Oh, I almost forgot: Doc wants you back at the camp for another conference. It has just occurred to him that since we're about to be wiped off the planet we ought to have a military commander. For the look of the thing, you reckon? You know, I dreamed of space travel from the time I was five. Never imagined I'd do it with a Sunday school. Don't hurry of course. Just come when it damn well suits you."
Paul caught up with him on the trail. "Look, Ed—"
"I'll recite it for you: mustn't lose my temper. We mustn't divide; mustn't quarrel; Doc's word is holy at all times—"
"No one says that."
Spearman wasn't listening. "Goddamn it, why do you think I've gone away alone so often? To explore, sure, to find things we need. By God I've found 'em too, haven't I? Also to get away from the Sunday school. Beating my brains out to win a little advance—you people can't see—"
"What doyouthink we should do? I mean right now—Lantis."
Spearman fretted in silence, striding as if speed and heavy steps could ease his distress. "Why, we ought to have gone to live at Pakriaa's village a year ago, after the reconciliation, while they were still dizzy from the fall of the idol. You remember—Pak was almost humble. Ready for big changes. We could have done anything with her—then. Eliminated the witches. Taught and trained thebest of her followers. We'd have ironworking now. We'd have a competent army. Why, we could take the initiative, drive south, break up anything Lantis may have while she's on the march. Yeah—a year ago. Sure—Mijok wouldn't approach the village, sowemustn't move there. Every day is an opportunity thrown away, wasted."
"You think we should have abandoned the giants?"
"What've theygot?" Spearman cried. "Don't even understand work—throw things around at a great rate, and then somebody sees a new bug or has a funny idea or starts singing. Or asks Doc to explain a point in philosophy. Or they decide to just sit and look at nothing for two hours. Fight? Mijok talks a good fight. You couldn't make 'em fight with a kick in the rear."
"Never tried it."
Spearman smiled miserably. "One doesn't, with a critter eight feet tall.... All right, they're people. They're intelligent. If we had all the time in the world and nothing threatening I'd like to study 'em myself. But look at the numbers. Three on the island. Six grown women here. Twelve flutterbrained children. Elis, Surok, Mijok, and the two tenderfeet they brought in today. Is that an army? As for right now—Hell, I've given up making suggestions." He tensed and stopped short. Paul glanced behind; Sears and Abara were catching up. "Thought I heard something."
"What?"
"Drums.... Guess I imagined it.... Lantis must have a terrific organization. Bound to, Paul, in a community of sixty thousand. Hadn't you thought of that at all? Communications, laws, disciplined army, a forest agriculture at least as good as Pakriaa's. Why, from something Pak said, I think they even have a monetary system—anyway something more elaborate than the barter that's good enough for Pak's little cluster of villages. Stone Age—but that's partly an accident of ecology, isn't it? I mean, they have to avoid the hills and open ground—wouldn't be easy to get a start in metalworking when you have to stay in the woods. I believe they're a people under strong internal pressure toward the next stage of civilization. With labor, organization, a few modern ideas, there would be ways to clean the kaksmas out of the hills. Then metals.We know the omasha breed on rock ledges wherever the kaksmas can't climb. They could be exterminated too. There's a whole world for the taking. Doc is right that the new culture has to be a blend of ours and theirs. Oh, the giants too, maybe, sometime. But it won't be done by piddling around with the kind of pretty idealism that never worked even on Earth."
Paul groped for the unspoken thing. "You'd have us join forces with Lantis?"
Spearman halted to stare at him. There was a flush of blood around his eyes, the visible pain of frustration that never gave him rest. He waited till Sears and Abara had come up. "I'm a minority. I haven't suggested a damned thing." He was silent until they reached the camp.
Abro Pakriaa was there, with seven of her soldiers. All seven wore purple skirts, insignia of leadership—"captains" was the nearest word. With makeshift pigments and brittle whitebark, Paul had recently painted such a group. The effort was for Pakriaa; she had been gravely delighted with it, seeing how prominent in it were her own vivid blue skirt and taller stature. To Paul's eyes the colors had sworn horribly, and he had been glad when the princess carried the daub away, balanced joyfully on her bald head.
Pak's seven captains made it a visit of state. Wright was soberly intent, and Ann stood by him, regally silent; play-acting for Pakriaa's benefit, but Ann sardonically enjoyed the pose. Pakriaa had gradually accepted the fact of Tocwright's leadership, but her view of the status of Charin women remained addled by contradictions; the idea of social and mental equality between the sexes eluded her completely. Dorothy sat watchful at the opening of the "home" room—Helen would be sleeping inside; Dorothy's fists were pushed into her cheeks, dark eyes upturned to Pakriaa's explanatory monologue. Abara effaced himself. Mijok loomed with folded arms on Wright's other side. The rest of the giants kept to the background.
"Abro Samiraa, Abro Kamisiaa, Abro Brodaa—" Pakriaa was naming the heads of the five northern villages. A loose alliance, but those villages had fought powerfully against Lantis a year ago and each could provide a hundred and fifty first-line soldiers and fifty of the skittishmale bowmen. "They are with me, my sisters," Pakriaa said, with sad gravity and not much of her natural swagger. "The wormseed Lantis has broken custom—her own people must spit on her. For the death of my messenger I spit on her heart and loins, I spit on her footprints."
The arithmetic was simple, Paul thought. A scant twelve hundred fighters against a three-sided attack from over ten thousand. Four Charin men with rifles, automatics, scanty ammunition, heavy bows. A handful of giants who knew nothing of war but theory and whose basic nature would revolt at the reality. Spitting wouldn't help. He forced himself to attend to what Wright was saying: "There must be one commander."
"I give no orders to Abro Samiraa and her sisters, my equals."
"Would you and she and the others accept direction from one of us?"
Pakriaa murmured, "I have never seen you fight."
Spearman laughed. Wright said, "You will, Abro Pakriaa. If you will accept one of us as commander, the army can strike as one soldier. There would be less confusion. And Lantis will not expect it."
That brought shrewdness to the little red face. "But you can do nothing hiding behind this pile of stones."
"A temporary shelter while we shoot. You know our fire sticks. This building commands the upper part of the lake and this end of the meadow. We will not be trapped here. There will be no siege. If it is necessary to retreat, we'll know the right moment to do it."
The oldest captain, Nisana, a wiry, quiet woman, said, "Abro Kamisiaa herself spoke of a thing like this."
Pakriaa murmured absently, "Did I give you leave to speak?" But she was not angry; she was considering it. "This is better, Tocwright, what you say now. I will send, learn if my sisters agree. But who will be the leader?"
"That should be decided now," Wright said, and Paul thought:Here it comes, Ed—you get what you want at last.And he remembered that obscure thing which might not have been in Spearman's mind at all:desertion—the thing was a dirty word, and the mind would not speak it. But Wright was staring at him—at him, not at Spearman."There's only one of us," Wright said, "who ought to lead, in this trouble. That ismyfeeling, Abro Pakriaa, but I alone cannot decide it. All of us here should vote on it."
Pakriaa understood the nature of a vote. Under her iron monarchy, minor village matters were often decided by that method if her own attitude happened to be neutral. Once made, and approved by herself, a pygmy vote was binding as magic. Her gaze touched the giants with a sour smile. She was visibly counting; then she was studying Paul with new curiosity.
Of the giants, only the two new recruits were not in evidence. Paul glimpsed the red-furred boy peering from the doorway of Mijok's private room; Surok went in to soothe him. Pakriaa said, "I will consent. After the vote I will inform my sisters as quickly as I can."
Wright's fingers were frozen in his gray beard. "Then I ask that Paul Mason take command, his orders to be followed without question."
Paul could not speak.How did this happen? How can I ...He heard Ann, imitating the formality of Wright's words, but with an undertone of passionate protest: "I ask for the leadership of Edmund Spearman."
Spearman frowned at her, flushed, proud, perhaps amazed. He said doubtfully, "Other nominations...? Voice vote?"
"Voice vote, as you wish," Wright said.
"M-make it voice vote," Dorothy whispered, and her face was begging:Is it too much? Can you stand it? Is it what I ought to do...?
"Satisfactory," Spearman said. Paul nodded helplessly.
Dorothy said, "Paul Mason."
Wright glanced at Pakriaa. When Spearman was nominated she had abandoned her patronizing air; she said with enthusiasm, "Spearman."
Mijok's voice rumbled in the depths: "Paul Mason."
The voting went quickly after that. Abara slipped into shadow and shook his head before Wright could call his name. Sears voted for Paul with a wry attempt at a grin. Surok hesitated; his tawny face smiled at Paul with apology and he said, "Spearman." Golden Lisson voted the same way. The other giant women and Elis voted for Paul. The children were quiet, not needing to be told thatthis was grown-up business. When one of the smallest boys started to hum, little Dunin squatted behind him and covered his mouth.
All the pygmy captains but one had followed Pakriaa's lead, after a pantomime of meditation, probably for the record. Now, with a vote of 10-10, this one captain was full of trouble. She understood that she would be the last to vote and must break the tie. This was Nisana, taciturn, with the white scar of a wound that had destroyed her lower left breast and run jaggedly down her side; Paul had seen her often but knew little of her. She was studying the candidates with a manifestly honest, tormenting effort to decide, and she avoided Pakriaa's astounded glare. The green eyes fixed themselves at last on one candidate with a blinding innocence.
"Paul Mason."
Pakriaa started as if slapped, but recovered quickly. She said, "Tocwright, is Abara not to vote?"
Abara shuffled a step backward, two steps forward. It brought him nearer the bulk of Sears Oliphant. His bulging eyes tried to escape Wright's look, and Pakriaa's; his ugly lips wobbled. He squeaked: "Paul Mason."
"Twelve-ten," Wright said. "Abro Pakriaa, I am grateful—"
Pakriaa ignored him. She was saying with acid sweetness, "Abroshin Nisana, perhaps you wish to remain here?"
It seemed to Paul that a mechanical force within him was taking over, unsought, at a moment of greatest need. "That would be excellent, Abro Pakriaa. If I am commander, I need one of you here: I am glad to select Abroshin Nisana."
The princess faced him. Her eyelids flickered—usually a sign of pygmy amusement more revealing than laughter, but one never knew, exactly. The machine labored, weighing dangers and advantages. A direct order now might win over Pakriaa or lose her completely and all the twelve hundred. She understood and admired aggressiveness; she was also a bundle of touchy personal pride. And—the slim spear in her hand could strike like a cobra. Paul said, "Abro Pakriaa, you will tell the other leaders our decision, and if they agree, have them come here at once."There was a gray-white shadow at his left. The balance, swinging delicately, was visible in Pakriaa's almost sleepy eyes. He thought:One thing quicker than a pygmy's arm—a giant's. At least he would not be pierced with white-stone, while Mijok stood there.
Pakriaa's arm swung—the harmless right arm, a harmless beckoning gesture to six of her captains, who followed her out of the fortress, leaving Abroshin Nisana staring at the ground and very much alone.
Spearman came alive. He spoke plainly, cheerfully: "Paul, count on me for anything. Do whatever I can." His voice had full sincerity. If his eyes were a little too steady, too candid—never mind it. It was a pleasure to take his hand, thank him, turn to immediate needs.
"Two lifeboat trips right away, Ed, in what's left of daylight. Ann, Samis, and the four smallest giant children on the first. All the carpentry and garden tools. Third trip in the morning." Wright's sudden relaxation was praise....
Ann left, with no more protest than a backward look. But at the last moment she ran back to kiss Wright on the mouth....
And when Ed was returning from the second flight, which had carried Dunin and four other giant children to the island—when it was night and the red eye of the lifeboat was slipping down from above the hills, then the drums began.