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 past the 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 is _I_ who 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--"