"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._
5
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 breeze in 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?"